Don’t know about the best, but I detest games around crafting and I absolutely loved Subnautica. The whole experience become one of my video games.
Found it to be intuitive and streamlined. They tell you everything through the menus, so you don’t need to run to the wiki for recipes (albeit I did use the wiki for coordinates on where to find certain things) and it has a story/events that push you further.
The gatekeeping isn’t just to pad out the game, but it actually makes sense narratively (i.e. you need to go deeper and deeper as the game progresses so you’ll be needing new material occasionally. You can’t just avoid the crafting and complete the story.
You’ll be constantly building a stock of raw materials and transformed ones as you need to improve your things but also produce fuel/energy, build/improve your base and there’s even gardening (the latter is optional).
They also offer multiple modes. I played the one where you don’t need to eat or drink, but otherwise is the same experience. But they also have a survival one where you need to eat and drink and another where if you die, it’s game over. Adicionally there’s also a creative/sandbox mode.
The game literally tells you you can use warm clothing or elixirs to keep warm. There’s even another method they don’t tell you, equipping an elemental weapon can change your temperature. Just have a flame blade on your back and you can survive running around in snow.
Learning where to buy clothes and how to make elixirs is not hard. Just talk to people near where you’re struggling.
Weapon durability is only a problem if you don’t exercise any discretion in which weapon you use for which situation. If you use your best weapon on weak enemies, you won’t have it later when you face stronger ones. So… don’t.
Inverted y for anything first person. I grew up with a joystick for flight sims, and that felt natural to me when I later played FPS games on controller.
Inverted x makes no sense to me (and yes, I read your explanation below), but I can ignore that setting just fine, so every game should have it.
While the moment to moment gameplay feels better (subjective I know) the design choices for the menus and leveling are completely backwards as far as improvements. Ui suffers from modern ui problems of just being poorly designed and having way to many tabs because icons and banners are so big. The xp coming only from challenges discourages team objective play as people are better of chasing challenges to level rather than complete the mission. And lastly, but probably the biggest issue, is always requiring online to play. Having to matchmake to play solo is horrid. Lagging while playing solo is embarrassing. They should take these server issues as a lesson and completely reverse this design choice because its clearly already showed why it wasn’t a good idea to begin with from day 1. Disappointing is an understatement they completely dropped the ball.
GaaS really fucks up basic game design. It’s like they intentionally are aiming to squeeze as much as possible out of a lime when they could just aim for a watermelon.
No idea how much always online server structure costs but it can’t be free. I wonder if the console manufacturers favor this type of game design as it brings them some cash in too.
The Steam reviews really reflect the gap between players and critics. Some of this is because critics need a working relationship between them and studios. No one wants to burn the free review copy bridge.
I’d say the reviewed aren’t too biased, while the gameplay itself is really really fun the score gets some points off due to server issues, the reviewers knows it’s temporary, while the players score are justified for the time being, the reviewers won’t review bomb for a temporary issue
A lot of the reviews on steam were mentioning lack of coherent design. No reason for the game to exist when the previous title does. A lot of people seemed to say this isn’t a server only issue but a gameplay one as well.
There are a million reasons for this kind of thing, cited for years now. These reviewers are exposed to more truly awful games than most of us, they're less likely to latch on to one or two gripes in a score, they're more likely to put the person in charge of the review who's most likely to understand the game's strengths (meaning they put the Dark Souls fan on the Dark Souls review and the Madden fan on the Madden review, for instance), and all sorts of other reasons. Were it me reviewing any game, I'd immediately dock tons of points just for the sheer act of requiring a server connection, because it can only ever make the product worse, but that hasn't stopped people from loving Fortnite, Diablo IV, or any other live service game. It's really just as simple as they came away from the game with a different opinion than you would have or expect. It's not a conspiracy or incentives influencing it; not from real review outlets anyway. Actual review outlets don't sweat it if they get cut off from codes, as it's happened plenty of times, and they review the games anyway.
Depends on the scale of the reviewing site. I was a game reviewer for a few years and am now a game developer for the past 10. Reviewing sites absolutely want to keep those review codes and some sites don’t review games that don’t send them codes. Maybe with big titles they will go buy a copy but there is a race to have a review out by the time the public can purchase the game. It’s not money but time. That’s why review codes are important.
That said it’s also about appeasement of the game studios and the player base. 7 is “still good but could be better”. Many review sites are worried about angering the player base or studio and will be very cautious on giving anything less than a 5. For the longest time giant bomb was hated for giving lower scores as a popular review site. Now they hardly do reviews anymore because it’s not worth it.
That all said a lot of review sites are looking at simple recommendation blurbs instead of putting numbers to it. It avoids the whole issue of angering anyone just because number is too low or too high. Additionally as long as the blurb isn’t just the word “don’t” most published and studios will be content with it.
Being the first one out only matters to a few publications. You're not competing with IGN and Gamespot just by being out first, so it doesn't matter to most of them. Review scores tend to fall a few points after the first day the embargo breaks, because those are all the outlets the publisher bet would review it worse. I play Fantasy Critic, and you can observe this happening with just about every major release. That doesn't mean the ones reviewing it with early review codes are any less honest about it.
Being the first and having a review out in the first day a person can buy it are different. Very little care about first. Lots care about being available for when the players can buy it.
Also embargo only applies to those getting review copies. So clearly those studios value getting the game for free rather than buying the game without embargo. A lot of time goes into a review. It could be a week or 2 of work. So still getting the game early is more valuable.
That said the reviewers without embargo are still the ones not trying to get embargoed. So the early reviewers are more likely to say nicer things.
It's more about the price of all the new games put together, and then the fact that a lot of review copies are sent in advance and for viewership purposes getting a review out quickly is important, but with some bigger studios not sending copies in advance more regularly now maybe we'll see less incentive for reviewers to submit to their will.
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