I hate that they tried to blame the developers here. I feel like they are just as exploited as the consumers. Many times have I tried to be passionate about my own work only to have it crushed and expunged by greedy upper management. I’d hate to be them working years on a passion project only to have it degraded by corporate grifters sending it into microtransaction hell
Honestly I liked a lot Subnautica 1, and despite the leadership change, still look forward to Subnautica 2. Better juge on the product than on internet dramas.
Sometimes people have ideas that just don’t work out. Even if the same people make another game, unless they just make a carbon copy they’re going to try and do something different. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well as the original, but at least it’s not churning out the same thing over and over and hoping people don’t notice.
Granted, Gamefreak has basically been doing that for 25 years, so what do I know?
I heard it had a lot of issues during testing but I didn’t personally have any issues with it having played it the first time 4 years ago nor have I heard of any widespread game breaking bugs. Might just be your particular system :o
Draw distance sucks for a vast ocean of plants and sealife. Seriously, I have a really good video card, and this fucking Unity engine can’t draw 500 feet in front of me.
So many wall “suggestions”, clipping, other graphical glitches, especially near the end area
Incredible music, but it’s barely heard because the game either cuts it off midway through or decides to go silent most of the time
Bad save serializations that can sometimes spam a ton of error messages on load
You can’t kill anything, including warpers that are more dangerous than leviathans
Can’t walk with a Prawn in an alien base, because you end up getting stuck on the floor for some reason
Reaper in caves, who can drop you off the map
An insulting unrealistic O2 meter, and not enough keyslots
The Cyclops is. Fucking. Useless. By the time you get this thing, the leeches in volcano areas fuck you over, when power is already a precious resource. And it still needs full upgrades to make it even remotely useful in Lost River.
Torpedos are useless. Flares, Floating lockers, air pipeworks, nuclear reactor, alien containment, all useless.
Death might as well be like hardcore, since losing a vehicle is worse than losing 30 minutes of progress
I also find it unbelievable that the other player never experienced bugs, because I also had a lot of them during my play through.
But your list is a complete mess with a mixture of bugs and design decisions. And the latter aren’t bugs. That’s just not how it works. It would make your argument stronger, if you stay with the facts and not include your personal disagreements with game features.
Half of those aren’t even bugs. They’re intendes gameplay elements and they are what makes Subnautica such a good game! No being able to easily kill most creature is what makes the game better. Torpedos being borderline useless is what makes the game better. The extremely limited O2 meter makes the game better!
The cyclops is amazing. You’re just very obviously use it wrong. It’s not meant to explore the volcanic region. It’s meant as a mobile base and it absolutely excells at this!
Honestly, the draw distance optimization may be the only valid concern here.
Draw distance sucks for a vast ocean of plants and sealife. Seriously, I have a really good video card, and this fucking Unity engine can’t draw 500 feet in front of me.
IIRC, they did not really know what the first game was about while developing it. I remember reading a dev blog about them adding a bug report in game with screenshot attached, and how that helped them understand players expectations and direct the development of the game towards that instead of having a pre-defined vision of the final game.
Yeah, this is the right approach, especially with the subnautica community that seems to be really thirsty for drama. I was going to wait for reviews anyway before getting it, so this whole “devs beg community” is probably for the preordering folk.
That said, my money’s on “subnautica 2 will disappoint regardless” because it continues to build on the original instead of being new. What made the original so good was the novelty of that format, combined with the horror aspect and the fresh lore. Now, after two games set in the same world and the same general flow, people know what to expect so they will be extra picky about s2 and I wager they will end up underwhelmed. I’m still hoping s2 will at least be extra pretty because goddamn if I didn’t love the environments of the first two games.
Does the same logic apply to shoes hand-sewn by sick children?
How the fuck did capitalism manage to make people care more for inanimate objects or software than actual human beings.
You are trying to portray a black and white picture about a situation we all know little about. It’s word for word, and in such case it be hard to give more credits to either party.
I heard that there is a lawsuit brewing, maybe this will give us more objective informations.
In the meantime, the only way to see if either the founders or Krafton vision would be the best would be to release the EA, even with the lack of content Krafton is complaining about. Like that we would be able to make our own conclusion.
I would not ignore if Krafton do betray UW employees. But I also take into account that for now it is word for word, and depending on which side you believe, both sides can be sided with.
If the three ousted exec did abandon their responsibility as Krafton said, their dismissal is justified. If not and that’s a way to not pay the promissed bonus, then a boycot is justified.
There isn’t many way to know, other than releasing the EA now. Like that the customer can have and idea of the true state of the game, without having to base its opinion on a bandwagon.
I agree. But you said “Better juge on the product than on internet dramas.” and I dont see how the game would tell us anything about how Krafton fucks the developers.
Krafton says that the game isn’t yet worthy of EA. Ousted led dev says that it is. Someone is probably lying here. Only way to put an end to that is to lanch the EA this year, for us to juge if it is enough content or not.
From what I’ve read, that bonus isn’t tied to a specific release, but to an earning target.
Not being able to get to that target is tied to the fact that Subnautica 2 EA should have been a huge cash influx, which now isn’t possible due to the delay, and the only remaining way would have been either a sudden renewed Subnautica 1 and BZ success or for the mobile version to be a incredible success, which I doubt.
Releasing the EA wouldn’t be an “I win button” from UW. It could go both way. Either the current state is enough for user to buy it, and not refund it, or it will be a resounding failure, with huge refund percentages. In the first case, this may allow UW to get to that target, but in the second case, it may in the worst case make the studio go under before Subnautica had any chance to be released completed
This entire argument is nonsense. With enough advance notification, all future games can be built with these rules in mind. If you are developing it in that way to begin with it’s not going to require any extra work.
I mean, it’s true. Killing game services in a way which ensures people have absolutely no way to use the games they bought is… a choice.
And now a million Europeans have just officially expressed that they don’t agree with “developers” (really, publisher higher-ups) being free to choose that.
So tone deaf, and clearly they’re just trying to steer the narrative.
They call out that it’s never taken lightly and it has to happen. We know. Stop killing games just says you have to do something when you turn off the servers. Either release the server source code so it can be engineered by the community, release a self hostage server alternative, even just documents or guides on how to get started.
But they’re going to try to make it about the mean old gamers want them to go broke
Well lets see, you are coming out of one of the biggest tanks ever for the gaming movie franchise. The online mentions are far more jokes about your IP than any kind of nostalgia.
Sure, go exclusive! And make sure you code 60% of your next project with AI - the gamers will love it!
I remember watching a film online that had AI generated subtitles. it was shit because the subtitles said vaguely the same thing but were still very different to what was actually said. and both the film and the subtitles were in English. can’t imagine how bad AI translations will be. also what’s wrong with getting a translator, who can understand context?
It, like most games of the era, followed the rule of cool. As such, it references a ton of similarly themed media. A lot of which was cyberpunk, conspiracy theories, and general sci-fi. All the unique ideas in the game are really just in the game part. The story and all that is almost all entirely lifted from other sources. So it makes sense to me that they didn’t project their own message into the game. It doesn’t say anything the media that inspired it hadn’t already said.
Ok let me Sheldon it for you: Yes, deals existed “back in the day” as the saying goes, but fans were not aware of (or reactive to) the business aspects of gaming enough for the deals to be the subject of headlines or controversy.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, just pointing out your example was a bit wild. I fully agree with your other point. Although I would also point out that the early exclusives were that simply because it just didn’t occur to devs to release a game on more than one console.
Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that. People see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.
It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reciting encyclopedia articles to sound smart.
Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.
I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.
I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”
Yeah, I believe Warren Spector has said before that the premise of Deus Ex was literally “what it every conspiracy theory was true”, and not really anything deeper than that.
I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.
It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).
I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.
That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.
All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.
It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.
Maybe? Any military presence on a mountain trail would make me break out the wipes and the poop bottle.
My point is more that it is one of those things that goes against “Kojima is a much less neocon version of Tom Clancy” that goes around.
The idea of Metal Gear as a tool to fire undetectable nukes from anywhere on the planet (that a giant walking mech can get to…) completely ignores that submarines are already doing that. And there really isn’t a defense to an ICBM unless you have Trigger themselves in the area of operations when the sub surfaces. The “defense” to an ICBM is to fire off all yours before it hits and make sure everyone dies. MAYBE Rex gives you one or two first strikes before the missiles start launching but… again, see “submarines”. The moment the first hit, President Solidus would say “ah no you di’n’t!” and have the subs surface and fire off their ICBMs and the end result would be exactly the same.
That also doesn’t get into how bad an idea any form of walking tank is (which, to be fair, was briefly acknowledged in MGS3). I love my Gundams and my Battlemechs but unless you have minovsky particle magic you just rapidly recreate the meta that thousands of house rules have failed to stop in Battletech: 1000 points of Atlas goes down REAL fast when you have even 500 points of effectively pickup trucks with gauss guns on the back. Jaburo wouldn’t have panicked and fed themselves to Kamille and Not-Char attacking. They would have grabbed their ATGMs and started leaning out of bolt holes to light those two up.
And if Rex hadn’t been inside of a giant missile silo (hmmm), it would have been lit up by a bombing run the moment someone saw it on satellite imagery.
But that is kind of my point. The MGSes, like Deus Ex, is mostly a hodge podge of conspiracy theories and cool concepts from other media. People see what they want in there and handwave the rest.
Does that mean the story is not political? Of course not (even if DX is inconsistent to the point it might be… Like… that Alex Garland Civil War might be less nonsensical in terms of sides somehow). But you can very much have an author(s) with no political intent make a political statement.
in my late teens/early 20s this game made me aware of more conspiracy theories than i even imagined possible, and i loved it. amazing game. pretty cutting edge at the time, but it aged poorly gameplay-wise. none of the sequels came close for me. i’d buy a well-done faithful remake of this in a heartbeat
I am just curious, what makes you say it has aged poorly in terms of gameplay? I would argue it holds up pretty well, but I am also a PC/KB+M only player. I strongly dislike UI/UX that has been compromised (from my perspective) for consoles/controllers.
Agreed regarding the sequels (haven’t played the fourth one, just the 2nd and 3rd sequel); they are OK, but not that special.
I just finished Mankind Divided earlier this month. I think it has higher highs than Human Revolution but suffers from being the planned “middle game” in the trilogy. It has better gameplay than HR, some great levels and some really good side quests. Also a really well executed apartheid theme that played out really well.
I definitely recommend you playing it. It’s not gonna be OG Deus Ex, but it’s a good game.
I really need to play it. I am sure I would enjoy it. I thought Human Revolution and even Invisible War (with mods) were decent. Invisible War is fundamentally flawed due to the small maps though.
A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.
I played Deus Ex for the first time like, 6 months ago and it didn’t feel particularly clunky. It’s not great, but it’s perfectly okay, and I’m someone who plays with a controller at every possible opportunity and I think BG3 is a better experience on a controller, having tried it both ways
i’m also a KB/M player, and to be honest it’s been several (many…? i don’t remember when) years since i’ve tried OG deus ex 1, and remember thinking damn this seems like a chore.
i might just need to give it another shot, with full awareness i’ll never get the same experience of playing through for the first time on windows 98.
I’ve made multiple attempts to finish Deus Ex over the years after giving up each time due to aspects of the gameplay. I would normally never give a game so many shots, but I love so many aspects of Deus Ex, I want to finish it, but I just can’t push myself to continue at certain points.
I think the biggest blockers for me is I love stealth games (thief 1 & 2 are all time favorites), and since Deus Ex does have a stealth system (though primitive), I tried to play it like a stealth game. a vanilla install means that tranq darts make enemies run around like headless chickens for a minute, and knocking people out with the baton is unreliable. Combined, stealthing is both visually comical, and realistically very frustrating to play.
I could deal with that, and I’ve tried switching it up by going more guns blazing, but the gunplay of Deus Ex is just as clunky, with slow firing weapons that deal little damage on fairly bullet spongy enemies. Combat just doesn’t feel good.
I tried mods and overhauls to see if I could rectify either of those points, which do sorta work as a bandaid. GMDX makes stealth WAY more fun by making headshots with darts work instantly, and baton-ing more reliable. With it, I was able to get all the way to France without quitting, but I think due to GMDX, I hit a massive difficulty spike where my stealth build became much less viable, and it once again just became frustrating. Perhaps a gun-build with GMDX would’ve been the winning combo.
I think my best experience was with the Revision overhaul, but by then I had started the game over so many times over so many years, I just didn’t have the appetite to get all the way back to France.
It’s a truly spectacular game in terms of story and open-ended level design, but the mechanics really are a turn-off. I wish my first playthrough had been with the Revision overhaul (though I wish it didn’t radically change the level design so much), but even still, I think it would benefit from a Nightdive style remake.
I see. Yes, stealth is in a strange position where it’s difficult to use it full time. There are multiple missions/maps where you will eventually not be able to use stealth.
I can see what you mean regarding guns being clunky. They do get more effective as you level up and get better weapons. Early game gunplay is very iffy.
But I actually like the RPG approach to gunplay and how it forces you to try and avoid direct confrontation and use a mixture of stealth and combat.
That being said, these are all fair points.
I’ve actually never tried Revision. I only use GMDX. Should try it for next play through. i feel like I need to reinstall once I clear out a major deliverable for work. :)
I didn’t mind the RPG elements of the gunplay either, it was how lame all the guns felt to use even with higher skill levels.
The shotguns take way too many rounds to down people, the smgs are pea shooters, and pistols can work ‘okay’ with headshots, but still just feel meh. I assume the sniper rifle is more effective, but I never used it much.
I wish they had made it to where low skill makes reloading and accuracy suffer greatly, but if you do manage to score a hit, it hits hard. That would make shotguns in the early game super valuable, but they could’ve still encouraged stealth and more thoughtful tactics by limiting ammo availability.
Basically the RPG and story elements combined with Tarkov style gunplay and thief-style stealth would be heaven for me.
I’d be curious of your thoughts on revision, if you ever feel like coming back to this comment section by the time you finish it!
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