Finally! I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game for Years because they were too long, repetitive, and filled with boring timesinks. And I used to be a huge AC fanboy back in the day. Starting from 1, I played each release every year until Revelations + 3 burned me out. Took me years to recover enough to play AC 4 and Rogue. Never even touched Unity, barely tried Syndicate (and only because I got it for free), and all the new ultra-long ones starting with Origins I didn't even bother starting, except for Valhalla during a free play weekend on Steam. Valhalla annoyed me enough over that weekend that I just didn't bother buying.
I've been waiting for a "back to basics" game like Mirage for a while now, and the fact that it has callbacks to the gameplay and setting of AC 1 is a big plus for me. I'll wait for reviews, but it's the most interested I've been in an AC game for a long time.
As someone that trudged through Odyssey and has been really enjoying Valhalla despite its immense size, I welcome this change. Good Lord these games are huge.
I enjoy the scale of large games, but Odyssey and Valhalla was too much even for me. I’d like maybe half that (which would still be at least 50 hours I suspect).
There's a lot of "it depends" in regards to a game that is fully completed at 25-30 hours. If Ubisoft is going to charge $70 USD for the game, along with an additional Deluxe Edition that costs an extra $30, I'm probably not going to buy it on release unless the story is phenomenal, and it's replayable.
I'd be the first to agree that the more recent releases (especially Valhalla) have been too expansive. The only thing that kept my interest with Odyssey and Origins were the settings (I love ancient Greece and Egypt). I think a 50-60 hour game is adequate for a AAA game like Assassin's Creed.
During what I still consider the golden age of gaming, which is 1997-2004, most single player games were aiming for 30-35 hours. That has been my sweet spot ever since but it doesn't mean a game can't be satisfying with less than that.
I personally don't find anything shorter than 10 hours enough of an experience. 25-30 sounds very reasonable.
Honestly, good. I don’t think every game needs to be this massive, sprawling open world that takes a hundred hours or more to complete. There is plenty of room for a more focused experience. And that’s coming from someone who is a big fan of open world games in general.
As fun as the Witcher is, the world may have been too big. Not every location had a quest, not every quest was necessary… some side quests were kinda bad. And it had a lot of collection bloat. The first zone wasn’t too bad. Small and focused, with collection stuff. It’s pretty nice. But trying to 100% everything after that is a nightmare.
Skyrim is a weird one, the main game is not the main story, but rather all the side stuff. It had collection bloat, but in the form of dungeons and quests. It didn’t really do the whole “legendary gear is in this obscure chest on the top of this random mountain that you have to visit on the 3rd Tuesday at 5am” thing. So while Skyrim is pretty big, it doesn’t feel like nightmarish, collection bloat that’s overwhelming.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was able to take both these approaches and make it work. It has a tone of secrets and things to collect. But it was done in a way that It didn’t feel mandatory. You feel satisfied doing the main story, but also by just going around and doing the side content like in Skyrim. But like Skyrim, sometimes people just want to stop the msq at certain places and just chill in the game doing random whatevers. However, like Witcher all the random collections and side content does feel overwhelmingly impossible to complete in its scope. I found a few YouTube channels dedicated to secrets and obscure side content in this game and its insane how much there is. And a lot of it is missable after certain points in the story. There is no way to 100% this game without a guide. With Witcher and Skyrim its at least possible without a guide.
25-30 is perfect to me. I’m currently playing Mass Effect, and I’m at about 30 hours and on the last mission. Just long enough to get in the world but not so long that it wears out its welcome.
Yeah, a lot of the time games like that are mostly spent running between locations. I just played through RDR2 again and as much as I love the game, most of the ~80 hours of content it has is traveling between missions on horse. I think 25 hours of pure content is just fine unless that 25 hours also includes uneventful traveling.
Yes. We’ve had so many examples of rushed games with great potential that never hit it. It’s actually refreshing to see a delay. It suggests that the dev team is still getting a say and that the game itself and its quality are still primary concerns.
I want a dark souls anime in an older style animation (think berserk) and directed by Lynch. I want to walk out of every episode feeling confused, exhausted, and vaguely depressed.
How are they going to structure this? Castlevania felt easier since there was so little story baked-in. But Miyazaki specifically made Dark Souls games hard to parse because he was trying to recreate the effect of reading english fantasy novels when he wasn't fully fluent in english.
The story in Fromsoft games are specifically sparse, spread out and require interpretation to grasp more than the bare surface. Most of the NPCs that give you meaningful dialogue are somewhat hidden. If they play is straight like a normal show, it might not feel like Dark Souls. If they make it obtuse, it'll be hard for viewers to parse in a 6-12 hour series compared to the dozens of hours players get to think on it.
They could make it like a prequel to one of the games so there’s a slightly more concrete story. Using non linear storytelling could make it feel confusing but that might be annoying. Season 1 of The Witcher I didn’t full understand until my second viewing.
That would be cool. There's a vast amount of time between when the Lords rose up and defeated the dragons and the decline we see in DS1. We don't even see the rise of the Dark Sign and start of undead plague, but the end of it when the world has mostly dealt with it and is slowly falling apart. The rise of the Dark Sign, fall of Artorias in Oolacile could all be really cool.
Ready when its ready sort of thing. Right now it looks like everything build, buy, and character design related are mostly finished.
So now they are working on gameplay and simulation which wont be easy for an indie team considering how much developing power it always took to develop the sims. As it stands there are basic things like sitting and hugging but with clipping and weird animation glitches. Not to mention they promised an open world yet to be seen in a functional state besides lots.
I wouldnt expect Paralives to be ready until mid 2024 at the earliest. Join their discord cause they post monthly updates on what they are developing with gifs and screenshots.
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Aktywne