Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)
The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:
The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.
And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):
Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.
Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.
Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.
I can’t believe Shadow of the Erdtree got nominated over Helldivers or Space Marine 2. It’s a DLC and it’s not even that good compared to the base game.
I haven’t got around to playing it yet, but what you’ve described sounds a lot like The Witcher 3 for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it enough to finish pretty much everything (except all the Skellige question marks which thoroughly outstayed their welcome), and Hearts of Stone is better than Blood and Wine, but the gameplay was pretty flat throughout, and most of my enjoyment was in the cutscenes and dialogue and following threads to their inevitably grim conclusions. It’s not a game that I would ever replay.
Not because it doesn’t deserve to win at least one, it definitely does, but because the people who count for 90% of the vote were literally writing misinformation riddled hit pieces and for some reason think that Chinese gamers are only 3/5ths of a gamer or something (to discredit the large player count).
I wonder how the story would change with big daddies in wheelchairs. Would they have a different job? Is that guy retired? Maybe Sinclair would develop crazy prosthetics…
I don’t know all the BioShock lore, but maybe that concept art was meant for a hypothetical version where they use disabled people as bid daddy’s. (I don’t remember where they canonically come from.)
From what I remember, Big Daddies are the repairman of Rapture. They go around fixing any leaks in the pipes and doing general maintenance and repairs. When the Little Sisters emerge, Big Daddies are repurposed to protect them. (IMO this is not a suitable job for a disabled person lol) I think they might have done some psycho drug thing to them in order to establish the relationship with the Little Sister but I don’t remember.
I definitely remember they had drugs to make them affectionate of and protectors of the Little Sisters. With things like concept art it’s hard to know how early in the process it was. Big Daddy’s could’ve been nothing more than “boss type enemy with old timey diving suit.” They could’ve been concepting their origins and purpose as well. The “guns” the middle and left are holding could also look like a tool. It could be something that serves as both. The mech suit from Aliens comes to mind, which was essentially the equivalent of fighting a bear with a forklift lol. Or maybe something like the rail spike gun from Fallout is a better comparison.
It could also be that they planned on each Big Daddy being a little different, or at least more different types than there were. I just double checked the wiki and there were two in the first game: the Bouncer (the iconic one from the cover) and Rosie. Also, it’s saying the original candidates for the Big Daddy program were criminals and dissidents. The idea that in the right wing dystopia of Rapture they’d force invalids into the Big Daddy program to make them “useful” isn’t terribly far fetched.
Maybe it was scrapped because there weren’t many spaces where wheelchair bound enemies made sense.
I actually felt it was one of the best games I’ve played in the last 10 years. I really enjoyed the story. The game is beautiful. I love the amount of immersion that is possible, especially with mods. I’ve played through it twice.
I really, really wish we could inspect weapons. One mod gets close, but it isn’t the same as a Rockstar-style weapons inspection. We don’t even get to zoom in on the models in inventory. A damned travesty because the weapons are gorgeous.
But overall, I find it hard to fault, especially given its state at launch.
Stellaris. I’m almost at 1400 hours in the game and while I now play it a lot less often than in the first 1000 hours, I still get the itch to play it again a few times a year.
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