So you mean companies move the majority of their employees to other projects once the majority of the work is finished with the current project they are working on? Wow.
That’s wild, let’s write a whole article about it. I’m definitely not complaining, but I thought the Witcher 3 was supposed to be the last Witcher game?
A while back Nexus did something that pissed off a lot of creators and they moved to other mod repositories, even deleting their shit off Nexus. In my experience, the good sexy stuff is more commonly found on other sites. Especially furry related ones.
God damn was that the dumbest drama in the history of internet drama. The Nexus was trying to do something VERY good for end users, and mildly inconvenient for some mod authors with control issues. Thankfully, very little of value was lost.
(Yes, I’m still a bit salty about being forced to the VASTLY inferior Thunderstore for 1% of my modding needs.)
The Nexus added “collections” - essentially mod lists directly from them - and to prevent said lists from breaking all the time, as different mods are updated at different rates, they made it so older versions of a mod couldn’t be just removed by the mod author so that a collection that uses that version could still get it.
Their argument (from my recollection) mostly revolved around their lack of control, they were upset that they could no longer delete all their content off nexusmods.
The sad reality is the reason it was brought forward was due to how frequently mod authors would throw hissy fits and delete their mods.
Wabbajack (precursor to collections and I’d wager still superior for Beth games) mod lists frequently ran into this issue. In many cases it equated to many many hours of work to fix, assuming it wasn’t an essential mod.
Thunderstore is actually excellent for its ease of use, making a mod list to share with a friend is as easy as export profile code.
Where it absolutely fails is any kind of conflict resolution, vortex has it but mod organizer imo is way easier to use (and consistently works) in that regard.
Not to argue on the drama, it was stupid and I fully side with nexus on their reasoning.
The Thunderstore’s biggest failing, in my opinion, is the lack of forums/comments. 9 times out of 10, the solution to a random modding issue can be found in some old comment. This is also why I HATE the recent shift to every modder having a personal Discord. Essentially unsearchable chaos.
Often I really do while playing games. Sometimes I love a good intricate or full of social commentary games, other times I just want to move my mouse and watch things die when I press a button. Though it has to look pretty at the very least if it’s the latter type.
As someone who’s never played any Yakuza game, what even is this series? Are you not playing as a Japanese gangster or something? Why are you now an actual pirate?
Yes the mainline games are you playing a gang member (im not sure about the new protag though}. I think this is the second time piece spinoff that tells a different story, they just reuse the previous cast as new characters. Like a Dragon: Isshin is the first game like this
It is has a serious narrative about crime, politics, family issues, corruption and honor. And in the next scene you’re spending thousands of dollars (yens?) on a custom toy car to win a slot car championship or building your own go kart and race against other gangster.
Let’s just say that this is not too out of the ordinary.
Oh to be someone outside, looking in at this series… It must look absolutely insane lol. As someone who’s been playing these games for years now, this feels right at home for this series to me.
The Yakuza games alternate wildly between being extremely serious dramas about underworld crime, and extremely light hearted and wacky side quests. Some people might find the change in tone breaks immersion, but I find the two extremes increase the impact of each other. When a game is serious all the time I get numb to it, there needs to be a variety of lighthearted content for me to really feel the impact of when things get heavy.
In basically every Yakuza/Like a Dragon game, you play as a former Yakuza who continues to interact with both yakuzas and civillians. Generally speaking, the core story is VERY melodramatic but the sub stories (short side quests) are zany and incredibly horny (one of the most famous ones involved Kiryu teaching a sex worker how to be a dominatrix… at a children’s playground) with generally a really zany side story (longer side quest) where you might own a cabaret club or play pokemon with homeless people or whatever.
That said, Ichiban and Majima (the player character of this installment) tend to have MUCH zanier adventures. Because Kiryu is sort of kind of above it whereas Ichiban is a mentally ill guy who grew up with video games and Majima is half “I act crazy to protect those I love” and half “I am batshit fucking insane”.
So what I expect from this? Incredibly zany opening as an amnesiac Goro Majima comes to terms with waking up in Hawaii (the R in RGG stands for “Reuse excessively”). And he’ll become a pirate to fight all the evil pirates (past games had Kiryu lead an army to fight against NJPW wrestlers who had armies of their own) but also likely rob some fools what need robbing because…
Kiryu semi-officially does not kill (it is ambiguous and unclear how much is a meme based on a mistranslation). Majima leaves huge piles of corpses in his wake.
And then, around chapter 6 or so, we’ll find out why Majima is in Hawaii. Shooting my shot (and obviously spoiler tagging it) but I expect
spoilerSaejima to be dead since I didn’t notice him in the trailer and the baby tiger is both a reference to Saejima (his tattoo is a tiger) and is the kind of pet/companion Majima can “inherit” going forward. And I expect RGG to want to reuse the Memoirs system to give Majima the same spotlight Kiryu got and losing his best friend for 40 or 50 years at this point will do that. Also… Saejima still has a LOT of baggage from one really shitty cutscene in 4, And at this point I can only think of two things that would break Majima and RGG knows we would fly out to Shinagawa and burn their studio to the ground if they dare hurt Makoto again.
At its core, the Yakuza games are incredibly heartfelt Japanese Crime Dramas with Soap Opera plots weaved in. Sometimes you are a criminal and sometimes you are someone caught up in it all. You usually have a very personal stake in the overall story whether it is protecting your kids or figuring out what really happened to your baseball career. But always, you are someone who cares about those that society ignores (homeless people, sex workers, trans folk, former yakuza, etc) who is inevitably willing to stand up against the forces of light and darkness to protect them. Because the yakuza/LAD games are not about being a modern day yakuza. They are about the ideal of the yakuza of olde.
For those unaware, most criminal organizations rise to power because of a lack of protection from the government. Many predominantly African American or Latino gangs very much “began” to protect their communities from racism and bigotry. And Warrior was a show that depicted this with Chinese triads in turn of the century San Francisco. They were far from altruistic organizations but they fulfilled a role the cops actively refused to (often fighting against the cops themselves). And, over the decades, efforts are made to villify them which results in nobody “good” joining which, in turn, results in only the worst of the worst joining.
In Japan, this very much happened with the yakuza. Getting into their feudal counterparts is complex but the LAD games touch on this with Hiroshima in 6. Following the war, the Japanese government was in shambles and a lot of people were left to fend for themselves. Crime families stepped in to act as small mini governments and protect and provide for Their people (for a totally modest fee…). But, over the decades, the Japanese government did a spectacular job of villifying the yakuza to the point that only the most evil fuckers join (many of Takashi Miike’s movies touch on this. And he even did a LAD short film back in the day)
Which is where the games come in. Kiryu, Ichiban, and Yagami and their crews are very much what a yakuza SHOULD be. They are people who have forsaken their role in polite society because they want to protect those who can’t protect themselves. They are far from perfect but that is how you get those sharp contrasts of partying it up and fighting off hordes of drunk salarymen for fun to realizing a group of sex workers have been abducted and are being trafficked to who knows where all in the name of “progress”.
And its how you get those cliche anime bullshit moments of the evil crime lord you have been feuding with the first half of the game suddenly becomes one of your strongest allies when it is revealed that a government organization is brutalizing people. Because he also feels the same way and agrees that putting a stop to this Evil is far more important than who has control of a street.
It’s one of those series that has expanded so far, with favoritism towards its characters, that they even decided to drop the name “Yakuza” in favor of the Japanese title, since so much of it has little to do with being a Yakuza anymore. Honestly, I can’t remember any game in which you’ve done actual Yakuza-like actions such as shaking down businesses, running loan shark scams, or executing hits. When you do end up making money, it’s through perfectly legitimate businesses whose biggest problem is “thugs keep attacking us!”
I’ve been calling it the Soap Opera of gaming since first playing Lost Judgment.
The games are about various yakuza/ex-yakuza just living their best lives basically. The main plot differs from game to game, but most of them are what I would call an “every game.” It’s got a little bit of everything; the majority of them are absolutely batshit insane side missions and mini games while the main game is a brawler/dialogue heavy RPG.
If you like video games and anime, this is a series for you because it’s basically both at once and every game is both self-contained and enjoyable on its own, but also references past games a lot and has impeccable continuity.
This one with pirates I have a feeling is going to be a lot like Infinite Wealth with Kasuuga being either one of if not the main character. He has a super wild imagination; every time you get into combat in Infinite Wealth, everyone changes to some fantastical creature or hero. Like you get into a fight with some drunk business men and suddenly they’re fire breathing zombies. It’s great.
“Splitgate was much more of an arena shooter, fast-paced, very circular motion,” Proulx adds. “With this next game, it’s much more of a class-based shooter or arcade shooter where it’s still fast-paced. It’s still about shooting people and portaling, but it’s a little bit more thoughtful, it’s a little bit more strategic. The angles are a little bit more intentional and less chaotic.”
Oh, cool. So they’re making it worse. Bad enough that they patched LAN out of the first game, they’re also patching out the gameplay reason I’d want to play it.
Nobody’s mad that didn’t throw money in the pit. It’s just a funny story that never seems to end. Every year they don’t have a finished product, the joke gets funnier.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s the perfect counterpart to companies like EA Games where unfinished games come out because developers had to meet an arbitrary deadline. Star Citizen is right at the other end of the spectrum and you see what happens when there are no deadlines and the product is never finished. I would love to play it, but my backlog is so big that I can afford to be a patient gamer. I have about 35 years until I retire and if version 1.0 is out by then I’ll be happy to take another look.
On the bright side though, they are consistently updating the game. I don’t play, but several of my friends play it all the time, and to them it definitely seems to be worth what they paid.
People are still falling through elevators and delivery missions are still bugged to hell four years after I quit for those reasons, but hey, they have beards now! 😂
What you mentioned is actually a comment I just made, but in favor of it. It’s just like konami and kojima, they gave him the boot because he’s a perfectionist and would take forever (but make an amazing game at the end). I see this as the same kind of thing. It’s taking forever but I have absolutely no doubt it will come soon™
Server meshing is the last major tech absolutely necessary for star citizen to run, for you to not be falling through floors, for box missions to work, etc. it’s all server issues caused by the fact that there’s only one server running everything for 100 people. Once server meshing is completed (early next year, a partial implementation is coming this summer) they can then move on to the already discussed “1.0 release.”
It’s actually coming much sooner than these ignorant lazy fools who write these articles would have you think. SQ42 is literally in the final polishing phases and during their big citizencon event this year they’re more than likely to announce its release date.
"A lot" is an interesting descriptor, especially when comparing loud easily defined groups with quieter more subtle groups.
Its the difference between those animals that puff themselves out to five times their normal size and those that prefer not to be seen at all. Are there a significant portion of the first as compared to the second, just because you see them more blatantly?
And I have "played" it multiple times for a short while over the years myself. Anyone saying it is perfectly playable in its current state is a liar and part of the cult. It's a glorified half broken tech demo.
And yes, it is vaporware, because there's so much feature creep that it will never see the light of day. They constantly completely re-write systems, often times systems that have been already re-written a couple of times. A lot of newer systems don't fit in well with previous systems or other aspects that are now very much outdated, which means they have to redo them too (like various ships). It's a constant redoing of things that have been done already. All while the major tech needed for what they claim to aim at is still not really there. And all of this comes on top of them adding completely new features instead of focusing on fixing & finishing what's already there.
The RSI Galaxy is a great ship (currently ~$300) and the loaner is an Anvil Carrack which is (currently $600). The Carrack is one of the biggest and best ships for all around activity, but no pilot guns.
Origin 890 Jump ($900) for luxury and is the biggest in-game ship you can buy.
Hammerhead ($700) is the largest combat/gun ship currently, with the Polaris coming out soon.
Reclaimer ($400) is the largest industrial salvage ship.
Absolutely can’t wait until my Galaxy is flyable, still hoping for it to be here by the end of the year
Maybe they can stop changing the story of beloved remakes. That might help too. I didn’t buy rebirth, and I won’t buy it unless it’s used. The only way I can voice my disapproval of what they’ve done with the ff7 remake and the bait and switch they did with part 1 is to not give them my money.
My issue is less around changing the story, more around incompleteness.
They’re making the turnout of certain events hazy and mysterious to allow for multiple future turnouts, and let them keep merchandising certain characters. And, they’re letting the conclusion keep going for multiple games.
It’s more of a monetary strategy than a storytelling one. Notably, FFXIV sells each of its expansions, but each one has an ending that feels like a victory and a satisfying conclusion to a story even when it sets new things up.
For what it’s worth, Rebirth is an amazing game that I would honestly consider to be the gold star of anyone making a AAA experience today. If the goal is truly quality, I don’t think it’s feasible to try to make every game better than Rebirth given the breadth of content in it and its overall production quality.
Really what this announcement boils down to is that they won’t be making more games like Harvestella, Valkyrie Elysium, Diofield Chronicle, and Foamstars, and they aren’t keen on keeping things platform-exclusive anymore. And maybe they’ll also be a bit more mindful of the budgets of their AAA games like Rebirth instead of taking the “spared no expense” mindset like they have been, which could come at the cost of quality, but I hope that’s not the case.
FF16 to me is paper thin in every regard. I would rank it last among all the FF games I’ve played. The combat is especially bad. You can basically button mash your way through all of it. Dodge a lot, that’s it.
Fr. Calling FF7R a “remake” of FF7 with its significant story changes and shift from perfect turn-based combat to the most mind-numbing half-measure “action RPG” combat is like saying you’re going to remake Tetris but now it’s a first-person shooter
I can only speak to my experience. I love the depth of FF7’s turn-based strategic combat, meanwhile I literally haven’t finish the first FF7R entry yet because I keep literally falling asleep during combat. I’m not being hyperbolic, I’m not being facetious, I literally have fallen asleep dozens of times during combat trying to finish that damn game.
If the combat speaks to you and you enjoy it, that’s awesome and I’m glad it can deliver to you what you need. But for me, I think it’s even worse than the combat in Tales of Berseria and I hate the combat in the Tales of series.
I love action games and I love RPGs, I just personally rarely find half-measure crossover gameplay styles satisfying.
That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.
I was fine with the change from turn based combat. I fully expected that even with them trying to hook in newer fans of the series with modern mechanics.
But there really was no reason to change the story. It was obvious they did it as a business decision when they turned the first 5 hours of the game into 40 hours of fluff.
I wasn’t even upset with the story additions for the extra character. It was kinda nice even to get some background on the characters before we leave Midgar without them.
It’s the fundamental changes to the story that really bothered me, that they made for really no reason.
I agree with all of that. My personal biggest issue is the combat, but it isn’t the only issue and it isn’t the biggest issue with the idea of the game as a concept.
But unfortunately SqEnix recognized FF7 for the cash cow that it is, and seem fully-devoted to milking it for every last drop it can offer
I mean, you do you, but for anyone else reading this who is on the fence, I adore the 1997 original (and am in fact replaying it right now), and I loved Rebirth. Solid 9.75/10 game for me, with the only detractions being constant interruptions by Chadley if you're doing a 100% run.
The gripes about the story being changed and stuff just don't hold up to me. The remakes are actually, by and large, very faithful to the original with a ton of fan service. They have some some new stuff with the remakes that I'm personally enjoying, and keeps me on my toes.
If I wanted the exact same story, I'd play the original, which, I am lol.
These new games actually make me like the OG FF7 more, if that’s possible. Or, at the very least, make me like the world and characters more since they aren’t just cuboid freaks. 7 was never my favorite of the bunch even though it’s the most popular, but I sure as heck spent 100 hours in Rebirth doing most of the side content.
It’s a very good game hindered only by the fact they there’s not a minigame Square said “No” to.
My partner was watching me play through Rebirth and commented on the number of mini games, and I said "honestly, that's pretty faithful to the original too" lol
Yeah there's definitely more, but the original has tons.
I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.
That’s why it’s called an opinion. I think the story pacing is garbage compared to the original. Introducing Sephiroth into the beginning of the game made zero sense, and then fighting him as one of the bosses really took away from the mystery of what made the original reveal of him as the real villain all that much better.
And the whispers were an absolute stupid choice to put into the game.
The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.
I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.
Because these corporations presumably think they’ll buy a talented studio, get it to make something its isn’t used to making, force a bunch of shit into it for monetisation and/or launch early in order to keep schedule. All this to keep investors/management happy. Then when the combination of the aforementioned (repeatedly) blows up in their face; usually by pissing off customers, they lose money. Finally you start layoffs and rehires if needed because you’re running into money problems.
They couldn’t care less about the talent. It isn’t rare for a lot of the talent to bail when these studio get bought up. Especially since it feels like you’re just going to be crunched the second you get the first job post acquisition. Found this while checking this assumption, a bunch of them left early for Arkane specifically.
I always viewed it companies like EA take a gamble. Either the investment pulls off the unlikely, convoluted shit you ask and makes you money or you take it out back and try with another studio.
You would think, right? But HiFi Rush was lauded as one of the best games last year and was highly successful, even being ported to PS5 and Switch at this point, so why close them?
From what I read it outsold forspoken and got around $6 million in the first month? That’s small change to a billion dollar publisher. Especially when you can close a bunch of studios(probably claim some losses for tax reasons like WB with catwoman) and reshuffle. Doesn’t need the individual studio to do poorly in this instance I’d guess. Just didn’t make the selection for “who do you want to keep going forward”.
My best guess is that Microsoft/Bethesda hired too many people during the pandemic, because gaming had a boom then. I do not know, if it’s a massive management failure or planned, that all these people would need to be laid off shortly after the pandemic-boom ends.
Yeah and right now we’re all raving that Helldivers 2 is great.
The point is that on average these massive conglomerates of corporate shareholder-driven studios are not soulful because they have the soul beat out of them. Devs have tons of soul, but if it ends up in the final product is ultimately a decision of the management, and they have had the souls sucked out of them.
There are still soulful games, but on average the industry is soulless.
As is the case with all media. Nobody remembers Populous or Bill Lambeer’s Combat Basketball on the SNES cuz they were horrible games, but I still hear about Zelda: ALTTP and Super Mario World.
I get what you’re saying, but “the entire video game industry” didn’t make Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m not jaded enough to claim the entire industry is soulless (indies and AA still exist), but the AAA industry is pretty much there, with the rare exception.
The article is leading me to think we’re going to get another The Outer Worlds experience where your actions don’t really have an affect on the world until the very end.
I feel like Outer Worlds was their take on Fallout, and this is their take on The Elder Scrolls. From the video they put out the other day, I’m down to clown.
I don’t know. When I was helping factions it only felt noticeable when they showed up to help at the end.
I haven’t replayed it because it felt like there wouldn’t be a lot of deviation between paths I choose to take.
It’s kind of like Dishonored’s chaos level system that can result in additional enemies and a different ending. It makes it feel like more of an adventure game than an RPG.
This is all obviously subjective but when people were hyping it up to have Fallout New Vegas levels of choice I felt let down.
Same here. In fact the hype is the reason why it didn’t do well imo. It’s a fine game, nothing too wrong or bad about it, but they hype definitely killed. IGN kept advertising it as “Fallout in space” and “the Bethesda Killer,” and look where we ended up.
I really dislike the X is the Y killer angle. It’s such clickbait and immediately puts fans on the Y side on the defensive. It’s helping no one.
Unless it’s an indie dev I don’t even care what else a developer has produced previously. With such large teams there’s too many cooks in the kitchen and it only takes one of them to sour the game.
I don’t understand the hate for the outer worlds. It has great satire in it’s themes like the fallout games, the build diversity is there and gear is impactful, the story is pretty fun and interesting. It’s like people hate it because it’s not the massive open world of fallout new Vegas, but people tend to not realize or I guess forget, there was a stupid amount of just walking from point a to point b in that game only to get to a super linear quest line. The outer worlds does a great job of simplifying the world in a meaningful way. The terrible remaster of it doesn’t really help the game either though, it really should have been left alone.
I think it’s a matter of expectations. When people were referring to The Outer Worlds as “Fallout but in space” in the lead up to the games release I think that set the bar quiet high and don’t feel as if some of the themes you’d see in Fallout were there or at least weren’t presented in a similar way.
I don’t think many people hate the game. I spent over 50 hours playing it and beat the DLCs. I just don’t think it’s a game that I would go out of my way to recommend.
It’s like people hate it because it’s not the massive open world of fallout new Vegas, but people tend to not realize or I guess forget, there was a stupid amount of just walking from point a to point b in that game only to get to a super linear quest line. The outer worlds does a great job of simplifying the world in a meaningful way.
It’s been about three years since I played The Outer Worlds but I feel I feel like I recall the quests being broken up into regional chunks. There weren’t a ton of loading screens which was nice but I felt like it cut back on the amount of depth the world had.
People got so hyped up about “Fallout in space” that they just ignored what the developers were saying about the game. They straight up said that it wasn’t going to be a big open world like Fallout and it wasn’t going to provide as many hours of gameplay.
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