Outer Wilds. I think it’s a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isn’t that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like “life-changing”. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.
I’m glad you liked it! I really wanted to like the game. I wish one of my friends in real life played through it so I could walk through some others’ perspectives on the game in person.
Several hours in, I couldn’t even make it to a point where the story started rewarding me. Which was part of the problem. I “cleared” one of the planets (Brittle Hollow), with its platforming elements (something I don’t like in 3D), and my “reward” was a small piece of a puzzle. I needed a lot more than that.
Even before that point, the game hadn’t made a good first impression. There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me. And then the ship controls drove me a bit nuts. The loop was the only interesting part about the game for me then.
Felt like the writing was on the wall for me after exploring that first planet, so I dropped it.
There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me.
Yes! I forgot about this. There were like a hundred characters to speak to and very little of it was interesting or even helpful. I couldn’t help but feel guilty when I just gave up and decided to get on the ship and leave without exploring all of the dialogue or points of interest.
I also gave Outer Wilds a try and don’t think it stood up to the hype. Got through probably 95% of the story and then gave up on it, there were two “puzzles” that I just couldn’t figure out. Ended up reading a walkthrough and was not sad at all that I put it down.
I haven’t quite finished it yet, my feeling is that it slightly overstays it’s welcome.
I’ve also noticed that most of the time I do a thing or two in the game then realise there’s not quite enough time in the loop to do another thing, but just enough time to make me want to not waste the loop, since I find starting a new loop a bit tedious.
It is, but i don’t think for a second empress is the only person to stumble across the solution. Unless it’s something so crazy only a crazy could do it.
I know there are a lot of reasons why it’s a harder choice to make; you can’t share the secret because that’s a security risk, you can’t make as much money, you are at greater risk. I guess i just miss the old days where people into tech were anti establishment and into doing things because it was cool.
All of the Yakuza games are basically, collections of well made mini games that turn each beat-em-up campaign into a hundred hours of fun. But among those, the Cabaret Club and Pocket Circuit RC race-car games from Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami, are probably my favs.
Aside from the other scumbaggery that Epic does, if you do wanna play their free games then atleast use heroic so you don’t use the wasteheap that is the epic games launcher.
for me the entire launcher is slow and a massive resource hog. The entire GUI has the same issue I had with windows 8 with everything feeling way too big and a whole lot of form over function.
I mostly game on my Steam Deck and assumed Heroic was only a Linux thing, but recently learned it’s available on Windows too. How’s it do? I’ve been collecting the free games from Epic and Prime Gaming, but barely touch them. Being able to open a single launcher for everything non Steam in Windows sounds amazing!
haven’t tried the other platforms in heroic other than epic, it works 100% except for adding friends. You can add them via the overlay but it’s incredibly janky. Then again, it’s about as janky as it is on the actual launcher. But other than adding friends works great.
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
The problem is that without those exclusive deals noone would change
Most people didn’t buy EA games at origin or Ubisoft games at UPlay even though you needed those launchers anyway. They even didn’t buy CDProjekt games at gog despite the games being dem free there.
Excluding deals on sought after games is literally the only way to get a majority of the players moving away from there comfortable “I have ally games and friends there already” position
People are lazy and hate change - without force it’s not going to happen
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
Around 2010, I remember this game studio sharing a innovative technique of game design where as people failed a boss battle, the game would slowly make the battle easier.
Some companies ran with it. Nintendo gives you extra help if you die multiple times in a level. Where some studios do it more behind the scenes. For example - giving you a bit more ammo. Or slowing the boss down a little more. I can’t remember the game, but they have a feature where a boss can’t one-shot you. And they give you more of that buff the more you die, so it “feels fair”.
Making the boss easier after I die to it would frustrate the hell out of me unless it was optional. I want it to be a challenge, not just something I can beat if I die enough times.
You’d have to die a few times to it too even notice it getting easier. Almost nobody wants to grind out a boss 20 times in order to beat it. And if properly done, the variables changed are so small each time, that it’s not noticeable.
It’s a system to help everyone enjoy the game without quitting out of frustration. Because the majority of people, in general, quit after a bit too much resistance.
There’s a quick drop off of enjoyment when a player feels the game is too difficult.
Far: Lone Sails is a beautiful art piece with unusual gameplay, and the sequel is great too.
Bedlam is kind of a love-letter to 90s and 00s FPS games. The gameplay isn’t amazing, but if you spent a lot of time in games like Quake, Unreal Tournament or Halo CE back in the early days of online multiplayer, this game is for you.
Unless it’s an MMO, or something like an online aRPG, the tag “live-service” immediately means that you’re fully expecting to release an unfinished game, collect your preorder money, get backlash for the game being unfinished garbage, and then release a few patches as a “Sorry we got caught” excuse.
The days when you’d buy something, and you would know that is the final version of your software, have been over for a long time
Even MMOs tend to be terrible live service games. This mode necessitates a good cadence of content (actual content, not stuff to buy) that most studios seem incapable of doing.
The point is that when you printed something on a disk, and had 0 capability of pushing patches down the road, you were forced to finish your product. Now it’s not the case, evidently
I’ve been playing a bunch of old NES and SNES games, and they all could use a few patches. Many are buggy as hell.
They were still cranking out unfinished trash back then because the cover art and box description was all we had to go by. No refunds on opened games, your money was gone and you had no hope of it ever getting better.
I agree it was very boring and the writing in the intro was incredibly weak. Every time I expected that wow moment (helgen, opening the vault) i just found disappointment instead. “Wow a fight! oh I’m just randomly handed a ship? ok sick time to fly, oh it’s just fast travel. New Atlantis is about to be crazy, oh it’s just a bland city” and everything being beige didn’t help. Fallout has the cool roleplaying in the wasteland factor, Skyrim has the cool fantasy aspect, Starfield seemed to just be ‘space’ but other games (Mass Effect, Outer Wilds, hell even the first half of The Outer Worlds) did it better.
It seemed p clear they don’t feel the need to innovate or have any ambition because their dedicated fan base is so large now that they don’t really have to. Which is fine but wasn’t for me.
I think I’ve grown past enjoying Bethesda’s wide, shallow ocean design philosophy and bare-bones dialogue trees. There are simply better RPGs on the market now.
I want to agree but... what other RPGs on the market fill this niche of a sandboxy open world that you can practically live in? Skyrim and Fallout feel like proper open world immersive sims at moments. Cyberpunk might be the closest one in recent memory but it fails in so many other aspects. Other than that I honestly can't think of anything.
Yup, they just keep making the same game with a new map and skins. Everyone had such insane hopes for this game, but I always assumed it’d be at best like fallout 3, better graphics in space.
Kind of interesting that the vast majority of negative/mixed reviews are regarding gameplay/story rather than complaining about major bugs (although jank has been noted in a few, and I’d honestly be a bit disappointed if there wasn’t any).
We’ll have to wait until release (Cyberpunk’s bugs weren’t that prominent in reviews either), but I really hope this “lol Bugthesda” meme can die.
Regardless of how buggy it is, I expect Dunkey to somehow break it as soon as he boots it up, which should be entertaining.
Skyrim for PS3 is in an unacceptable state to this day. The longer you play a save the worse the performance gets. My cousin finished the game at like 5 fps.
Fallout Nee Vegas has crash on startup issues day one on PC. Lots of folks couldn’t play it and I believe an unofficial patch came faster than an official.
Watching a few people play it on stream, they didn’t come across any bugs but the AI was making really silly choices still. Like Rushing a gunner with a melee weapon from far away. It’s essentially still the “Gary” AI. From everything I’ve seen, it’s going to be Fallout but you can drive the alien crashed spaceship to another planet.
As much as I love them, I’m about to be a hypocrite and say I don’t know if Bethesda will ever have non-janky AI. It’s the one thing that’s been fairly consistent over a very long time now.
Whether it’s enemies or your followers, or just pathfinding weirdness with NPCs, it’s like their AI is just kind of… there sometimes. If had a conspiracy theory about it, I’d say they’re doing it on purpose to get you to explore the world by finding your missing followers (of which I’m sure we’ll see many get stuck on different planets entirely now).
I mean it wasn't a meme. Bethesda games are buggy on release. The PS3 edition of Skyrim was notoriously not fit for release, I honestly do not think that level of bugs would ever have been tolerated nowawdays. It's also something that Microsoft's QA team really ought to be credited for because it seems they are the reason this game stands out amongst Bethesda releases in recent years.
That said imma wait till a few days afterwards just in case. And the story getting bad reviews is not unsurprising as Bethesda has not really had a good one since Morrowind, or maybe Point Lookout in F3.
You are right, but I just get tired of it sometimes as a “predictor” or that they should be lauded for not releasing something that falls apart at release.
Bethesda have a reputation for a reason, but the lack of QA (or at least publishers willing to listen to QA) in a lot of modern gaming has made some of Bethesda’s previous issues seem almost normal.
I guess that’s more an indictment of modern gaming than really a defense of Bethesda, lol. And for all the shit they get about “modders fixing their games”, they were the ones who actually went and fixed a lot of FO76’s issues after that launch disaster.
Either way, regarding the story… Yeah. I find that oftentimes the side quests (particularly faction quests or the FO4 follower quests) tend to be way more interesting than the main quest in some of their games.
The lolbugthesda meme exists because it’s true. There aren’t many games I’ve had to completely start over because of a game breaking glitch in a side quest, but that was Skyrim and the infamous thieves guild glitch.
They’re good games but pretending there are no bugs, either funny cosmetic ones or serious progress blocking ones, helps no one.
Sure. I don’t think I was pretending there weren’t any bugs. I think it’s more the dismissive approach toward their games before release that gets a bit tiring, even if it is often warranted in some respects.
Creation Engine is buggy as fuck, and I’ll always expect their games to have a fair amount of jank at the very least. Even Obsidian had troubles with it (though some of those bugs could also be attributed to lack of time and testing).
But I hope that if this does prove to be have better release than their others (admittedly, it can be a low bar), that it sticks.
I played from 5 pm yesterday at release until 5 am today, and I literally encountered one single bug, which was that I managed to get a big enemy’s pathing hung up on a rock, so I could kill it.
It's a shell of a game, it looks like an early prototype that was rushed out the door. And that's probably exactly what it is, it's an attempt at a quick cash grab using an old popular IP. If you enjoy it, that's fine, but let's not keep collectively lowering our acceptable standards.
bin.pol.social
Ważne