That's disappointing. Some level of unmet expectations are to be, well, expected for a sequel to such a cultural behemoth as Cities: Skylines, but it sounds like Colossal Order made some sacrifices on the release date altar. Such a shame.
I can’t believe nobody has said Furi! That game lives through its soundtrack. The game is a series of intense boss fights, but during production they sent concept art and fight details to the artists so the music better matched the scenario, and it all came together beautifully.
Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn’t a fun part of the game for me, and it’s easy for the developer to do.
This saved my butt the other day! I got some message that my current save was corrupted or detected tampering? and to stop playing on it. I was able to go back a couple of auto saves, find a good one, and not have to do a bunch of content over again!
At the point the game allows multiple manual saves, rewinding decisions is trivial. There is not much of a point in restricting autosaves too.
The only way a game can enforce permanent decisions is if it only has auto-saves, in which case it could have a couple hidden backup saves just to prevent any issue from ruining people's progress. Even then that's not enough if players are willing to tinker, but at least it's not trivial.
Online saves are an option too but I wouldn't be too fond of a game that is needlessly restricted to online-only just to make decisions permanent.
Also, at least on the PC, it’s possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there’s legitimately value to having an “ironman mode”, but I’d really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs – I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn’t manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn’t do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can’t debug games.
Definitely, technical problems are another reason not to be overly strict.
Ironman mode absolutely has value, but this gets into a greater discussion that I feel more gamers should keep in mind. The value of these restrictions and challenges are your entertainment as well as fairness towards the people you are actively playing with. Game rules are all arbitrary by definition. It doesn't really matter if someone playing by themselves completes an Ironman mode fairly or cheats at it.
It's because gamers were convinced to take game rules more seriously than they deserve that today some believe that fictional items in a remote server they don't control can be worth hundreds of dollars. That hundreds of hours of RPG grind are somehow a necessary requirement to play a match of a game with someone else, and also that paying to rush this entirely artificial aspect of the game is worthwhile.
If the developers of a game prefer that it's played in Ironman that's fair, but there is no need to come up with exceedingly complex and restrictive solutions to police how people play. If they don't want to play differently, that's fine too.
I mean, if a game publisher wants to try to offset the game price via adding advertisements or to try to market the game via your social network or whatever, fine. I’m not going to try to tell game publishers how to do their business.
However, as a game consumer, I’d like to be informed before I buy a game whether game publishers are doing this in a game before I purchase it, so that I have the opportunity to opt out of buying it. Personally, I’d rather that they at least offer a “premium” version without stuff like this; the mobile video game industry often does an “adware and a premium no-ads” model.
Steam defaults to notifying people on your friends list what games you are playing, though they let you turn it off. I doubt that any user wants that on, all else held equal, other than the specific case of multiplayer games where users play multiplayer games with their friends. It might help a game publisher market their game to other users, but I’d rather just pay whatever extra it takes to make up the difference. I’m not going to say that it’s worth it to every user to pay a little more to maintain game immersion, but it is to me.
For any RPG (especially one with multiple characters):
Highly flexible keyboard controls to manage inventory.
I want text-editor levels of search, move, drop, swap, open, and close. Give me regexes, custom filters, and macros. Give me unlimited tags for items, and simple interfaces to manage them (eg: sell all that have a tag, move all items tagged with a characters’s name to their equipment slots).
It doesn’t need emacs keybindings, but that would be a big plus.
The spin-off Strikers has the absolutely brain-infecting Love te Wonderland
However, I’ve recently finished Cassette Beasts, and it’s a really really strong contender. Imagine creating an OST piece as amazing as Same Old Story, then going back and adding lyrics for it for when you are fused. And then there’s the even more phenomenal Shot in the Dark (only linking the lyrics version here).
bin.pol.social
Aktywne