To be fair, “it takes one to know one” kind of applies here. I played a whole heap of D2, right from the launch.
I was one of the dumbasses who paid for the base game, and the two abysmal DLCs to follow, and then for forsaken.
Forked out only for all of the content to be either made free to play / taken away and ‘vaulted’ (not that anyone would really miss it).
Friends would keep telling me to hop back in after every expansion and I genuinely wonder how their rotten formula can still keep such a wide audience invested.
I dug out my old Logitech Driving Force GT from the closet and blew off the dust. I haven’t gotten into a new (to me) racing game since Gran Turismo 5. The hardcore simulationist trend doesn’t interest me, I miss proper career modes and I have just had some awful bad luck with games being broken. I just occasionally revisit some classics.
So after many enthusiastic recommendations I grabbed Forza Horizon 5. My first impressions were great. The intro was a lot of fun, with the big set pieces causing me to fight my wheel as it bucked after being long out of practice.
But this was not representative of the actual game. The vast majority of the content is filled by fairly normal races with long stretches driving to them, back and forth across the same stretches of empty open world. It’s sort of like a Ubisoft game, but just cars.
This still could have been a good time. I like the driving model well enough, there is a large selection of cars and the environment, while bland, is certainly much less of an eyesore than what awaits me if I go back to play Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the umpteenth time.
I’ve got some criticisms of the actual racing (the way it generates opponents and their vehicles sucks, the tracks are boring), but what really killed it for me was this slowly creeping, eerie discomfort that built up in the back of my mind over hours until it became overwhelming. The vibes are fucked.
This is Fortnite, the racing game. It’s full of cameos and tie ins with influencers. Brands are plastered everywhere. Microtransaction adverts in most menus. Everyone talks in this creepy, corporate approved “wholesomeness” and aware of how “epic” what they’re doing is. There is a really uncomfortable tension between this huge festival that completely empties Mexico of pedestrians and how much the game fetishizes Americaness.
I wanted to scream during a sub-plot where you race a bunch of rich douche bags who are beefing with some guy at the festival. The game throws out shit like “they shouldn’t be discriminated against for their money, they can’t help the fact they are rich” and talks about fucking therapy. All the writing is this bad, I hate every single character in these inexplicably unskippable cutscenes.
It’s absurdtpo me how basically no racing game company realizes that one of the key points to have your game be fun is to have some kind of progress. Contemporary racing games literally just throw cars at you in hope to make it fun by constantly giving you new toys.
I get that this is a thing that sells to the masses who /want/ those shiny new toys, but man. Imagine if a big studio actually took the time to improve on the vintage NFS progression formula :(
I hate that a lot of the ones with a progression settle on XP to unlock tiers of cars rather than money and buying them too. I liked going to the used car dealer ship in Gran Turismo and seeing what I could afford.
Contemporary racing games literally just throw cars at you in hope to make it fun by constantly giving you new toys.
Forza Horizon 5 is bizarre for this. It has an acquisition system, but right after the intro you pick one of three cars, all new and not cheap. Then you get a custom rally car from the next race. A bunch of unlocks are going to give even you more cars afterwards, and will keep doing so regularly.
Like hang on, maybe let me work up from one of your cheap, older cars first and work my way up?
But this is also the game that unironically calls you “superstar” from the jump and sucks you off constantly.
I can identify with Mario much better than these new “woke” characters because he has no discernible personality and nothing he does ever makes any difference to his world.
Who is this guy anyway? He was the face of the moon on a previous post, and I know I've seen him before in a movie or TV show. Is this truly the face of god himself? Just curious.
Tangentially related question, but who is this guy that downvoted you? It was a completely innocuous question, and I know I’ve seen other innocent questions and statements like this downvoted for no good reason I can determine. Is this truly the judgement of god himself? Just curious.
I get downvoted just for existing sometimes But, I'm not in it for popularity, if I was I certainly wouldn't waste my time on social media platforms. I could say the sun is a star, and people would downvote it. I could say the sky is blue, and people would argue and say I'm an idiot.
Well I'm here to set the record straight. I AM an idiot and damn proud of it, which maybe explains why i spend my time on social media sites to start with.
Kerbal Space Program 2. The new For Science! update finally made the game fun and performant! And because I suck at the game, I needed to send 4 rescue missions to return Valentina from the Mun.
Base game, not including mods? It’s comparable, especially if you didn’t like career mode and preferred science mode. I can see where they’re going and I really like it personally.
However, if you also include mods, and you kinda have to… the sheer quality and amount of mods that really elevate ksp1 is going to make the answer to this question “no” until it has been out for years. You simply cannot compete with a decade of overhauls, dlc sized expansion mods, and visual upgrades.
The only mod I used in KSP1 was the Engineer Redux(?) mod, but I uninstalled it when advanced orbital info was added to the base game. The science mode couldn’t keep me motivated after finishing the tech tree with a research lab on minmus, and the career mode eventually gets too easy and too hard at the same time. I find KSP2’s exploration mode to be a perfect balance of the two, so I’m having a blast!
What do you think of 3? I just couldn’t get into it and I think it’s that the 3D camera just makes it harder to see what you want to see and select what you want to select, as opposed to 1/2 where that was so effortless. That bad feeling stopped me from trying it thoroughly.
I actually am one of the few fans of all 3. I’m also looking into Planet Coaster made by the same people that made 3
You won’t really appreciate how good 3 is until you start messing around with the UI and really get a feel for when you’ll need to toggle on ride height flags and path height flags, etc.
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