I agree, but I would strongly emphasize the graphics. This might be the most visually impressive game out there right now, but yea, the gameplay is boring af and the “sense of dread” that the og had is lacking here.
Probably won’t do a complete playthrough using this, but would be fun to screw around a bit as Letho and live out my fantasy of him being the protagonist of the next Witcher game.
One thing this article gets wrong is the usage of REDkit.
To quote from the mod page:
Q: Is it made with redkit?
A: Not really, I spent 2.5+ years on making this mod, there were a bunch of tools which I used, including some ehich I had to write myself (wolvenkit Json converter, many python scripts for processing entities, meshes, generating setup scenes etc). The mod is built in radish system. Redkit was helpful in fixing some animation bugs on last development stages.
So it did help, but this mod probably could have been released without the new mod tools.
I’ll be real with y’all, a 50$ 4 hour tech demo just doesn’t appeal to me, especially in a world where the indie market is absolutely booming with phenomenal titles.
Sure, the first one was nice, but I never felt like I was so impressed by it, that i’d do it again.
Unsurprising. The first game, while novel and interesting, was not a good game. And from what I read, the general consensus is that the actual gameplay of this one is even worse than the first’s. I admired what the first game was trying to do and I even think they did it well, but at the end of the day the majority of people play videogames to have fun.
Regardless, some folks love both games, and I’m happy for them. That being said, it’s a very niche game and I find it odd for Microsoft to have bet so heavily on it to be more popular.
I loved Gothic to death, and 2 is my all-time favorite game, but after having their wrists slit by the publisher with Gothic 3, and everything happening after the release of that, I am not upset it’s over.
The quality of ELEX was miserably bad in every way imaginable, and it only got worse with ELEX2. Risen had great potential with the first game, but completely flopped it with the next two.
For a lack of a better expression, they were a one-trick pony, and rode that wave of success into their eventual grave.
I’m not sure how substantiated these claims are, but i’ve also heard that most of the original team have left years before the shutdown either way, so essentially, what was left of Piranha Byte is just a husk of what used to be
The sad truth is that most of these devs would not have survived without embracer. MAYBE some of them can pull a Platinum and say “Yo, want to pay us to make a really mediocre tmnt game?” to help make ends meet. But with funding in the indie space what it increasingly is becoming… the odds of pulling that off are poor.
Of course, BECAUSE of the mass consolidation by platform holders and publishers those studios don’t even have the opportunity to try and make a shitty transformers game to keep the lights on.
Like, a decade or two ago the talking point was the EA killed all these amazing studios who were one hit wonders when they were bought out. And yeah, fuck EA. But there is a reason most of those genres ALSO died out with the studios because… they were one hit wonder genres. People loved the novelty of Dungeon Keeper and then rapidly lost interest with every iteration.
But also? Maybe those studios could have pivoted and we would have had what we see today with The Defenestration Trilogy and so forth.
This isn’t what was happening. It’s a tale as old as time, once a corporation becomes large enough it will buy up scrappy competitors and allow them to fail so that they can take the ideas and staff who would otherwise be resistant to the business getting sold.
This happens because even if 50 of those ideas fail but you have 1 guy who comes up with a battle royale game mode, it pays off. None of these companies want to own and manage 50 indie studios, so they shut them down and absorb them on purpose.
And big studios aren’t even immune from this. I think Bethesda is keeping their name, but they’re in dangerous territory. Obsidian is hanging by a thread and barely got saved from this. DoubleFine still exists for the moment. But look at what happened to Tango Gameworks getting shafted by Xbox. The industry devours indie studios day by day for the hope of their stock growth, don’t be fooled
I am not saying embracer or MS or Sony or whoever else are “good guys”
But actually look at the hellscape that is indie development right now. Studios with solid track records are fighting tooth and nail for publisher deals. And newer studios are just fucked. NoClip have done a few episodes of a “documentary” about making a game and Danny O’Dwyer gave a really depressing take on what it is like pitching for a publisher that compared it to Tinder and being glad if someone is kind enough to actually say “no” rather than ghosting you.
Some of the studios involved might have been able to secure publisher deals. Most would have gone out of business likely even sooner.
Its easy to blame big corporations and big corporations deserve a lot of blame. But it is more important to understand what is actually going on so that maybe people don’t throw shitfits when developers use Early Access or even try the kickstarter well again.
Most of this nostalgia was already functionally dead and got a second lease on life, really. There was no chance another Alone in the Dark or Outcast was going to come out of the previous IP owners.
Wasn’t Piranha Bytes not profitable for quite some time?
Their games certainly had a community of fans, but I don’t think those are enough to keep a whole studio afloat.
Just thinking out loud, I did not look at any numbers, but in my head what’s done them in is not producing games that feel good to play. I loved Gothic 3 and Arcania at the time, but I’d choose any other 3rd person RPG that actually has snappy controls over the more modern stuff like Elex and I feel like that’s the mainstream opinion going around.
Yeah, far as I know they also started to struggle with Risen already, as cost started going up for 3D RPGs with open worlds. If you are a niche creator, that’s a problem as your niche cannot be endlessly expanded.
I never tried ELEX or ELEX 2 (kinda should, but eh, bit late now), but they looked fine. Nothing noteworthy, but decent. But the thing is, I have a long long list of just RPGs that I still want to play that are on my backlog, like even Baldur’s Gate 3. And now Dawntrail for FFXIV just released. It’ll be years more before I get around to ELEX. I wish they had gone more something more artsy in style than just generic-3D open SciFi world, as that ages badly. Look at Mass Effect 1 and so on.
The game pass version was broken for me. Sudden and massive fps drops every few minutes, seems like a memory leak. Had to play Lords of the fallen instead.
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Aktywne