If you already own a decent PC, most of these games have already been released there, although later than on PS5. Only ones missing from that list so far are GoW: Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2.
I thought the story in Horizon was fantastic. I’m a Sci-fi nerd, so that all hit home with me. The second game, not so much though. It was like they didn’t quite get why the story of the first game worked.
I have problems with God of War though. The story feels like an attempt to copy what The Last of Us did with Ellie and Joel, but without really understanding why their dynamic worked.
I have a lot of complaints about the HFW plot but the biggest one is the juvenile way they handled Tilda and Sylens in their capacity as prime movers. Aloy herself is a mature character but the story around her takes place in a moral scape of the world as seen by a fifteen year old.
Sylens goes through the motions of his scheme and keeps the same smug “I’m above it all and don’t owe anyone any explanations” attitude, through setback after setback and reality check after reality check. It seemed like the authors were poised to deliver a harsh discussion about ends vs means, how the world isn’t a magical fairy tale and sometimes something important needs to be done that requires dirty politics and won’t be magically solved by the one pure hero pulling the sword out of the rock; but then they squandered it completely and went back to ‘yeah all glory to the chosen one’. Most frustratingly they had their angle right there, already baked in: Aloy fails the first 7 times she tries to do anything, so if Sylens mocked her “this is the real world, you don’t just go ahead and solve things, Hero”, she could legitimately retort “idk, have you tried”. Instead they just don’t have this discussion and go back and forth “screw you I hate you” “behave, girl” again and again in a flat loop.
Tilda was made in the mold of this cringey moral that’s all the rage now about how everyone’s an abuser and when people say “I love you” they really mean “I own you” (as also seen in Dragon Age: Absolution). It reads like someone’s pent up frustration about their controlling parents, like in his nightmares the person who created this plotline sees his mother taking to the air in that floating exoskeleton and shouting amid a rain of guided missiles “you’re going to college and that’s final, submit or perish”.
I feel like HFW kind of lost the plot when it introduced the Far Zeniths. They just didn’t work for some reason. I kind of wish if they were going that route, they had been the descendants of the people who left for Far Zenith and they had a better reason for wanting Gaia and Earth or something, so they weren’t just cartoonishly evil.
I think the main problem with the world of Horizon is that the most interesting event in their world has already happened.
The story of Zero Dawn worked so well because it is the interwoven tale of a young woman who sets out to discover why she was cast out of her village at birth, and the almost archaeological unraveling of why the world is the way it is. When you finally piece together both the plot is almost already at it’s climax, and you are left with both the understanding of why it must be Aloy who stops the new threat to the world, and the motivation to do so.
But that doesn’t work for a sequel. The format of Zero Dawn relies on exposition about the very nature of the world, that’s why the main quest has a bunch of missions that more or less boil down to walking around an old facility and listening to recordings.
How are you going to translate that into a new sequel? Either you’ve got sequels planned already, which I find unlikely given what Forbidden West amounted to, or you need to try to invent more world building and plot. It seemed quite clear to me that Guerillas writers for Forbidden West didn’t know their own world as well as I had assumed they did. The “how did we get here” plot in Zero Dawn revolved around a small cast characters, who, with the exception of one, were all both very neuanced and strongly invested in their own plot. The Zeniths of Forbidden West come across almost as inverse Deus Ex Machina, characters who fly in from the moon with what seems like no other reason to mess up the plot than “We had to find something”.
It’s the reason why I’ve been holding off on getting a PS5, and recently decided I just won’t. The only thing that has come out recently that tempts me is BG3, but I’m past buying a console for a single game; I’ll just play it on PC.
First, I think its the first game of this type to have any successful control scheme for a controller at all, so I think it deserves accolades for making it happen at all.
Second, while I still mostly play in traditional mouse and keyboard, I am an old man now, having played the original BG as a teen when it came out. Having the controller as an option is huge for me when I am in pain.
Anecdotally, my partner never played these games growing up and she fucking hates trying to play with mouse and keyboard. She says it feels clunky and slow and confusing.
Is it the best? No. Is it an excellent effort? Yes, because it actually works.
The fact that a game with a ruleset as complex as DnD manages to have a couch co-op option and gamepad controls built-in is an achievement, imho.
Eh, it depends more on what you’re used to. I personally hate using a mouse and keyboard and greatly prefer a controller, and it’s not that different from other RPG games that use a controller interface. I’m used to a wheel interface from games like Mass Effect, so it’s more intuitive for me than a mouse and keyboard.
Funny thing is, I realize now there’s multiple franchises I’ve stopped for gameplay reasons, not story.
In God of War, not only was I contending with an offset thumbstick that I didn’t feel like replacing, but I was stuck on a fight that I didn’t seem to be geared for, and was getting pummeled.
Last of Us, I got stuck on some stealth section against enemies that didn’t seem to behave as the tutorial suggested.
Demon’s Souks would just be leagues beyond me anyway, so no chance there.
I like the 2018 GOW and first Spider-Man, but just couldn’t get into the sequels. I guess they’re just so similar I felt like I was done and didn’t want more. Horizon I never liked because I hate the combat. I also liked the first Last of Us, but didn’t want to play as someone I hated in the sequel.
I kinda wish the article has expanded on what he said, if anything. Does he still think they are well made games even if he doesn't like the direction?
Like, I don't like the new Zelda games, I don't think they have stayed true to the original Zelda (not you Zelda II) games. That said, I cannot deny that a lot of care and polish went into them, I just don't like the direction.
Sure, the new God of War games are not the original avatar-of-rage Kratos but they are still exceptional games.
A new website will suffer the same fate eventually. The best solution I’ve seen is CKAN for kerbal space program mods. Each mod just hosts its own releases for free on github or wherever they like, and the whole mod index is just another github repo.
The problem with that it’s not “wherever they like”, it is github 99% of the time. It is easier to fix when github enshitifies completely, but it will still require fixing
I guess you still have the issue of someone needing to pay for the huge number of downloads, most of which are going to come from users who make no other contributions to the site. Maybe you could combine a fedi site with torrents or something?
The Internet Archive. No need to reinvent the wheel. Have a discussion with them - set up a new project. Boom - everyone’s mods hosted in perpetuity by a free digital library.
Since mods are almost exclusively unable to be copyrighted nowadays, there is a very good chance the Internet Archive would be more than happy to host the mod data - as they have with many community projects.
So…old mods or mods for uninteresting and obscure games would eventually die because of zero seeders.
I know there’s no easy answer for this question but this would happen. Just try looking on the p2P scene for an unpopular or extremely niche tv show. There’s usually zero or sometimes in a rare occasion less than 3 seeders
Is this going to be another ET situation where we find hundreds of Xbox games in a random desert 40 years from now because Microsoft wanted to kill physical copies?
I’m pretty sure this is less about the quality of the game and more about ppl working on his creation without him. You can see this a lot in comic books
Creators will be pissed that ownership has continued work on something they created without them.
Pretty much why Allen Moore hates comics so much. Or even why John McAfee hated his anti virus program.
“Filled” / “Three people” Hahah what? Folks are just asking you do the smallest of read through on an article, and if you make the very common ‘whoops that was wrong’ mistake, just correct it instead of throwing a fit about how you’re being bullied.
I get that but also due to how the Fediverse cross syncs, no one else has commented on it that I could see when I replied. Three responses on an asynchronous model really seems small overall.
Small, yes, but it’s not like I’m not expecting it. As someone who did not write the article, I have no idea what I should replace it with that would sound better and meet everyone’s expectations.
However, every game on Xbox Series X also has to work on Series S, meaning every game is sort of chained to the limitations of that console to a degree.
Since you’re forced to develop for the S when developing for the X, the title of the article still works as-is.
Microsoft’s walked this back for a few games now, BG3 being the largest, and I’d bet a lot try at Witcher 4 will get that same bump.
Edit: even then, the X wasn’t an FPS issue and games were hitting a stable 60 on that while shitting the bed on the S, so developing for the X is still not the problem.
I played about 3 hours of 2018, and my honest opinion is that the story was kind of interesting, but the gameplay was slow and clunky. The most fun I had with my time was the fight in the beginning with Baldur, and most of it was a cutscene. I prefer the gameplay and fluidity of combat in the original trilogy, which I have beaten, to this new version. With that being said, it’s still a good game, just not my cup of tea.
Welp. Almost all of the conversations I’ve read about this change have devolved into “hopefully the new owners don’t enforce their political views.”
They always say shit like “if you don’t like a mod, don’t use it,” but they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that if they can’t tolerate the (ex-)site owner exercising his own moral beliefs, they can find a different platform.
Oh yea of course they’re not, and I would say bigotry was not my aim with my comment. The company can do whatever the fuck they want and it’s probably better this way.
I do get that some people might want extreme free speech where nothing gets censored. It allows for other non conventional ideas to spread. For better, and for worse. Yea nowadays it’s often for worse but hey, there’s still a chance. All of this is really subjective.
I just don’t believe that a mod that changes Voice 1 and Voice 2 to Women voice and Men voice is bigotry. Removing pride flags in a game is… well it says a lot of the person, but it doesn’t harm anyone directly and it’s something you have to actively add to your game if you want it. There could be criticism of pride which can be valid as well but that’s beyond my point.
Having this kind of content hidden and with trigger warnings is still more or less doable depending on the content, and can allow for more expression than classical rules, and not only bad expression.
Shitty mods like Crack Life for half-life are super offensive but funny as hell if you take it with a grain of salt. Knowing that could be banned sucks.
But if their argument is that you can simply ignore mods you disagree with, then those individuals should stop brigading against and whining about, say, a mod that enables queer relationships. As their own arguments imply, they can simply ignore those mods.
They should really pick a side instead of cherrypicking what’s convenient for them.
The offensive mods should be hidden by default or similar, with a trigger warning on the mod asking to move on if you don’t agree instead of crying in comments. Same for LGBT… stuff, but we can show by default because it’s not offensive, but have a way to hide it so that those that hate social progress won’t cry as well
And there you go. A platform for everyone. You won’t agree with everyone, but you can make the experience tailored to what you want or don’t want to see
Wait, was it confirmed sold? The news post on Nexus fron this morning indicated that the existing head admin and CEO (of 24 years) was just stepping back (and not even away entirely), and had already put the year+ in of identifying two successors from his existing team.
I didn’t see anything regarding a sale, and the existing admin said quite a bit about taking this seriously from a standpoint of what’s best for mod makers and users and not best for business profits.
Edit: I’m not seeing any company name given because as far as I can tell, it wasn’t sold. It’s the same company, same employees, the person at the tip top is just shifting.
And since when is “comicbook dot com” a source for game modding news? Unless someone can show me something from a more direct or reputable source, I think this is just someone running with the most click bait interpretation of the nexusmods post.
Edit x2: Dormedas’s resetera link has some convincing investigation that the two people named as taking over the reigns may work for a company that provides esports training, and also consulting services for user generated content focused companies.
They say ownership has changed hands but that it isn’t a corporate “exit”. The whole announcement is extremely vague on the details with the only names given are two people.
Thanks! That’s damn good for “best effort”! A convincing lead on what company it may be.
Personally, I still don’t think it’s time for immediate red alert, but I’ll have to keep an eye on things. Hopefully we’ll see some competitors like GameBanana step up to the challenge.
comicbook.com
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