Edit: Started to read through everyone else’s opinions and it dawns on me that this is just going to be a giant list of things I may have never even heard of that I might want to play, and can’t. You are a sadomasochist. :)
This sums up my opinion of the new Assassins Creed. It’s a beautiful world but half the time I can’t actually see anything because I’m either blinded by sunlight or shaded by darkness.
I haven’t heard of the game but see that it’s going for $27. For me at least, buying a $27 game, I’d expect 10 hours minimum of enjoyable gameplay, which throws the free refund out the window if it would deliver.
It could be possible that they wanted to increase their game length to justify the price and stretched things if the first 80 minutes were tedious and slow. I’m sure there’s some consideration to front load the enjoyment into the first few hours, with or without the refund, but I would assume lesser priced games would focus on that and not one going for this price.
gotta avoid sunk cost, I used to buy 30$ games and say if I got 10 hours its worth it when I didnt enjoy the game and wouldve been better off spending my time (which is always more valuable than the amountt of money lost on a game 20-70$) elsewhere
OMG it’s wild that you would say that because I’m actually reading (listening to really) Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson as I’m making this! If you’ve never read it a pretty big plot point is a Brown Note image that looks like noise but that will scramble people’s brains if they have enough of an affinity for computer languages.
I feel like it was in the first 3rd or so? To me that counts more as setup than anything else. The rest of it has been more of the implications, how it works, and what to do about it, which I would consider more to be spoilers.
Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
We have basicly everything you play games on, so also both of these. But the Steam Deck is absolutely the gigachad, even moreso than my actual gaming pc if you just look at hours used.
If you forced me to get rid of all my devices but one, it’d probably be the Steam Deck that’ll be left. And yes this consideration included my gaming pc and smartphone.
The only regret I have about buying the Steam Deck is being so late to the party. (i got it like 6 months ago)
The brown is bad, but to be fair to the right side, it’s the left one that has bad reflections and is blurry - it was released when bloom effects were new and it used them way too much.
I will check out utube videos on the game before buying, if the game is over a certain price and a complex game. This will spoil some things, but it is usually not too bad.
C&C Generals 2, they got canceled and then made in to a mobile game. I considerd staying 10 hours in line to try it out at gamescom in köln 10-12 years ago, decided to get drunk instead.
Yeah that was a letdown for sure. Still better than releasing it as a mobile game I think.
If you haven’t heard they recently released the source code of C&C generals and zero hour and there’s multiple efforts working on a community patch.
I’ve been watching the competitive scene of zero hour for a few years now. It’s really exciting and now that the source code’s out, sky’s the limit on what we can achieve.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne