Yes, it’s a pretty game. Sure, they hit their design goals, but it’s the design itself that I hate. It’s geared entirely towards close combat to the point where half the weapons are redundant or otherwise stupidly useless compared to others. It’s geared towards close combat to the point that the player’s projectiles disappear after a certain distance, while the enemies’ shots can travel much further. Sure, there’s plenty of ‘nice’ things they added to make it easy to churn around a bunch of groups of enemies up close, but it’s insanely dumb how it’s 100% of the game design. Especially because many of the maps are trying to show off large vistas and open areas, where it becomes VERY obvious that the player’s shots disappear while you’re being pelted by enemy fire just fine.
The extra game modes of flying and being in the mech are neat in concept, but so insanely underbaked they feel more like a waste of time task to push through than a cool extra part of the game to enjoy. They’re not mixed in with the on foot parts well at all and feel more like basic transitionary moments they attempted to add some gameplay to.
The attention to detail sucks, especially in the UI. A couple easy points demonstrate it: The most obvious is how their UI triggers work. You can click a button, and it plays the activate sound, but it’s not activating if you click it before the mouseover/highlight animation is done. In a similar vein, most affirmative interactions are a stupid wait for it long-press while going back to the mian menu from between levels is as simple as an escape key press. A purposefully slow forward with an instant back is just… pointlessly dumb. In a similar vein, while the game is showing you all the crap you did and found in the level, your only options are to sit there and get annoyed with the obnoxious, slow, and loud tallying of everything, or skip ahead to other pages and go back. Escape and space don’t skip or do anything there. Basically, there seems to only be one poorly thought out path to get to anywhere in the UI, with no convenient or standard alternatives implemented: Half baked.
The story and character designs were made by edgy teenagers. It’s infinitely worse than Doom Eternal or 2016. Old Ones are C’thulu ripoffs, most of the styling of Hell/etc are now just generic scifi with a bit more red, and many of the new designs are somehow more generic ripoffs of older doom. They pull inspiration from tons of other spooky things instead of rolling with the Hell themes or other established lore. So much of the added lore is just ripoffs of greek mythology and other things, too, like a boat to ferry souls and a bunch of other crap I don’t care to remember because it’s just not memorable, intersting, nor do they fit the usual themes of Doom.
In a similar vein, so much of the story is lackluster and uninspired. There is some interesting sounding writing hidden in the lore book, like why the slayer’s mount is half mech, but it’s simply stated in the lore instead of being a potentially cool way to introduce the mount or other things. So much of the game is ONE game loop (close combat) with few dynamic options and a bunch of extra half-baked fluff tacked on.
It’s frustratingly narrow sighted and underbaked to deserve to follow Eternal or 2016. It feels like it’s in some parallel universe from the other games, even from 2016 and Eternal.
I want to play the DOOM Slayer rampaging through a Hell inspired by 90’s metal, not some parallel universe written by edgy teenagers where he’s some glorified Master Chief ripoff with anger issues for a personality who’s just following orders.
All of them, but especially V. I have tried a few times to play them but never get more than a few missions in before losing interest in the story. I think I have to like or identify with a protagonist to enjoy a game, and most GTA characters are pretty unlikable.
I'm with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.
Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden... but in a game like GTA? Yawn.
I completely agree about rdr2, but I didn’t play it that long before I just installed mods to let me duck around more and explore the beautiful world.
games i don’t like that everyone seems to love: games that waste my time with levelling systems that draw the game out way longer than it’s fun, which is most modern AAA games. I hate how people say things like “you get your moneys worth playing WoW because you’ll spend hours playing it” and “i liked portal but it was too short”, portal was good partly because it was short…
First one was a cool premise but really annoying in some ways. The game sort of assumes you get certain fragments of blue prints by certain points but doesn’t actually make them easy to find nor really give you any hints to find them.
For people who’ve played it was for the sea moth and and later the moon well.
Yep, it loops between exploration and basebuilding / crafting.
The exploration part is what usually gets people hooked because the alien underwater setting is amazing. The other stuff is more to give you a reason to stick around for longer, and pace your exploration since need to unlock things at certain points.
This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.
A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”
It was weirdly a little light on crafting in some ways. But extremely heavy in others. I tried playing it like Minecraft and stockpiling stuff but that’s not really the way. I found it slightly more enjoyable to gather things only when I needed them.
Also the game has no map and I’m REALLY bad with directions. Like REALLY bad.
That’s the point of the game - it doesn’t tell you where to go and what to do because you’re meant to explore the environment yourself. And the debris you scan, the screenshots you take, and the thrills that you get - are the real reward here, and not some goal that game artificially imposes on you. So I think you were just playing it wrong.
Look, I genuinely get your point, and I was tracking with you until you said this. Fuck off. Fuck for with this stupid bullshit. I was not playing wrong. I was playing it the same way everyone else does. I was exploring. I was collecting. I was finding new things. It was getting very clear that the distances the game expected me to travel were meant to be done much faster than what I was capable of. I was getting multiple upgrades for things that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have the thing that lets me install them. It’s been ages since I’ve played and I’m not psychic so I’ll never know what the actual devs’ intent was, but something was off. I’d definitely missed something. What’s more annoying is that I was finding multiple blueprints I already had or something? I don’t remember the context. Like you needed 3 fragments or something. And I’d find more like “ah surely this is the third for the thing I need” only to get the 5th of something I already had. It was give years ago when I played, at least, so I’m probably explaining wrong.
But don’t fucking say I was playing wrong. That’s such a condescending, brain dead thing to say to someone who is critiquing a game.
“Hey, based on what’s going on and getting tons of upgrades and not unlocking the thing to install the upgrades, I think I’ve missed something and I have no idea where to find it. It would be nice if there was a way to unlock this without scouring every inch of the ocean I’ve been through multiple times and without looking it up online.” No, you’re just playing wrong! It’s a game about exploration and discovery!
You’re not alone. As much as I love that game, the absolute lack of direction is one of my biggest gripes with it, right along with the atrocious inventory system.
You’d think someone who manages to build a fricking atomic submarine and a mech suit would be able to pinpoint relevant tech on the go somehow but no. Also you get a scanning room that can pinpoint little pebbles a kilometre away but is it helpful? Nope. Just another half-baked gameplay element that was never developed beyond the initial concept.
So yeah, your concerns are absolutely valid. Anyone who played this game would agree. But maybe that’s why I personally love the game. Clunky and beautiful, frustrating but once you find that thing you’ve been looking for, a bit rewarding too.
Yeah, I think people look at that criticism and think I mean I want super explicit bright glowing objects with a Skyrim style HUD that points me directly to where I need to go to get blue prints. Nah. Some ideas:
Some way to tell if there aren’t any more in an area so you don’t waste time looking when there isn’t anything.
Some sort of device that tells you how close some are, but not where they are. Like the classic “beep … beep … beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEPBPBPBBPBP” thing that gets more frequent as you approach. But make the max range relatively small.
I think they were called life pods? Like the other crashed emergency escape pods. For things you’re expected to get like the sea bike (I don’t remember the name), sea moth, and moon well maybe always put some blue print fragments on life pods you find later. This way you can’t miss them (unless you’re really really not paying attention). You can still make it so you get them earlier on, but this way in case you missed some somehow you can always “catch up” to where the devs expect you to be. Like if they expect you to get them ~10% in, then make it so the life pods you find ~25% in give you what you are missing for the sea moth.
A bit of a map system. This one is controversial, so I’m putting it last. A huge appeal of the game is not having a map. But even just a blank screen showing you all your way points, but not showing you where you are or what biomes are around would be useful. Then do something like show where blueprints are in an area. Maybe something like once you get two of three it shows you the general area where the remaining ones are, but doesn’t put a marker on the HUD.
Because with games like this where progression isn’t gated behind actually having some of these items, you can get in weird states where you get further in and didn’t get them. But maybe >95% of players did. The other <5% just missed something somehow. And then there’s no real clue on where to.go to back track to get it. And you can get in these annoying situations where it seems like you should have it but you aren’t sure, and you don’t want spoilers so you don’t look it up. Then when you look it up maybe you see a spoiler and it turns out you shouldn’t have it yet, that’s common. Other times you missed something super obvious in some very random area you only needed to go to once and never checked again because it seemed empty.
But it’s just so infuriating when people say things like “you’re not playing right” like, I’m getting frustrated because I’m playing right! If I wasn’t checking everywhere I could miss things. So I have to check everywhere to make sure I don’t. But then you can still miss things because there’s no real way to guarantee if you actually checked everything.
Tbh I’m against the full on map idea since it would ruin and demystify/trivialise the aspect of exploration, but maybe they could have made it so that the scanner room HUD chip UI was actually useful and displayed any kind of distance indicator. Often times I’d be scanning for limestone chunks for example. Now my HUD is full of circles that all have the exact same radius and no indication of distance, just a vague direction, and it’s so frustrating to work with that.
They could have added some sort of compass as well. They chose not to.
I wish they implemented something like No Man’s Sky’s non-intrusive HUD, which conveys both heading and distance at the same time in a super nice way.
Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.
Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.
The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.
Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.
You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.
Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.
Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.
All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.
It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.
I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.
I don’t need hints because I’m not playing the game and I’m not planning on continuing. I’d gotten further than you think. But for context I’d already begun to explore the deeper areas when I ran into this conundrum. I built a stupidly long oxygen tube to get down there. I think the game expects you to have the sea moth first. That was one of the first moments I thought something was wrong. Then I think once I got it I couldn’t take it down there without an upgrade because I also didn’t have the moon pool unlocked. You’re talking about life pods, I never had a problem finding life pods. Those were easy and fun. It was going deeper without the sea moth and upgrades that was troublesome.
Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.
I prefer AA for controllers actually. Rechargeable AAs are good these days and you can just swap them out. I actually really hate this trend of integrated batteries in things where it isnt necessary. Yeah we need new form factors of replaceable batteries, but the switch from replaceable and standardized to neither is definitely causing problems and costing us money.
Trying to find replacement batteries for integrated batteries is a pain too, since might not be able to find an OEM replacement or battery from a reputable brand. So you end up having to go with whatever random no name battery that could be worse than the OEM battery and end up dying after less than a year.
My preference is rechargeable AA or AAA. And even better if the controller itself can recharge the battery like drone controllers.
I got some good rechargeable AA for my controllers about three years ago and will never go back. I have one pair more than controllers and I always have a charged pair read to switch out if needed.
I got 2500mAh batteries from duracell and the charge lasts for days of activity on my xbox controllers. Longer than my PS4 controllers with integrated battery for sure.
I’m still using the same AA eneloops I used since I picked up my Steam Controller all the way back in 2015-2016. And I also used it with my 360 controller too. Just keeps chugging along being good for a month before I need to swap.
Yeah the PS4 battery life has been crap and I don’t know why. Was finally able to replace Sony controllers with 8bitdo now that Steam provides support for the extra buttons to be mapped to unique keys and use analog triggers and gyro together. So been nice not having to spend money on the dualsense, which doesn’t even have hall effects/TMR sticks.
I bought two packs of Eneloops from Dell in 2007 that are still constantly in use. I haven’t noticed any degradation. I can only imagine how many alkaline batteries these things have replaced.
Took me a long time but I settled on Xbox one controllers. I use rechargable batteries but can run the AAs if u want. AA batteries have longer shelf life if u let the controller sit long periods vs rechargeables always seem to discharge. Support in just about every game. Can be had reasonable price on sale now and then and lots of parts available for them. Id never buy a controller with a non replaceable battery!
8Bitdo controllers are pretty hit and miss, but this is a big hit for them. The Pro series (and maybe others) comes with a rechargeable battery but the slot also fits 2 AA batteries.
If only they could get their software more feature rich and consistent.
I mocked Xbox controllers for years due to them using AA batteries… until I actually started using one with my PC. Now, I wish all controllers used them. It’s vastly more convenient than charging via USB cable.
Halo 3 is hands down one of the best games ever made.
Unquestionably the best console shooter ever made, indisputably the best splitcreen co-op and multiplayer game ever made.
I understand pc gamers or people who didn’t grow up with an xbox might find those statements in their expansiveness hard to accept, no halo 3 was fun but it wasn’t that good though… to which the only correct answer is yes it is.
I think my preference for halo 1 is pure nostalgia. I have so many memories of my best friend at the time and I going co-op legendary. Or using “gamespy?” To play online matches.
I’m having some bugs (but i’m not sure if that’s something that can be blamed on Sony or not), but besides that it fully lives up to the hype! So glad i didn’t have to break out my old PS3 too just to play it. That poor thing has a hard enough time playing LBP and Minecraft
Halo 3 is the only Halo game who's campaign I have never beaten other than Infinite, which I haven't touched and probably never will. I was working on fixing that, deciding to play through each Halo game in order of release on legendary, but I got side tracked. I had planned to first beat the whole Mass Effect trilogy on insanity before returning to Halo, as I've only every played the first game, but then I got side tracked again. Now I'm playing Kenshi. It's no wonder I never finish any game series... I always have the desire to restart from the beginning of a series each time, but have an attention span this small.
Think I have something like 16k hours across all my PC games, with EU5 having the most at ~1.7k, I’ll never understand how someone can have more than 10k in one game.
My most played games like Terraria are well under 1K. Even this was before I become a parent and started working full-time.
These days if I put more than 50 hours into a game its considered a lot. I just finished the Oblivion Remastered and literally this was the only game I played for many weeks, with a playtime of ~45 hours.
Some people are afraid of trying new things. And they also don’t mind doing the exact same thing over and over.
So they play repetitive games like Call Of Duty, Rocket League, LoL, Dota, Counter Strike, … where every match is the same gameplay. And they don’t get bored, even after 10k hours.
If they were to play Terraria, they would be the ones mining the entire map as a “challenge”
PvP is inherently not repetitive due to the fact you will be interacting with many many different people over your gameplay sessions. And people are random, inconsistent, and weird.
Also, some people like honing a particular skill. It’s not really about being afraid to try new things, but rather trying to be better at one thing.
that’s true to a degree, but not for 10k hours, 10k hours is literally the amount of time people use as a benchmark for slogging away at something until you master it and i can’t think of any FPS game that is quite that varied unless you just play a new map every day
One thing, and it’s likely just an oversigt, but controls. With Consoles being the computers that everything is designed for, the lack of proper controls for Mouse & Keyboard have become a bit of a nuisance.
Normally, it’s not a big deal. You just configure them yourself.
But it did irk me some when I gave Cyberpunk a go and tried to switch the Interact/select button from (F) to (E) and it didn’t move both functionalities. Now (E) was Interact, but in menus it defaulted back to (F) as if menu select was a different function.
Alternatively, when the console control scheme is tight and well made but the PC controls are ASDF + whatever random keys spread at opposite ends of the keyboard.
Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post…
Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.
When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn’t smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.
When the numbers didn’t look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn’t deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.
When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.
Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don’t play Korean games. Kpop and cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don’t play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.
Don’t buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.
Friendly reminder that Korea invented and perfected micro-transactions. MapleStory has done more damage to both worldwide gaming and Korean game devs than anything else could ever hope to.
Which is very sad because MapleStory was such a great game, at one time. I still play it (private servers) often, 20 years later. The game had such creative passion in it before Nexon took over and monetized the shit out of it.
The devs themselves are fine. It’s the leadership that’s cancer. Abusive leadership in Korean companies is actually a pretty well known issue. It’s just more self-destructive in game companies, which I have direct experience with. So they did a lot to me and my friends. And said friends shared their stories of other Korean game companies.
You’re absolutely right to question, especially with my level of anger, but I’m confident this one is justified.
However, instead of participating in the game development, he chose to focus on a personal film project.
My assumption is that Krafton expected the leads to put in 12 hour days 7 days a week to meet ridiculous expectations and the leads took some vacation time or something along those lines. That would match up with common publisher behavior, especially the ones that trash people publicly.
They did not have any reason to personally attack the leads except out of spite, and odds are high that doing so will only anger the player base towards the publisher.
Trashing the devs was a terrible idea, and what they wrote was clearly petty and spiteful.
They did not have any reason to personally attack the leads except out of spite,
Lol what the honest fuck are you talking about?
They were facing a boycott because it seemed like they fired the original creators to avoid paying the employees.
They could have issued a statement saying that they would still pay the remaining employees and everyone would assume that they still fired the creators out of greed reasons. If the creators actually didn’t do their jobs, then they would want to make it clear that they are the ones actually committed to making a good game and this has nothing to do with greed.
That may not be the case, but at present we simply do not know what the reality of the situation was.
A publisher trashing devs of a beloved game with personal attacks certainly was a bold move.
However, instead of participating in the game development, he chose to focus on a personal film project.
We are deeply disappointed by the former leadership’s conduct, and above all, we feel a profound sense of betrayal by their failure to honor the trust placed in them by our fans.
If that description is accurate then there’s nothing unprofessional about that.
What would be unprofessional in that situation is the original devs not doing their jobs and then allowing a fan backlash to grow.
Again, we don’t know the reality of the situation. I think everyone would be curious to hear from other devs at the studio that aren’t part of management or the three who were fired but we haven’t yet.
My assumption is that Krafton expected the leads to put in 12 hour days 7 days a week to meet ridiculous expectations and the leads took some vacation time or something along those lines.
This is from the lead himself, on his movie production website:
I’m Charlie Cleveland and I’ve been designing video games for over 25 years. I founded Unknown Worlds and built games like Natural Selection, Natural Selection 2, Subnautica and Moonbreaker. I absolutely love making games but wanted to try something new.
At the end of 2023, I left San Francisco after almost 20 years and moved to Los Angeles to reset my life. Instead of taking it easy, I now find myself working on multiple film projects. It’s amazing how fast it’s all happening - being right in the thick of things makes it so much easier to meet like-minded people!
Also, according to this link, he’s taking a break from making video games, for at least a couple of months now, before all this stuff was out.
It might not be as one-sided as you think. But right now it’s he said, she said, so nobody really knows.
Early release was supposed to be in 2024. We have halfway through 2025.
Lead devs have said the game is ready for early release, so they are likely taking a break from a game they feel is being delayed by the publisher. The publisher is whining about expectations, not obligations or anything along those lines.
I’m with the devs on this one, project burnout is real.
The leads allegedly also were looking to gain $225 Million dollars (supposedly 90% of a $250 Million bonus), so of course they are saying the game is ready.
Charlie Cleveland did say they were going to split the bonus with the team, but imma be honest, why not put that into writing? Why take that huge cut in the first place, and then trust that the leads are going to do the right thing.
I don’t think at this point you can really be sure of anything. Since the former leads have said they’ve filed a lawsuit (but not for what they’re suing), it’ll most likely come out at one point.
The devs rushing the game out half added results in them getting $225M. So they have incentive to be shitty too. I don’t know enough about any of them to say which is more likely but that logic goes both ways.
I mean the former leads (or at least one of them) say the game was ready for Early Access, the publisher says it wasn’t. This could be the deciding factor if the studio gets the bonus or not.
Although today the publisher said some previously leaked slides were real, that show how the potential EA release fell way behind schedule over the years and would have been pretty bare-bones and that a delay would have made sense.
Always good to let this kind of drama develop for a couple weeks before passing any judgement. Not to say I fully believe the publisher’s narrative either. But maybe it’s not the time for grandiose proclamations of a boycott yet.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne