Some of these scores haven’t been updated from early access yet, so this number’s probably going to go higher. Might be the top-rated game of the year. I’m sure it’s well-deserved, too. I played the crap out of the EA version when it first dropped.
Heh, Hades II isn’t small at all. The bar for a “big” project has just risen to a kind of ridiculous, mostly unsustainable level.
IMO it’s a sweet spot size. Small enough to survive in a niche genre, small enough for development to not run off the rails, yet big, big enough to have a big budget and feel like a huge game.
In a world where game budgets balloon to over $300m, Hades 2 fits comfortably into the “smaller game” category. As do Blue Prince, Expedition 33, Silksong, and Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, among other top-rated games this year.
I mean, if y’all really insist, I can specify “not AAA games.” That’s the point I was making; this year’s game of the year nominee lists are going to look quite different than usual.
but it has to involve some scaling down of both the size and cost of these projects and also player expectations, who are always demanding more, more, more, and anything less, from visual fidelity to playtime to map size, is viewed as an inexcusable downgrade, especially for something like a sequel, which is most of what the industry produces now. Something has to give, and after a lot of bending, we are on the verge of this whole thing breaking.
I kind of hate that line.
It might be true with how ridiculous some gamers’ expectation seem to be, but I have to wonder if its like a ‘Twitter mirage’.
Are people looking at, like, KCD II and BG3 or even older stuff like GTA V and thinking ‘man, if the graphics aren’t better and the world isn’t even bigger, the next game is going to suck!’
I’m not… I mean, even if I adored a particular title, I’d be happy to buy expansions instead of $300m+ gigagame, and perfectly happy with cheaper graphics as long as it looks cool.
And that’s different than jank. As a good example, Starfield technically looked high fidelity and expensive, yet felt clunky and ugly.
I remember when Hades came out and my buddy was saying it was going to be GOTY over Cyberpunk 2077 and all of us just laughed at him. I think he was on the right side of history
I think it’s a combination of the graphics and just the limitations it forces on you. It really forces you to think outside the box for builds, at least in my opinion. I’m sure there’s people far more qualified though to figure out what it is
I’ve borrowed a few. Off the top of my head there’s FF7, Ghost of Tsushima, and Animal Crossing New Horizons. I also borrowed Persona 5 because I wanted to give it a try but never actually booted it up.
I requested them to stock a copy of Fire Emblem 3 Houses too but they took so long that I just bought a copy myself, but literal day my copy arrives they stocked it.
It’s the same with my XBox Series S. It’s just sitting there, collecting dust. Just as my steam library. My switch though has seen some rise in usage during the past few months as my kids are getting old enough to play video games and I prefer them to do this instead of binging Cocomelon…
PS4 severely disappointed me after PS3. The regression in GUI / OS multimedia features from XMB was one part of it. Charging to play online was another part of it.
When it came to games? Any exclusives it did have, besides souls games which I don’t like, ended up ported. Regretful purchase. What games were coming out came out slowly and the quirky/experimental games I loved were all but dead and gone from Sony Studios. Matters less to people who only play on console, but I PC game too. It became a useless brick.
I figured PS5 would be more of the same and stopped buying Sony hardware.
Nintendo with the Switch 2 I bet will be on a similar trajectory and already was getting there except for games with Switch 1. Donkey Kong Bananza is brainless, MK World is inferior to 8 Deluxe. They’re being weird about giving dev kits to developers.
I have both PS3 and PS4 and they are equally great devices: great and responsive UI, great titles. PS4 still have 90% of games playable offline without patches or accounts. PS5 looks very bad like latest gen console + XB1 (but at least XB1 have games, and backward compatibility.
My fav tidbit about this game is the Wikipedia section “development”. I quote:
Konami felt it had become overly westernized
Bitch you the ones that took the IP away from Team Silent and gave it to western devs who had no clue what to do with it.
Now they smell there’s money to be made and are cashing in.
And they are cashing in hard. I will never buy a $80 game.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, really cool to hear. We just started a Realm for our 8 yr old and his friends and I hope he has fond memories when he gets older.
I’m not OP but I wanted to say that’s really cool! My dad set up a server for me and my sister when we were kids and some of my core memories from my childhood are playing Minecraft with friends.
Unnamed Space Idle, kinda seems like I’m pretty much at the end of currently available content. Haven’t maxed out all the things, but it doesn’t seem like there’s much left after this. Though I do suspect that unlocking/maxing out the thingies I’m working on might take quite a while, could be the game gets some content update before that happens.
Rogue Trader. No idea really how far I’m into the game, I enjoy the setting, story… it’s just that the gameplay is maybe a bit tedious-ish. At first it seemed awesome when I got my ship and was let loose in the nearby systems, but I can’t help but to feel it’s the “Mass Effect’s planet scanning” again… at least there’s no Mako. I am playing on pretty much baby-mode just to get around the combat, as I’ve felt that’s been pretty tedious in other games from the same company.
Have you played owlcat’s other stuff? I got deep into Pathfinder Kingmaker but lost steam and stopped at some point. Have heard good things about wrath of the righteous, and would like some 40k content that actually explores that universe, but I kind of expect to have the same experience.
I have played Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, and ran out of motivation with both. I don’t remember either that well, it’s been quite a while since I played them, but I feel like Rogue Trader does share similarities with them. Overall… I do like the game, but man if it doesn’t require me to force myself to play it occasionally. 40k vibes are great, dunno if I’d care about the game if it wasn’t 40k.
I got to admit the warping between systems and exploring planets does get a bit old. I’m sure not all of it nescessary, but if it’s there, I gotta explore it, damnit. Most planets are just there to be scanned and they might have a spot where you plant a moneymaker. Some planets have some small area to walk around and do some skillchecks and most likely have some skirmish for small-ish rewards.
Plot areas are pretty big and have (usually) several moral compass tests, which are basically: “nah, let’s not kill everyone, everyone has good in them”, “I’m gonna burn you alive because religious reasons”, “give me your possessions and you might live”.
One that really makes my head explode is when your group spots a floor trap. If you don’t carefully walk each member around it, literally everyone will step into it otherwise. And there’s A LOT of these traps, though admittedly vast majority of them can be directly defused.
Minecraft is always a great time. My last revisit I tried hardcore mode to see how far I could get. The devastation I felt after falling into lava and losing all my progress 😭😭 still hella fun, would recommend trying if you haven’t already. Makes you play a lot more strategically.
Also I love I am legend too! What other books do you like?
I tend to bounce around with books. I don’t get much time to read but i’m sucker for the basic classics. I’d say on my list of all time favorites is Robin Hood, Macbeth, Beowulf, and anything Arthurian. Hitchiker’s Guide and and everything Tolkien is on that list too.
If i wanted to get a bit niche (and on theme) the Minecraft novel written by Max Brooks was weirdly fun to read when i was younger.
I have quite a few books i’ve picked up and haven’t finished yet too though like Catch 22 and the Star Wars Prequel Novels.
Yeah, I think I’ve only bought one or two PS5 exclusives since I got mine around October 2020. Demon Souls remake and Horizon Forbidden West (though the latter is now available on Steam).
That said, I still think I’ve gotten a good amount of value out of the console by reaping the Patient Gamer™ rewards by picking up many of the major PS3/PS4 titles during good sales. I didn’t play many video games during the PS3/PS4 era, so I missed out on quite a few major releases. I’ve accumulated a pretty great digital library with some fantastic games for a relatively small amount of money (which, like my Steam library, I’ve only actually played a fraction of).
As an aside, probably my favorite PS5 exclusive has just been the free Astro Bot game. The haptics in the DualSense controller are frankly cool as hell, and I hope more games utilize them going forward.
Personally, I’m quite happy with less exclusives and more multiplatform games that I can play with all my friends regardless of what device they bought.
My biggest issue with gameing now is that PC has too many exclusives and I can’t play my favorite games with a lot of friends because they wanted a console instead of a device that can be used for any digital workload.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne