I wanted to like this game but the story was just so uninteresting to me that I had to put it down. I know not everyone is like me but as someone who adored the stories in oot and majoras mask, I couldn’t do it man.
Yeah TOTK story was better in that you’re unraveling a mystery instead of just seeing stuff that already happened. Technically the stuff in TOTK also “already happened”, and mechanically it’s pretty much identical, but imo the way it’s framed makes it much more interesting and compelling. I think the key is you’re seeing these events in order to uncover new information, whereas BOTWs flashbacks didn’t really give you any useful information, just filled in the details of a story you already had the cliff notes for.
Agreed fully that TotK story is much much better that BotW.
I went straight from BotW to Elden Ring though, so they took my score down. Elden’s gameplay, story, and world are unmatched by any other open-world game. The world is so full and flush and ALIVE. There’s oodles of empty space in the open-world Zelda games, and there’s so few enemy types. I still love the games, but as a late late Elden Ring adopter, I have a new impossible standard for a world… that’s open.
The Steam reviews really reflect the gap between players and critics. Some of this is because critics need a working relationship between them and studios. No one wants to burn the free review copy bridge.
I’d say the reviewed aren’t too biased, while the gameplay itself is really really fun the score gets some points off due to server issues, the reviewers knows it’s temporary, while the players score are justified for the time being, the reviewers won’t review bomb for a temporary issue
A lot of the reviews on steam were mentioning lack of coherent design. No reason for the game to exist when the previous title does. A lot of people seemed to say this isn’t a server only issue but a gameplay one as well.
There are a million reasons for this kind of thing, cited for years now. These reviewers are exposed to more truly awful games than most of us, they're less likely to latch on to one or two gripes in a score, they're more likely to put the person in charge of the review who's most likely to understand the game's strengths (meaning they put the Dark Souls fan on the Dark Souls review and the Madden fan on the Madden review, for instance), and all sorts of other reasons. Were it me reviewing any game, I'd immediately dock tons of points just for the sheer act of requiring a server connection, because it can only ever make the product worse, but that hasn't stopped people from loving Fortnite, Diablo IV, or any other live service game. It's really just as simple as they came away from the game with a different opinion than you would have or expect. It's not a conspiracy or incentives influencing it; not from real review outlets anyway. Actual review outlets don't sweat it if they get cut off from codes, as it's happened plenty of times, and they review the games anyway.
Depends on the scale of the reviewing site. I was a game reviewer for a few years and am now a game developer for the past 10. Reviewing sites absolutely want to keep those review codes and some sites don’t review games that don’t send them codes. Maybe with big titles they will go buy a copy but there is a race to have a review out by the time the public can purchase the game. It’s not money but time. That’s why review codes are important.
That said it’s also about appeasement of the game studios and the player base. 7 is “still good but could be better”. Many review sites are worried about angering the player base or studio and will be very cautious on giving anything less than a 5. For the longest time giant bomb was hated for giving lower scores as a popular review site. Now they hardly do reviews anymore because it’s not worth it.
That all said a lot of review sites are looking at simple recommendation blurbs instead of putting numbers to it. It avoids the whole issue of angering anyone just because number is too low or too high. Additionally as long as the blurb isn’t just the word “don’t” most published and studios will be content with it.
Being the first one out only matters to a few publications. You're not competing with IGN and Gamespot just by being out first, so it doesn't matter to most of them. Review scores tend to fall a few points after the first day the embargo breaks, because those are all the outlets the publisher bet would review it worse. I play Fantasy Critic, and you can observe this happening with just about every major release. That doesn't mean the ones reviewing it with early review codes are any less honest about it.
Being the first and having a review out in the first day a person can buy it are different. Very little care about first. Lots care about being available for when the players can buy it.
Also embargo only applies to those getting review copies. So clearly those studios value getting the game for free rather than buying the game without embargo. A lot of time goes into a review. It could be a week or 2 of work. So still getting the game early is more valuable.
That said the reviewers without embargo are still the ones not trying to get embargoed. So the early reviewers are more likely to say nicer things.
It's more about the price of all the new games put together, and then the fact that a lot of review copies are sent in advance and for viewership purposes getting a review out quickly is important, but with some bigger studios not sending copies in advance more regularly now maybe we'll see less incentive for reviewers to submit to their will.
In case you didn’t see already, Portia has a sequel that’s at very late stage early access.
The whole pantheon of Factory games fill a similar itch like some others have mentioned.
I’ve very recently started playing Dinkum which is a bit more Portia/Stardew/Animal Crossing like, with running around to harvest and mine then crafting and selling to buy things to build your island.
A bit less purely crafting but a good game with similar spirit is Graveyard Keeper.
Some of the survival games have decent crafting mechanics. Like 7 days to die you can turn down the zombie part and spend some hours running around and getting material to build a base and fix vehicles and stuff. Also Raft and Volcanoids are some other crafty survival game.
Don’t know about the best, but I detest games around crafting and I absolutely loved Subnautica. The whole experience become one of my video games.
Found it to be intuitive and streamlined. They tell you everything through the menus, so you don’t need to run to the wiki for recipes (albeit I did use the wiki for coordinates on where to find certain things) and it has a story/events that push you further.
The gatekeeping isn’t just to pad out the game, but it actually makes sense narratively (i.e. you need to go deeper and deeper as the game progresses so you’ll be needing new material occasionally. You can’t just avoid the crafting and complete the story.
You’ll be constantly building a stock of raw materials and transformed ones as you need to improve your things but also produce fuel/energy, build/improve your base and there’s even gardening (the latter is optional).
They also offer multiple modes. I played the one where you don’t need to eat or drink, but otherwise is the same experience. But they also have a survival one where you need to eat and drink and another where if you die, it’s game over. Adicionally there’s also a creative/sandbox mode.
I always wondered this, why is it that so many people hate the Epic launcher? is it a technical thing? is it the company? I never had any issues with games, either bough or given away for free. Not sarcasm, I’m genuinely curious.
Inverted y for anything first person. I grew up with a joystick for flight sims, and that felt natural to me when I later played FPS games on controller.
Inverted x makes no sense to me (and yes, I read your explanation below), but I can ignore that setting just fine, so every game should have it.
GaaS really fucks up basic game design. It’s like they intentionally are aiming to squeeze as much as possible out of a lime when they could just aim for a watermelon.
No idea how much always online server structure costs but it can’t be free. I wonder if the console manufacturers favor this type of game design as it brings them some cash in too.
Never happens to me, but is that like if a game you’d override outside the game and play inverted it’d be fine 90% of the time but then it doesn’t make any sense in some menus or maybe the map or whatever?
You have a few options.
On the deck, just use the joystick for one and the trackpad for the other.
Or use either mode shifting or action layers (I never remember which is which) so that behavior changes when you hold another button.
Think kinda like tab vs alt tab, but with like… anything on the controller. Want the joystick the behave differently when holding the left trigger or whatever?
Sounds like it’s not the game for you. Overcoming environmental challenges is kind of the name of the game, and if the baseline “cold bad but fire hot” thing isn’t something you enjoy then I’m not sure you would enjoy trying to navigate any of the main story areas in the game.
Right? This is the first time ive heard a complaint about not being able to solve the weather problem. How much of a problem would the rest of the game be if you cant solve this.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne