Well, the studio that brought us TS had been closed down in 2009 already. Deep Silver had opened a new studio under that name in 2021 (admittedly employing parts of the “old gang”), which is the one we’re now seeing getting shut down.
After Crytek had thoroughly fucked them, yes. Much of the key people were the same and thats really what I referred to. The Old Guarde did not survive a second fall.
More importantly, people who directly influenced my childhood via Goldeneye and the original TS were in there when it went down again. To them, I give the mightiest of salutes.
That’s because it actually is the exact same image
Whoever wrote this article messed up and pasted the same image twice for the Au Ra race, which is the first one shown here. The actual before and after shots are pretty obvious
Edit: this is not true, I was recalling a different event. Links are down the thread
I'm not sure if the image has since been updated, but the horn-y boy before/after isn't the same image twice despite looking very similar. The left image has light-colored areas on the horns and some other similarly minor differences which are more noticeable when flicking between them but kinda hard to spot in a side-by-side.
Ah, I do see what you mean upon closer inspection. You have a keen eye
However, this is most likely due to the author grabbing the two images from a different source which subjected them to different compression artifacts. They definitely both are the same model, even if the actual image files are not 1:1
I play the game and have followed these updates as they came out, so I was able to tell very quickly from looking at the hair and eyes. But don’t take my word for it: I quickly tracked down the actual before/after shots. Sorry for reddit link
It is the same model, but the difference is in the horns and scales. Those pics don't do a very good job of showing it, though. From the paragraphs right above the pics:
Following community feedback after the announcement of the graphical update back at the fan festival event in Las Vegas, he shared an update of the Au Ra race, whose updated horns and scales had been initially revealed as looking very reflective but a little too much like enamel.
“This reflectivity looked very high quality so it was good for showing off, but it didn't really match our vision of what we wanted the Au Ra to look like from our original design back in 3.0, so we continued tweaking,” Yoshida admitted before sharing a new headshots of a male and female Au Ra where their horns look less reflective and more natural. “This goes for all of the updates for the other races as well. What we showed in Las Vegas wasn't the final product but a work in progress.”
It’s all a bit tangled up now, but the second set of pictures in the article shows the current in-game models and then the remade models, where you can clearly see the difference in the hair. The first set (the one in question here) shows the remade one, and then the remade-remade one with the muted horn texture.
I remembered this particular Au Ra from the slideshow about 4 months ago, so when I noticed the distinct hair being the same in both and found the original slides I tunnel visioned on that. But in truth, what we are seeing is a second pass after player feedback from the event I incorrectly believed the shots were from.
I apologize for not being as in-tune with the game’s news as I had assumed. I do not play an Au Ra myself so I had been kind of tuning out the drama around the scales and their luster. But it (and the changing of the glowing eye rings) has been an ongoing pain point for many. People get really attached to their look
As someone who has put countless hours into various MMOs (including FFXIV), I totally get people getting anxious about their characters looks potentially changing. I remember when WoW had their character model update as the feedback from players then. Blizzard resolved the issue by adding a client-side option to toggle between old and new character models.
Hmm, they aren’t clear whether it’s fully voice-acted or whether he provided phonetic sounds for them to synthesize according to the text, but in either case, it’s not AI whatsoever.
Important to note that ESS Technologies (the company cited there) was literally a company who made synthesized speech for video games.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer’s technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games.
I think tech like this makes way more sense for like random ass NPCs. Like the ones cluttering the background of a city or whatever. AI could really enhance them and make them interesting.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
I could be wrong here, but this feels like a larger trend of trying to consolidate profits. Cut out anything/anyone “unnecessary”. Similar to the whole AI trend.
God dang it, apparently he has now stated how he is “going to dedicate more time for making music and reduce the amount of work”, so he’s not entirely retiring. I’d say to him “make up your mind!”
Man, I really wanted to like this game, I love the setting, art, music, and overall aesthetics, but I’m having trouble finding the fun.
When I first heard about it, I was hoping it was basically a linear road down the coast, with a story to experience along the way (kinda like the boat/car sections of HL2). But then it turned out to be a repetitive grind. There are some mechanics I think are novel and add a lot of fun (ex. the Quirks system), but 90% of what I was doing in the game felt unfun and pointless so I could eventually return to the garage and do it all again.
For me, the fun comes, like in some other crafting games (e.g., Subnautica) and roguelikes, from chasing the next upgrades, enjoying the sense of empowerment they bring, and getting to explore new areas.
For that reason, I love the idea of survival crafting games, but I hate the sandbox, perpetual loop format most of them come in (like No Man’s Sky). Subnautica is the gold standard (with Dysmantle being a surprise second place) of having a finite, focused progression path. Pacific Drive scratches that itch.
Although, I will admit that it’s more stressful than I would have liked too. I knew about the procedural generation and run-based loop early on, but I still kind of expected something overall tranquil. But with storms coming on a timer in every junction, anomalies frequently overwhelming every space you need to explore, and the high stakes of potentially losing a lot of critical material, I found myself playing much more anxiously than I would have preferred, which is what I alluded to about the endgame.
I’m fine with stressful, high risk gameplay, it’s when the game asks me to spend a bunch of time doing something I don’t find fun that it loses me.
Subnautica in particular did this to me. All my friends who like Outer Wilds told me to play Subnautica. I loved the exploration and story, but I didn’t care at all about building a fancy base that I would never see again after finishing the game. There was a particular point where I was bottlenecked on finding a single resource type that was located in one single place in a giant ocean, which turned out to be a place I felt I was being told not to go yet (trying to avoid spoilers). I thought i was being dense, just not learning what the game was trying to teach me, so I ended up having to look it up, only to realize the game did an absolutely piss poor job of directing me toward the resource. My entire experience was soured by that.
It was after that that I decided single player survival crafters are not my thing. I like them as a multiplayer experience, because you can amortize busy work across multiple people, and socialize as you do it, but by myself I’d rather do anything else. I get it if someone finds it relaxing to do that kind of thing, but it’s not for me.
Ha, that’s funny, that’s the exact opposite of me. But games are my downtime, and socializing is work (for me), so I am almost exclusively single-player.
Shame about Pacific Drive, but I get it. There is a ton of repetition.
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