I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.
Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.
There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.
I have no clue why it says MOBA gameplay because it is nothing like a MOBA unless there are multiple definitions on that term. The only thing is that you have 4 (5) skills?
Played the demo for like 8 hours which was enough for getting all my 5 chars to level 10 or more which feel enough to put on whatever in the skilltree.
Agree with the slow progress however but I don’t mind too much. I have a lot of fun with the game.
I have an issue with the idea that Borderlands is dominating gaming news. I didn’t even realise it had launched so I wouldn’t exactly call it popping off the shelf.
I was going to comment the same thing. Maybe it’s just the circles i’m in, but like the only thing i’ve heard about it is the price and the performance issues on PC
Yeah but I would have known thwy had released because they would have been advertising or something. I don’t feel like anyone’s spoken about Borderlands since that comment about how it should be $90 or whatever.
That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.
I get where you're coming from, I found out Borderlands 4 launched when I saw the news about it having performance issues. That said, if you look at Steam charts Borderlands 4 is just smidge below Silksong numbers and at the time of writing this comment Silksong is the 4th most popular game and Borderlands is 6th most popular game, barely beaten out by a game called Banana (which I've never even heard of and I have no clue why it's that popular).
I get what kind of a game it is. I don't get how that is so popular. We're talking about player counts that not even Destiny 2 could reach. The only rational conclusion I came come to is that those numbers have to be botted.
my guess is that a lot of people let the game idle in the background to farm items, that’s why it’s so “popular”. It’s not “active players”, it’s just a large number of people farming items in the hopes to get one they can sell for a larger sum.
Afaik it has been in the top charts for over a year.
The big problem is how to make it fun for those who are not space nerds. They are making a game for hundreds of thousands of players with a budget of a game for tens of millions. They are getting funded for a feline-shaped bag, once it’s out chances are it’ll be so aggressive, mangy and moody no one will want to play with it. Aiming at a reticle projecting where the enemy will be when the shots land for 30 hours with occassional explanations by hollywood b-listers is not everyone’s cup of space tea.
Yeah… all I wanted was Freelancer 2.
Then I realized, Microsoft had to step in, get rid of Roberts so Freelancer could see the light of day. And it dawned on me, we’re not seeing Freelancer 2 from this guy.
“The team is heads down,” Huckaby said. “We drew a line in the sand when we said 2026. I don’t know if we’re going to make it, I just know that we’re going to do every single thing possible to make it. And part of that is not taking time for the distraction of CitizenCon.”
That means they already know they are not going to make it. Otherwise why say this more than one year before?
Will probably have an actual galactic empire before this game releases. Assuming they never does release because I’m not convinced that the guy isn’t totally in on the idea that it’s a scam.
Edit: Read the article. Really just another shit gaming journalist. Their whole justification for why the rest of the series isn’t good basically boils down to “I only wanna play boomer shooters.”
I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)
Competent Scrum Masters, 95% of the Scrum project that I’ve been part of caught on fire is because of an ass PO and an incompetent SM who can’t rein in the PO.
No Man’s Sky has almost every feature that Star Citizen will have/has:
Frigates
Walkable ships (via the new corvettes)
Space stations
Food/cooking
Quests and lore
Planet exploration
Ship to ship dogfights
Like, by the time SC releases, the game’s features will have been done by multiple companies. I expect people actually buying the game, if it’s ever released, will do so for the memes and not because the game has anything innovative to add to gaming.
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