Living fossil.
I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can’t pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.
There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.
I just spot interesting projects and creations others create and then just write my own thoughts on them
Soo… journalism?
In any case, do whatever makes you happy, whether remaining solely on here or creating your own thing from this like a website or blog. Your content is among the best on the platform and I hope you know how much we all appreciate you.
Story wise though, i’m a bit mixed on. I’m really liking the story, just not as a Max Payne story. The Brazil setting isn’t really doing it for me and it feels a bit more GTA Coded than Noir, at least until i detach it from the first two games.
This is pretty much the general consensus of the game overall I think. Good game, just not a good Max Payne game.
Look Ubisoft: this is what your devs could be making if you’d let them make what they want to be making. Instead of churning out another cookie cutter “Ubisoft game”.
Yeah GoT quickly turned from a fun game I enjoyed to a game I almost loathed and resented as I had to force myself to finish it.
It really doesn’t have enough variety to support being that long, in my opinion. The mission design is way too bland and samey and the tone of the writing just starts wearing you down. Literally everything is the same serious tone delivered in a dour monotone. A handful of moments with Kenji is not enough to break the tedium. It would be fine if the game was 20 hours long, not 60.
I still think it’s a fine sort of 7.5-8/10 at the end of the day but I consider it one of the most overrated games of all time. It’s just a polished Ubisoft collect-a-thon open world with solid combat at the end of the day. It’s not game of the decade or whatever.
I suppose I will use the same “supporting indie devs is a good deed” justification as when I purchased Blue Prince on launch day for this game.
La Belle Epoque inspired game that is reviewing at 92/100 on OpenCritic with several mentions of it being a GOTY contender? And the themes are about wrestling with hope and optimism in the face of nihilism and hopelessness? (Disco Elysium my beloved)
I never stood a chance.
Ubisoft made a fun game, but it’s way to big for it’s own good.
Well, everyone expected this game to copy Ghost of Tsushima, so maybe it’s not surprising that it ends up copying its biggest flaw as well.
I’m a slut for La Belle Epoque so even though I’m not necessarily in the market for a JRPG at the moment I might just cave anyway with scores like this.
I’m almost done with Blue Prince too, so it’s fortuitous timing.
Used to use Sync and I still prefer it in a lot of ways, but I can see the writing on the wall what with ljdawson not having reared his head for well over a year. That app will stop working when Lemmy 1.0 rolls out.
Switched over to Summit and I’m slowly getting used to it. Still missing some features and options and having some bugs, but overall it’s good and I think it will grow into being the best app for me in the future.
God damn it my backlog is already long enough why’d they have to go ahead and do this.
Sigh
Now where’s my credit card?
I think this criticism is fair to be honest and is one of the things that’s sort of swept under the rug a bit in discourse about Witcher 3. I definitely think the pacing is off just as you mentioned. I’ve heard other people regret their choice of Triss because they had basically locked in her romance already by the time you start doing stuff in Skellige with Yen and start seeing what she’s like.
Personally I think the Yen/Geralt dynamic is a lot better than with Triss, although it’s got its own troubles (nobody is perfect). I like the banter between them and they feel more like a proper couple.
The game as a whole also flows better with Yen as your romance choice in my opinion and to me it feels more like the Triss romance is an afterthought yes. A bone thrown at those who desperately can’t stand Yen.
Geralt (in the books) is deeply in love with Yen and is also bound to her by literal Djinn magic, so it makes sense that he’s always hot for her in the game and I think the attention paid to the Yen side of things is a desire by CDPR to anchor their game in the preexisting lore.
If you’re not dead set on Triss or wildly opposed to Yen I’d say go with it and do the Yen romance. It’s very suitable for a first time playthrough imo.
Same here. Do you think this data is from Email Apps/Clients rather than the addresses? iPhones are extremely popular and so I can imagine loads of people open their mail on their phones. But I have a hard time seeing more users being on Apple mail adresses compared to the huge widespread gmail.com users.
I’m sure the remake will release with the same level of QA and polish that the original Oblivion shipped with. That renowned Bethesda standard of quality.
I love it. That’s actually so sweet.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
That would have been quite something. I’ve seen P.T. being played and that was fucking scary.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
FF7 was the slam dunk choice because it is not only so iconic, but as the first 3D entry the original is also absolutely god-fucking butt ugly. I can see why FF8 would be logical in a sense, but I’m not sure it has the popularity to capitalise on. It has its charm but it’s hardly most people’s favourite Final Fantasy. It would be a cool choice though.
I don’t necessarily think any of the other entries need remakes as badly. I think FF6 is absolute peak as it is but it would probably be most likely in my opinion. It is also vastly popular and iconic so there is a lot of money to be made there. And I can’t deny that even I would be curious to see what it would be like if given the full remake treatment.