What’s up with everyone calling it ugly? It’s a shit car, but I think it looks cool. Something that has no place in reality, but fitting in a video game.
The cybertruck has enough issues that I wouldn’t want one, but yeah I would like a car looking like that, if it was actually a good car not made by Tesla.
Bummer. Game Informer was the leading game magazine when Game Pro and Nintendo Power were around, though? I think not. Game Informer was third fiddle at best.
2006 is a bit late in the game. Game magazines as a relevant medium peaked in the 90s. By 2006 you have a pretty robust internet, what’s the point? Yeah, sure, if you stick them in every single B&N they’ll sell, but Game Pro and Nintendo Power were institutions in the 90s. If you wanted to know about games, that was the way.
Fair point! Looks like Nintendo Power had well over a million throughout the 90s and Game Pro sat around half a million. GI didn’t start until 1991 so it would’ve been significantly lower, but it started getting pushed harder by 2000.
We’ve probably done more research in this thread than the person writing the article lol
Honestly I mostly just know because I have a big stack of old Game Pros and Nintendo Powers from the 90s and I only ever remember seeing Game Informer in Barnes and Noble once those became a thing.
Same here, back in the 90’s had multiple year’s worth of Nintendo Power magazines & later on Game Pro as well. I do remember seeing Game Informer around & sometimes bought those issues but never really got into them. I can’t even think of any friends that had Game Informer magazines back in those days.
TBH I’m kind of surprised at those numbers /u/GammaGames@beehaw.org posted, maybe Game Informer was a bigger thing outside of the northeast U.S. where I was.
It was mostly distributed by FuncoLand, and only really started to pick up when they included it in their Fan Club subscription. B&N bought them in 2000 and pushed it hard while expanding stores, eventually they got big enough that they could get exclusive reveals.
So it’s a case of pretty much always being bundled in with another service!
big same. i don’t even know if i’d be here commenting on gaming forums if i hadn’t had Game Informer back in the day. Introduced me to the whole “scene” around gaming!
Great article. That’s exactly how I feel playing games like that too. They’re so well done, and the world’s are so great. They just forget the game part of the game.
This is what mods are meant for… to bring a beautiful setting and game engine to its limits beyond what story and gameplay could be crammed in at release.
In my friend group one is really into both ME and AC, he really didn’t like Andromeda but he did like Odyssey.
The other felt that Andromeda was okay/mid but that Odyssey was also a lot of fun.
I never got into ME and the last AC game I played was Black Flag, and that may have legitimately been after Odyssey was long released. So while I can’t speak on these games, from what I gather online and from my friends is that Andromeda was kind of a buggy mediocre game that didn’t do as good of a job for the ME universe as it could have, whereas Odyssey was a bit of a deviation, which the people who don’t like it tend to criticize and everybody else seems to enjoy the game for what it is, if not maybe a little Ubisoft standard fetch quest grindy.
In the case of Odyssey, I think it’s a good potential that is limited by the restraints of Ubisoft, in the same way that has just happened to Star Wars Outlaws. Because for all of the obvious faults we can give Ubisoft, I think it’s fair to give merit to the developers and designers who, for example, completely recreated France for AC: Unity. For all the faults that game had at launch, apparently they did eventually clean it up and my friend really enjoys it.
It sounds like Outlaws has a great world but just didn’t get the polish, like Ubisoft tends to do.
Also some unrelated design choices, I’ve seen in gameplay videos like the repetitive mini-games (which can be turned off - but why design something that players turn off because it gets tedious and annoying?) and the AI during non-stealth combat encounters being completely inept, firing in the complete wrong direction. The little things become cumulative and can easily turn a perfectly fine game into a mish-mash of features that we’re put together with any cohesion. The last thing that I remember in terms of criticisms are that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of impact on the system for reputation. Someone who hates you after an interaction can be completely on your side just by doing a few side missions for that character. Not sure if this continues on into the late game, but if it does it seems to be another instance of just not quite fleshed out design.
The minigame looks fun, but not 4 doors and 3 item crates in a row fun. The reputation system is typically a really engaging and fun thing, but forcing yourself under constraints by choosing to not do missions with someone isn’t as engaging as being put into a situation where you choose one merchant over another, and then that merchant is just done with you forever and may even send goons after you. From what it sounds like, in present state if an event like that happens, just do some odd jobs for the guy and it’s all forgotten?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the game - I tend to like games and movies that people are criticizing, since at least lately most of the criticisms have been… severely biased… but sometimes there’s also truly legitimately terrible stuff, like Rebel Moon. There’s always a line of subjectivity of course, there are people out there who enjoyed it, but the other people see the nearly 21 minutes of the movie, legitimately nearly 30% of it, being in slowmo and say, “Hey, that’s pretty awful, why would you do that?” on top of having another mish-mash of ideas that are presented and subsequently dropped to never be heard from again. I don’t think Outlaws is comparable to Rebel Moon, I have a feeling it’s probably better than its reception but still worse than it should be.
WRT the hacking minigame(s), it’s much faster than e.g. Fallout 3/4 hacking and lockpicking. The rotating locks are a rhythm game that take 10-20 seconds. The sudoku-esque “slicing”/ hacking one takes about 30 seconds. Compared to Fallout 4 where you can be mousing through every line of characters to find the bracket pairs that remove a dud choice when you’re hacking, it honestly slows me down less. I haven’t had AI go wonky in combat.
I haven’t seen the reputations bounce around. I got the Pykes angry at me right at the start, and I haven’t managed to claw my way back yet. I haven’t been trying hard, to be fair, but if side missions are there that can easily recover you from negative faction standing, the game definitely isn’t putting it in front of me.
I’m always skeptical of edited videos that show bugs because controversy drives views, so there’s an incentive to find problems.
IMO it’s not amazing and it’s not bad. You need to enjoy stealth to enjoy Outlaws, because you need to use stealth 90% of the time to avoid getting overwhelmed. The worldspace is amazing, just like AssOdyssey. I love Star Wars as a universe, but not the movies themselves, and Outlaws doesn’t focus on Jedis or rehash the same old characters. And this game really feels like Star Wars.
If you’re not either really into Star Wars or really into stealth, I’d recommend waiting until it’s discounted, but mostly just because the Gold Edition price is insane ($110).
It’s actually pretty crazy just how hard that game flopped. I would have always thought that a company like Sony could’ve just brute-forced such a big project to achieve some success (or at least break even), but 25,000 units sold is almost unheard of for a game as expensive as Concord.
What mystifies me is usually when they do this sort of thing they throw it on Plus and get a mountain of players. Fall guys, and Destruction All Stars spring to mind as examples. I guess the effect isn’t so strong with the new tiered system, but it may have saved them some face.
When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.
A lot of games media has talked on it (to varying degrees). But Concord basically had a bad beta/demo and launched at a time when EVERYONE wanted live games to fail (see: Stop Killing Games Initiative). AND it managed to piss off the gamergaters in the process.
We’ve seen this to a lesser degree in the past with… basically every Battlefield since the WW1 one? Bad demo/beta (mostly because people still haven’t learned to not play Conquest and to instead play Rush) coupled with the CoD/BF fanboy war results in outlets and Gamers actively wanting the game to fail and shitting on it every chance they get. It is just that EA understand that BF is the kind of game that still sells enough to justify keeping Dice around.
battlefields a bit different. battlefield basically nowadays is that the game always launch in a terrible state, and fixes itself a year down the line. battlefield players will play the game regardless and maintains ~6000 user playerbase active
I mean… where do you think the “this has a terrible launch” comes from?
If Influencers like a game, everyone looks past the massive performance and stability issues. If influencers don’t like a game, a single crash is enough to mark it as trash that should be ignored until a couple patches… which is a death sentence for a multiplayer game that requires a critical mass of players to be worth buying.
I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.
I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.
Its pretty tough when they release a game that took so long to develop, that was meant for an era of gaming when live service games were hot. Now that a lot of live service games are flopping due to over-saturation, I think even Sony saw it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to push the game further without either reworking it into something else, or just cutting their losses.
It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.
I don’t know how they expected to succeed without any marketing. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of this game, even on my PS5 (where they usually advertise the absolute hell out of a 1st party title like this), until the day it released.
Or how their game being just another hero shooter/moba crossover in a sea of such games would differentiate itself enough to warrant also costing $40 instead of being like its competition which is FREE.
I legit learned of it around when it released from gamingcirclejerk making fun of chuds for calling it woke or whatever. Next time I heard of it, it was the shut down announcement.
They didn’t want to pay for marketing. But all this news coverage… Didn’t they already say they’d re-release it after an overhaul? I guarantee a non-insignificant amount of people will buy it just to see what all the fuss was about…
I saw this (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBnStS9d2xg) nearly 5 minute cinematic trailer in June and was expecting some kind of action/adventure game for most of the way through. Then they said it was a hero shooter out of nowhere and I thought to myself “don’t we already have plenty of those?”
My assumption is they are making sure they get their severance/golden parachute before the mass layoffs begin. But I guess it is still better than “This is a really hard day for me to fire everyone who put their trust in me. I am going to go drown my sorrows in a prostitute that is waiting with blow in my lambo outside” that we usually get.
You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn't the case, the guy isn't quitting the company, he's apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.
Ah. Shame on me for not reading the article. Usually associate the director of a big game as high up enough in the studio that they still get good money.
In that case… this is completely pointless and is just an attempt to avoid needing to figure out the right tone for the “This is the worst day of my life and I am so sad that I just fired a couple dozen people because of my business decisions” linkedin post that is usually associated with the mass layoffs. He isn’t even metaphorically falling on his sword. He is just washing his hands of it.
“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development...he’s a good human, and full of heart.”
Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.
I haven’t played Plucky yet, but this is what I liked about Tunic. It gives you a hint, and then trusts the player to experiment with the hint they’re given. It makes it feel like your own adventure.
Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It’s like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.
The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let’s you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it’s easy to forget the right button combination for it. It’s very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won’t even pop up. An experienced player won’t notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.
Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn’t help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.
I like the game, but agree with the over-tutorialed complaints. They have two difficulty modes, I wish only story mode got all the handholding. I think there’s enough obvious indicators to get you through all the game mechanics.
kotaku.com
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