It’s okay, but it’s a far cry from giving me the feelings of a cyberpunk world in my opinion and I’m a massive fan of blade runner and the like.
Why am i spending so much time wandering at the street level where everywhere just looks and feels the same. Travelling is so boring.
And the voice acting of V (I played female) is so overreacted, it’s one of the cringiest performances in gaming, considering it’s meant to be all serious and whatnot.
Why am i spending so much time wandering at the street level where everywhere just looks and feels the same.
What game are you fucking playing? “Looks and feels he same”!?
What are you even going on about? Every neighborhood, every nook and cranny, looks and feels different and has it’s own personality and story to tell!
Night City is the real protagonist of the game! I could spend hours upon hours just walking those streets, experiencing the city (and have), and I’m far from the only one…
And the voice acting of V (I played female) is so overreacted, it’s one of the cringiest performances in gaming
I’m sorry, what? Cherami Leigh got a well deserved BAFTA nomination for that performance!
(Lost to Laura Bailey for her work as Abby on The Last of Us Part II.)
What, were you playing with your eyes closed while listening to something else…?
To me every nook and cranny just looks bland with nothing to do there. Everywhere just had the same sidewalks and railings. There’s no way i could ever navigate that game without waypoints.
And with the acting the emphasis she puts on certain words in a sentence just don’t match the situation and the others she’s talking to, and it feels like she swaps between extreme emotions on the same dialogue and it’s like tonal whiplash to me. There was no nuance to lay in between, and nothing to unpack for the listener. You know when she’s angry because she has her 110% angry voice on and so on.
Unless the situation is heightened and dire, it just never fit in my opinion. Her performance fits a stage play more than what’s meant to be an immersive video game in my opinion.
Jackie’s and Keanu’s voice acting though was stellar.
My problem with Cyberpunk is it feels like all style and no substance. Night City is probably the best looking city I’ve ever seen in a game. The world designers did a phenomenal job with the visuals and atmosphere.
But it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough to do in the city or ways to interact with it or the NPCs. There should be more buildings you can enter and more activities to do. For me that’s what sets GTA and Red Dead apart from Cyberpunk. They have much more to do when you’re not on missions.
To be fair style over substance is one of cyberpunk’s (the style, not specifically the game) main design philosophies…
But yeah, sure, the game could stand some more fleshing up. Most games could.
That said, there’s a lot of stories going on in Night City that you won’t get through quests, but are told bit by bit through messages, notes, minor encounters, and environment design… more than in most similar games I’ve played.
Would it be nice to be able to enter every building, take a job at any random hot dog stand, ignore the quests and, I don’t know, infiltrate Biotechnica and leak all their ugly business to the world…? Sure, but that’s not something V would do (without getting paid), especially once they’re on a timer, the engine probably wouldn’t be able to support, and, most importantly, we’d still be waiting for the game to come out.
This is something that still disappoints me despite all the updates made to add immersion. The street food vendors just kind of hang out and stare at you. That and how every vendor interaction is just popping open their inventory and grabbing things.
I remember Postal 2 having a really clunky attempt at customer to vendor speech interactions where both were NPCs. Not as cool as a ridable metro system, but still.
The game is definitely too sparse and spread out. It should’ve taken more inspiration from the likes of yakuza than gta and made a smaller but more dense world to play in where every nook and cranny ACTUALLY meant something rather than giving the illusion of doing so.
Agreed. I have bounced off this game a few times for similar reasons. For a game that is about a cyberpunk future, it felt so much like a gta clone. Having played the ttrpgs, I think I just have a different version of the world in my head, and the games version just feels off.
Yeah seriously, V gets so worked up over fucking everything and I just couldn’t give a fuck. Calm the fuck down and take your Xanax, V. She’s stressing me out over nothing.
After Jesse died my motivation to continue dropped off a cliff. All the other characters are so boring and uninteresting. I cringe everytime johnny silver hand shows up. Also the driving and gunplay feels really really bad. Its got skyrim-like clunkiness without the flexibility and interesting world to make it worth while.
That’s just having actual accessibility and difficulty settings, but with extra steps.
I appreciate the ability to mod games, but decent difficulty options really should be first-class citizens that the developers have put some thought into. Accessibility is important.
Stick a god mode in it and don’t record my scores in any competitive rankings. One of my favorite things to do is run MAME in cheat mode and just mindlessly blow shit up.
It may be a difficult debate between accessibility, experience and artistic vision. Though considering how many games are made every year, I think we can have difficult games with no easy mode. People who don’t enjoy them or can’t play them can simply play the thousands of other games.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for accessibility. During my time in the video game industry, I personally paid great attention to options for colorblind people. Unfortunately, pretty much everything else was outside my scope. But it doesn’t make any sense to potentially ruin the entire work just so 3 more people on the planet will play it.
If a game is frustrating to play, but I enjoy the story - I watch a playthrough. If a game contains elements that I don’t like - it’s probably not a game for me, so I move on to other games. If I had some disability that made it very hard or impossible to play some games - okay, fair enough, that would genuinely suck. But again, I’d move on to other games.
Of course, it’s possible to add detailed difficulty settings, so that everyone can customize their experience. Mostly a great solution, if the team has the time and resources to implement it well, which isn’t always the case. However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.
Some movies can cause epileptic seizures due to some of their scenes. Should the authors throw their vision and ideas out the window, because some people cannot safely watch the movie? I’d say no, because that would kind of ruin the whole point of artistic expression. I think we need to be able to depict and express all kinds and forms of art, even if some groups will be unable to experience them.
Maybe some time in the future we’ll be able to solve all of this easily and reliably (e.g., some kind of neuralink for people with various conditions). But as of right now, it seems to me that this is practically a non-issue. The impact is incredibly limited, while proposed solutions are either costly, unrealistic or straight up counterintuitive.
Really well put. In general, I find it frustrating how many people use the word “acccessibility” as a means to argue no games like Dark Souls (intentionally having only 1 difficulty for a single intended experience) should ever exist. But to me that’s conflating disability-accessibility with a more literal “accessible to more people” type of accessibility. I’d argue “approachable” would be a better word for the latter.
People with motor skill issues or whatever else beat Dark Souls all the time. Heck, fully abled people are intentionally giving themselves equivalent experiences by beating it with dance pads and guitar or drum controllers or whatever else all the time. So the difficulty isn’t an accessibility issue, the game is actually pretty slow paced (you can make a decent argument that more recent From Soft titles speed things up to an unreasonable degree for some motor disabilities, but I’m talking about the OG here).
What I hear instead, most of the time, is some version of “I’m a dad, I don’t have hours to throw at a boss every night”. And my instinctive response, most of the time is simply… I just don’t think you like this game? Getting your ass beat and needing hours and dozens of deaths to learn a boss or beat an area is the intended experience, and you’re having it, whether you put those hours in 1 or 12 at a time. If you don’t enjoy that, that’s just fine, there are millions of great games that don’t force you into such a punishing experience. It’s a little bit like complaining a puzzle game has too many puzzles in the way of the platforming.
Anyway, my point being, I think centering the From Software “accessibility” conversation around difficulty options, something the devs have determined is a pillar of the game’s design that they won’t change, prevents us from having a proper conversation about accessibility, in terms of actual disability accessibility. I think there’s really cool conversations we should be having about how we can make attack animations more readable to a visually impaired player without compromising on difficulty, for example. None of the Souls games even have so much as a colourblind mode, and we should be putting pressure on From Soft to add something as trivial as that as the franchise explodes in popularity, but “dark souls accessibility” is an entirely unrelated conversation instead, which kinda drowns out any other.
I think there’s really cool conversations we should be having about how we can make attack animations more readable to a visually impaired player without compromising on difficulty, for example.
Good post, I agree with you and the above poster.
This brings to mind the parry system in Metroid Dread. Enemies flashed yellow before a parryable attack signalling you should hit the button at that moment. It’s possible and it works.
So then why don’t all games do this? Because Metroid Dread was designed from the beginning to support this system. In Souls games, parrying is not just a matter of timing on attacks, but if the attack can even be parried at all given the specific attack (not all can)/player stats/equipped items, 3D positioning of hitboxes for both the attack and the player’s defensive parry, as well as variable parry windows based on the specific shield or weapon equipped. Now take into account that Souls enemies often have multiple attacks each and this becomes a very significant amount of developer work. Not to mention that given all these factors, timing a button press to a parry flash may not always result in 100% success rate. Imagine how frustrating a system like this would be if even when you did everything “right”, the physical placement of hitboxes only resulted in an 80% success rate on any given parry. Would players not find this frustrating? The point I’m trying to make is how complex this system would actually be and how much work it would take to implement.
However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.
I’m going to be honest here, I did not end up caring for Metroid Dread much. For a number of reasons I won’t go into here, but partly because of this parry system. Parry windows were clearly telegraphed, did huge amounts of damage often resulting in one hit kills AND they guaranteed to drop health/ammo pickups. With the risk/reward system practically non-existent you were so highly incentivized to use them that it made combat feel much more defensive. Rather than attack enemies, it was often more beneficial to approach them, bait out an attack, and punish.
Now I do take some responsibility for my actions here. It was my choice to begin playing the game this way. But I do also think there’s something to be said for design elements that train or at least encourage players to engage with them in certain ways. Difficulty options are not just game design decisions but also attempts to understand how individual players may engage with those decisions. Expecting developers to have the ability or even foresight to anticipate all these different interactions is an extremely high, if not unreasonable barrier.
But in the end, I simply say that Dread was not a game to my liking. I know there are a lot of people who absolutely love it. Just not a game for me.
I’ve heard the same excuses about Souls games that I hear about learning an instrument. Many times it’s from the same people and no they aren’t disabled. They just say I don’t have the dexterity or it’s too hard I could never do this or that. To them I show them this amazing man: youtube.com/
This man has an obvious disability, but plays guitar better than like 90% of guitarists. The same argument can be made about paralympic athletes. They’re often in better shape and more talented than people who aren’t disabled and the reason obviously isn’t some natural talent they have. They’ve put in the work to be great. That’s what it takes to master anything. You have to practice, you have to try, you have to push yourself.
if we going by quantity, I think 2007 was the most stacked, like omg the amount of hype for these games at the cafeteria lunch table was insane. www.imdb.com/list/ls087306278
it honestly feels weird hearing people call these games “classics” xd I am NOT ready for this!
It think it has to be 2007 just because there are games that didn’t crack the top 10 that year that would be goty in other years. It’s also a huge year for multiple platforms, pratically every major franchise had a good release that year.
Ditto this, 2007 was a fucking crazy year. All that next gen hit at once, people still taking risks on unique ideas. Nowadays you only see that kind of stuff from the indie scene, though they’ve been doing a great job with it IMO.
I agree with other comments here, but, to be honest, this year has been really good! Expedition 33, Silksong, Hades, The Alters, Nightreign, Blue Prince, Dispatch, to name just a few.
After playing the story through a few times, it’s hard to actually stay invested in it anymore, I also did all side quests one run too, and I’m not keen on repeating that. However, 2077 is the only game where I will start it up just to drive around and listen to some music, whether in game or something I pick myself, and then just turn it off. Usuallt for 30-45 minutes. And I played many of the GTAs and all but the first Saints Rows. But only 2077 will I drive around just for the hell of it.
Hahahaha, they violated that well over a decade ago. It was supposed to give acceas to all future releases at one point, which died the moment it released on consoles. iirc people were pretty upset about it way back when.
Unfortunately the actual text of the alpha license terms appear to be lost to time, but you can find a number of posts online claiming the same thing, that it was worded in a way to indicate the license covered all future versions (across all systems), not just all future updates of java (and bedrock if you converted your account early enough).
While that may be true, that fact is immaterial. Microsoft can control which servers can exist, and thus they can and will do anything they want. The only way around them is to mod the game so that it’s more like a Terraria model, where anyone can run a server and anyone can connect to it.
this is already how it works for the most part, they just have Microsoft acting as a middle-man for player accounts as a form of DRM. you can remove microsoft from the equation entirely by using “offline mode” which also allowed cracked players to join.
Wait seriously? I’ve never played Minecraft, but the only control Microsoft has is an optional(?) account? Without that you can use any version of minecraft you want to connect to any server you want? That can’t be right, otherwise I can’t understand why this thread exists.
neither can I honestly, without mojang’s servers as a middleman there would be no account security and no skins, but both of those problems are easily fixed through server side mods/plugins made for that purpose.
this actually pisses me off a whole lot because i’ve hosted minecraft servers for over 10 years, and until recently Mojang had a completely hand’s off approach. the way I see it: if I’m hosting it on my own hardware then Mojang can get their filthy hands off it, only i decide what goes on my own god damn server.
Right, so it sounds like there needs to be a Mod that allows Minecraft clients to bypass central auth, I suspect a mod like that would look very similar to piracy as far as Microsoft is concerned.
no, the official server client has a setting called “offline mode” which bypasses the central auth without any mods what so ever, mods are only required to get back custom skins and security features
players could continue playing on their accounts like normal, they just need to do an extra “login” once they enter the server, to verify they aren’t spoofing as someone else
“offline” (usually pirated) clients can only join offline servers. regular clients that are logged to an account can connect to both online and offline servers.
Witcher 3, which I played like 3 months ago. There was this one goofy quest where you had to save a mage by getting a magic book with a weird name that you could abbreviate to GOG. You needed a spell from it to disable the mage’s tower defence and regulatory management system (something along those lines), or DRM for short.
Her best card, in my opinion, but still janky because of the shard mechanic. It limits how many of her cards you can reasonably run in a deck which I just dislike. Great game, though!
There’s so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don’t see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don’t forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don’t ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).
I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.
I can’t justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn’t strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.
I think the thing I miss most about this game is how much it did with hardware from 2005. It looked great, played well, had a decent length but also didn’t outstay its welcome.
I’ve played through it at least twice. I doubt I’ll ever replay City or Knight as they were amazing but far far too long.
I liked Arkham City, it felt more like the game they initially wanted to make. Batmans movement is a bit smoother, you get some fun gliding elements, and it opens up the map so there is a bit more of an exploration/investigation element.
I think Arkham Knight might have gone too large, and I feel like the batmobile sections felt too tank like.
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