Developers are demonstrably not getting more efficient with their content. More content means more assets, and that’s why development timelines have only gotten longer over the years.
I do, and I miss it. I’m far more likely to feel these days like they made too much game to its own detriment than to make it a length that felt better for the game’s pacing. Baldur’s Gate 3 was phenomenal from start to finish, but games frequently come in at a third of its length and feel like they were longer than they should have been. Lots of games transitioned to open world that used to be linear, and the open world is little more than a menu that makes it take longer to select your mission, because you have to travel there. They create checklists of busy work to keep you playing worse content between the moments that you actually want to do, like the side missions that litter modern Assassin’s Creed games with progression gates. I didn’t know how good we had it when we got FPS campaigns between 8 and 12 hours in the years following Half-Life 1, because they’ve been so rare since Titanfall 2 came out 8 years ago. Games being longer now is not solving a problem that I had, and I’d argue it’s often creating problems.
Maybe you prefer your games longer, and good on you if you do, but it’s most definitely not due to developers getting more efficient with their content. For one reason or another, because you’re demanding it as the customer or because modern asset pipelines make it make the most fiscal sense, they’re just spending more time making the content.
You can still get short games, you just won’t find them from AAA developers anymore because publishers want big games with bigger profits. Titanfall 2 was a great campaign even if short, but Halo 5 was the last short game we had and people threw a shit storm (rightly, it wasn’t near the quality of TF2 and had other issues).
If you want short games, the indie space has you covered. Always small games out there releasing.
And game devs have certainly not become inefficient, it’s just the standards of quality are higher. People still want more complex, better looking games. And I don’t mean just graphics; unique art styles are all the rage. Games like Balatro and Cruelty Squad prove graphics aren’t everything as long as you keep a cohesive style and have good gameplay to back it up.
Personally though I avoid small games. I’ve had my fill of them growing up, I’d rather play big games with open worlds and all that jazz. I want to be invested in these worlds not play and forget.
I agree that AAA developers are the ones typically not making short games, and I agree that I am well-covered by indies. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. FPS games are about the only genre I feel like I used to be well-served in that indies haven’t quite picked up yet, so I can’t really just “go elsewhere” these days to scratch that itch (but games like Mouse: P.I. for Hire may be the start). But I was really just arguing against the efficiency part. I don’t think they’ve become less efficient at making content, but they’ve seemingly stayed exactly as efficient and just spent much longer doing it. I don’t find that a big open world makes a game any more memorable, especially when it exhibits the negative trends of filler and bloat I mentioned already.
I knew it was a jrpg from the beginning, but the way the stories unfolded and piled up had me confused. There was a new question every chapter and it just bwcqme bigge and bigger. Awesome game
The kinds of people that claim “wokism” in games tend to also not actually play the games they’re bitching about, so they don’t actually know what to expect.
Awhile ago my partner and I discovered there’s a combined work “Woke Advisory List” of videogames compiled by these backwards grognards. It roughly places games into categories of “Do not play, tis too woke” and “mild Trigger warning - has woke elements”
There is no small matter of quality of game that seems to influence which category the game is put in. Generally blah games with like a non sexy female protagonist and a single gay person randomly existing as a character you optionally meet might classify as “Holy shit! Too woke too WOKE!”… But then LIFE IS STRANGE is only categorized with the mildest of warnings of “some gay themes”… Like bro… “some” ?
It is equal parts hilarious and disheartening to go through and look at all the shit they decry as woke collated in one place and to recognize what counts as “exceptions” because they cannot bring themselves to cast games they love onto the burn pile.
It’s not just that they don’t want to put games they love into the pile. Their whole idiology is based on woke games failing. If a game is successful and “woke” then their idiology must be wrong. They will never admit to this being the case, so instead the game must not be that “woke” after all.
My thought was that Geralt and Ciri’s stories were over or decided, and I’m disappointed they didn’t find a way to do a Witcher story either in the future or past that enabled you to pick your own gender, appearance, Witcher school, or whatever else, maybe with creative use of the trial of the grasses or something.
I’ll happily play as Ciri to revisit the universe and maybe some familiar characters, but I just wish they’d done something newer or more original.
Beyond bored of both sides hijacking games for their identity me so specia outlooks. Get a personally FFS. Oh no she’s a bit hench for a woman. She’s been training and killing monsters most her life. On no people mad because woman in game. literally wgaf Geralt was awesome but the arc has ended for now nice and naturally.
If you read the books you’d be pretty excited about Ciri being the protagonist as in the books she just goes off into the sunset whereas now we get to see her return pick up the mantle and possibly get some new settings in France and England.
In general English usage I think you may be right.
In the world of “The Witcher” (which is translated from Polish) there are both male and female mages with inborn abilities. Sometimes they are called sorcerers and sorceresses, sometimes they are called mages, sometimes they are called something related to their specialisation of magic, and sometimes wise women who do magic but didn’t go to the academy are called witches.
Witchers, however, are not mages. They are made from ordinary humans and are gene manipulated and highly trained to be monster hunters. They have some witcher powers that are related to runes, and they make potions that have side effects only they can survive thanks to their manipulated bodies. Witchers at birth do not have special potential. Though a lot of little witcher trainees die, so you could argue they are artificially selected in that way.
Ciri is kind of neither of those, but she has special abilities related to space and time manipulation. In the new trailer it seems she drinks a witcher potion, but from what we know she never underwent the manipulation that witchers did.
Could be that she used her space time powers to find a more stable version. Or who knows all the crossovers could be canon and she grabbed some bullshit from monster hunter or some shit.
She might have done the trials with another school. In the trailer, she is wearing a feline witcher medallion, not a wolf one. I don’t think the lore ever mentions the School of the Cat having their mutagens destroyed.
Im not really into the lore, more of a Warhammer fantasy guy I was just making a guess based off of the sheer number of crossovers. Seriously that shit is absurd, its like a reverse Scooby-Doo.
I’m not too far into the lore either, but the Witcher audiobooks jsut happened to be up next in my listening queue, so I guess I’ll find out about all that pretty soon.
The Wolf school had it’s mutagens destroyed, yes. But in the trailer, it appears Ciri is wearing a feline medallion, implying that she is somehow affiliated with the School of the Cat now.
IIRC, the original polish “witcher” was made by taking word for “witch” and changing the grammatical gender to be masculine. Evidently this was not an existing word meaning “male witch”, and so was better translated as “witcher” (ie a made up word clearly derived from “witch”) instead of “witch” or “wizard”.
I haven’t seen a single complaint about Ciri being the protagonist of the next witcher game andI believe it’s because she isn’t a “let’s put a woman here for the quotas” type of character.
Is it here, or on the internet as a whole? I have already seen a TON of vitriol in the trailer’s comments on YouTube. They’re loudly skreeeing woke, and DEI, and even the less insane ones are “so disappointed in CDPR.”
EDIT - I spoke too soon, they’re even here in this very post.
Currently I split my time a bit on reddit and Lemmy, but at this point I don’t even bother with their gaming communities. Lemmy is miles better in that regard imo as far as discussions go.
Really? Can you share them? I saw the post on lemmy complaining about wanting male/female options, but there’s also this article with gems such as below.
actually pretty good analogy. like, whole generations of fucked up men come from the idea that if you just give up on the bad ones they disappear and nothing will come of it
That doesn’t really work though… You could say the same thing about any demographic, and it would be correctly called out as racist/sexist/homophobic/etc
It Takes Two. I thought the game would be over about four times, but then it kept adding even more mechanics and got HARD. I thought it would be super casual, did not expect that much length and depth to it (ignoring the cheesy story 😅)
Beyond The Edge of Owlsgarde. No spoilers, but despite playing it for plenty of hours (don’t have an exact count), I felt it was short. Pretty cool enough of a modern point and click adventure game, though.
(Lore nerd rant ahead, tl;dr: Ciri being the protag is 100% fine and I expected it but her being a full witcher is weird)
There’s exactly one somewhat valid complaint to be had here, and it’s that Ciri in the books explicitly didn’t go through the Trial of the Grasses (aka one of the main mutation processes that makes you a witcher or, as it often happens, just straight up kills you), so idk how they’ll justify her being able to use witcher potions and stuff now. And (also in the books) she has lost her access to magic at one point, so using witcher signs is strange too.
I can see her wanting to take the plunge and go through with the trials, but I’m also certain that Geralt wouldn’t want that for her bc of how much it fucks you up + most of the secrets of the trials have been lost.
I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and wait and see what explanation they come up with for her being a full witcher, but it better be good.
So, from lore perspective, I have no objections to her being the protag but I don’t love her being a full witcher. I liked what they did with her gameplay sections in W3, I hoped they’d have just expanded on that gameplay idea more.
She’s wearing a feline medallion in the trailer, so it stands to reason she’s affiliated with the School of the Cat now. She probably went through their trials. And apparently CDPR has stated she is indeed a full witcher now.
I agree it seems a little shoe-horned to make her a classical witcher. I hope it’s not just to give her the title, because she could easily be the protagonist, and/or have the job of being a witcher without the trial of the grasses. She was given the training and education of a witcher, and has magical powers of her own already. Receiving the trials would be a huge deal, narratively, to the characters, and to world building. I could easily see this being a fumbled corporate attempt at placating fans that wanted to see geralt, without any regard for the characters or world building. (Similar to “Rey Skywalker” having absolutely no business being a Skywalker). But that’s all speculation. If it’s treated as a major plot point, and not done just for the hell of it, it could still be good.
Yeah, exactly! I’m not married to the lore to the degree that I won’t give the devs a chance to explain how this came to be, but I’m worried it’s going to just be a cheap “well we needed to keep the signs and the potions as mechanics but Geralt is retired, fuck it, let’s say they found instructions on how to safely make more witchers in Vesemir’s cupboard somewhere.”
Yeah I’m not sure what her becoming a witcher adds to her story. She already has a lot going for her. Now if she became a badass witch like Granny weatherwax that’s the left turn I want to see.
Ciri used headology: The bandit lies down questioning how exactly disappointed his mother will be in him when ciri gets back from the coven.
No no you see it is because I have dedicated the last 20 years of my life to Witcher lore and have memorized not only every line but every plot in the series and books, and you see, Ciri is supposed to be much [choice: less/more] powerful than this trailer makes her appear! I’m boycotting this game and recommend everyone else does too! I’m tired of them shitting on lore with woke propaganda!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne