Bullshit, Bruce Nesmith. You’re just a dishonest coward trying to absolve yourself of blame.
Edit: the paid horse armor was extremely controversial among gamers at the time, and plenty of people prophetically warned about what the consequences were going to be. Bethesda damn well knew or should have known exactly what Pandora’s box they were opening.
Drag doesn’t like the random out of context quotes that interrupt the article with “spoilers”. Drag is already watching, drag doesn’t need to be convinced with a trailer! It’s as bad as watching Columbo.
That’s not to say they didn’t expect backlash, they fully expected some, they simply didn’t do a field study to see how bad it was going to be. Actually pretty common in the industry. Thow shit against the wall, see how bad the outcome is, discount that against profit. :)
“One of the things about Horse Armour that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions,” Nesmith told us. “Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time. We didn’t know!”
I was working in the industry at the time and people absolutely talked about the implications of microtransactions and how it would result in more expensive games and being nickel and dimed.
Like, I distinctly remember conversations with actual human beings from exactly the horse armor DLC and maybe we didn’t think it was going to result in, say the online shooter battle pass formula exactly, but we without ambiguity understood that meaningful in game items, and things like levels / experience would be monetized.
The biggest shocks to me were how patches would be used to reduce the game testing cycles, enabling companies to print incomplete or broken versions of games, requiring day one patches.
It’s a disgusting practice now, and it was then too.
Its not the graphics that need a rework, its their quest syatem.
The side quests were tied to your overall level, meaning if you were overleveled, you could unlock quests to battles that were only explained way later in the main quest line. Also the Frozen Wilds expansion made more sense if you did them BEFORE the final quarter of the main story line, but the missions themselves were of a higher level than the endgame boss.
Regarding the main quest line, while its quality is noticibly much higher in Zero Dawn than the later game Forbidden West, the way they were structured meant that f you unlocked the extra dialogue (from talking to certain NPCs) out of order, the whole script felt a little jarring.
Tldr: the quest system of Zero Fawn needs a fuckton of polish, not the graphics
Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.
I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.
Also, the one incharge of side quests needs a bloody promotion. The side quests quality in Forbidden West was overall as good as the MAIN quest quality in Zero Dawn.
The quest themselves (minus a few misses), the voice acting and mocap, the POLISH. swoon
I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.
If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.
Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.
The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.
Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”
Hard agree on the weqpon upgrades. Getting the perfect one, upgrading it to the nines and FEEL like it was worth it was one of the fun parts in HZD. Not so much here (Wildmaws shudders)
Regarding Strike, if they had slowed down the pace of the game, like death of the world in a few years instead of months (with hard timeskips you could gree to), and set the Strike tables in out-of-the-way corners you never have to go to without good reason, I MIGHT have felt like playing it. Deff interesting, just not part of the overall tone of the game.
With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.
As a massive fan of Age of Empires since the first one, I still cannot believe they re-released them as “Definitive” editions, and then have proceeded to add new DLC to them.
I love the support and attention they’re getting, and the new content they never had before. But I cannot get over adding paid DLC’s to a DEFINITIVE EDITION OF SOMETHING!!!
Normally I would take this as a joke but they shut off concord after 10 days and that was worth 200mil. I’m surprised they didn’t give it 2 weeks at least.
The first time I heard about concord was when they shut it off. I don’t know how they expect a game to do well when they did absolutely zero advertising.
That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.
Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?
Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel.
To me this feels like perfectly within the scope of what should be the realm of “remaster”, it’s just that history teaches us to expect less.
Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.
The templated auto face animations during dialogue along with the low enthusiasm VO from half of the cast is really the only factor that keeps OG horizon from being perfect.
Why are we getting remasters for games that already look great on PS5? There are plenty of games that could actually use the touch up, and don’t run natively on current-gen at all.
It feels like Sony is sitting on a goddamn gold mine.
I bought the original on Steam sale about a year ago. Played 2-3 hours. Didn’t really feel hooked by the story or the gameplay. Graphics looked great to me on the SteamDeck.
Same. I’ve heard others have the same complaint, but there is a point in the story where it clicks and you’re like “ooookaayyyy, I get it now,” and it makes you want to play more.
It doesn’t really help Aloy and the side characters from still feeling almost entirely wooden though.
Worried your hundreds of millions of dollars of development costs won’t result in a hit? Just keep remaking games that were already successful over and over again.
I’m confused, isn’t this already available on PC and PS5? Why does it need to be remastered? I thought remastering a game meant making it work on a new platform.
A “remaster” is traditionally more focused on a rerelease with improved graphic fidelity - details, resolution, possibly lower-effort improvements to models and geometry, but basically the same game, slightly modernised with better modern compatibility.
A “remake” would be a complete overhaul of the modelling, QoL improvements, or reimagining some systems potentially including game engine. Eg, the FF7 remake.
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Aktywne