There’s many things I can overlook here but the lack of bikes nixed my hype fully. I don’t want to build car hell yet again. I can leave the house if I wanna see that.
I mean… If I want to build a hell, I still want options.
Like, realistic space use for car hell would be interesting but maybe sometimes I wanna build a university on a hill and student housing at the top of a different hill and to get to class you have to bike up a hill both ways.
No bikes??? I hadn’t heard that, one of the most satisfying things about playing C:S1 to me was making great bike routes and useful public transit, without bikes I really don’t feel a drive to play this one now honestly hah. Maybe they are going the Sims route where all the useful basic things they added in the previous edition will be released over time as DLC, ffs.
I don’t think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn’t it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games… It’s so confusing that I think I’m just not going to buy their games anymore.
You’re right. After Dark was one of the first(?) DLCs and I’m not sure if bikes were part of that or the eco-friendly DLC but bikes definitely are not part of the vanilla experience (I have quite a few DLCs that are important to me and no bikes yet)
Yes you are making an unreasonable complaint. You’re complaining that the story doesn’t include one particular niche element of interest to you and comparing it to having shit thrown in your face.
Yes, but I was under the entirely reasonable expectation that I would indeed get my niche thing (that being three or four lines of dialog), given the game’s overall setup, mechanics, advertising and franchise. It wasn’t just not included, it was actively averted as hard as possible.
Would you not be disappointed in the same circumstances?
I exclusively use a VPN with everything and have done so for years. If steam has an issue, they have yet to inform me lol.
On a serious note tho, there is an issue if you use a VPN to access store prices for a country outside your own. Regional pricing means that some people game the system and Valve rightfully cares about that.
You don’t have to, your regional price is linked to your account’s regional setting so that if you move you can legitimately change your region but VPN doesn’t affect it at all.
I was watching The Spiffing Brit’s exploit video of Spore. It definitely made me wish for a modern Spore game. To be clear, the visuals don’t need to be much better just better lighting and it’d look modern enough. If they overhauled the gameplay systems then it could be a 10/10 game.
I think Outer Wilds is the most unique and fantastic way to tell a story I’ve ever experienced. Truly open in a way I’ve not seen before or since.
With the banger of a soundtrack too, I just can’t bring myself to rate other games higher than it; even if I enjoy them more, Outer Wilds is probably the best game I’ve ever played.
Slay the Spire probably makes the list as it’s inspired countless tweaks on its incredibly balanced deck building experience
Unpopular Opinion: The last few hardware generations have had diminishing returns while increasing the cost of being a PC gamer drematically. While the DOOM games are generally well-optimized, I just upgraded my whole ass system after 8 years just two years ago and I’m hitting minimum specs to play the new DOOM game at all. Same with Indiana Jones, same with STALKER 2, same with Alan Wake 2.
Of course, we also went from 8gb of video RAM being more than enough to needing fucking like 16-24gb as a standard somehow.
Seriously, the rig I bought to play fucking Bioshock Infinite kept up for about 8 years. I know I didn’t go all-out in building my machine but I didn’t 10 years ago either when I put my old box together. Honestly current machine feels way more high-end than the one 10 years ago did.
Anyway, kind of feels like a rip-off by the industry to me, and this is the same industry that is pushing for GTA 6 to cost $80-100 because they’re not making enough money somehow.
Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.
In a way, it’s like being back in the NES days all over again. Sometimes the game itself would just push the hardware too much and it would slow down. This shouldn’t be happening at all in this environment, it’s a joke. It goes well beyond just positive reviews for this kind of stuff.
There needs to be better compression for texture and sound files. That’s pretty much the reason for the giant install sizes and RAM requirements. In theory it’s possible, but it hasn’t really changed in decades.
“AAA” companies don’t want to spend q/a time on code. Indie devs don’t seem to have that problem. So there’s a huge gulf between quality.
Personally I think the day one patch excuse for reviewers is bull. Day one patches have been a thing for at least 25 years, everyone should know they don’t fix bad games. If the companies are not being called out for bad practices then they’ll never bother to fix them before going gold.
Additionally, if a day one patch were actually enough to fix these issues, then just delay the game by a day. That way, the launch day gamers won’t suffer through a (sometimes) unplayable experience and possibly leave bad reviews.
The reason the new Doom and Indiana Jones games require a card with ray tracing is a consequence of the consoles all having ray tracing and an increasing number of PC users do too.
So to support a diminishing number of PC players would require the game to be lit twice, one with RT and one with traditional methods. Obviously this costs more in development and testing and studios are increasingly deciding it’s just not worth it.
It’s got to be the biggest dividing line we’ve seen in years. I suspect things will settle down for a while, now.
“With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.”
Any time a critical character dies (usually because you’re on a killing spree) it says that. But it’s also become a meme when someone famous dies in real life.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It happened when important NPCs died, rendering unfinished or future quests associated with that character impossible to complete or start; iirc essential NPCs didn’t have immunity to damage and death in Morrowind like in later Bethesda titles, so these NPCs were protected only by the player reloading their save after getting this message upon the essential NPCs’ death.
Just a habit, on lots of subreddits now, you get AutoMod deleted or banned from their subreddit if you use curse words. This happened to me on PC gaming subreddit. I got hit with a Perma ban there 3 months ago and they wouldn’t tell me why I kept messaging them over and over again, told it was for excessive profanity. Apparently lots of my comments use the f word so that’s not acceptable.
I started to censor myself too on other platforms because sometimes they have warnings like “Are you sure you want to post this?” and I feel like they’re shadowbanning my comment.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re getting put on a list. They probably have it designed that way, people who use offensive language often or certain words, add them to an internal list and restrict their interactions with the rest of the people heavily.
I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.
I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.
Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.
Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games
I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?
To add to your point, Jedi Survivor was a huge improvement over Fallen Survivor. I’m not sure how you could look at that game and say that there hasn’t been any improvement at all.
Honestly I’ve I did jot know how survivor improved upon the first part since the pc version was so overshadowed by it’s technical problems. Tho I’ve heard the patch yesterday improved the performance massively
I did play months after release and I have a pretty beefy PC so it was fine for me. I did only encounter stutters at one specific area halfway through the game but other than that, it was really smooth for me.
Survivor improve Don the first one by expanding on the stances you had in the first game, a much larger world with a larger variety of enemies and tools you can use in combat. There’s a hub area which is kind of cool but I honestly didn’t really get the appeal of that. There’s also quite a bit of cool moments in the story that were really neat but I won’t talk about it because it’s a spoiler. I liked it a lot actually and it’s a shame all of it was overshadowed by the awful performance on launch.
Ubi actually has 2 kinds of open world games… Assassin’s Creed Style and Far Cry Style. I prefer the former, I was disappointed to see the Avatar game was the latter
I just want to say I was really disappointed when Far Cry 3 basically became the template for Far Cry games.
The main thing I hate is the “observe this outpost from a distance then permatag all the enemies so they’re visible through walls, then take them out” mechanic.
It has elements like both, but it doesn’t do exploration towers that unlock areas. It feels more like a third option between the two, which makes most sense because it comes from the devs that did both The Division and Avatar.
I enjoyed Outlaws open world gameplay, even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It was still an enjoyable experience that felt like discovering the worlds on your own, instead of being guided and follow a checklist of stuff to do, despite having a list to get upgrades and do story and missions. It felt a bit more like Rockstar style open-world, where you just go about your business and run into encounters, instead of going from A to B all the time.
I’m right in the middle of this game currently, and I do fully see some of the jank that shows up in this game. And it does have some issues (I couldn’t land my ship on the starting planet until I finished a specific quest, but the game doesn’t tell you this).
However, I’m finding the game pretty fun overall and kinda hope they iterate on this scoundrel idea and make sequel. I’m having fun sneaking in and looting all these places.
I really hope they make a sequel game, or maybe a similar game based on a different character that would allow for a bit of a wider range of gameplay. But I wouldn’t mind if they kept going with Kay, she’s a likeable protagonist to me and I just love Nix.
Have to say I ran into very few bugs and I wrapped up the main story and loads of extras after about 45 hours. Funnily I ran into only one bug after finishing the main story, getting stuck in ingame cutscene-camera that prevented me from doing anything else, including being able to reload the game lol.
There’s definitely been some minor goofy and janky stuff throughout the game, but nothing that ended up gamebreaking. I think the most un-finished part of the game that I wish they’d fixed up before launch is the lipsync issues. It just looks so bad in some scenes and takes away from the otherwise great immersive experience.
Yeah other than this weird thing where the quest made landing the ship weird, I have had anything totally break the game — though it did crash on me once. But the autosave got me maybe ten seconds before that so I loaded right back where I was.
Mostly I’ve just seen little graphical bugs. Like when you fly off world and the “loading clouds” show up. Sometimes there will be a flash of a big, black chunk of the screen that shows up for a split second. Stuff like that.
I wouldn’t mind if Kay got her own little series out this. She’s cool, and Nix is cool. I like them both.
I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don’t trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it’s typically lies or false claims…or they make cinematic trailers which don’t even represent the game at all because… cinematic.
That can even be a guide to many things like tools, if it’s pricy but has good word of mouth and not heavily advertised (sometimes the biggest expense) then it might just be worth the cash
I don’t think this game even lasted long enough for word of mouth to have popularized it. I didn’t hear about it until it was dead. I am wondering how many players Helldivers 2 had at 11 days (not a great example because it was an existing IP with existing fans). Could they have made it if the game had actually been good? I am not sure. Shutting down super fast got them more publicity than anything else they did.
I’m not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that’s a minority of advertising these days
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
Yeah, they definitely didn’t market it very well, at least to the PC crowd. It seems the PlayStation version is doing much better, with advertisements in the PSN store.
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