UE 5 sucks major dick though. Like oblivion is a cool AI generated remake and gold use of that engine. But it’s far from optimized. My frames go from 120-45 in a matter of 2 seconds in the same area.
If Square decides to do another FF remake, they’ll either skip over 8 and do 9 instead, or they’ll go back and do 6. That’s what I think. But if they did 8, they better overhaul that stupid Draw system.
I mean, there’s a fair reason most exclusivity is dead.
There’s a lot of cool PS4 games that just don’t run well on the PS4. So, it’s a much nicer experience to get them on PS5, at 60fps, full resolution, with instant load times.
It’s also honestly kinda nice that someone with low income can buy a used PS4 and still join for most of those games online.
FF7 remake is cool for a lot of reasons, but we’ve got countless reasons to support the idea that turn-based combat isn’t the barrier to playing those old games.
I LOVED the first game. Soundtrack on in the background sometimes, liked the board game (just manual meh balance FP1), got all the achievements, really enjoyed it.
The second IS a good distinction from it, it’s not just rinse and repeat the same game. Great story, epic music, different scale and problems. It’s just like… They took the second tier of ideas they had for FP1 and implemented them. It actually probably would have been a good game if it didn’t have those footsteps to follow in.
Surprisingly, a few recent sequels have been amazing. Shapez2 is an unbelievable follow up to the OG. Hades II is the same imo. Massive, beautiful, fun distinction in gameplay, but still great ideas and balanced and such.
Monster Train 2 is great in demo, Kingdoms 2 crowns is a bit less recent but is such a great follow up to what’s effectively an arcade game in the first. It’s not all downhill or anything
I didn’t really like the aesthetic at first so I was on the fence.
It’s 3D, and most things take up more space with plenty of them taking some height as well. This makes the builds a bit more complex in a fun way. Also, the scaling is wild. You need a LOT more shapes, so you can duplicate or make more efficient things, ship them by train eventually, really makes it feel like a different game by the end than it does in the start.
They have a huge content update coming June 2 as well
Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?
I mean, all series are going to have some point where they dick things up, else we’d have never-ending amazing video game series. I don’t think that the second game in the series is uniquely bad.
Some of it is just going to be luck. Like, hitting just the right combination of employees, market timing, consumer interest, design decisions, scoping a game’s development time and so forth isn’t a perfectly-understood science. Making the best game of the year probably means that a studio can make a good game, but that’s not the same thing as being able to consistently make the game of the year, year after year.
Some of it is novelty. I mean, part of most outstanding games is that they’re doing at least something that hasn’t been done before, and doing so again — especially if other studios are trying to copy and build on the winning formula as well — may not be enough.
Some of it is that most resources don’t always make a game better. I know that at least some past series have failed when a studio made a good game, (understandably) get more resources for the next game in the series, but then try to expand their scope and don’t do well at that new scope.
Engine rewrites are technically-risky, can get scope wrong, and a number of games that have really badly failed have happened because a studio tries to rebuild everything from the ground up rather than to do an incremental improvement.
You mention Cities: Skylines 2, and I think that “more resources don’t always help”, “luck”, and “engine rewrite” were all factors. When I play a city-builder, I really don’t care all that much about graphics; I’ve played and enjoyed some city-builders with really unimpressive graphics, like the original lincity. CS2 got a lot of budget and had a dev team that tried to use a lot of resources on graphics (which I think was already not a good idea, and not just due to my own preferences; reading player comments on things like Steam, what players were upset about were that they wanted more-interesting gameplay mechanics, not fancier graphics). Basically, trying to make the world’s prettiest city-builder with the money maybe wasn’t a good idea. Then they made some big internal technical shifts that involved some bad bets on how well some technology that they wanted to use for those graphics would work, and found that they’d dug themselves deeply into a hole.
Sometimes it’s a game trying to shift genres. To use the Fallout series as an example of both doing this what I’d call successfully and unsuccessfully, the Fallout series were originally isometric real-time-until-combat-then-turn-based games. With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the game to be a pausable 3D first-person-shooter series. That requires a whole lot of software and mechanics changes. That was, I think, successful — while the Wasteland series that the original Fallout games were based on continued the isometric turn-based model successfully, Fallout 3 became a really big hit. On the other hand, Fallout 76 was an attempt to take the series to be a live-action multiplayer game. That wasn’t the only problem — the game shipped in an extremely buggy state, after the team underestimated the technical challenges in taking their single-player game multiplayer. But some of it was just that the genre change took away some of what was nice about about the earlier games — lots of plot and story and scripted content and a world that the player was the center of and could change and an immersive environment that didn’t have other players acting out of character. The audience who loves a game in one genre isn’t necessarily a great fit for another genre. In that situation, it’s not so much that the developers don’t have a winning formula as that they’ve decided to toss their formula out and try to write a new one that’s as successful.
Cities skylines 2 was way more ambitious than the first game but they barely scaled up the size of the studio over the years and then pushed out a half baked product. I remember they tried to play the scrappy indie studio in defense of the games state at launch as if they hadn’t released the most popular city builder of the last like 15 years and oodles of DLC since along with niche hits in the City in Motion games
I think CS:2 was far too ambitious, and there were very strange design choices around subsidies which effectively removed any challenge from the game – at first. I just played it the other day, and frankly it has turned around a lot. Decent game now.
KSP2 was just a corporate shit show – devs were well intentioned but ultimately were unable to continue based on factors out of their control. It really sucks because KSP1 is one of the best games ever made and KSP2 had a lot of promise.
Despite common sense I bought The Hundred Line at launch, but thankfully it is indeed a very solid game. To the point I spent 25 hours playing it over 3 days. It’s more or less a Danganronpa game, so it might be too cringy for some people, but having gained enough tolerance to those things it’s wonderful. Probably better than DR, but it’s apples and oranges in some aspects.
One “problem” is that the game is really easy, and the whole SRPG part is mostly to enchance the story. It’s still really fun, I think that like with Kirby they intentionally wanted a game that anyone can approach. And though I’m just getting started it also does indeed appear to have 100 endings, I ended up on the romance route from my first set of decisions…
So I’ve been playing Tropico 4 for a bit, and it looks pretty good. You’re always zoomed out, so you don’t need to have more than like 8 polygons for a limb.
I literally could not run cities Skylines 2 or KSP 2 at a good frame rate. Everything was modelled incredibly well and looks great, but that doesn’t mean shit if I can’t run the game. I strongly suspect that’s a big contributing factor.
In addition to this, they’re going to against their biggest competitors: the previous game. It’s literally the same game with more content, runs incredibly well by comparison, has a huge mod library, and is much cheaper to boot. Might not be as pretty, but it actually might not matter given what you’re playing.
I think there’s probably a lot of issues that contribute to this to be honest, but it feels like at it’s core it’s a fools errand to begin with.
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