I played it and completed the story. In my opinion it’s not awful, but it’s not exactly good either. The gameplay is bland, repetitive and unoriginal. Nothing about it is special in any way and unless you care about the Star Wars license, there is literally zero reason to play it. If you do care about the license the gameplay is serviceable enough to keep you busy while it tells its story, but that’s about it. Which makes it pretty ironic that Ubisoft blames Star Wars for the game’s lack of success.
This is pretty disappointing to me. I know it’s kind of an unpopular opinion these days, but I really enjoyed Outlaws. It was just different enough from other Star Wars properties to be novel, but recognizable enough to be convincingly in the Star Wars universe. Sure some characters were a bit flat, missions were repetitive, and it didn’t invent a new revolutionary mechanic or anything, but does every game have to be groundbreaking? I got solid enjoyment out of it, and was looking forward to how they’d continue the story.
That’s totally fair (though I haven’t played any recent Zelda games, so I can’t speak to that). I actually think quite a few recent open world games didn’t need to be open world at all and would have been better if they were more of a single player guided narrative.
One game that did this perfectly IMO was Guardians of the Galaxy. It wasn’t open world, but you could explore each “chapter” or “level” or whatever as much as you wanted and could replay them individually. That made the whole story feel really tight, coherent, and well thought out. I find myself really wanting that format in some of these big beautiful (and yeah, often boring) open world games.
While it got a lot of flack, I thought the smaller contained worlds of Outer Worlds can be a better in between. Open spaces to explore and run into things accidentally, but constrained enough that the world and plot can still flourish.
In fact, Ubisoft recently blamed Star Wars’ flagging brand reputation as one reason for the game’s financial failure.
God be less self-aware Ubisoft. You built a boring game with the same mechanics as all of your other AC games, and you gave it the emotional maturity of a child’s blanket. You aren’t going to be raking in money if you’re too afraid to have a story that has any emotional depth.
I want to preface this by saying I’m not a game developer, but I have played a fair share Unreal Engine games and my honest opinion as a consumer is that it is a literal plague especially in the indie game world. Show me 1 second of gameplay of any game and I could tell you with 100% certainty whether it’s an unreal engine game or not. And the main issue isn’t the engine itself, I bet its a fine engine that can do everything that a developer needs it to do.
The main issue in general gaming but most noticeably in UE is the absolute horrible TAA antialiasing. Somehow we went from crisp and sharp looking games in 2010 to absolutely blurry messes today. UE is the biggest offender, every single on of their games uses TAA as its main AA method and only with the sharpening filter turned to a 100, is it barely serviceable. And on top of the blurriness you have visual artifacts especially in Picture-in-Picture (PiP) rendering, so forget realistic scopes or mirrors or particle effects. And if you decide to use any other method for AA, all the characters hair looks like an unacceptable flickering wiremesh. We always see these tech demos of amazing lighting and huge open landscapes rendered in realtime with UE but it all amounts to nothing if everything is blurred beyond recognition.
The second biggest gripe is the abysmal performance. Sure if a game looks good you can expect it to be a little bit more demanding on the hardware side. But thanks to TAA, no UE game actually looks good. So you’re just left with the hardware demands. But in the past, if your PC couldn’t handle a game at max setting you just tone them down a little bit and “viola” your game runs good. That is absolutely impossible with UE. I have 3 UE games that I regularly play, and the difference between lowest and max settings on all of them is ~5 FPS. So your game looks like a PS2 game and you get barely any performance gain, awesome, good job UE. Not to mention that in an attempt to maximize “performance” most NPCs that are further than 50m are rendered at 5 FPS, looks realy good on those big open landscapes with amazing lighting.\
I am sure that all of those problems are solved if the engine is in the hands of a talented developer that knows what their doing and puts value on visual clarity and performance. But that is not what the vast majority of UE developers do. UE feels to me like a modular package. You just slap things together and it supposedly works. But you can’t expect to create art by just slapping things together. It also feels like UE tries to become the jack of all trades but master of none to appeal to the broadest market so that Epic can cash in on all that licensing money.
I wonder why exactly somebody decided that the search for a perfect AA method has to stop TAA. We went from jaggy edges to edge detection and oversampling (MSAA) being the standard in 2000-2012 but people where unsatisfied with the performance tank so we needed a lighter method. So we got post processing AA like SMAA which is a scam and does absolutely nothing or FXAA which simlpy applies a blur filter to edges. Not the most elegant solutions but they will do if you can’t effort to use MSAA. Then TAA came around the corner and I dont even know how it looks so bad, because it sounds fine on paper. Using multiple frames to detect differences in contrast and then smoothing out those diffrences seems like an OK alternative, but it should’ve never become the main AA method.
I’ve honestly expected the AA journey to end with 4K resolution being the standard. AA is mostly a matter of pixeldesity over viewing distance. Mobile games have mostly no AA because their pixel density is ridiculous, Console games also rarely have AA because you sit 10 feet away from the screen. PC being the only outlier but certainly having the spare power to run at higher resolutions than consoles. But somewhere along the way, Nvidia decided to go all in on Raytracing and Dynamic Resolution instead of raw 4K performance. And Nvidia basiacly dictates where the gaming industry goes.
So I honestly blame Nvdia for this whole mess and most people can agree that Nvidia has dropped the ball the last couple of years. Their Flagship cards cost more than an all consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo combined. They cost more than mid-high range gaming laptops. And the raw power gain has been like 80% over the last 10 years, because they put all their R&D into gimmicks.
I got quite the good AA by rendering the screen at 4k and letting the graphic card underscale it into the screen’s 1080p resolution. No AA needed, looks fiine.
That is basically MSAA without the edge dection. Rendering in 4K and downscaling is the dirtiest but most effective AA method. But downscaling the whole screen also applies to UI elements, this often times results in tiny blurry fonts if the UI isn’t scaled appropriately. But more and more games have started to add a render resolution scale option that goes beyond 100% without affecting the UI. Downscaling also causes latency issues. I can run Metal Gear Solid 5 at a stable 60 FPS at 4K but the display latency is very noticeable compared to 1440p at 60.
I miss the time when you could just disable the games native AA and force MSAA through Nvidia control panel. But most newer titles dont accept Nvdias override, especialy Unreal games.
I was told the developers were scumbags that abandon all their games, and had abandoned this one to make Palworld, even though they had just updated it at that time as well. Could the idiots review bombing the game on Steam have misled me?
Windows 11 comes with OneDrive shortcuts replacing the local storage Documents folders by default. Nothing in those folders is saved locally, only online on Onedrive.
It’s a “feature” nobody asked for and Microsoft told no one about.
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Aktywne