I often stay away of new games because that exactly, the hype. If you play a new game and you say it sucks, everybody yells at you, but if you let past the time, it’s the time the one who gives reason to people.
In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.
This happened to me with Resident Evil 3 Remake, I didn’t knew that had so many haters behind but I really enjoyed the game. One thing to hate, they say, is the short duration of the game. I mean, you could beat the original game in 2 hours, if you didn’t knew nothing about the game, could take you like 7 or 8 hours
I always think it’s fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It’s always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.
I had to search “Bethesda space game” just now to even remember its generic name …
I remember at the time it was getting all these awards. When I still had game pass I booted it up to see what it was all about. Dear god was it dull. All I remember is some dude comes out and is like “you had a space vision! Take my ship!” And I thought that was the most absurd way to start a game.
I was just talking to someone at a party about what games we’d been playing, and we also had to fully stop and think a while to remember the actual name of the Bethesda Space Game™.
Oftentimes, devs are practically the only person who can. Especially small hobbyist devs. They’ll spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing their own game as they build it and forget they have to then circle back and tune it for people who haven’t.
Potentially my hottest take, but this is my biggest criticism of Silksong. Even as someone who likes difficult games, I bounced off it. I’ll get back to it eventually, I know I’ll love it once I crack it, but it was taking a lot of effort I just can’t devote to it right now.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s too difficult or that the difficulty level is bad, but it’s overtuned. The devs spent 7 years developing it, playing it, replaying it, adding, tweaking. I believe they made exactly the thing they wanted, but that makes it very dense and intricate and you gotta be on just the absolutely correct wavelength to get there …
I say density, though Elite Dangerous puts a spin on how large the map should be.
In Elite Dangerous, most of the galaxy is unexplored. The Bubble (human inhabited area) is fully explored, which steadily dwindles as you go to about 1k ly outside the Bubble. Out there, you’re basically on your own.
When you explore and map unexplored areas, you actually get some money depending on the quality of your finds. If you find some Earth-like planets, for instance, you can get a lot of money from exploring. There is also an inexhaustible supply of systems to explore, so there’s no need to worry about running out.
Everything except the story bits would be procedurally generated. And it would probably get pretty boring having like three interior types repeated over and over.
There is no open world that is too big. They can only be too small.
However, the quality of an open world is not predicated on the size of the open world, but rather what is actually in it.
And this doesn’t mean that open worlds must be drowning in content, as the quality of the content itself also matters, and certain worlds that are large and empty can still be interesting due to its traversal being good, or the sandbox nature of a large empty world.
Some of the worst examples of open worlds are the kind that are just filled with isolated little fetch quests; busywork that’s all marked on the map with no element of organic exploration. Or the kinds of open worlds where nothing actually happens “organically” without the player starting it.
The best kinds of open worlds are the ones that emphasise exploration and/or have background systems governing the world in some way (i.e. factions that interact with each other without the explicit involvement of the player).
In Disco Elysium the game straight up called me out for apologising so much. It hit me so hard I stopped apologising as much irl. 10/10 game would be ashamed again.
Crosscode has a ton of dialogue changed if you turn on NG+ modifiers, such as carrying over levels or using a “cheat code” for ludicrous damage, 1shotting almost everything.
One NPC quotes the “you cheated not the game, but yourself” copypasta.
This year in particular has been absolutely insane. I’ve played more releases the same year they launched this year than any in recent memory and still feel like I’ve missed out.
Dragon Age was last year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves are all great. Avowed kind of counts, and I’d recommend that one, too. I didn’t like Hades, but Hades fans sure are enjoying Hades II. And maybe I’ll get to Hollow Knight: Silksong before the end of the year, which people seem to largely be into.
Short answer: you wouldn’t buy this game, given your valid criticisms.
This type of extortionate pricing policy speaks to the general user base being nobs, die hard try hards and probably a toxic gaming environment. Having a barrier to entry in any activity prevents total idiots from entering. Consoles have made it easier for people who don’t understand how to operate a PC to play games but that necessarily means those games will be replete with obnoxious people. The advent of smartphones has done that for the internet.
When people may get into a competitive game, data shows that they commit to it as their primary game.
It becomes a part of their identity. You see things like Leage of Legends going strong despite a slow down in new players - people just commit to it for better or for worse, likely because most of the skills they’ve gained in it and friends they’ve made will not transfer to other games. Even other FPS games have different nuances that are non trivial once a player becomes serious about winning.
Take Wild Rift vs Mobile Legends Bang Bang. MLBB is objectively a worse rip off of League of Legends and the Chinese game Glory of Kings, but it was first to market on mobile. Now that League has released their mobile version with immense polish and quality, many mobile moba gamers just aren’t interested - they’re already totally invested in their main game, despite it being proved in court that it’s a cheap copy. (Not cheap as in $$$ though)
When you’re a kid, spending time on any competitive game will be fun (if you can handle the baseline toxicity) since you will start bad at most of them. When you get older there is a real cost to switching, you will not have as much fun until you build up the years of muscle memory that would be needed to even approach your skill at the previous game.
Because of the lock in, if a competitive game finds a sizeable enough player base and lasts a good handful of years, the devs essentially get free rein to milk their cow as they see fit.
I think it’s the history of my posts. I’ve been interviewing developers from programs and projects for a couple of years now. From Heroic to Lutris to EmuDeck, RetroDECK, Junk Store to things like RomM and Minigalaxy. These and articles on the scene…I don’t know, I guess it’s just because I’ve established my voice as one in this gaming scene.
It’s not as loud as some, but it certainly was nice to have some validation that a company wanted me to review their product!
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