I think Outer Wilds is the most unique and fantastic way to tell a story I’ve ever experienced. Truly open in a way I’ve not seen before or since.
With the banger of a soundtrack too, I just can’t bring myself to rate other games higher than it; even if I enjoy them more, Outer Wilds is probably the best game I’ve ever played.
Slay the Spire probably makes the list as it’s inspired countless tweaks on its incredibly balanced deck building experience
Unpopular Opinion: The last few hardware generations have had diminishing returns while increasing the cost of being a PC gamer drematically. While the DOOM games are generally well-optimized, I just upgraded my whole ass system after 8 years just two years ago and I’m hitting minimum specs to play the new DOOM game at all. Same with Indiana Jones, same with STALKER 2, same with Alan Wake 2.
Of course, we also went from 8gb of video RAM being more than enough to needing fucking like 16-24gb as a standard somehow.
Seriously, the rig I bought to play fucking Bioshock Infinite kept up for about 8 years. I know I didn’t go all-out in building my machine but I didn’t 10 years ago either when I put my old box together. Honestly current machine feels way more high-end than the one 10 years ago did.
Anyway, kind of feels like a rip-off by the industry to me, and this is the same industry that is pushing for GTA 6 to cost $80-100 because they’re not making enough money somehow.
Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.
In a way, it’s like being back in the NES days all over again. Sometimes the game itself would just push the hardware too much and it would slow down. This shouldn’t be happening at all in this environment, it’s a joke. It goes well beyond just positive reviews for this kind of stuff.
There needs to be better compression for texture and sound files. That’s pretty much the reason for the giant install sizes and RAM requirements. In theory it’s possible, but it hasn’t really changed in decades.
“AAA” companies don’t want to spend q/a time on code. Indie devs don’t seem to have that problem. So there’s a huge gulf between quality.
Personally I think the day one patch excuse for reviewers is bull. Day one patches have been a thing for at least 25 years, everyone should know they don’t fix bad games. If the companies are not being called out for bad practices then they’ll never bother to fix them before going gold.
Additionally, if a day one patch were actually enough to fix these issues, then just delay the game by a day. That way, the launch day gamers won’t suffer through a (sometimes) unplayable experience and possibly leave bad reviews.
The reason the new Doom and Indiana Jones games require a card with ray tracing is a consequence of the consoles all having ray tracing and an increasing number of PC users do too.
So to support a diminishing number of PC players would require the game to be lit twice, one with RT and one with traditional methods. Obviously this costs more in development and testing and studios are increasingly deciding it’s just not worth it.
It’s got to be the biggest dividing line we’ve seen in years. I suspect things will settle down for a while, now.
“With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.”
Any time a critical character dies (usually because you’re on a killing spree) it says that. But it’s also become a meme when someone famous dies in real life.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It happened when important NPCs died, rendering unfinished or future quests associated with that character impossible to complete or start; iirc essential NPCs didn’t have immunity to damage and death in Morrowind like in later Bethesda titles, so these NPCs were protected only by the player reloading their save after getting this message upon the essential NPCs’ death.
Just a habit, on lots of subreddits now, you get AutoMod deleted or banned from their subreddit if you use curse words. This happened to me on PC gaming subreddit. I got hit with a Perma ban there 3 months ago and they wouldn’t tell me why I kept messaging them over and over again, told it was for excessive profanity. Apparently lots of my comments use the f word so that’s not acceptable.
I started to censor myself too on other platforms because sometimes they have warnings like “Are you sure you want to post this?” and I feel like they’re shadowbanning my comment.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re getting put on a list. They probably have it designed that way, people who use offensive language often or certain words, add them to an internal list and restrict their interactions with the rest of the people heavily.
I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.
I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.
Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.
Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games
I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?
To add to your point, Jedi Survivor was a huge improvement over Fallen Survivor. I’m not sure how you could look at that game and say that there hasn’t been any improvement at all.
Honestly I’ve I did jot know how survivor improved upon the first part since the pc version was so overshadowed by it’s technical problems. Tho I’ve heard the patch yesterday improved the performance massively
I did play months after release and I have a pretty beefy PC so it was fine for me. I did only encounter stutters at one specific area halfway through the game but other than that, it was really smooth for me.
Survivor improve Don the first one by expanding on the stances you had in the first game, a much larger world with a larger variety of enemies and tools you can use in combat. There’s a hub area which is kind of cool but I honestly didn’t really get the appeal of that. There’s also quite a bit of cool moments in the story that were really neat but I won’t talk about it because it’s a spoiler. I liked it a lot actually and it’s a shame all of it was overshadowed by the awful performance on launch.
Ubi actually has 2 kinds of open world games… Assassin’s Creed Style and Far Cry Style. I prefer the former, I was disappointed to see the Avatar game was the latter
I just want to say I was really disappointed when Far Cry 3 basically became the template for Far Cry games.
The main thing I hate is the “observe this outpost from a distance then permatag all the enemies so they’re visible through walls, then take them out” mechanic.
It has elements like both, but it doesn’t do exploration towers that unlock areas. It feels more like a third option between the two, which makes most sense because it comes from the devs that did both The Division and Avatar.
I enjoyed Outlaws open world gameplay, even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It was still an enjoyable experience that felt like discovering the worlds on your own, instead of being guided and follow a checklist of stuff to do, despite having a list to get upgrades and do story and missions. It felt a bit more like Rockstar style open-world, where you just go about your business and run into encounters, instead of going from A to B all the time.
I’m right in the middle of this game currently, and I do fully see some of the jank that shows up in this game. And it does have some issues (I couldn’t land my ship on the starting planet until I finished a specific quest, but the game doesn’t tell you this).
However, I’m finding the game pretty fun overall and kinda hope they iterate on this scoundrel idea and make sequel. I’m having fun sneaking in and looting all these places.
I really hope they make a sequel game, or maybe a similar game based on a different character that would allow for a bit of a wider range of gameplay. But I wouldn’t mind if they kept going with Kay, she’s a likeable protagonist to me and I just love Nix.
Have to say I ran into very few bugs and I wrapped up the main story and loads of extras after about 45 hours. Funnily I ran into only one bug after finishing the main story, getting stuck in ingame cutscene-camera that prevented me from doing anything else, including being able to reload the game lol.
There’s definitely been some minor goofy and janky stuff throughout the game, but nothing that ended up gamebreaking. I think the most un-finished part of the game that I wish they’d fixed up before launch is the lipsync issues. It just looks so bad in some scenes and takes away from the otherwise great immersive experience.
Yeah other than this weird thing where the quest made landing the ship weird, I have had anything totally break the game — though it did crash on me once. But the autosave got me maybe ten seconds before that so I loaded right back where I was.
Mostly I’ve just seen little graphical bugs. Like when you fly off world and the “loading clouds” show up. Sometimes there will be a flash of a big, black chunk of the screen that shows up for a split second. Stuff like that.
I wouldn’t mind if Kay got her own little series out this. She’s cool, and Nix is cool. I like them both.
I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don’t trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it’s typically lies or false claims…or they make cinematic trailers which don’t even represent the game at all because… cinematic.
That can even be a guide to many things like tools, if it’s pricy but has good word of mouth and not heavily advertised (sometimes the biggest expense) then it might just be worth the cash
I don’t think this game even lasted long enough for word of mouth to have popularized it. I didn’t hear about it until it was dead. I am wondering how many players Helldivers 2 had at 11 days (not a great example because it was an existing IP with existing fans). Could they have made it if the game had actually been good? I am not sure. Shutting down super fast got them more publicity than anything else they did.
I’m not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that’s a minority of advertising these days
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
Yeah, they definitely didn’t market it very well, at least to the PC crowd. It seems the PlayStation version is doing much better, with advertisements in the PSN store.
the kids who are the age we were in the half life glory days–they don’t want single player. they want league of apex legends fortnitewatchstrike
single player games won’t go away completely, but they’re definitely taking a backseat to whatever the rage is with the kids. currently mobas. just google “most played video games” if you’re not depressed enough already
“Single player games have taken a backseat”. Okay. We’re just going to state that as a truth? And also just stating kids as being the main video games audience still?
I mean if single player games have taken such a backseat, why are big companies pouring so much money into games such as Horizon, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Anno or Dark Souls? Why are indie games, thousands and tens of thousands of them, so overwhelmingly single player? Why is Zelda still not a MOBA? Just does not really hold water as an argument IMO. If anything it seems the opposite is happening and after the height of MOBAs in ˜2015, the market is slowly creeping back.
I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.
Wrong, they just take less effort and have a more constant revenue stream.
Potential for profit means nothing, when so many attempts at milkable forever games end up like Suicide Squad or Concord.
Also you can come into them half baked and pull the plug if the game doesn’t sell (because it’s half baked) like they’re doing with SS and they did with the Avengers game.
They spend more money.
They don’t, you can’t spend money you don’t have, whales are working adults.
Kids spend money for less. Better ROI, not higher payoff.
You make the 18302nd skin and troves of kids will badger their parents for fortnite bucks so they can buy it but not everyone will. The upside is that making a skin costs you single digits percent points of the profits, so even if one or two are a dud, you’re fine, the good ones will make up for it.
It’s a business model you can throw money at once the game’s got an audience base, which is very attractive to companies, because it’s uncomplicated and reliable.
There’s plenty of room to monetize single player games when it’s add-in content to games that you continually replay as opposed to add-on content for something that’s story driven. More systemic games like Civilization, roguelikes, simulators, etc.
When your game isn’t live service multiplayer, your incentives change to putting out more sequels rather than iterating on the same game. So your revenue per game goes down, but there’s no reason it can’t necessarily be as lucrative overall.
It’s not confusion. Your perspective is survivorship bias. For every Rocket League, there are 10 Concords. That’s why the entire industry is imploding right now. Everyone thinks their game will be Fortnite, but only so many games can be Fortnite, and a lot of that even comes down to luck, so you’ve got games like Avengers and Suicide Squad losing hundreds of millions of dollars each instead of making games for half or a quarter of their budgets that would have recouped their costs and then some.
Well then I guess your recommendation would be to keep trying to be Rocket League, even though statistically you’re going to leave a crater in the ground formed by hundreds of millions of dollars and the better part of a decade of work? Keep in mind there are single player games that make more money than Rocket League too, if we’re going to cherry pick.
I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.
That’s true but it’s not because people aren’t playing single player games. The reason single player games are less profitable is because the non-subscription, non-microtransaction single player market is extremely saturated with indie games. That makes it very hard to sell AAA single player games. The standards are extremely high and the opportunities for extra monetization are not there.
I have been a single player gamer for most of my life, yet I haven’t bought a AAA single player game in decades. I have more indie single player games to play than I know what to do with, and frankly they appeal to me more than AAA titles. Expensive graphics and voice acting don’t have much draw for me these days. I am much more interested in roguelikes and retro games now. I think there are thousands of others like me out there, among all those who don’t go in for multiplayer games and haven’t purchased a console.
Single player games are less and less profitable these days. What the original commenter could have said is, these days, there isn’t much money to be made telling a story when fortnight makes so much money by doing nothing but cosmetics.
It’s not a question of demand, it’s a question of profit. Multiplayer games stand to make a lot more money than singleplayer. Nobody will spend real world dollars on cosmetic items in a singleplayer game.
Even if your coutry reaches 100% and you haven’t signed, please still do incase some signatures are invalid
TIP – It is better to collect more signatures than required. Sometimes the national authorities might not be able to validate all the statements of support you provide.
Changing designs due to market pressures isn’t censorship. Remember the Sonic movie, where they redid the animation due to criticism? Nobody was outraged at that change but when it’s tits, all of a sudden people care.
What “market pressure” are you talking about? The game topped charts because it seemingly wasn’t afraid to have an attractive female lead while backing that up with fun gameplay. The difference with the Sonic movie was that no one liked the original design, and the movie wasn’t patched after people bought tickets.
If you’ve ever seen isometric pixel sprites, authors often draw those first “naked” to get the shape right. If they show an in development model that’s naked, and later have added clothes, is that then “censorship”? No of course it fucking isn’t.
aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there’s the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost
Aside from TF2–and even that I got a bit bored with–most all of my interest in multiplayer FPS died along with Unreal Tournament. Doesn’t feel like having fun is the goal anymore.
Need for Speed: The Run, but good. Give me an uninterrupted race accoss the US (or any other continent), against 199 other drivers, with strategic decisions to make such as fuel stops, sleep breaks, multiple paths… Make it a rogue lite with unlockable vehicle classes, police chases, weather changes, racing through traffic… Bonus points for realistic physics and VR support.
Some NFS game are straight up terrible (Undercover…), but at least the good ones with similar gameplay (NFSU2, Carbon) still exist. But The Run was worse than bad; it was disappointing. It could have been good, but wasn’t, and they never tried to make another one with a similar premise.
The only good part of the game is the bonus mission in Carbon Canyon, in all its HD glory.
Honestly I loved The Run. It was a jam packed unique short game experience. It was definitely too short for it’s price, but you know at that time Blackbox was working on 3 separate games.
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