You can’t even play without spending hours scrolling Reddit and Twitter to figure out WTF is even going on. Eventually I was spending more time reading about the game than playing it and that’s when I quit. Since then Reddit and Twitter have become an absolute dumpster fire so I was even more glad I quit when I did.
You may be interested in Aska. It asks the question “what if valheim was also a colony sim?”. It’s a bit less chill then Stardew/Portia, but it is a classless, moneyless community building game.
I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.
Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.
Little Nightmares 1 & 2 get my vote. Also, Alan Wake 2 is a lot of fun and not exactly a horror game since it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it has a fantastic spooky vibe.
Horror comedies are definitely a thing, but tbh I’d still consider Alan Wake 2 an outright horror even with the lighter stuff! Very spooky elements, with great writing and story crafting. Bonus points if you play Remedy’s other games for the Easter eggs
A new shooter that Sony launched a couple weeks ago and have subsequently cancelled and is offering refunds. So basically an astronomical waste of money.
Sony released a more realistic looking big budget Overwatch clone. It was fine, but nobody cared, because nobody wants a $40 live service Overwatch clone where all the characters have similar silhouettes. They spent 8 years making an okay game for nobody. If they’d done something different with the same basic characters and gunplay it could have maybe been good. They didn’t though, so estimates suggested they sold about 25,000 copies worldwide before pulling it from their store and refunding everyone.
Ontop of all of that, it was also just clearly a corporate cash grab where the people who made it either didn’t feel strongly about it or they didn’t get to put their soul into it as much as they wanted.
It’s not just bland, it’s a cold and calculating kind of bland. Like being served nutrient paste, but it’s not even flavourless instead they added artificial banana flavour so now it’s both depressing and makes you feel sick.
I’d say the bigger problem is just that the Bethesda RPG model is completely outdated. It feels like something you’d play a decade ago, but what used to be it’s contemporaries have absolutely eclipsed it by this point. If I wanted to play just a fun easy fantasy romp, I’d go for Dragon’s Dogma 2. If I wanted an actual RPG with bones that could offer me a challenge, I’d play Elden Ring. If I’m just looking for a well-written story, I’d go play something by CD Project Red.
Bethesda’s games aren’t well written, aren’t that interesting to play, and basically cannot offer any real challenge. The only real saving grace for Skyrim has been the modding community, which has been able to continually breathe life into what would otherwise be very tired game design.
adjustable tension springs and locking mechanism for varied stick cap types (Xbox Elite series 2 does most of this but uses magnetic caps which would interfere with the TMR sticks so ball bearing connections or other option would be preferable)
Adaptive haptic triggers (PS5) which can be toggled to hair trigger mode via switches (Xbox Elite series 2)
multi-touchpad on face (PS5)
analog face buttons (DualShock 2 controller had this but only a few games utilized this… the best example was the PS2 era Metal Gear Solid games)
customizable “per-button” color assignment / micro OLED or e-ink screens so button graphics can be swapped (PBTails new controller does the per button RGB color assignment)
USB-C / 4 wired connectivity + charging
baseplate contact-charging (PS5 controller has these so you can set them on charging docks)
hot swappable battery pack + AA battery holder pack or ability to not have a battery on at all when connected via USB-C (Xbox 360 controller had this)
swappable non-magnetic Zinc-alloy faceplates (PBTails new controller has these)
removable back triggers with dedicated button assignments (like the Steam Deck’s L4/5 and R4/5 buttons; not just cloned face buttons like Sony and XBox do)
integrated microphone with hardware toggle (PS5)
proper “separate keys” d-pad… not the mushy type
touch-sensitive surfaces for every button and stick (Meta / Oculus Quest controllers do this)
per-finger-joint touch sensitive grips for each finger segment (Valve’s VR controllers did this)
the ability to separate the halves of the controller so that each hand could hold one half independently and have them track similar to most standard VR controllers (think combining the switch controllers and Quest controllers)
NFC communication (Amiibo-stuff for example)
If any single controller did even half of this, they’d easily be the GOAT.
Your character doesn’t speak per say, so you usually are limited to gestures for interacting with other players.
The stone refers to a series of items thatve been around since dark souls 1 where you drop a magic stone and a voice comes out saying the line. In dark souls 1 and some others it was a rock you dropped and it broke open making sound, so the “stone” term stuck.
In elden ring it’s called a “prattling pate: ‘voice line here’”. Your character blows into it like a flute kinda and the line is spoken.
Basically the guy showed up, said “damn ur fashion is on point” then left :)
In the game, there are stones that you can find, and when you use them, they say something. There’s no voice chat in the games, so these can be used to communicate
Aside from Microsoft selling it as one, there’s a reason the 360’s contoller design is basically the de facto basis for most PC controllers. It’s the most comfortable one I’ve used for 3D games by far. Everything you need is easy to access. Nintendo lifted essentially the same design for their Wii U and Switch Pro controllers.
The d-pad on the 360 controller was garbage. It was the only thing holding it back.
I think they’ve found a great place with the One/Series controllers.
I also really appreciate that with the jump to the Series X/S they didn’t change controllers. They had one that worked that people liked, so they kept it. And it works via Xbox’s proprietary wireless protocol, USB, or Bluetooth, so it works on pretty much anything but a Playstation or Nintendo.
I couldn’t care less about the D-pad. All that matters is how it feels in my hand and access to the primary controls like joysticks, triggers, and face buttons.
where does AAA even come from. Is it like michelin stars and the american automobile association started it. If not why don't I hear about the AA or just A or B or C or D games. They should do like the recording industry and have categories based on amount sold and I would limit sales for full retail price. Once they set the price as what they think of it then they only get credit for those who pay full freight. Just to limit deeply discounting to pump the numbers and maybe to encourage a reasonable starting price.
My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.
It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.
It comes from the publishers in the 90s. They needed an easy way to tell stores/distributors how popular they thought each of their games would be, to help them decide how many of a certain title the distributor should order. The games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”. That then lead to more and more games being marked as AAA due to budgets getting increased, and the whole system became a bit redundant.
he games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”.
Is there any evidence of this being the case? Personally, I don’t remember anything other than “AAA” back in the day, with other variations coming about much later as budgets grew and people wanted more specific delineations.
It’s pretty hard to make levels of difficulty that actually change things enough outside of either giving the enemies more damage and HP or simply adding more enemies, or in scored games having higher score thresholds for higher ranks (these can be anything from an actual score to the speed you finished and everything in between that’s basically just a number that you can compare to another number).
It certainly can be done, though. I can’t help but think about the bots in counter-strike. They range from braindead drooling moving targets to Terminator machines that can 1 tap you with a pistol from across the map. They actually have a difficulty scale that’s more than simply being tougher to kill and hurting you more. It affects how they move around, the speed they begin shooting, their accuracy, etc. I don’t know why these kind of bots do not extend to pretty much any game with enemies. Just give them 3 sets of behavior that makes them easier or harder to deal with.
It depends on the genre of course because of the mechanics in play. Sure, FPS with bots are hard but a lot of genres are as challenging because the mechanics usually surround mostly running and gunning with bots (if you’re playing with bots). Making the ‘AI better’ is going to be extremely difficult, especially when balancing resources out for your minimum requirements.
But for say an 3D action game, enemy ambushes, tougher environmental challenges, harder puzzles, more platforming, increase gear rarity for ‘normal’ gear and stuff can add a real challenge. Bullet sponges seems like the path of least resistance to development time. Especially if the 3D action game is single player.
Counter-strike specifically is a tough one because what other mechanics can be involved in it? In the original CS:S there were actual environmental concerns like you could shoot off boards on the rope bridge denying that path. When it released, the rope bridge was static and was always there. I’d imagine this was due to resources on the physics vs. 31 other players having to have a reasonable sync with the server and their updates.
Battlefield has done this over the years but instead of making it really dynamic it has been fairly static, even if it changes the map, it always does it the same way. Blow up a building in BF:BC2? The walls will always fall the same way and the destruction will always be the same, so it’s like a state on or off update for that location for everyone. BF3 which was newer seemed to have even fewer instances where this could happen as just an example but they also doubled the player count. There have been other games that have done more dynamic updates but every engine, fidelity, language, updates/ticks expectations are all different.
Not every genre or game has to be focused on just your targets. The more mechanics that are offered or can be offered are going to be different but certainly, it seems like many games still do not take advantage of that even though they could.
Goldeneye and its spiritual sequel Perfect Dark (my favorite game of all time) do this varying AI skill thing along with the mission objectives expanding across difficulties. An argument can be made against it because someone playing on “easy” doesn’t really experience the whole game but it’s also cool to replay levels on a higher difficulty where the map is larger or you’re interacting with more things or you’re starting in a different location.
I remember the Command and Conquer games, namely Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wraith. You could set the bot behavior and difficulty. Also, when the difficulty was set to brutal, the bot would have all the limits removed and would start the game with double the money the player had. Even tho this is a rts game, I think it’s a good example of how to make bots if devs are given the time and there is an effort for something more.
It’s really hard to beat a branded Xbox controller, these days. I was extremely skeptical for a long time, then I gave one a shot, and there’s no going back.
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