Even if the sickness issue is solved at some point I just don’t ever see VR become a dominant way to game. There are just too many downsides.
Story-focussed games can not direct you where to look. You are completely cut off from the world so you can’t e.g. watch a child or elderly relative while you use it or chat with friends while you work using it. Environments need a lot more work for a smaller market share if you can look at them from any angle. Hardware is much more expensive (and always will be) compared to a system that just needs to render a screenful of content at the same quality level. Your UI options are more limited if you want to keep things immersive.
Exactly, and that’s why we don’t have one. Maybe I’ll get one when my kids are a little older, but for now, it’s a lot more fun to experience things together than to have someone completely closed off in a VR world.
Even if I didn’t have kids, I still probably wouldn’t want it because I’d like to spend that time with my spouse, and looking at an avatar just isn’t the same.
I think the entire line of thinking that you need a first person perspective to be immersed in a game or virtual world is also flawed. As someone who has been on Second Life for more than 16 years now which uses neither VR equipment nor a first person camera 90% of the time I can certainly “feel like I am there” despite all of those factors and in the presence of many other factors that do not exist in RL like teleporting and camming through walls just fine.
Is that ever claimed anywhere? AFAIK, VR has just been marketed as a new way to experience a virtual world, not as the only way to be immersed in a virtual world.
I think VR would be really cool, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with my lifestyle at this point. And I’m not sure if I would be able to handle it since I and my spouse get motion sick quite easily.
Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that's not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn't be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur's Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It's straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it's less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don't think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
Tbh I'm still not sure what the point of it is. In gtav you get into trouble with police if you rob shops, steal cars or drive over pedestrians, among other things like scripted missions. In saints row it's about gang warfare and them being a nuisance during your city demolition. In mafia you have to obey road laws, hide weapons from plain sight and they are generally a bigger threat.
You can't rob stuff or do heists in 2077, you can summon your own car for free at any point so no need to steal them and since you can fast travel you don't drive as much anyway. The missions that do have car chases are heavily scripted and on the rails.
Is this something just for people who want to go out of their way to fight endless waves of cops and thats it or am I missing something that makes it such a hype worthy feature?
It was a huge immersion breaker for anyone not going stealth/low profile (as the author admits he does). In fact, it was the reason I haven’t played until now. I guess I’m a patient gamer and it irked me what was missing from launch. I’d built my 2070 machine for this game years ago and now I’m stoked to have a 3080 to break it in with.
Seems more immersion breaking to me that you can fight maxtac and get away with it in the first place, or that they all still just forget about you if you hide for a minute or two out of sight, but we'll see. Maybe I'm just missing something and will appreciate it ingame more.
I mean what features are removed exactly? They have all the components needed to install windows/mac/linux and hook up a mouse and keyboard. I really don’t see any distinction besides they come with gamepads and a gaming oriented OS instead of keyboards and a more general OS.
Also I saw that cutscenes once before making it as far as you describe, I don’t even remember how, pretty sure it was midway through act 2. But it’s definitely a semi generic cutscene for when you lose in a particular type of way.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m absolutely happy that this game is doing well, that people love it, that it isn’t exploitative, etc. those are all great things.
But do we need a daily article essentially restating the same thing?
$70 million on gpu cluster + $21 million yearly on employee AI tools and training. They could fund 21 $1 million indie games per year with zero expectations, but no push the money to the slop and get nothing in return. Fuck them.
The fact that he knows that people won’t believe him is hilarious. It means he’s fully aware that he has a problem and has never taken any steps to fix it.
He wants to rejuvenate his reputation but the time to do that was about 25-30 years ago. If you make one game and you’ve over promised on it, the very next game has to be your redemption, or you go CDPR route and you fix it, you can’t do it decades later.
A redemption arc this late would’ve had to have been quietly making a great game, no big announcements in advance until it was done or nearly so and playable, and then letting it speak for itself.
I watched a video of some of the “gameplay” of that, and… Wow. It is the most by the numbers mundane idle game I’ve ever seen. Inspired, how uninspired it is.
I played Legacy for an hour purely out of curiosity. It was absolute shit. Boring, uninspired, “worst of mobile” gameplay, generic visuals, multiplayer tacked on in a way that doesn’t enhance the gameplay. I will speculate they simply repurposed the Legacy engine for Masters of Albion.
It’s almost certainly going to be terrible.
If you want a business sim, you would be far better of looking at the Capitalism series, Industry Giant 2 (it holds up pretty even after 20+ years) or perhaps Big Ambitions.
BioWare needs to do what the Castlevania creator did. Konami wouldn’t give up the rights to Castlevania (or sell it — the Netflix deal was lucrative, after all) and just make their own studio “with blackjack and hookers.” Sure, the studio behind Bloodstained was problematic when it came to delivering on certain promises to Kickstarter backers, and sure, the mobile ports were abandoned and the Switch port was (apparently) never fixed… but on PC and Xbox at least, the game was fine. The best of Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow, it’s the best Castlevania game not called Castlevania, and it’s among the best Castlevania games, too. I’m not sure there is even one that is actually better at everything. They really took all the good parts of Castlevania and, instead of a gimmick like an inverted anti-castle or entering paintings, they just made the castle stupidly huge, almost unreasonably so. The architecture doesn’t make sense, but it never did.
It happened with the developers behind Fallout as well. They became Obsidian, and I think InXile got some of those developers. Obsidian went on to make Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds. InXile made a bunch of RPGs too, but I can’t name any without looking them up.
I see this on the internet a lot. People posit things like “wouldn’t it be awesome if these fired devs got together” or “Why don’t they make good stuff anymore? Wouldn’t it be great if somone made a thing like this old beloved thing…”
…Except it’s already happening. Or happened.
And there’s just so much noise on the internet, it’s largely unknown to the folks who’d be interested.
To be clear, I’m not blaming OP, and I’ve done the exact same thing myself. But I still find it kind of… sad.
Anyway, thanks, I am bookmarking Exodus and Archetype Entertainment now.
I checked out Exodus. The lore behind the game looks fascinating however my concern is how the devs are going to handle time dilation and your choices.
If my character takes off for a decade, I expect some sort of noticeable change. Buildings a little grimier or nice and clean. Creating new models and maps to reflect the time dilation and the choices you make is going to add a lot of extra dev time.
InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.
Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.
In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.
Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.
It happened with the developers behind Fallout as well. They became Obsidian
Ok, well, let’s not forget that the only reason Fallout achieved mainstream popularity is because Bethesda took it and applied their Elder Scrolls formula.
The Outer Worlds
Which although being more polished than Fallout, was nowhere near as good. They also had some bad writers with an agenda that made sure players couldn’t have relationships.
InXile was most famously the Wasteland series, the spiritual successors to the original fallout designs (1 and 2). But they also did Tides of Numeria and Bards Tale (I think, but don’t quote me)
BioWare has lost alot of it’s talent in the last several years. There’s almost no one left that played any hand in the Success of Dragonage or Mass Effect 1-3
Not gonna lie, I was pretty stoked for Battlefield 6. Haven’t played one since 3 and all my friends were gonna get it. Guess I’ll just go fuck myself and keeping playing Overwatch or something.
I played the beta weekends. I can assure you anything fun will be nerfed, because all the fun stuff was what the sweaty basement boys were complaining about the most. You’re not going to miss out on much of the final product.
I played it too and I 100% agree. However, I feel like it’s always a good thing to keep in mind that the best time to play an online shooter is when it first comes out. That way you get to at least have fun before all the casual people move on to other games and the sweaty people are the only ones left. My friends convinced me to try Fortnite just a couple years ago and all that happened was I got stomped every match and was like “this is fun for you guys?” I’ve been playing Overwatch since release and it’s basically impossible to get a match I’d consider “fun,” so to speak. I just wanted to get in on the fun for Battlefield before it turned into all sweats. Now I’d prefer to just avoid it all together.
I’ve been hooked on The Finals for my destruction shooter fix, since the development team (Embark Studios) is mostly composed of ex-DICE employees. Their upcoming game Arc Raiders also looks pretty good.
I was stoked for BF6 until it wanted me to enable Secure Boot and install rootkit anti-cheat. Now with the Saudis and Jared Kushner in charge installing a rootkit to play a game is an even worse idea. Maybe if I only used the computer for gaming.
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