The Outer Worlds was so bad I had to put the controller down and abandon it. A fan made song got the feeling of “dystopian capitalism in space” better than the actual game did.
And an older one that’ll get me burned at the stake: Fallout New Vegas is the worst of the first person fallout games.
With 2 out I thought I’d give the original one more chance. I wish I hadn’t. The story is just as bad as I remember, and the gameplay is somehow worse.
I mean the only way to talk about the story is that you’re better off just running through without thinking about it, because at every level it just fails at its messaging. It simply is what it is. What compounds that suck is that the game isn’t even that well designed of a shooter, or implemented well. The controls are gummy, your character feels weightless, and as someone almost 7 feet tall IRL I still feel like the POV is a foot too high. Guns feel boring, the skill system is unimpactful, dialog is stilted, characters are flat as cardboard, and overall the entire game just feels like you’re meant to squint at it until you forget what you’re doing and just reminisce about playing fallout. All I feel when I play is a distinct fear that I will see the seeds of Outer Worlds in games I loved as a kid before I knew to look for such flaws.
I don’t know if the story is bad, I just don’t care about any of it. Parvati’s story was cute and I liked helping her but I couldn’t tell you anyone else’s name and I was playing it yesterday.
The loot system just feels like it doesn’t matter. Maybe I screwed myself over by doing an INT based build cause my science hammer just demolishes everything.
I wish I could say you did; almost any build works at almost any difficulty. Int is famous for being the most broken stat, though. All you need to beat the entire game is to start with very high int and dex, then grab a hunting rifle.
You’re right BTW, the loot system doesn’t matter at all. Consumables only matter at supernova difficulty, and even then just because you have to manage hunger and thirst. The drug boosts are nice enough in theory but are completely unnecessary for any strategy. Damage types are pretty unnecessary, and beyond Spacers Choice weapons don’t really upgrade enough to be worth switching. Armor is unnecessary on normal, and is essentially wet paper on anything harder. All said, stims are the only thing that matter unless you’re on supernova; if you are, get ready to fill out your inventory with bread and water.
Well just fyi. The end missions are currently, still today, broke. So only one ending available that is regardless of whatever choices you made.
I loved the first one. I like this one but they made some bad changes.
But mostly they need to fix the mission bugs.
First one you could change the armor and weapons on the companions.
Also I really liked the vicar and Parvati. Vicar was like a snarky gay guy and I loved it. I will admit the other 3 were blah. But the new companions on OW2 are kinda bland.
I don’t really like any of them. Niles and inza had potential but wasn’t developed.
And I straight up dislike Tristan’s personality. He’s just awful.
Aza can be entertaining. If they made her more impulsive I think that could have been fun.
For instance if you take too long in negotiations and shes present. She just starts attacking people after some time limit.
Or randomly attacks strangers she doesn’t like the look of.
They could have done something interesting with her.
But mostly they need to fix the damn quest bugs so I can finish the game.
Also there was a quest in ow1 where some sketchy dude asks you to do some sketchy thing. And you realize this during the quest. You can go back to him and get the reward. Or sucker punch him.
I didn’t think it was so bad I had to stop playing, but I did stop playing one night once it got late and just never started it again, nor had the desire.
It seemed fine enough, but it just didn’t click with me I guess.
Oh really? I did have fun with the Outer Worlds. Nothing too amazing, but it was fun enough to keep me invested. Parvati was also a large reason for that, I loved her character.
I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
I get that people like the story and feel like they have an influence on it, but for me it felt railroaded even from the start. “Oh yeah it’s open world but if you go anywhere other than the path we laid out for you you’ll die by deathclaws” is what it’s known for.
My biggest gripe is that when I play fallout I want post apocalyptic retro futurism. 50s vision of the future gone wrong. I feel like I don’t get that with NV and that’s the whole theme of the franchise. It’s the pizza at the Chinese buffet, like, I’m not here for that, why are you here? This is just Nevada but slightly shittier.
I mean… sure, I guess it bears mentioning my first playthrough I did brave the deathclaws and survived by being sneaky and took a wildly different path than most people at the time.
The idea isn’t that there’s an easier path of least resistance you can take, but that it actually let’s you go off the rails if you give it effort or come up with some logical ideas.
In modern gaming, solving problems with logic is almost dead, and NV had a lot of that.
Ok, but compare that to breath of the wild. The game really is an open world. And you can go right up to the boss and kill him with a stick of you know what you’re doing. You, as a player, decide to go get stronger first. You don’t have characters specifically telling you to avoid an area, and a quest line that specifically takes you down a specific path that gives you a specific narrative.
Plus it’s got all sorts of logic puzzles like, all over the place.
Hell in fo3 you don’t get railroaded until the final mission, first time I played it I didn’t even go to megaton until way later. Fonv starts you off with it. For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to? C’mon.
For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to?
It’s an odd point to get hung up on, I can certainly describe a lot of areas the game is lacking by today’s standards and some other open-world type games, but this wasn’t one of them for me. Some people are going to feel challenged by being told “don’t go there” and some people will feel offended and some people won’t think much of it I guess.
Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk… but they did so many things that are just… mean. They disrespect the player constantly… tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed ‘flower’ quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being “just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version.” So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.
I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.
I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.
However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit
Sorry late reply… yeah i realized a lot of my frustration was trying to play spoiler free… but this game seems to beg for guides/walkthroughs, and i agree w you i really dont like games that feel super dependent on constantly checking a guide not to mention just breaking your immersion n taking you out of the gameplay… but some of the stuff is like “no way im just figuring that out!” Like egregious level of “hidden area behind a hidden area to fight a hidden boss that unlocks a hidden upgrade” level shit. Its one more in a long list of really bummer decisions from this team.
I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.
Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.
I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.
You’re playing a middle aged detective (though he looks older, or at least more worn down) who just woke up from an alcoholic coma after taking all the drugs, unable to remember anything about himself or the world he lives in, except for the fact that there might have been a woman, which was somehow both the best and the worst, and possibly some trivia about disco.
I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to remember or understand everything the game throws at you, at least on a first playthrough. That’s what Kim is for.
Just go with the flow, and remember that in this game failure often leads to more enjoyable outcomes than success.
But he’s a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I’m a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.
He was a professional detective. You know, before he erased his brain with massive quantities of alcohol and drugs.
It’s up to you to decide who he is now.
Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, reincarnation of Kras Mazov and art cop, is one of the many possibilities where gathering and putting information together would be… secondary, to say the least.
Just put your points in Drama or Inland Empire, and dull concepts like “reality” will be quite irrelevant for our good detective (much to Kim’s stoic chagrin). 🤷♂️
Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.
Steam has notes built in
This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn’t pay to the company after what they did to the developers.
You can add any game to Steam and play it through it. Just add the exe as a non steam game.
You must have a better memory than me
I wouldn’t be so sure lol… The game has some built in “mission” stuff, and I’m sure I probably accidentally went to the same place a couple of times when trying to figure out how to progress, but never felt the need to write anything down. I found that the dialogue itself was usually good enough to remind me of anything important I might need to know for the current conversation
It’s just that I made a resolve recently-ish that I need to properly get into stories in games. Unlike back in the day, when I played through ‘Half-Life’ 1 and 2 and gathered pretty much nothing about the plot. ‘Disco Elysium’ seems to be the type of a game where a lot of the story is in the details dropped by the characters, reading materials, etc.
I’ve been recently replaying the original ‘Deus Ex’, and had Denton crawl around every level for hours, reading each newspaper and poster he comes across. The papers do in fact frame the main story, clarifying the relations between factions and such.
An extreme case of this is apparently the ‘Elder Scrolls’ universe, with which the community gathered sizeable lore and history that goes several layers deep. I’ve never played the games (perhaps for the best), and only happened upon a tangential discussion about this, but the impression was that they’re deciphering it like ‘Ulysses’.
I kept dying. And I couldn’t figure out how anyone dies in a narrative game. I couldn’t really figure out how to play the game and gave up after dying 2x in the same conversation.
I’m still so confused how one dies from conversation.
Instead I watched a video about the game.
I play a lot of games but nothing like this one. I wanted to like it but I’m too dumb to figure out the mechanics. And I even tried watching videos and found them convoluted and confusing.
Huh opposite for me. I have played Slay the Spire for like 2000 hours. I have beaten it through ascension 20 on all 4 characters like 20ish times at this point. I still pick it up and play it when I’m bored and it still is fun somehow.
I could not get into Balatro like that. I think I have roughly 50 hours in it and like 3/4 of the way through it with all the decks and challenges and simply cannot bring myself to complete it. The last 10 or so hours just felt like a slog. Still a good game but the sheen wore off for me well before I could 100% it much less start replaying.
To each their own I guess! Funny how similar the games are and how there’s just some people that love one but can’t get into the other.
That’s funny, I love Slay the Spire, but I have mixed feeling about Balatro.
Balatro is addicting in that once I start playing I don’t want to stop, and yet after playing for a few hours I couldn’t say for sure I had fun at any point the whole time.
Playing Balatro feels like exploring the backrooms to me - just infinite bland nothingness.
I played Demons Souls and it was awesome, but Dark Souls is so confuse, I couldn’t understand shit about the story, and it’s not that hard, harder than Demons Souls but no that hard.
You want someone to test your games for ways to break it? I know just the guy!
“Hey there, it’s Josh. Today we’re checking out The Milgram Experiment. Thank you devs for the complimentary game code. This is a horror/moral choice simulator. And we all know how trustworthy MY morals and choices are! But enough about that, it’s time for NEW GAME!!!”
20 minutes later
“Well, everything’s on fire. Everyone’s dead. And the frame rate is a staggering 3 frames per year! So that seems like a great place to call it a day. I hope you had fun, I know I did, and I’d like to thank the devs for this copy of their broken game. I’ll see ya next time!”
I do admire his line of reasoning. Just every time. Like I used to do silly things in the sims and theme park, but his natural curiosity is next level. HOLD PLEASE.
I think that all comes down to how the travel, visual appeal, and POIs are handled. As well as a personal interest in the gameplay loop. The following are my general opinions on a few games for why I think they do or do not work.
Daggerfall would be way too big, because the POIs are few and far between and there is no visual interest between, but it worked because it had fast travel.
Each of the successive TES games had more visual interest to them and wel spaced POIs and I spent a lot of time walking on first playthroughs without fast traveling anywhere.
Similarly No Man’s Sky could seem too big at first blush, but if you like the gameplay loop it’s infinitely fascinating. For anyone wanting to move further in it’s also helpful that there are gates to help make large jumps, without them being a requirement to enjoy things.
Cyberpunk 2077 was very visually interesting and had a ton of POIs and was fun to traverse on foot and in a vehicle. I thought the size was fantastic on my first two playthroughs. The third time the badlands areas got a little frustrating though.
Stalker and Stalker 2, are very fun to traverse by foot for me despite being very large. They are visually very interesting, especially 2. There are plenty of things you can stumble on and explore. In fact on my first playthrough of Stalker 2, I didn’t even realize it had a fast travel option for over 60 hours because I didn’t feel the need to look for one to use. Loved the huge size of those.
WoW was horribly oversized, as are many MMOs. WoW was(and imo still is despite many upgrades since I played, just not a fan of toony looking games) completely uninteresting visually, had no “on the way” POIs and had no motivation to look around. Long travel was a chore on top of a burdensome gameplay loop. I hated WoWs size. It felt big just because it would take people longer to play. I can’t express how fucking boring it was to me. And exploring had zero reward. I remember wandering into the water and swimming for like 30 minites to get behind some massive tree or something (all I remember was it was a brown gradient that’s how dull the visuals were) and I get behind it and there was fuckall. That was the last time I played I think. More brown gradient and uninteresting light blue water gradient stretched off into a foggy white gradient. Fucking hated WoW but especially its size. MMOs like that are the equivalent of having a rail shooter that’s more train ride simulator than shooter. It works for other people, I just couldn’t stand it.
Outward is a fantastic game but it’s world feels a little too big sometimes. I don’t really enjoy wandering it that much even though I enjoyed the game on the whole. Just felt I got to the point of sprinting from one objective to the next because I was tired of traversing the map.
So it’s really game dependant imo. If they nail some key aspects, size doesn’t seem to matter.
Nah, Fromsoft has great vibes. But the worldbuilding and story is all deliberately obscured because of Miyazaki’s love of sci-fi he couldn’t properly read. That makes it a trove for obsessives but it can’t really be called good.
It’s definitely good and it is done in a way that can only be done in video games. Too many video games depend on passive exposition instead of finding actual lore in the world.
Do you consider it being “spoonfed” to you when you read a book and the plot and everything is just written down?
Do you consider it positive that you have to “work for it” if every fifth word is written in Chinese and you have to translate them?
Making it hard to understand does not make it good. Making it easy does not make it bad. Is there an aspect of it you like that isn’t just that it’s hard to understand? Because that’s all you mentioned.
Right, so if making the plot and lore obvious in a book is fine, it’s also fine in a game. Using pejoratives like “spoonfeeding” criticises this without giving any reason.
From games are particularly bad because most of the lore is on item descriptions that are often themselves locked behind random drops and easily missed questlines. This is not good world building, this is purposefully obscure world building. People mistake “hard to put together” for quality, but it’s the opposite - making this stuff harder to get makes it worse, because players are less likely to get it! If you feel too communicate the lore to most players, that’s not good!
I hope you don’t mean Baldur‘s Gate when you say Larian and BioWare. edit: downvotes seem to forget that the Forgotten Realms worldbuilding wasn’t done by the licensed games.
Of course she won; she had a literal second set of hands to help her. It’s the same reason that Goro is the best character in MK. I obviously never win when I play as Goro, but that’s because everyone else is cheaters.
/s
I wish Steam would put the 3rd-party requirements nice and obvious above the buy button. Along with "uses AI content", "in-app purchases" and "always online requirement" banners too. And more too, every game should be shamed before users get to the buy button.
Best advice would be to forget it exists. There are actually thousands of other games out there that are almost exactly like Battlefield, I doubt the Next New Thing™ will be worth giving up a little bit of sanity over.
That’s fair. Battlefield is the most basic of all three. COD being even more basic with the elimination small maps. They all have a class system, military assets, and the same basic concept of teams. The difference is in the realism/depth of how far you want to go. Now, what OP is asking for is not practical from a business standpoint. You need deviation to separate your product. So there is going to be that deviation to the point of it being worthwhile to compete with the battlefield. But never to be what OP is asking for. It isn’t smart business.
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