Kojima, the driving force of Metal Gear is gone. What is left is a corporate committee who through focus testing and guesswork try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
They will make any new version look and feel as much as possible as the previous games, only deviating for committee-approved reasons of monetization, trend chasing, or marketing appeal.
What they will not and can not do is to strap a rocket to the roof of Metal Gear Solid, take a hard right and drive the car off the road and into the hills and launch it over Mount Everest. They don’t have the will, the auteur ability, or the trust of the fanbase.
Kojima could do that, which is what made the franchise what it is today.
MGS is dead, but Konami owns the pelt. What comes out next is just taxidermy with animatronics.
As far as I’m concerned the series is definitively over. 5 was the final. You don’t really need Kojima for remakes, just a team of good devs who love the series. But I also don’t trust Konami to pull that simple thing off. What is with the really bad “remake” ports from all the game companies in the last few years? Is it that hard to remake a game?
As someone who thinks Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the best Metal Gear since Solid 1*, I really do wish it had become an ensemble world. Platinum doing Raiden/Grey Fox. Imagine IOI making an ACTUAL stealth game set in that world. Hell, I could even see a timeline where Arkane made a game where you play as The Cobras. Instead, we just kept going back to the Snake well and had ever increasing dissonance between cutscene, boss, and normal gameplay characterizations.
As for bad remasters/remakes: A lot of that is that this is The COVID Year in terms of releases. These are most of the games that would have had most of their dev cycle during lockdown and were heavily delayed or had massive scope changes to meet release windows. Sometimes that means we get truly amazing games (BG3) and sometimes that means we have shovelware that just needs to avoid sunken cost fallacies.
And the other aspect is that a LOT of studios, particularly Japanese ones, are in the process of upgrading their tech. I loved Like a Dragon: Ishin (and am so excited for Gaiden next week). But that was a VERY small scope/ambition game (a mostly beat for beat remake of one of the lesser PS2 games) that was pretty openly about exploring Unreal Engine. And there have been a lot of games that are less open about “Hey, we are mostly dicking around to see if this tech works for us”.
*: 3 was awesome but very much “Empire Strikes Back”… in a lot of ways including the conspiratorial “So did the Creator actually write this? Because a lot of signs point to ‘no’”. And 5 was an awesome sandbox with no plot or pacing to speak of
I played the main series and never played the side, PSP games like peace walker, so I was completely lost when playing 5. I was wondering what this setting and people were for a while, until I realized I had to go back and read up on peace walker.
Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.
All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO and PW was a prototype for the format of TPP):
This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her but her true love is, and always will be, Big Boss. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.
Don’t think too hard about why Skullface is basically just Hot Coldman but more of an edgelord.
A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.
I hate it when developers make what they say are side games in a series essential to canon, especially when they don’t tell you they’re doing it or when they go into the side game not planning to make it canon and then decide it’s canon during or after development.
Or I should say, I hate it when developers make the next main series game assuming you’ve played the essential “side” game and leave out or half-ass their catch-up for people who haven’t played it. I call it “Chain of Memories syndrome” after when Kingdom Hearts made Chain of Memories essential to fully understanding KH2.
What they need to do is take whoever the next director of the game is going to be, strap them to a chair Clockwork Orange style and mix the entire Criterion Collection and Evangelion for about a year or two.
Then just for good measure have them write a page of names and slap them anytime a name nears anything of normal.
Then, and only then, should they be allowed to start working.
try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
Based on their last attempt they couldn’t even manage that. Have we already forgotten that as soon as Kojima left the company, Metal Gear Survive came out?
PS, Kojima has a really cool Instagram where he posts his thoughts and stuff he likes, if anyone is a big fan and wants to sub to him. Dude has some radical tastes lol
I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like “that ones got real bad reviews” and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.
“Hey gonks! Remember that game we released and was dirty as hell but you all gave up the eddies because we told you it was preem. We finally have the game we should have released just 3 years later. Go ahead and flatline your 200hr characters and reboot.”
Same. But I have wanted to explore other characters. My current one I made a baseball bat wielding, hard punching, aggressive nomad punk with a heart of gold, with some sniper secondary skills. Basically what I imagined a nomad would be like, with the skills I thought they’d have.
I kind of want to see what it’s like as full stealth or a corpo hacker or a street samurai katana wielder or knife thrower.
If you got 200hours out of release then clear you got your moneys worth out of the game and enjoyed it, promises not kept or not.
Personally the game could’ve been better but I certainly enjoyed the one 120ish hour playthrough I did and had no major issues other than some texture bugs or weird physics, I had a capable PC though not a last gen console trying to play at being modern.
And don't circlejerk over the dead horse that this game is unsalvageable because it had a shitty release. People forgave No Man's Sky, but the internet won't let this one go.
Shitty games with shitty releases go into oblivion, the game is obviously good.
I’m not criticizing the game, I’m criticizing the company and the billionaries that preside it and decided people swallow it all up if they launched a game in the state they did.
I agree but I think it took about this long from Cyberpunk released till there was a better outlook on No Man’s Sky and I bought both at release, I enjoyed both, but I’d say at release Cyberpunk was a better game at launch (I didn’t have any bugs I got lucky). NMS did much more work on content in the following years to where it’s barely the same experience. Has been awhile since I restarted Cyberpunk will do for 2.0 though. Maybe I haven’t caught much newer content and they added it but it seemed updates were tweaks / fixes than content.
if there was a movie that was 200 hours long and you chose to stay for the entire duration and not walk out, then you either enjoyed the movie or you need to learn about the sunk-cost fallacy
I did a heavily modded 90hr playthrough and loved it. Dealt with a ton of crashes though 😅 I’m planning on playing this vanilla finally, or very lightly modded for UI and stuff.
Yea I played vanilla release over 100 hours, then some ui/qol mods. Looking forward to a vanilla 2.0 and dlc run then maybe see what some of these overhaul mods are doing a few months after that once they’ve been patched up
PC launch play was mostly fine. Only Console launch, mostly caused by massive delusion about min. spec.s, was f'd up completely. The PC issues were also the easiest to fix and even when they could fix the Console issues, they had to convince the Console store's Owners that the relaunch wouldn't be a shit show. But then I play on PC and so expect similar to last time, once I buy it after it launches.
I’m actually a fan of the game. I’m excited to play it. I just find it funny they are saying they have made it so much better that they recommend starting over. My point is that they are saying they finally got a lot of things “right” in 2.0 that we were playing an inferior game with quite a few quaility issues. Probably due to deadlines, etc. I’m happy devs continue to improve based on sales and feedback to make it better.
No it’s a good game. I like it even with the qc issues because it’s ambitious. But the devs are basically admitting that they worked on it for 3 years to fullfill the original vision and it’s so much better that it’s worth starting over.
Yeah, I’m not buying that either. I’m on a 2014 i7 and a 3060 playing on ultra. My sole issue was not running on an SSD which I resolved yesterday. That kid is clearly playing on a potato and lying.
They’ve pretty much been standard for gaming and containing the os on PC for 5 if not more. HDDs are still good for storage, but only luddites and people trying to save money in the stupidest way would have their games on them.
Playing on ultra on a 3060 ? So you’re getting 20-30 fps? Because that’s what it gets on mine with a much newer CPU. I had to turn it down to med-high to average 45 fps
Gotta love the Bethesda fanboys upvoting this one cherry picked comment. They’re are like 70 comments in there with all different combos of system specs complaining about performance.
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn't - it's GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
It was straight up broken for many console players.
Some PC players had performance issues.
For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
Linus really doesn’t respond well to criticism. He’s trying to act like a sale and an auction are 2 different things? If some hardware vendor tried to feed him that excuse he’d devote a whole video to it! Hell, if someone had sold one of his screwdriver prototypes he’d probably have thrown a fit and sued (as is his right)!
He’s picking quantity of videos over quality, so stuff like this is only going to accelerate.
Ignoring everything else, because other accusations seem to have more credibility, although a charity auction is certainly a type of sale, sale has completely different connotations than charity auction when devoid of context. It's a fair issue for them to have and raise.
No it’s not. It’s not how the item got out of LTT’s hands that the issue here. It’s that LTT didn’t return a fucking prototype! Sold, lost, melted down, really doesn’t matter. If I’m making products and want to send one to LMG for a review, I’m insisting on him paying a hefty deposit first, because he clearly can’t be trusted.
I see this as a “you’re technically right, there is a legal difference; BUT the issue here is not how it was passed to someone else and not returned to the owners, but that it happened at all” type deal.
The wording doesn’t matter. Call it an auction, sale, donation, grand theft, whatever you want. But that the end of the day, a small company now no longer has access to their expensive prototype. That’s very damaging to them as a business, let alone the damage that LTT caused to Billet’s image by their haphazard review process. Billet has every right to sue for damages over this, and I personally think they should.
They should manage the organization and stay the fuck away from the product.
Only really mature product owners that understand what they are doing and LOVE the product they are making should be allowed near your product… and they will work with devs to make something wonderful.
Satisfactory, Valheim, manor lords, enshrouded… just a few examples of product that is loved. And it shows.
According to Danish law they are risking 6 months of jail time (or 6 years under “particularly aggravating circumstances” but I don’t think that’s relevant), so not just money. The destroyed trophy, even though they weren’t directly aiming for it, a good lawyer might go after them on grounds of vandalism which is up to 1 year and 6 months under normal circumstances (disclaimer: I havent’t seen the video).
So far I don’t think there’s much precedence on it so it is hard to predict the outcome. Usually you wouldn’t get the highest punishment for a first offence, so if it is jail time I’d be surprised if it’s more than a month. But a jail punishment will haunt your criminal record for 5 years while a fine will stay with you for 2 years, which is actually the the worst part if you have anything but a low-level job in Denmark.
For the likely large overlap this audience might have with dnd, it didn’t make 100mil a year so it gets to eat shit. It doesn’t help that the video game license isn’t counted in that total. Other Hasbro brands do make 100mil a year.
I thought magic was one. It is surprising to see layoffs there.
Anyway, of course a corporation does evil shit. The only moral is the line going up.
Yeah, card crack is real. They’ve been whaling and getting kids into gambling since the 90s. Don’t know why lay offs there. Line go up just a little more probably.
It’s not that. It’s that the fewer people they have to pay the more money they get to keep. It’s incredibly short sighted and self destructive. But they don’t care at this point.
They’ve been caring less about artists and the community in recent years.
At cons, they used to pay for artists hotels and give them free booths to set up, now artists get nothing and have to pay something like $750 for a booth.
I think that’s more about WotC giving up on cons and tourneys than giving up on artists. If they’re having events at all, they’re not putting as much money into them as they used to.
You mean using AI to design the card’s mechanics? I’d like to think we are still a ways away from that, specially since they’d have to train their on model that adjusts not only for the text generated but what the actual card would do in a game. they could use it for french vanilla cards I suppose, but it’s not like those take a human that long to make anyway.
I didn’t say they needed to be quality or anything, they just need to appear quality to corporate, as all the corps are starting to cannibalize staff at the idea of using LLMs. Corporate doesn’t play the game and doesn’t care about long term, just the short term gains.
MTG used to have 2 or 3 releases a year. Enough to keep things fresh, but not an instance amount.
When I was working in a Game Store in the Early 2020’s, there as more than one release a week, and a major release about once a month. They set the milking machine to maximum.
For those being happy that valve is in this position, don’t. Any company that gets into a monopoly position, accidentally or not, will turn. Google too had “do no evil” in their manifest, until they didn’t
While I agree, it is important to note that Valve is a private company. When you don’t have to please shareholders and do absolutely everything to increase revenue, there is possibility for a level-headed leader that keeps the company customer friendly.
But if anything changes (greed takes over or leadership changes), it could still turn.
Valve is a private company right now. But Gaben is 61 and it goes without saying that Valve is at the top of every predatory tech capitalist’s wishlist. Can you even imagine what Microsoft or Google or Meta would pay for Valve? Steam is great, but that probably won’t last forever. GOG is waiting in the wings if Steam ever becomes enshittified, but most of your library cannot be transferred over.
Yeah. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Steam, and there’s a lot of high-value stuff. The mod workshop is great. Linux support is top-tier. There’s a lot of good stuff. The only major bad thing from my point of view is lock-in. Having a vast library of games tied to one account isn’t great. And having publishers and mod-makers etc essentially forced to rely on that platform is not good. Steam itself is good - but consolidation of power is generally a bad thing.
For that reason, most of my new games have been coming from GOG over the last couple of years. GOG’s DRM free policy means there’s basically no lock-in effect. That’s a major strength, even if some of their other features aren’t as strong as Steam.
I have mixed feelings on GOG. I want to like them, but the lack of Linux support is a real thorn in my side… Having DRM free stuff is great and I’d love if more games had DRM free versions, but currently steam actually supports me and GOG wants to pretend I don’t exist… And realistically, I’m not totally sold on GOGs promise of always having access to your games… If GOG explodes you’re probably going to lose access to your games too? I mean, of course it’s easier to archive a game for yourself if it doesn’t have DRM, but unless you do that religiously for each game on GOG you won’t be able to acquire them after GOG hypothetically explodes either… Hopefully you get enough warning to archive what you care about, I guess?
I do totally respect that DRM free copies can make a big difference but everybody argues that GOG means you’ll always have access to your games, and I’m not sure it’s substantially different than steam in that respect for “normal” people, you know? If either store kicks the bucket people are going to be out of luck. I kind of just want to throw Steam and GOG in a closest until they make out, though. Would be nice to get the best of both worlds.
Where did this rumor come from? Private companies have shareholders, too, and they have as much say in the profit direction of the company as the shareholders of any public company.
You’re not wrong, but shareholders look at their investment very differently than stockholders. Private shareholders can’t necessarily cash out whenever they want because the sale of private equity is usually tightly controlled by the company. This means they need to be interested in long-term growth and success. While public stockholders can also hold their shares for a long time, there’s much more ability and incentive to buy and sell quickly to make a quick profit.
Anecdotally, I worked for a publicly traded company for 6 years before they got bought and taken private by a private equity group. The way profitability and trends are measured is night and day. As a public company, everything was hyper focused on quarter by quarter results. One underperforming quarter meant a tank in stock prices, hiring freezes, and a general sentiment to the employees of “quit spending money on expenses if you want to have a job next quarter”. Being controlled by private equity, they’re most concerned with year over year growth and the long-term stability of our operations.
Valve has been the market leader for years and still hasn’t let the consumer down. Their business strategy comes down to offering us the best possible service. Meanwhile crappy stores like Epic Games try to lure you in with free games and timed exclusives and I still gave up on their featureless mess of a platform.
I keep finding all these cool games and instantly get deflated when I find out they’re online. I want single player, i really don’t like playing with other people.
I remember being a kid playing Morrowind and really wishing my friends could play with me.
Now I’m an adult and I don’t want to play with the kids. They have way more time to play and take my ass to the cleaners. After the umpteenth time getting tea bagged while some 13 year old goes on about fucking my mother, his voice breaking repeatedly throughout, I swore off multiplayer.
There’s a jump between your first paragraph and the second. In the first one you said you wanted to play with your friends. But in the second you got the worst of Internet boys.
I also wanted to play Morrowind with my friends. We got Elder Scrolls Online but that’s a monkey’s paw wish. I wanted drop in multiplayer and an experience more like left 4 dead. I don’t want randoms. I want my friends. I don’t want a big always online persistent world. I want the single player world, but with my friends.
If I keep going I’m just going to reinvent Baldur’s Gate 3 multiplayer. That’s basically what I wanted back when. Not the MMO shit.
Hell, even the dark souls “summon a friend in” is like 70% of what I wanted.
It reminds me of the absolute insane stuff arcade manufacturers would do to keep control over everything.
Capcom used to sell full blown arcade systems where the game’s ROM was actually volatile - in 2 years, it would vanish. You needed to pay them a monthly fee so that a technician would come up with a special device capable of rewriting the data periodically.
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