Hey! The first half was actually really good. The second half didn’t happen.
Seriously, I remember replaying Fahrenheit like 2 or 3 times and always stopping at the halfway mark. That very first level in the diner promised soooo much, and the game never delivered.
The early God of War games were so unbelievably brutal for these. On harder difficulties, I would often master a boss only to have to retry it again a few more times because the quick time events to actually finish them off would be kicking my ass.
A redemption arc implies fucking up in the first place and working to rectify the previous mistakes.
They lied and the game was missing a lot of features at launch, but now all those features (and more) are in the game, which is still being updated for free a decade later.
I don’t like the game, and I wish the devs acted differently so that a redemption arc wasn’t needed in the first place, but it is what it is. The devs worked their asses off, the game is now playable and feature complete and is still being updated, and from the looks of it Hello Games have learned from their mistakes and are not promising the moon for their next game.
I mean, if the game is actually good with its common space tropes as their marketing materials, instead of having the need to be culturally reframed into a “chill sandbox”. 10 years of disjointed game mechanics and bugs still implies bad game design.
Instead of completely changing the game into something else, they opted to add features that complement the original gameplay loop, and lots of people love what the game has to offer.
There’s nothing wrong with not liking NMS, and as I said, I don’t like it either, but I wouldn’t say that the game doesn’t fit the promises made just because you don’t like it. From what I remember, they promised a sandbox game with a big universe and tons of planets to explore along with your friends. NMS currently has that, plus base building, ship customization, and more. All these systems are subservient to the main gameplay loop of going to planet -> gathering resources -> building more stuff, but it’s like that for every sandbox game. I don’t like Minecraft and Factorio either, but like, it’s my opinion. NMS never promised a 10 hrs story driven experience and cinematic cutscenes.
Doesn’t fit the promise made was not the argument; shoddily made, then being reframed into something else was the argument, nor was I expecting a “cinematic experience”. And no, I like Minecraft, MC is crystal clear about what it is trying to be: a building game first with an open world and survival element.
I cannot say the same with NMS and its space tropes and exploration loop.
Your argument is that the game doesn’t fit its “space tropes”, but somehow that’s not you having different expectations than what it was actually promised and delivered?
I expect functional dogfights, not simulator like flight model, but something arcady in a space game with functional AI. How is that an unrealistic expectation?
Let’s not even talk about a simulated universe of faction battles, which Sean even mentioned as being in the game.
There are also different factions in the game that the player can interact with and gain/lose reputation. According to the wiki, entertaining relationships with the in-game factions net the following benefits:
Availability of certain blueprints to purchase.
Faction specific dialogue options.
Possibility to start missions, which require a minimum faction standing.
High standing will grant the player aid at times when under attack by pirates.
Discounts on technology modules in Space Stations.
Maybe it’s not as in-depth as you (and I) wish it was, but it’s there already.
Don’t do that? I recently replayed the remastered versions of the old PS1 Final Fantasy games, and they have built-in cheat codes (press left and right stick to turn on God mode). I didn’t do that and played the game normally.
Thanks for proving my point.
You are strangely confrontational for some reason. But anyway, my point was that the game is, and always has been, exploration first, and everything else is complementary to the main gameplay loop. You were setting your expectations up for some sort of grand RPG dogfight game that never was, and are now telling us that it’s HG’s fault.
“Don’t do that?” I didn’t press S to win, they still circle around in an arc. And they can barely kill the player when he is not moving. Is that good dogfighting AI in a space game?
“You are strangely confrontational for some reason.” Because it is a common tactic for NMS fans to claim others have “different expectations”, which you have done twice already.
“exploration first” Precisely, Minecraft started as a building game, NMS started as an open-world sandbox, or is it an aesthetic planetarium? Does that mean expecting good dogfights is unwarranted? Would you please check their original promotional material on what they are selling?
Minecraft started as a building game, NMS started as an open-world sandbox, or is it an aesthetic planetarium? Does that mean expecting good dogfights is unwarranted?
It’s a sandbox exploration/crafting game, not a combat/flight sim game. The survival aspect in Minecraft is barebones and monsters are stupid and useless, so what? Why is Minecraft “crystal clear” about being a “building game with a survival element” but you still insist on NMS being a “space game”? What does space game even mean? Can’t two space games provide different experiences, a different focus on different mechanics, or is good dogfighting a prerequisite to all space games?
Would you please check their original promotional material on what they are selling?
I did. I could count the number of SECONDS space battles featured in their pre-release trailers on one hand. The major focus was always on exploring planets, taking in the sights and gathering resources.
Because it is a common tactic for NMS fans to claim others have “different expectations”, which you have done twice already.
I’m not a NMS fan. I think the game sucked. I hate sandboxes.
“You, however, had different expectations.” Why are you keeping hammering the flight sim angle? Did I say 6 DOF and Newtonian physics? And you wonder I got defensive? xD
“What does space game even mean? Can’t two space games provide different experiences, a different focus on different mechanics, or is good dogfighting a prerequisite to all space games?” Fair enough, then take it out; the abandoned mode should be the default. Everyone is finding combat so bad that it is obnoxious anyway, and I wouldn’t mind for it to become a fantasy planetarium like Space Engine mods. :)
“I’m not a NMS fan. I think the game sucked. I hate sandboxes.” I love them, I can do so much with them, this is not this one, though. Sandbox doesn’t mean there is an excuse for bad mechanics.
Im just happy to see that Arc Raiders have been able to keep 91% of their players since launch, whilst Battlefield 6 has lost 85% of their players since launch. Obviously Arc Raiders is doing something right 😅But you’re right, its not a pve game per se. Its a PvPvE.
When Steam had its outage recently, I decided to go through my GOG library instead to find something to play. Noticed I had the Thief Trilogy, which I had never played, so I gave the first game a try. I wouldn’t have thought that a 3d-game from 1998 would hold up so well! It pretty much does stealth as good or even better than modern games. Sound design is brilliant as well. I’m 10 hours in and quite hooked on it right now.
I could be wrong, I think it’s a rare case of a game releasing with zero levels. The idea there was to let people take it and make their own levels for it (which, I’m sure, many did)
The trusty twinkpad will play a lot of ‘good old games’, just to name a few:
Doom(s), Quake(s), Unreal, Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), Thief(s), Dungeon Keeper(s), Carmageddon, Fallout(s), Resident Evil(s), Vampire: The Masquerade, Hitman(s), Clive Barker’s Undying, Gothic(s), Half-Life, Tomb Raider(s), Myst(s), Monkey Island(s), Baldur’s Gate(s), Icewind Dale(s), Diablo(s), GTA(s), KotOR, Outcast, Serious Sam(s), Cave Story, Dark Souls (1 & 2, bcs 30fps, but only barely/unpleasanty?), …
Maybe some newer retro ones, like Dusk?
Or not that visually important games, like 2D platformers and management games, etx - like Stardew Valley, Terraria, Dead Cells, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Celeste, Momodora(s?), Spelunky(s), …
I’ve never played doom so I have no frame of reference. But I feel the op image was intentionally cropped deceptively because I had no idea what I was looking at either
Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:
Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.
Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.
There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.
… Why bother with the feature, at that point?
Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.
There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.
Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.
Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.
Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.
Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.
You want realistically scaled?
Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.
Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.
… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.
Fascinating.
Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.
Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.
RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.
Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.
Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.
Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.
Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.
Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…
Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.
… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.
It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.
Ok serious comment: That’s a damn good review. And a surprisingly good quality device that’s a little ahead of its time.
I’m impressed that you reached out to devs, contrasted with other handhelds, and tried so many different games. That’s almost everything I’d want to know.
What kind of battery life does it get with various games? Sorry if I missed that. I expect ARM is a lot less power hungry than x86.
Thank you so much! It’s always a bit of a nervy experience when I’m sharing a review. Even more so when I linked it in their own Discord, because if anyone will rip through details and point out flaws…its gaming fans. So hearing this? SO kind of you!
I’m lucky that I manage to somehow convince all these people (the devs and other creators!) that they should in fact be friends with me, and that they’re all kind enough to listen to my requests. In fact, the PortMaster team are going to let me interview them soon, so that’s something to look forward to!
Battery depends on settings, like always. But one example was Nier: Automata with high settings across the board, for around 1:25 playing, it took just under 20% of battery. But that’s because I pushed the settings. Emulating PS2 it coasts, but best to limit to to say 2.5x upscale (obviously), unless you’re going for a full 4K in a monitor. And further down, the old systems will go for eons. Android native games gave me 7ish hours at the highest settings I could opt for? While running at 120FPS and not dropping a single frame.
Take this with salt, because I’m hopped up on codeine waiting for Tuesday when I can get tooth pain sorted!
To the best of my understanding, AMD/Nvidia/Intel each run their own forms of architecture (eg. AMDs RDNA) which are probably closest to RISC for simple instructions and SIMD/SIMT (single instruction, multiple data/threads) for more complex vector calculations.
Not gonna lie, the concept “pushing the enemy back without killing it and having infinite ammo” sounds pretty interesting to me, like an Vampire Survivors but the enemies never die, it would be pretty hard!
Reminds me of that one enemy (in form of a ghost) in Phasmophobia, a Deogen (if my memory serves me correctly). Unlike the rest of the ghosts which only know your location based on any noise you make, any interactions you make with certain objects, or if you are in its line of sight… This ghost ALWAYS knows where you are, except it is really slow.
I love/hate the idea of an enemy slowly making it’s way over to you from across the map, and you can’t see it, but it can see you. * shudders *
It would be pretty neat to have a game based solely around prolonging your inevitable demise, trying to survive for as long as possible, maybe with roguelike features such as rng and differing runs.
I love the deogen. I was just playing phasmophobia last night and encountered one or two of them. I love that it flips the game on its head. Quite literally every other ghost wants you to hide somewhere, usually in a tight spot like a locker or behind a cabinet so the ghost can never get line of sight on you. But for the deogen that’s the exact opposite of what you should be doing, and if you don’t know that or don’t know it’s a deogen before it hunts, you’re screwed. Nothing gets my heart pumping like hearing a ghost rapidly running towards my exact location like Usain Bolt as I realize what it is and desperately try to escape my hiding place before it traps me.
Fun thing about the deogen is that it’s the second fastest ghost in the entire game, and then it slows down to be the slowest ghost when it’s extremely close to you. So you can’t safely hide anywhere, no matter how far away from it you are. By the time it’s near you, the deogen becomes slow enough to out-walk, but if you manage to back yourself into a corner? Good luck.
However, I haven’t played the game in quite a while (despite it being one of my most played games) since imho the devs did a great job of royally fucking up the game. With the direction they took it, I just get burned out when playing it after such a short time nowadays.
Bear in mind this example is one of a long list of things I believe they got wrong: I initially thought the equipment overhaul was a good idea, except after having played for over 100hrs I don’t feel like grinding to get all my old equipment back again, especially after so little has been done to make the core gameplay more interesting.
Anyway, sorry, rant over, used to be one of my all time favourite games.
I was also a big fan of the gear overhaul initially, until I saw how it was actually implemented and really came to dislike it. I just don’t see who it’s here for. It screws over newer players who are stuck with really poor gear, making the already punishing learning curve the game has significantly worse, and it screws over any experienced players by punishing anybody that actually wants to interact with the level prestige mechanic once they do get themselves to level 100. Meanwhile anybody who doesn’t prestige just permanently has even better gear than what previously existed and never needs to worry about the other tiers. And since there’s no reward for prestiging aside from a cosmetic badge, why should you interact with the system at all? Overall it was a poorly thought out and unbalanced update.
While some updates haven’t been great and some things desperately need to be reworked, I’ve still been really enjoying the game. Once you get to around level 40 and unlock all the original gear, you can largely pretend the gear overhaul never happened. The newer maps and map reworks are awesome (aside from the new-ish lighthouse map point hope, that thing sucks), and I don’t play frequently enough to get too bored of the basic gameplay loop. Playing on nightmare where you only get 2 evidence helps since it adds a bit more strategy to each round than just getting 3 pieces of evidence and leaving. The newly reworked media evidence is pretty fun too, where you get rewarded for getting videos and pictures of unique forms of evidence rather than taking 10 pictures of a pile of salt that somebody stepped in.
I just mash mod key + backspace on hyprland to kill it haha. Bye mfer!
But also sometimes lately hyprland hasn’t been playing as nice with steam games and my mouse doesn’t interact with the game. The fix I found is to fling the steam client over to the other monitor. Works I guess. Linux problems lol.
Relatedly, I’ve noticed ports of console games, particularly by Japanese devs, and especially Sqeenix, not actually having an option to quit to desktop. Sometimes hitting Esc will pop a plain system theme window with an option to close the program, but I’ve seen ones that didn’t even have that and had to be killed externally. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but even exiting DragonQuest 11 is a pain.
This is also hella common in a lot of online or multiplayer live service games recently. Forces you to alt-F4 if on PC. Especially bad with Sony’s playstation ports; they treat it like you’re on the PS5 and can just switch games to automatically close the running one.
I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design “bible” was that an interface must never present an “are you sure” prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.
Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Which is interesting, because at least for me, the main reason I try to save often like that is because of games like bethesda games or other games that don’t autosave and will crash, losing you HUGE amounts of progress.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.
I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.
But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.
I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.
Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.
I didn’t play Detroit for so long because I expected it to be like most other interactive movie type games where you maybe make 3 total decisions that actually have an effect on the whole story. Checked it out on PS+ and still felt that way up until I finished the first level and it shows the fucking massive decision tree of all the possible choices you could have made in that segment and was blown away. Hella them I didn’t even notice were viable things I could have tried.
This is what these kinds of games should be. It’s fucking amazing. It actually gives replayability to something that, in the past, was more of a one and done deal.
Bruh, yes, I know exactly what you mean. I’m actually getting ready to replay D:BH again because the last time I played was about 1.5+ years ago, and I think I’ve finally forgotten all my decisions. My husband said I got one of the best endings he’s ever seen someone get, and I really didn’t want to be tempted to answer everything the same. There’s SO MANY ways that game can go/end, and I want to explore them all!
I made the mistake of playing Until Dawn first, then D:BH, and then I downloaded the Dark Pictures Anthology and played 2 out of the 4 of those. I’m sure those would have hit different had I played them first, but knowing that the ending is ultimately the same no matter which direction you go definitely ruins the replayability. All 4 run into the very issue you were worried about with Detroit.
I’m aware of Valve being very generous with warranty/replacements of controller hardware for the Index. Even years after the warranty is up. But I think this is because of the major durability issues and known defects that the Index Controllers have.
In any case, Valve seemingly has lost money on a certain percentage of Valve Index kits/controller hardware. Based on how many people I know, including myself, who have gotten replacement hardware from Valve. Sometimes many times for recurring issues.
But I’m not aware of Valve doing the same for the Deck.
Edit: and you can tell they focused really hard on making the new controllers more durable:
No charging port to melt
durable sticks that won’t start drifting
No special finish on the controller that can be worn/scratched away
No internal battery to go bad
seemingly far fewer delicate parts
Funny point on the melting charging port. 2 years or so after the Index came out, SteamVR started warning using with a status dialog that told users to stop charging their controllers while they use them. They never accounted for long play sessions and people who would want to charge while playing.
The steam frame controllers use AA batteries, the steam controller has a lithium ion internal battery.
Also it does have a USB port but the primary charging method is via the pogo pins. But obviously you might want to recharge from a wall outlet so they also include a USB port. But that’s obviously going to get used far less often than it would otherwise.
Just don’t overdo it. I’m not a native speaker and I don’t know if OP’s post is generated, but the dash in the third bullet point really serves no purpose. The first dash could be replaced with a more appropriate colon.
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