l haven’t played Planet Coaster, but my impression was it’s more of a coaster builder than a theme park manager? A lot of “hardcore” players play OpenRCT 2, and for a slightly more modern take on the genre there’s Parkitect. But classic RCT hasn’t been replaced
I wouldn’t know, I’m a filthy casual. Parkitect never did it for me, but Planet Coaster did. The point is nobody’s making a new Rollercoaster Tycoon under that name, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t worthy successors from competitors.
Cities Skylines is a better example, I remember how much Sim City sucked, but Cities Skylines knocked it out of the park
Skylines is ok, it never clicked for me, consider it more of a city painter than a management game… That plus Paradox’ DLC policy made the game quite unattractive to me rather quickly. And it was very car-centric.
Unfortunately, I’m unaware of a serious contender.
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.
God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League
Agreed. As someone who doesn’t really like shooters and never got into League or DOTA, I had mixed feelings about playing a ‘hero shooter/moba’. I’m actually blown away at how good it is. They did phenomenal job. 10/10.
It’s a invite only alpha and as I write this it’s #7 on the steam rankings of current players, 6 if you wanna exclude Banana which is it’s own hilarious thing
I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.
I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.
But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.
I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.
The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don’t pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king
What the hell, I don’t recognise this game at all. Neither this image, the name nor any other image or the trailer on Steam, but apparently I own the game on there… I’ve never been so confused about and at a complete loss of memory of something I have purchased.
The original release had 2 DLC’s. This is the re-release called Re-Reckoning, which inherently included the original 2 DLC’s, amd then a bit later they did a new DLC called Faresworn that the original release never had. This is from that most recent DLC story and area.
I’ve played this game to 100% both on the original release, and this re-release.
It’s one of my favorite action rpg’s out there. It’s not special. It never did anything new, really. It originally released around the same time as Skyrim and got forgotten. I still have always felt this game is better and more fun than people give credit for. It’s huge, has tons to do, has bright colorful biomes, goofy characters, silly stories, cool effects, and is just such a charming thing.
Some of my love for it is that it’s just a simple fun accessible action rpg. Some is I genuinely liked the stories. Some of it I liked how cliche and cheesy it was at times. And back when it first released, some of it was just nice to see some actual color compared to Skyrim back then, which I was also playing.
I’ve been stuck on the DLC for a long time now, not because of difficulty, but because I just don’t find it very interesting. Hoping to force my way through it one of these days.
It honestly is a large DLC that overstays its welcome. I know a lot of people think this game is kind of meh to begin with, but if someone enjoyed the original game and story, I think they’ll like the DLC because it has some more closure on the story and it does introduce some neat new gameplay mechanics.
The issue is you gotta really stick with it. It starts out fun to explore a new area, and then eventually you reach this point where it becomes a bit frustrating, but as you get through it, some stuff unlocks and it becomes really cool gameplay-wise. Also there’s a middle semi-grindy part where it felt like the difficulty got unfair, but after some unlocks involved in the grindy pary it got fun again and really became something else.
I think it could have been done a bit better, but overall as a fan of the original game, I enjoyed myself. You just unfortunately gotta push through to the end to get past this kind of middle part that drags.
There’s lots of fun and ridiculous characters too. I think they did a great job having it really feel like it fits the goofy theme of the game world even though it wasn’t the original team.
You are correct, it’s been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed
A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.
I don’t know, the first one was cobbled up together from early access by programmers at a marketing firm and while janky (part of the charm some would say), it was quite an achievement.
The approach which should have delivered better results was wrecked with takeovers and company drama then dumped to the public in a bad state.
It’s not much of a delay. It was supposed to come out in 2 months, but delayed another 2 months. Doesn’t seem like much time to get any real work done.
They also cancelled their premier at the Tokyo game show days before schedule. I have to wonder if they’re worried about the backlash that a lot of games are getting lately (Dustborn, Concord, etc) and just trying to push the game a little bit further out to avoid controversy?
bin.pol.social
Aktywne