I was quite satisfied with Alone in the Dark. It could have used some polish, but it was delivering more Resident Evil 1 style gameplay in a way that even the Resident Evil series refuses to do.
I'm old enough to remember these terms developing. I can remember when the first Diablo came out and called itself an 'ARPG'. There was some controversy over this term and simply the use of the term RPG. As video games developed, there was some prestige around the 'RPG' label. By the late 90s, you were looking at a lot of well loved and top games using the term. Gold Box Games, Bard's Tale, Ultima, JRPGs like Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.
Diablo is the first game that I can recall that really prominently advertised itself as an ARPG. They did this of course because it wasn't really as deep as the rest of them. There weren't a lot of 'choices' to be made in this game. You set up your character and ran through the dungeon. They wanted to use the 'RPG' label because it was well regarded at the time and helped move units. It was a lot like calling an RV a sports car because sports cars have wheels, doors, can drive on the road. ARPGs had RPG mechanics, in that there were things like stats and you could choose abilities/spells on level up. But they really weren't RPGs.
Around that time in PC Gamer there was a great column about what made an RPG an RPG and it was clear that games like Diablo weren't it, the key from that was an RPG had players making meaningful choices that had a lasting impact on the game world. Whether you threw fireballs or lightning bolts wasn't exactly a meaningful choice that had impact on the game world.
When it came to JPRGs vs RPGs, the difference was always fairly clear. RPGs were of the D&D variety. While they featured magic, the system itself was somewhat grounded in reality. JRPGs had a distinct style. Big numbers, wild combos, certain aesthetics, etc. To me the JRPG label makes sense, because it is a different style of game. I would note that JRPGs though really didn't fit the definition of RPG for the most part, a lot of 'RPGs' didn't because there was very little decision making. They were quest style games where you had a party that levelled up, but you weren't making many decisions in the game that had much an impact.
I think the labels are absolutely important for distinguishing the type of game it is. People want to know what they're getting into when they play it. If I'm expecting Baldur's gate and get Diablo, I'm probably going to be a bit disappointed.
How would star wars even work in a total war game?
I can see the hero characters like jedi and such fit with how they work in the WarHammer games. Things like tanks and walkers filling the space of single and low unit count monster troops.
But would regular troopers be standing in lines of 50? I suppose it’s not a stretch of the imagination to think they could make smaller infantry units, but I have always associated the total war games with dragging out the lines of my spears and flanking cavalry rather than flicking small teams of shooters into cover positions
The Battles of Naboo and Geonosis basically play out as line battles with massive groups marching in formations at each other, not to mention most of the Tartakovsky clone wars, so I could see CA approaching it like Empire Total War with hover tanks.
Honestly, I doubt whether CA are even willing to adapt their formula enough to actually have small teams of shooters flicking into cover positions.
What the fuck we’re 5 years into this console gen? They didn’t even start releasing the real games yet. I can’t think of a single Xbox exclusive titles and ps5 has what, astro bot and the friggin 17th FF7 remake?
Sony’s not doing great right now either. They’re either matching or several million units behind where they were with the PS4 at the same point in the console generation; given that their closest competition has been decimated, that’s not great for them. They don’t make games as quickly as they used to, which means they don’t make as many as they used to, and their margins are slimmer on their successes while the failures like Concord and PSVR2 hurt more. Both of those consoles are rapidly headed toward a future that only looks like personal computers for high-end gaming. Nintendo is at least mostly immune to this for at least the Switch 2 generation.
That’s comparing Pro to Pro. I meant all PS5s were trailing behind all PS4s by several million units at the same point in time as of a few months ago. Allegedly, after that report was published, Sony had their best PlayStation quarter ever, but I don’t remember if they disclosed which metric they were measuring that in, and there’s a good chance their best quarter ever still didn’t make up that deficit.
Tell that to PC’s growth and consoles’ decline. Plus the new Xboxes mentioned in this very article are seeking to be exactly that, much like what the Steam Deck does today. It will play PC games but will be called an Xbox.
Why is there even a console war in the first place? Who really cares these days? Just get what you want.
Me? I’m lazy and don’t want to put the effort into building a PC or worrying about optimization, viruses, etc. So I just get a gaming box to plug in and play.
Yeah, the line between AAA and Indy games is kinda blurred at this point. Especially because quality has split into production quality and gameplay quality and higher production quality seems to be getting more accessible to smaller dev teams.
Like I’ve been playing Enshrouded and have been enjoying it. It’s a large game (like I think the map is comparable to a WoW continent with fewer total regions but each region is larger… I think it’s a bit bigger than breath of the wild) but I have no idea if it would fall into the AAA box or not. Nothing about the game screams “Indy” or “small development team” other than the game being (IMO) really well done and not feeling like a product of a ??? step between “start making game” and “profit” like so many AAA games have felt like with all their season passes and MTX.
Ultimately, “good game” vs “bad game” is more important than “AAA” vs “Indy” (or whatever other categories), which is why I first asked about it. My bias has gotten to the point where I’ll ignore a lot of the games that look like they are AAA games tuned for engagement and profit rather than necessarily being fun, but I could be missing out.
I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is great for newcomers to the series, but I can understand if a fan of the original was disappointed that it’s basically just the first game again.
While I agree with the general sentiment, Gothic 1 is basically unplayable on modern hardware. It outright crashes, and a generation of players misses out on one of the best/most pivotal western cRPGs in history.
Not to mention, graphics cards and even the worst potato are so much more powerful than our gaming rigs in 2001 that we can afford more than 32 MB of video memory for textures that don’t look like blurry smears, or perhaps, characters with actual fingers.
Both could be fixed by mods/patches - even official ones. You don’t need a remake.
Old games, just like old movies, are only relevant and great as products of their time. Gothic is dated as hell in many regards - which is perfectly ok - so a remake would either be just a glorified texture pack or wouldn’t be true to the original.
Make it playable, add new textures, higher resolution, etc. where possible, but don’t change the actual game.
Some games are so borked from a technical perspective they'd need a remake to work right, like Oblivion. That game is so technically bottlenecked by itself that even on modern hardware I fucking stutter, and I've trawled so many performance mods with fellow players in the comments just having to come to terms with the fact that no mod can fix the inherently poor optimization on an engine level.
Remakes can definitely be warranted in certain cases. Sometimes it's easier to just start over clean than try to untangle an existing mess and Frankenstein it back together. Sometimes making vast changes can produce an alternative reality of a game to be enjoyed by more or a different audience, like the Resident Evil Remakes, which are fucking excellent, or the FF7 remake, which, while contentious, is mostly only so because of purists, who do still have the original they can play (and I do believe companies should always keep the original around)
Games that would appreciate an update never receive one and games that wouldn’t receive several. That is to say, give me ps1/ps2 armored core remakes without terrible controls already. They would surely be profitable now.
I hate Ubisoft, but I actually do think this was decided to happen before they unionized and is just bad timing.
Decisions to close studios like this never happen so quickly and usually take multiple months between the time the decision is made to the time the actual closure takes place.
It is possible that the studio caught wind that they were being closed and decided to unionize in order to capitalize on the bad PR. But this is all speculation since we don’t know every detail, and both sides will leave out various details to give themselves an advantageous position in the conversation.
It’s possible but imo unlikely. I know its very different in a lot of ways but Starbucks at least will close a location to “save money” practically day of a successful unionizing vote. A union gets harder to squash the longer they’re around, and more likely to spread to other locations, so companies get pretty trigger happy about shuttering places.
Basically Ubisoft makes games that are so not optimized & require you to have a monster of a PC to run. And the last time I checked it’s also most AAA games. Anyone that doesn’t put in the effort of optimizing games is someone who doesn’t care about good industry practices & is probably a money-hungry asshole who likes to use & toss people aside.
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