That’s troubling. I’ve been playing the shit out of both GTA V and RDR 2 because they have the two best campaigns I’ve ever played. Especially RDR2. It was unique in its trajectory, in its beats…I really hope the follow ups, (however many years down the road those might be) won’t be affected too much by this. The writing made those games what they are.
I haven’t played baldurs gate, but I’ve been seeing a lot about it, mostly positive. Interesting, the news about that company. Being successful doesn’t usually call for a massive shakeup. But that’s capitalism for you. Fuck the workers, squeeze more out of those you keep. Classic.
As someone who has a very small selection of games they like, play God of War. I never played any of them before the 2018 game and I loved it. I start it again and play through like once a year to 100%. Only game I ever 100%ed.
Loved RDR and GTA but not much else has kept my interest anyway close to GoW except maybe Hitman.
Speculating but they’ve probably already wrapped up all the writing for GTA VI and planned to move on after that. Imagine with Houser leaving we’ll see a few more vets as they finish up their roles for VI.
When you walk into the drunk guys home for his money and kill him, but his son goes “pa, pa, pa…” I know it’s a video game, but I wasn’t expecting that. It was one of those moments where i can never forget. I felt like I actually hurt a person in my mind and kept thinking about it, still do. Absolutely the best game that brings you into the fold as a player.
I dunno, I’m not a huge gamer. I’ve had just FIFA and gta v on my console for years happily. Rdr2 is a newer purchase for me and I love it. But I don’t really like fantasy games, so I’m not really larian’s audience.
I like shooting and driving and open worlds. And soccer. I put off getting rdr2 for so long because I couldn’t drive. I regret writing it off because I was definitely wrong about it
I was saying I’ve been hearing good things about BG3 and saw they fired a lot of people to “streamline” the company. I was just deriding capitalism for that insane mindset
In related news, as part of its recently publicised cutbacks, BioWare has “let go of” Lukas Kristjanson, the lead writer behind Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and the writer of the first three Dragon Age games, Mary Kirby.
Oh it wasn’t Larian, that name was mentioned to me so I just assumed from the quote above without rereading. I dunno the connection between larian and BioWare, but they’re obviously releasing games together? Or sharing titles?
Gotcha, so Baldurs gate 1 and 2 were released by bioware it 1998 and 2000 respectively, the lead writer for those games was let go by bioware recently, Larian is a completely separate company that got the IP rights to do BG3 👍 I can see where the confusion came in lo Edit: More context in the development section of en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_3
GTA V? Really? I absolutely hated the story in that, and I hated the characters. Here are some of my issues with it:
Trevor:
interesting epilogue, but otherwise pretty much no character arc
really wanted to see him try to take on the Los Santos gangs (DLC!)
Franklin:
largely just does whatever Michael says
wanted to start a dealership, but he kinda gives up once he makes it big (DLC!)
Michael:
arc was okay, but he didn’t seem like a good fit for main character, especially when Franklin gets the ending
All in all, I felt like the three character perspective was largely a distraction from the lack of actual storytelling. SA and IV didn’t have that, so they actually had a meandering plot with some character development to round it all out.
I haven’t finished RDR2 (it’s so long!), but I really loved RDR and heard that story for RDR2 is even better.
I mean, I’d argue that GTA V didn’t have the most emotional storytelling, but it wasn’t a character driven game like RDR2. The characters had the stories they did because they each opened up different avenues into different types of crimes. They didn’t focus on it. The characters were all insufferable. But that doesn’t mean the writing for the story itself wasn’t good. Yeah, the characters all kinda sucked, but the storytelling propelled the tension and wasn’t just some lame bullshit that felt like it needed to be there. The characters don’t develop that much, but the backstory was great, the intrigue and the vastness of the word made it great. That’s all writing. But you’re right, it couldn’t stand alone as a character driven story.
RDR2 on the other hand is a character driven story at its heart. You definitely need to play it because it’s incredibly well done. If you’re looking for good storytelling, emotional connections to the characters’ trajectories, and a great fuckin game, RDR2 is where you wanna be.
I’m not expecting RDR-levels of storytelling or anything, and the original RDR is way better than any of the GTAs in terms of storytelling and characters. However, GTA V felt like such a downgrade from previous entries.
GTA V starts out strong, with a fun heist sequence, which gets the player excited for more. And then the next thing we see is Michael at marriage counseling, and then we meet Franklin, who seems ready to take up Michael’s mantle. Then we see Trevor, who is now running drugs in the rural area, which is also pretty exciting. At the start, I was excited to see all three develop their individual storylines, with Franklin just getting into the underground, Trevor establishing himself as a drug kingpin, and Michael getting his last heist in.
But instead of that, Trevor and Franklin kind of give up on their arcs and they just focus on helping Michael with the heist. Why? Why doesn’t Trevor try to take over the drug trade in Los Santos? Why doesn’t Franklin try to start his own dealership? Or at least steal cars as side content? If they’re really interested in heists, why is there only about five of them? Why can’t I go do more after finishing the main storyline? What about Las Venturas, doing heists there would be a ton of fun!
To me, the storytelling really dragged once Trevor came to Los Santos, which was more than half of the game. In fact, I dropped it and came back about three times (restarting twice) because it was so uninteresting, until I finally forced myself to speed through the story just so I could cross it off my list so I wouldn’t feel the need to come back. I didn’t have the same problem with either GTA SA or GTA IV, and I even finished GTA IV after GTA V (played off and on on console before GTA V, then bought and played through on PC).
And the world felt small to me. I know it was physically bigger than every other GTA game, but it felt so much smaller than GTA SA, which was able to fit three cities and a rural area and still make them feel far apart (GTA V just had one city and a rural area), and it felt similar to GTA IV. I didn’t feel any desire to explore like I did with SA. The backstory was interesting, but I think it just highlighted how disappointing the rest of the story was.
In fact, I even like GTA III more than GTA V. It’s pretty janky to play today, but it still has that OG charm to it.
So I honestly don’t understand why it’s so loved. Nothing about it really stood out to me aside from the graphics and performance of the engine. I didn’t like the driving as much as IV (controversial take), the humor felt bland to me, and I didn’t find any of the side characters particularly interesting, except maybe Lamar, and he also largely gave up on his arc.
So GTA V is by far my least favorite of the series, so much so that I’m not looking forward to GTA VI.
How very warm and inviting of you. Im glad there are such welcoming people as you, that are excited to see new studios trying to make good games instead of the same old slop we get from the same old companies.
/s, in case anyone couldn’t tell. What an intolerant comment.
Another solution is to place tolerance in the context of social contract theory: to wit, tolerance should not be considered a virtue or moral principle, but rather an unspoken agreement within society to tolerate one another’s differences as long as no harm to others arises from same. In this formulation, one being intolerant is violating the contract, and therefore is no longer protected by it against the rest of society.
Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.
Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.
There’s no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don’t see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.
I don’t care how cheap it is or how amazing it allegedly is. I clawed my identity back from Zuckerberg, and I don’t intend to go back to that abusive relationship.
500 not even on sale. It often goes for $350 these days.
Honestly, it’s a steal. The reverb G2 is really good, easily used with Valve Index controllers.
In the long run though, anyone currently interested should probably wait for Valves next release. Then you can decide if MS-lock is worth it, it can certainly be frustrating at times being locked to Windows.
yeah i only put 500 as its the MSRP, its actually lower than that. more of the point is, if someones claiming that 500$ is expensive because its a meta product, they weren’t even intending to go into VR, as the HP Reverb, and what it sort of replaced before that, the Samsung Oddessey+, were sub 500 for a long time.
Idk, maybe it’s just that I’m comparing too much of the Witcher 3, but the story and importantly sidequests in Horizon Zero Dawn are mediocore at best for where I’m at atm. I’d concur it’s better than Bethesda though.
The Witcher 3, to me, made Bethesda games feel dated. The structure of the game is nearly identical, but when you arrive at your quest, it never plays out entirely straight forward, much like the Witcher source material. Cyberpunk does follow along those same lines, even if it never quite hit the highs that Witcher 3 did.
HZD is very Ubisofty, but done right, as in it’s not littered to the brink with pointless collectibles and can actually be completed. It’s way more action than role-play or story focussed but that’s not a bad thing in itself. I think of it more like Tomb Raider, and for that kind of game HZD has plenty and very good storytelling.
It probably cost more in development to port the game to Switch than any other console. Graphics quality is irrelevant when users willingly buy a device with worse hardware than consoles. This seems like a case of “fans” wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Unless the developer opted out of allowing their iOS app(s) to run in macOS, which, unfortunately, many top games did. And of the games that were made available, there are those that only have touch controls, which are awkward at best and impossible at worst on macOS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since this strike is against certain companies and not some entity that represents the entire industry like it does for movies and television, that means that other individual companies who come to an agreement can still hire these people, right? If so...imagine if we had that in movies and television.
We do. A24, for instance, is still making a couple movies by agreeing to work under the proposed terms by SAG. As far as I know, no one else has made such agreements yet. The more of such exceptions that get made, the weaker the AMPTP’s position will get.
Because they have a different contract for work not covered by the current strike? That seems kind of a weird take, especially since they thought the strike did apply to them originally and they shut down for several weeks until the lawyers got together and said, oh no, you have a different type of agreement.
It’s not like they changed or updated their contract to become exempt. SAG just went, oh, your business doesn’t fall into the terms of the strike so you don’t have to strike with the rest of us.
You could. But that's also if it's the only game you play and you don't boot up Sea of Stars, Quake, Halo, Goldeneye, Yakuza, Unraveled, or what have you. I don't have a Game Pass subscription, but the math on it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.
Yeah. If you play a lot of little indie games, and tend to only play through them once, it’s an absurd bargain.
It’s also great in that you can try a lot of stuff without having to research it at all first, so you get really nice surprises sometimes. And you can try things risk-free, so sometimes I’ll try something I wouldn’t have expected to like and wouldn’t have bought and be pleasantly surprised. It can open up entire genres to people this way, as an intro to different types of games.
I do tend to buy a month or two, drop out, then buy another month when the catalogue is different though.
In this scenario above, playing Starfield and it being too enormous to finish in a month or two, you'd hardly have any time to enjoy these other games either.
You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally "rent" 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.
Baldur's Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who've beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.
Looking at my game purchases a year and as a pretty heavy gamer, I come out just over the cost of game pass. Big thing is that I get to keep my games without needing to re-up the subscription.
Yeah right now when there’s a lot of games coming out it seems great, but middle of COVID I remember nothing was coming out, and I would have had to keep paying for the games I had already played.
$9.99 for a month of gamepass PC, or $10.99 for console (ultimate you’re paying for cloud access or online play, so it’s a disingenuous comparison) You can play starfield for a month, then buy it for 20% off through gamepass, so $55.99. $55.99+10.99 = $66.98.
So you basically get a $11 month-long trial, then $2 off the full price if you decide you like it enough to keep.
I’m interested in playing this but I don’t own a PS5 and I’m not buying a whole console for one game. They would have gotten a day 1 sale out of me if they released it on PC.
Originally, they did plan to release it on PS5 and PC. My guess is Sony made a timed exclusivity deal with them, which Sony had done with companies before. SE shout themselves in the foot by taking it.
Ditto for me. I have all Final Fantasy games released on PC, but I can’t justify buying a PS5 for a single game. I’ve chosen to watch a let’s play of the game. Glad I did because it’s definitely not a Final Fantasy I’d play a second time.
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