I admit, not having a PS5 I haven’t played FFXVI yet, but sometimes these things are world building around a more personal story which is what I understand the game to be from other people talking about it, just because something features in a world, doesn’t mean it needs to be further explored if that’s not the story that’s been written. Just because thats am element that interests Kotaku writers more due to there nationality and politics, doesn’t mean it was the story the writers set out to tell.
Thing is, and I haven’t played it either, but I know this from conversations I’ve seen about it, your character is a slave. Or, rather, is from the caste of people that is enslaved because they have magic. That means it’s something that can’t just be background, because it quite literally influences how everyone in the world interacts with Clive.
There was a really good Jimquisition on how being a “bearer” is treated in the world, and how SE just kind of overdid it with a lack of subtlety (jump to about the 4 minute mark to start, because there’s a lot of faff at the beginning before the video starts talking about the game). https://youtu.be/sgjqXTvHaLk?si=9EQqqsA4x2HEOmqc
Yeah, I did see Steph Stirling’s video and I do get the arguments, but personally I don’t agree that just because it’s an element in the world building and the backstory of the main character it has to be a driving element of the plot.
Look at it like X-Men, being feared and hunted by humanity is sort of X-Men lore, but it isn’t the driving force of every story. Sometimes they’re just off having adventures in space or whatever.
See, this is why I wish this game wasn’t currently PS5 exclusive and had come out on PC like they originally planned. I can’t say what story it seems like they wanted to tell just because unless I want to watch someone else play it, I can’t know. I couldn’t even read much of the article because I didn’t want to get too far into spoiler territory. It’s very frustrating because this seems like an interesting discussion to be had.
Then maybe we who haven’t played the game shouldn’t be having opinions on some aspects of it, because context matters and we lack context on the whole plot.
I didn’t say you had a strong opinion either. In any case, having any sort of slavery present in a “medieval-esque” game doesn’t sound too weird to me. From the promotional material it seems like the game is about fights between countries and some eikons/primals/titans and the characters channel the fight of those primals though them?
The whole concept of primals is linked to slavery by the very simple notion that once the character is touched by their mana, it becomes a slave to them. This is how it has worked in all the FF games I have played.
IDK, complaining about the game having aspects of slavery but not addressing them seems a weak complaint to me when probably the game was never about the thing, the thing just being a setting. And I’m not against the thing being just a minor setting, not every game must either make t their focus or make it not exist.
Again, I have not played through it so I’m not gonna say if their implementation is correct or not. All I’m gonna say is that Americans really focus so god damn much in the slavery topic, it’s like unless it’s properly addressed it’s some kind of taboo in media.
You sat there and said I shouldn’t have an opinion because I haven’t played, when you haven’t played either but get to have a strong opinion on it plus eye roll at Americans. My only opinion is, “eh, seems like they whiffed it instead of going into what they introduced,” and that’s based on a review I saw by a Brit. 🤨
While I personally have no opinions on FFXVI, I find that such a consumeristic stance, that the only valid way to form an opinion is by (buying and) playing/watching/using it themselves. Because if so, how can anyone be meaningfully opposed to a product or a piece of media? Seems a little strange if even people who are critical of something are supposed to buy it.
Sure they may have no firsthand impressions, but they might make their minds from a variety of reviews, critiques and discussions around it.
Your character is not a slave. (Spoilers limited to promotional materials) Player character is the oldest son of the ruler of one of the major countries in the game world, so a prince. Ability to wield (very specific) magic is quickly explained that some of the nobles of that family can do. He somewhat is a slave at some point, but this is a very brief story moment (tbf at the very beginning, you meet your character as a slave before he goes into childhood memory where he is a prince). When relevant, NPCs do interact with character as with slave, but its rarely relevant. So it is very much a background theme, even if a major one.
That’s why the phrasing was “from the caste of people” in the clarification. It was just a cultural difference: his home treated him as honorable and other cultures don’t.
When he is briefly enslaved, it wasn’t because they mistook him for being the kind of person you get to do that to, it’s because he was that kind of person and simply hadn’t been treated that way before.
his home treated him as honorable and other cultures don’t
Not the point of the story, when NPCs get to know who the character is theirs opinion changes
it wasn’t because they mistook him for being the kind of person you get to do that to
That is actually almost what happened. If he was not a mage, that story point would change little.
The “mages are slaves” thing is more akin to FF6’s “there is no magic in this world”, like it is a somewhat big deal that Terra is mage, but game doesn’t spend much time there since it is not a point.
No, not at all, generally not a good sign whatsoever (unless you’re wall st apparently). I guess there’s the chance it was particularly inefficiently staffed, but then Vox seem like they should have known what they were doing, so that doesn’t seem likely.
The new owner seems to have a few gaming brands already, Game Rant being the only one I’ve heard of though. Perhaps they’re planning a consolidation and this is the redundancy from that?
Not necessarily saying there’s a silver lining, just trying to rationalise
The new owner seems to have a few gaming brands already, Game Rant
Isn’t GameRant, like, 90% AI-generated clickbait content nowadays? Can’t talk about what they were about a few years ago, but every time I find a GR article when looking for something, it’s clickbait AI slop. Like “When will the sequel to X release? Everything you need to know” (scroll down to read post) “there’s no confirmation about a sequel”.
There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”
Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.
In my friend group one is really into both ME and AC, he really didn’t like Andromeda but he did like Odyssey.
The other felt that Andromeda was okay/mid but that Odyssey was also a lot of fun.
I never got into ME and the last AC game I played was Black Flag, and that may have legitimately been after Odyssey was long released. So while I can’t speak on these games, from what I gather online and from my friends is that Andromeda was kind of a buggy mediocre game that didn’t do as good of a job for the ME universe as it could have, whereas Odyssey was a bit of a deviation, which the people who don’t like it tend to criticize and everybody else seems to enjoy the game for what it is, if not maybe a little Ubisoft standard fetch quest grindy.
In the case of Odyssey, I think it’s a good potential that is limited by the restraints of Ubisoft, in the same way that has just happened to Star Wars Outlaws. Because for all of the obvious faults we can give Ubisoft, I think it’s fair to give merit to the developers and designers who, for example, completely recreated France for AC: Unity. For all the faults that game had at launch, apparently they did eventually clean it up and my friend really enjoys it.
It sounds like Outlaws has a great world but just didn’t get the polish, like Ubisoft tends to do.
Also some unrelated design choices, I’ve seen in gameplay videos like the repetitive mini-games (which can be turned off - but why design something that players turn off because it gets tedious and annoying?) and the AI during non-stealth combat encounters being completely inept, firing in the complete wrong direction. The little things become cumulative and can easily turn a perfectly fine game into a mish-mash of features that we’re put together with any cohesion. The last thing that I remember in terms of criticisms are that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of impact on the system for reputation. Someone who hates you after an interaction can be completely on your side just by doing a few side missions for that character. Not sure if this continues on into the late game, but if it does it seems to be another instance of just not quite fleshed out design.
The minigame looks fun, but not 4 doors and 3 item crates in a row fun. The reputation system is typically a really engaging and fun thing, but forcing yourself under constraints by choosing to not do missions with someone isn’t as engaging as being put into a situation where you choose one merchant over another, and then that merchant is just done with you forever and may even send goons after you. From what it sounds like, in present state if an event like that happens, just do some odd jobs for the guy and it’s all forgotten?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the game - I tend to like games and movies that people are criticizing, since at least lately most of the criticisms have been… severely biased… but sometimes there’s also truly legitimately terrible stuff, like Rebel Moon. There’s always a line of subjectivity of course, there are people out there who enjoyed it, but the other people see the nearly 21 minutes of the movie, legitimately nearly 30% of it, being in slowmo and say, “Hey, that’s pretty awful, why would you do that?” on top of having another mish-mash of ideas that are presented and subsequently dropped to never be heard from again. I don’t think Outlaws is comparable to Rebel Moon, I have a feeling it’s probably better than its reception but still worse than it should be.
WRT the hacking minigame(s), it’s much faster than e.g. Fallout 3/4 hacking and lockpicking. The rotating locks are a rhythm game that take 10-20 seconds. The sudoku-esque “slicing”/ hacking one takes about 30 seconds. Compared to Fallout 4 where you can be mousing through every line of characters to find the bracket pairs that remove a dud choice when you’re hacking, it honestly slows me down less. I haven’t had AI go wonky in combat.
I haven’t seen the reputations bounce around. I got the Pykes angry at me right at the start, and I haven’t managed to claw my way back yet. I haven’t been trying hard, to be fair, but if side missions are there that can easily recover you from negative faction standing, the game definitely isn’t putting it in front of me.
I’m always skeptical of edited videos that show bugs because controversy drives views, so there’s an incentive to find problems.
IMO it’s not amazing and it’s not bad. You need to enjoy stealth to enjoy Outlaws, because you need to use stealth 90% of the time to avoid getting overwhelmed. The worldspace is amazing, just like AssOdyssey. I love Star Wars as a universe, but not the movies themselves, and Outlaws doesn’t focus on Jedis or rehash the same old characters. And this game really feels like Star Wars.
If you’re not either really into Star Wars or really into stealth, I’d recommend waiting until it’s discounted, but mostly just because the Gold Edition price is insane ($110).
If anyone wants a complete GZDoom game (or 2 or 3 depending on how your counting) right now to try, Hedon is really great. Also, made by a solo dev(music and VA work was outsourced), so absolute flex on AAA game companies.
If you can get a clue as to what’s going on, message the dev on steam. It’s one guy, so they probably don’t know about the issue. For a for a little while, if you had Heretic loaded in GZDoom, it would load that instead of the Hedon.
Just looked it up on Steam, and it’s part of a bundle with another GZDoom game called Supplice which looked pretty cool, so I got that. I also bought a game called Incision which looks pretty wild too.
They’re all boomer shooters and I’m excited to play them.
This game is great. Feels kinda like Half Life with the fast paced combat of Doom. The exploration is just as good as the gun play and some of the solutions to secrets feel so clever
FYI: Cross-platform cloud save sync is currently not working. Developers are working on a solution. Workaround is to enforce Proton.
Edit: The workaround I’ve read somewhere is wrong. Currently the only workaround is to either manually copy the save data or to set up a 3rd party sync solution (which for Steam Deck means to enter desktop mode).
The PS5 doesn’t even have a browser because they’re scared of exploits
Why not just have some hardened Firefox with auto updates instead of licensing a browser from a company specialized in exploitable browsers for consoles? Nobody uses netfront, why Sony and Nintendo are so obsessed with it?
I only bought a ps4 well after the 5 dropped, and only because my pal had got a new xbox and wasn’t playing with his ps4 anymore. Long story short I got the ps4, 3 controllers, and 5 hardcopy games for £50 and a joint. Until I can get a ps5 for that…I ain’t upgrading
They can. The issue is it’d eventually split the community. Mods that no longer have support will be lost, and the ones that do will either decide it isn’t worth updating each time or have to put up two versions. It also creates needless new work for people, especially the F4SE devs.
Aside from some still holding to LE. There are the 1.5.97 SE users and the 1.6+ AE users. And there have been at least one or two more updates in the 1.6 line that also caused more issues and require their own dedicated builds of various mods.
It’s not that they can’t, it’s that people are getting blindsided by updates to a game which supposedly hasn’t received updates for over half a decade, and downgrading on Steam is a surprisingly huge PITA. The Midnight Ride recommends patching, fwiw.
No, fortunately enough. A FO5 written by Obsidian could be released as a bug-free superset of FO4, but includes the whole USA and the moddinglinked people would still be trying to mod FO4.
Because the game is old and hasn’t been worked on in years. They’re no reason to even think about turning off updates for it unless you happen to know the random years later update is coming.
But I learned the hard way awhile ago with Xcom 2. They “update” that all the time, but don’t do anything to the game, is just the shitty launcher they keep updating every month.
In my particular case, I just didn’t know it was enabled (my modding guide mentioned a way to stop it, but I guess I did it incorrectly). The game hadn’t received updates in half a decade, and I don’t really use Steam for anything else. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in that boat.
Most tutorials I can find involve enabling the steam cli, then using steamdb to look up the “depots” of previous versions and downloading the old update in chunks, then unpacking and copying the old game files to your install location. Not exactly convenient.
I used the 360 as my main console back in the day because it was getting all the good games and multiplats usually ran better on it. I got a PS3 in late 2009 when the price dropped and it started getting worthwhile exclusives. When Microsoft tried to pull that always online crap with the One, they lost me forever. Since all of their games are on PC day one, there’s even less reason for me to get one.
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