They went downhill since Morrowind… it was their last game that managed to capture players on its own merits, with zero mods.
People forget that Bethesda used to be a sports and arcade game developer back in the day and that Elder Scrolls was very much uncharacteristic for them. They tried and made some interesting things for a while but once they hit mainstream they never went back to the interesting stuff. It also means I don’t think we’ll see an ES6 game worth talking about.
I actually started with Skyrim:SE, had a super silent heavy armor mage and loved it, then I made something and destroyed my save file;
[overexaggeration ahead]: A week later I was riding on a unicorn as Waluigi through a HelloKitty cave, throwing spells of NSWF towards everything. Fun times.
Morrowind was excellent, but I don’t think knocking oblivion out is totally fair. Especially when you add the expansions sans horse armor dlc. Martin Septum frowns upon you.
It’s a stupid take and the reasoning is equally stupid. Luke doesn’t really get involved in the Jedi stuff until Episode V which means he implies A New Hope is not worth watching. Except Episode V doesn’t really make sense without Episode IV now does it?
As for CP77 I think Act 1 100% should’ve been expanded because what is V-s motivation? To get to the top. We never get to experience the climb to the top. We just get the heist and then we get the downfall of trying to fly too close to the sun and into the storyline of what we’ll do with our remaining time? There’s no real buildup for the ending of act 1 because V-s desire to get to the top is never really explored. We have no established motivation to succeed with the heist and as such also no real stakes when it goes sideways.
Now imagine if the story was restructured into 5 acts:
Introduction to night city - more or less the walled off section that we currently get in Act 1.
Rise to the top - the city opens up, you get to do the side quests, hustles, etc etc and you get some additional “main missions” that defines your rise to the top and your relationship to Jackie. The rescue mission (which is the first mission in the game) would be the final mission of act 2 as that solidifies your reputation for bigger jobs.
The heist - more or less what the main missions of current Act 1 are.
Terminal illness - Act 2 but with the feeling of actual urgency as you’ve tied up whatever loose ends you had in act 2. The only exception to the urgency would be dogtown as this is the point you access Phantom Liberty because the main story of the DLC ties back into the main story of the base game. All the Johnny and Samurai missions would also be in this act because this act is about Johnny.
The finale - The current act 3.
In that sense act 2 would be the biggest act, act 4 would be a bit smaller act and the rest more or less stays the same. This fixes the ludonarrative dissonance of having limited time due to the sickness but also infinite time to do all the shit you want. It gives space to introduce and flesh out characters instead of bombarding you with new characters as you’re going to a personal tragedy. It also gives a more rising tension to the story because you’ve actually established V-s motivations and all the setbacks bounce against the established motivation (who you lose along the way, will you even make it, if you do at what cost etc). The story would instantly be far better paced with actual stakes in play.
I actually think that was their original idea but they wanted more Keanu Reeves in the game so they reworked the story to have more reasons for him to be there. The only way to do that was to cut almost everything before the heist and move it to after the heist.
Yeah. The game is what it is, I don’t have any expectations of them reworking CP77 story. But the way the creative director responded comes across like he didn’t really understand what they did wrong with CP77.
I’ve played elite dangerous for 4k hours. Done everything there is to do in that game. Had a great time. Glad I chose that game instead of the SC scam.
at least from the perspective of general PC users.
This is a bit of a side tangent not strictly related to this article - The overwhelming vast majority of computer users are not gamers. Most people do not play videogames on a PC and whether or not a few games run or not on Linux is irrelevant to them.
What is relevant to them is productivity software, employment requirements, ease of use, and stability. And, on those particular fronts, Windows still has a noticeable advantage despite being a dumpster fire that costs money.
I acknowledge the many achievements that have been made in the world of Linux development lately and I’m so stoked to see it enter the mainstream more and more, but grow very tired of all the articles, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc saying that Linux is “ready” because it can play games - as if that is the only thing that matters.
Kind of similar story of ancient gaming tragedy, I was a young lad going for 100% in FFVII, and after spending however many hours getting everything ready, I saved right by Emerald Weapon, deciding to tackle him right after school the next day. Aaaaand then I came back to everything on the memory card being gone due to some dumb glitch. Still never beat Emerald Weapon.
I loved Secret of Mana and on several playthroughs, the hardest boss, for me, has always been that damn tiger in the witch’s castle. When it zig-zagged like a spike ball, the chances of getting wiped were huge. One hit = unconscious.
Before the Internet got social media, we had the GameFAQs voting thing; you’d get head to head popularity contests of coolest characters. Cloud always won, but it was nice to check daily to see who was most popular.
I still use GameFAQs, though. Even after the buyout, the guides are important to those of us RetroAchevement-ing through some older titles.
If you take a look at all the loot box mechanics out there honestly theirs is the least bad. STILL BAD and shouldn’t be a thing, but they’re way less in-your-face and also you can sell the boxes that you get for free just by playing and use that to buy games.
I’m not defending lootboxes but I will defend history. They weren’t the first one. The physical implementation of the same concept has been around for decades (gatchapon in the east, baseball cards in the west), the first digital implementation was in Maplestory about half a decade before Valve and the first implementation in a western game was in FIFA (whichever it was that contained the ultimate team) about a year before Valve made their implementation.
There’s plenty of blame to throw at Valve, but some of the lootbox blame, namely the one you’ve brought up, should be thrown at EA because EA was first in the western market and the industry would’ve gone down the lootbox route even if Valve hadn’t done anything.
In Western regions (North America and Europe) around 2009, the video game industry saw the success of Zynga and other large publishers of social-network games that offered the games for free on sites like Facebook but included microtransactions to accelerate one's progress in the game, providing that publishers could depend on revenue from post-sale transactions rather than initial sale.[23] One of the first games to introduce loot box-like mechanics was FIFA 09, made by Electronic Arts (EA), in March 2009 which allowed players to create a team of association football players from in-game card packs they opened using in-game currency earned through regular playing of the game or via microtransactions.[26] Another early game with loot box mechanics was Team Fortress 2 in September 2010, when Valve added the ability to earn random "crates" to be opened with purchased keys.[13] Valve's Robin Walker stated that the intent was to create "network effects" that would draw more players to the game, so that there would be more players to obtain revenue from the keys to unlock crates.[23] Valve later transitioned to a free-to-play model, reporting an increase in player count of over 12 times after the transition,[25] and hired Yanis Varoufakis to research virtual economies.[27] Over the next few years many MMOs and multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) also transitioned to a free-to-play business model to help grow out their player base, many adding loot-box monetisation in the process,[25][28] with the first two being both Star Trek Online[29] and The Lord of the Rings Online[citation needed] in December 2011.
The upshot is that since nobody knows whether they own it or not there is nobody bothering to actively enforce copyright, so you can just download the games for free if you want on NOLFrevival.
Both NOLF 1&2 and Contract JACK are available on the website above, patched and fixed to work on modern machines.
YMMV but when I tried NOLF 1 for the first time earlier this year I sadly found the gameplay so poorly aged I wasn’t having enough fun to make myself finish it - despite the setting, theme and writing being quite fun.
I might give it another shot at some point though, it was a critic’s darling back in the day and I’d like to be able to say I have played it.
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