“Stray Gods” is an incredibly beautiful game. I was turned off by the playstyle at first, but then I embraced it and got really invested in the characters and the story. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys Greek mythology and/or fantastic stories about interpersonal drama and enjoys games with tough dialogue choices.
The soundtrack also!!! It’s a musical game and the songs are all SO BEAUTIFUL. I teared up a few times.
Yep! I believe console preload started yesterday or the day before. Steam just went live. So stoked we can all have it ready to go right at the release time.
Looks like it borrows heavily from some of the best of the open world action/arpg genre - The Witcher, RDR2, Assassin’s Creed, Elden Ring, and BOTW, even a touch of Shadow of the Colossus in there. If it’s as polished as any of its inspirations, it’ll be a banger.
I apparently wasn’t ever paying attention bc I had never heard of gamescom before now, and now it’s been a flood of trailers coming out from there. Is gamescom the successor to E3? That was traditionally where I remember new releases coming out way back when before it dissolved/died/whatever.
Geoff Keighly has been trying to replace E3 with his Summer Games Fest. That’s where a lot of announcements come out. Iirc, Keighly said that this Gamescom wouldn’t be reveals for new games, but updates on ones we know are coming.
I’d say neither are really replacements for E3, since E3 had showcases from PS/Xbox/Nintendo. Nowadays all the major publishers and console makers have their own reveals.
For players of Black Desert, how much does Crimson Desert seem to be inheriting from it? I’ve seen some calling the trailer bullshit but I’ve heard that BD is also quite mechanically broad.
I think I’ve realized some of my favorite games recently have involved a lot of walking up to objects and holding the E key to fill a meter.
That sounds like a terribly bad-modern style of game, but of course the context of decisionmaking and effects to those actions can be very important. Going to a terminal that takes 10 seconds to hack may mean 10 seconds you’re very vulnerable to attacks, and that a success means you successfully distracted, or trapped out, any adversaries that may not want you to hold E.
And then of course, it’s also fun sometimes for singleplayer games when you don’t want the tension of outsmarting opponents, just rewards for good positional decisionmaking.
Emergent gameplay is a big part of what makes video games unique as a medium. I'd say a good example I've played recently is Death Stranding. One of my favorite games of all time at this point, it really is best and worst described as a walking simulator. Or moreso, a delivery simulator. At its core, you'll take on missions involving the delivery of different amounts and sizes/weights of packages to destinations near and far. Sometimes there are invisible ghosts that want to kill you, sometimes there's visible, inanimate landscape that wants to kill you.
What takes it from 'walking simulator' to 'walking simulator' is the fact that the walking is complex. The smoothness or roughness of terrain can directly influence the stability of your character. Even small rocks can be marginally trickier to traverse than truly flat ground. You may find pavement, dirt, rocky terrain, snow, or deep rivers, which require considerations. You can brace yourself for stability to help, and your movement speed, momentum when changing direction, and whether you're standing or crouching all affect your likelihood to slip or trip. Many items help you to move off the beaten path and find shorter routes, with ladders or climbing rope & anchors allowing the scaling or descent of steep cliffs.
Through experimentation, sliding helplessly down a mountain, and having all your important shit get washed away in a river as you scramble around like an infant, you come to understand your mobility and limitations. Enter: the packages and your hubris. You can accept multiple missions at a time. Some missions require few or relatively light packages. Some ask you to move an amount of goods that ought to be palletized. Through understanding your limitations, and attempting to slap different amounts of cargo on your person, you can possess Icarus and fly as close to the sun as you want.
But, there's more than just your person. You can use floating sci fi wheelbarrows that trail behind you, carrying a large amount of goods, but restricting your ability to use climbing ropes or ladders. You could use a motorcycle, allowing for speedy traversal and some light offroading with small storage on "saddlebags", or even a huge ass truck which affords incredible storage potential, at the cost of a squirrelly and incline averse driving model.
And I haven't even really gotten into all of the equipment or strategies required to handle the "ghosts", whose unique abilities and behavior provide an interesting additional challenge where being caught by one could easily mean the loss of your cargo, or even your life. Even in the big ass truck, you aren't truly safe. The intermittent and locational time-accelerating rainfall means even cargo you haven't dropped or bumped can have its durability rusted away given some time.
Though the game, of course, has a story, it sits alongside a story of the player's experience, limited only by the bravery and recklessness with which you, essentially, don't want to make three trips to the car to bring groceries in, so you load up yourself and two linked floating carriers to carry nearly 1,000 kilograms of cargo, and make a winding, manually waypointed journey through the desolate and oppressive landscape, stopping to deliver parts of your massive load as you come to each post-apocalyptic shelter in your list of deliveries.
Your successes and failures within are unique to the way you chose to plan and execute your trips. Shit, man, I like this game.
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