Does he think books should be shorter because the years of authors’ lives spent composing them are also not sustainable?
I wonder if he’s aware that development budgets can be allocated in different ways, like paying good writers to make substantial (and long) stories, or refining the user interface and game mechanics so that they’re fun to play for a long time, rather than pushing every new hardware generation to its technical limits.
Honestly if shadow of the erdtree didn’t come out it would be considered the gold standard dlc.
Edit: and you get to skip straight to the dlc on character creation. It makes some story decisions for you but if you want meat and not potatoes then that option is available.
Yes but also no. Played base game recently, and i had a lot of bugs and frustrations. Some of them because i ran it from hdd, which is not their recommended way of media to install on, but some were clearly design failures and bugs…
I just finished four endings and am now grinding side missions. Through oner 90h of great gameplay, I had like 5 bugs (1 crash, 1 person walking on air, 1 body that rolled away like a car, 1 car stuck spinning wheels on a flat surface, 15 cases of “summoning” a car to see it dropping upside down 30 meters away)
I’ve seen worse in terms of bugs, and it’s an interesting game with tons of content and different ways to build your character.
Yeah, yeah, we know they fixed the bugs but did they fix the game? Do cops still exclusively spawn behind you so you can escape them by driving in a straight line?
Interesting. I just looked it up and it seems they completely revamped the entire police system. It light finally be time for me to give it another shot.
It’s a good game now. I waited over 2 years to buy it and think it’s the best single player shooter I’ve played since Bioshock/HL2. Have completed it 5 times now using different builds and am thinking about getting the expansion if it goes on sale at xmas.
I bought it on release because TW3 and Deus Ex are some of my favorite games but it was so bad back then that I haven’t touched it since. Alright, I’ll give it another shot.
I don’t think you’ll regret it. The story is incredibly rich and outcomes depend a lot on your choices and playstyles. It never feels like you’re grinding for levels to me. There’s the occasional bug, but no more than other games I’ve played. I think it’s probably the first genre defining game we’ve seen in about a 15 years.
Can confirm. I’m playing through my 4th total playthrough (once on launch, once about 6mo later, one on the DLC launch and one now) and the last two have been noticeable in terms of quality improvements. I’m playing modded to shit, but only have had a few crashes. Police feel fine now, I’m not using anything that alters their spawn logic. Just about the only thing I’ve not enjoyed still is driving, even modded to hell lmao
Others answered but it’s easier/cheaper for them to use a vendor’s engine. It makes sense.
What sucks is that UE seems to almost have a monopoly on engine leasing. I wish there were more options. Having all games use the same engine is putting too many eggs in the same basket.
They claimed that it was expensive and was part of the reason for cyberpunk’s turbulent launch.
It’s a real shame though, most UE5 runs awful it seems, and are still limited by single thread performance, unlike RED Engine which scales far better with more CPU cores.
Tbh RED engine also has its plethora of problems, missing features, and makes it harder to onboard new team members (need to train on new engine instead of basically every single dev having experience with unity or unreal).
Aside from doing the work to maintain and update your own engine, there is also the problem of onboarding new hires. If you use a standard you can go out and hire people already experienced with working on the engine. If you use your own, you have to teach a new hire to use it before they can be any help.
I read that this caused a lot of development woes on Halo Infinite for example.
So far, it’s a pretty looking game. The trouble is finding things to do in it.
That was the end of the quest. All setup, no punchline.
There was no one to thank me. All I had was a little more loot. Where’s my impact on the world?
If these quotes ring true in the final game, that’s a hard pass. I want RPGs, action-oriented or not, to allow me to play a role. A million games can make fantasy look pretty, Obsidian needs to make it interesting.
that’s what i’m saying! I hope the quests are more dense with writing in the final release. Well-designed quests with clever writing are the entire appeal of an Obsidian RPG!
After playing part of their game Outer Worlds, I’m not surprised. I thought the writing was alright, but the game felt lacking and empty. I was surprised because I’ve only ever heard good things about New Vegas. I haven’t played New Vegas yet but I’m assuming it’s a much better time
You’d be right in my opinion. New Vegas is incredible. But something felt missing from the outer worlds, and I was hoping they would find it in avowed.
I should probably get around to continuing Witcher 3. I just have a mental issue with quests and choices blocking other quests that I just end up reading the wiki. Help me.
I sure hope so, I got quite burned on the last big budget game I’ve played years after the hype. God of War 2018 felt like a culmination of every wrong with gaming at that time (outside of mtx) and AAA games only got worse from there.
Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?
I hate those because:
Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.
Do you mean quick time events (QTEs)? The game has at least one cutscene I remember where you’re prompted to activate an ability to change the outcome, however, I think that’s it. The games usually doesn’t have them.
Although, it does commit an entirely different sin in terms of unskippable cutscenes: There are several ‘immersive’ cutscenes with you suddenly walking at a snail’s pace or climbing slowly around while the cutscene plays out.
I’ll just wait for the Witcher 4 patch 2.0, which will release after 3 years from the original release date and will actually contain the advertised game.
Ditto. Was surprised to hear it that far along, with absolutely no prior leaks/hype, except maybe they learned from CP2077.
Eventually sorted out they mean ‘production’ in the movie sense, not the product sense. And I suppose that’s fair, given how much modern ARPGs incorporate voice & physical acting, foley work, motion capture, etc
Digital Foundry did an analysis. It’s a mixed bag, some games may look better, some worse. The core problem seems to be the new upscaling technology PSSR from Sony (for haters its pronounced like “pisser”, oh I see in your other comment you are already aware of this lol).
Imagine paying a premium price of 800 Euros and then getting this. Fanboys will defend it no matter what, just like Apple fans defend if they purchase crap.
Every acronym should be run past a bunch of ten year olds. No idea how they thought this was a good idea, but then again, they greenlit Concord at about the same time.
I’m burnt out on open world games. Some are good with dense rich areas that are interesting and make you want to explore but most these days are just bland, overly large and filled with generic quests.
Games need to stop being open world for the stake of being open world. I think for a lot of games, having multiple open-ended areas can work much better.
Definitely one of the reasons I absolutely love the original Borderlands. Large world, but broken into a lot smaller chunks/maps. More games doing stuff like that would be absolutely perfect.
I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…
…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?
Yep pretty much. All games boil down to what you mentioned above but the execution can vastly differ. I guess the low end is the Ubisoft approach where everything is just a generic world and its go climb this tower/ capture this outpost etc and the high end is the Rockstar approach where it might be drive there, do this but things could be different in between that keeps it engaging. I guess it feels more like a living world.
Yeah I guess so. Less like a look here’s a world that I designed, how do we fill it approach and more like a what story do we want to tell and what does the world look like kind of approach if that makes sense.
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
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