I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.
It was the same for HL2 though. I played it like 10 years after it was released, didn’t make the game worse. With VR the first experience will probably be even better in the future.
How greedy of the man, to checks notes admit to not wanting to make a cash grab and instead leaving the series unfinished because they didn’t think they could do it justice.
Leaving it to rot for 15 years was far more unjust than a slightly less “revolutionary” game. And the concepts they show in the new doc are cool as hell! I would have loved to shoot at blobmonster! They just decided singleplayer FPS games weren’t as profitable, and that’s fine, I guess. They’re a company, they want to make money. But pretending they were somehow doing us a favor by leaving the cliffhanger for so long is utter nonsense. Especially since they wound up simply retconning it so the whole wait was pointless anyway!
Edit: y’all they literally said in the doc that if they’d kept working on it for 1-2 more years they would have been able to complete it, but they were more interested in multiplayer games and went to go work on that. But if you really want to drink the self-aggrandizing bs that Newell spouts, go right ahead
It sure sounded like you were. It’s because you said cash grab. That’s a negative attribute. You basically said it’s garbage but made him a lot of money. Along the lines of like the last 4 terminator movies.
Well, I use Steam a ton and have a Steam Deck. But, Steam dev effort to income ratio is probably ridiculously skewed. The company pretty much prints money. In that way, Steam is a cash grab.
I do question if Steam hadn’t been such a success if Valve might have released HL3 by now.
It has Google vibes to it. Google makes so much money in ad revenue that a lot of their other products just get cancelled.
I do like Valve overall though and am a fan. I’m a fan that wants to know the ending of HL3.
cash grab
noun
plural cash grabs
: the greedy pursuit of an opportunity for making money especially when done without regard for ethics, concerns, or consequences
Is assassin’s creed any good? Once a game becomes a franchise with a bajillion releases I just tune it out. Feel the same way about marvel movies. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re bad, but I’m more annoyed that they’re trying to shove it down my throat, so I tune out.
There’s two or three good ones in the series. Thankfully the rest aren’t as bad as Far Cry which is just about the shittiest franchise I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
Obviously subjective, but I was a very big fan of the series for the first several entries, kinda began losing interest around Unity (although in hindsight, Unity is probably one of the best ones in a few ways, but at release it was a very buggy mess).
I am not personally a fan of the way they have ignored the modern day story line after around 3, as I am one of the few on the planet that actually found that part of the narrative compelling and the part I was really playing for.
I don’t like they gameplay changes since Origins, and it has increasingly become more of an action game over time and less of a dope assassin game.
Unity is flawed, but somewhat of an underrated gem. It’s such a shame that it released in the state it did and got the reception it did because that’s pretty much what caused Ubisoft to pivot into the style of the Origins and onwards style games.
Imagine what could have been if they built on what they had in Unity? The free run up/down system had so much potential and - while janky - the Unity parkour can produce some of the most pleasing, slick and stylish sequences. Just look at the stuff people are pulling off!
Also, revolutionary Paris is the best realised city they’ve ever made for an Assassin’s Creed game.
The downfall began when Ubisoft abruptly wrote Lucy out of the story after Kristen Bell asked for more money. Then they killed off the literal main character one game later, and nowadays you’d be excused for forgetting Desmond ever even existed given how little the modern day matters to the plot.
I’ve played pretty much all but the most recent. They have their ups and downs. The first was almost like a proof of concept. Kinda boring, but the story sets up the sequels. There was a good overall story arc in the Desmond/Ezio trilogy (Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations) that hasn’t been duplicated since.
AC3 was a bit of a breath of fresh air, being part of the American revolution, but it wasn’t for everyone. The story was being deviated from earlier games too much. AC4 is, for me, still the best single-player pirate game out there. It continues with Rogue. Both of those games I highly enjoyed.
Unity (Paris during French Revolution) and Syndicate (Victorian London) both have fantastic maps and character design, but gameplay and story just wasn’t as interesting to me. The series was feeling stale.
To Ubisoft’s credit, they knew that too and entirely revamped the gameplay and menu system starting with Origins (Ancient Egypt), then Odyssey (Ancient Greece), and Valhalla (Vikings during 9th Century). Valhalla was really fun. I love how they change certain villages up throughout the year… adding festivals/challenges depending on when you play. The maps were just getting too huge and overwhelming at this point.
I play the games now mainly for exploration. Gameplay and story are secondary as they aren’t as interesting anymore. They really put a lot of detail into their surroundings and do their research on history, whether real or fantastical. It’s escapism to another land in another time.
Ubisoft is not Rockstar. The story is no longer the reason to play these games. They are forgettable. The Desmond/Ezio storyline of the earlier games are no more. However, we don’t have to wait several years to play a sequel.
Valhalla was the only one that I paid full price for since it was 2020 and we were still basically trapped in our homes, but definitely got my money’s worth. They seemed to take more time making Mirage so I’ll check that out eventually. They are remastering some of their old games so I’d play those over the dated originals.
The Far Cry series has a similar feeling for me, but with a first person perspective. New lands to explore, new stories and characters, but some are better than others.
Calling Warcraft Rumble an RTS is like putting a hamburger patty on a plate and calling it a steak. You’re technically correct, but you’ve also completely missed the point in what people want.
One of those games I intended to check out for a couple hours, but have spent way longer than I’m willing to admit chilling and chatting while in between things.
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