From the 360 Era — Too Human
The control scheme is bizarre at first (right stick is melee) but it works once you’re used to it. It’s Sci-Fi Norse mythology, I recall it having a pretty solid art style. I picked it up used from either Blockbuster or EB because I wanted to see just how bad it was, ended up enjoying it far more than I expected, I’ll give it a “Yeah, it’s ok”, disc images are readily available if you want to emulate it, can find a physical copy cheap online too if that’s your thing.
Starfield. It’s the definition of a “mixed” rating on Steam. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either. You play it for an hour and your reward is that an hour has passed.
After running through the main story once, I modded it to where you cannot buy any natural resources - they must be harvested in person and/or setup a base and and ship all natural resources to a central storage planet. This essentially turned it into a spreadsheet-logistics game which gave me a a second, much more enjoyable playthrough. But I agree - absolutely medium-tier game.
A best of is something I’ve thought about for one year. Either that or I’d show off some of the rejects bin of screenshots (I always end up taking a lot of photos most of which don’t make it). Both would take a lot of time though so I’m still debating. I should probably decide soon though because I’m reaching a month and don’t want to run out of time
I’m playing Xenoblade Chronicles. I started it years ago and dropped because I was disappointed by the writing. Now I’ve been playing the other games in the series and gave it another shot. I am enjoying it now - the combat is more interesting than the one in 2 or X and the world is fun to explore. I do still find the characters a bit shallow tho and the story fails to create mysteries, as it spoils them immediately in an attempt to do foreshadowing.
The incredible adventures of Van Helsing. Decent rpg with loot but was fairly imbalanced among character classes. The real winner was the mini tower defense games in it and the spinoff tower defense game, imo.
The gaming magazines were fun and all, but your posts take me days to get through because you really sell me on wanting to deep dive into everything, and you even provide links to exacerbate the situation!
Very nice work. These posts are genuinely my favorite thing I look forward to on Lemmy.
I finally started death stranding! I got goosebumps the first time I was out on a mission and the camera backed away letting you just experience the scenery and music. And then so scary when, you know, it’s scary. Great at setting the mood. It’s beautiful
Keep in mind it can be a marathon - it can be a gigantic long game if you fill the gaps, doing the ‘side delivery missions’ etc. Just…take your time, enjoy the scenery! The second area is amazing. I hope you keep enjoying it!!!
(and thank you so much, comments like yours are - can’t pretend otherwise - a big part of why I keep these coming!)
I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.
Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.
To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.
And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.
The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.
Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.
Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.
Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.
I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.
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