I’m glad they did that, change on a remake or something, I don’t recall if they actually did it for Anniversary since it was still a ps2 game, but if games are art they should be preserved as they were, this is just a remaster that you can even play with the old graphics if you want.
Genuinely struggling to remember what that could even be about.
I mean, it’s been like 25 years since I played them, but I don’t recall any obviously bad things in there. It’s not like it was filled with old Jackie Chan film levels of cartoon racism.
The voice acting has quite a range of stereotyped accents. Nothing they say is overtly racist, but the over the top accents themselves are insensitive.
I haven’t played it but that doesn’t sound racist to me if the context is right. There are cannibal tribes today. They are black skinned. This is fact.
Neat, I’m with everyone here when I say this is the much better solution.I’d prefer it to be a bit more clear of a warning and a bit less of a company apology so people who do need the warnings such as younger kids are informed and not immediately put off by playing something almost immediately presented as ‘inexcusable’.
Honestly I’m glad we’ve moved from “Censor out anything that might be slightly objectionable” (Like they did with Sam & Max for example, and I believe the GTA Trilogy got hit with a bit of this), to “Look the game is old and from a different time, what society deems acceptable is always changing, deal with it or move on.”
I’m so beyond tired of being told I can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it. I actually bought this three pack solely because it didn’t censor Tomb Raider, a game I was very sure they were going to censor
And is what they should do rather than trying to delete it.
Provide context so that future generations can enjoy what’s good about the media and acknowledge how parts of the content/media are problematic and not appropriate.
“We’re listening and we hear you,” Phil Spencer wrote on X earlier this week. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
If I understand corporate speech correctly, this means that XBox is essentially doomed. This is far more damning than anything that he is responding to could possibly have been saying.
I’m playing this game right now and it’s honestly a six out of 10. The only reason to launch the game at all is because of the world design which is top notch. So top notch it scores all of those six points, because the plot characters story and gameplay are all a let down otherwise. This is the type of game that will disable the controls for your magical flying broom and then tell you that you need to climb a wall. I wish it wasn’t so successful so they didn’t think this formula was so good, because if they made the game actually good AND a Harry Potter property, that would have really been something special. But as it is now, it’s just an uninspired video game painted in a pretty coat of a popular franchise. I’m sure we’ll get a sequel.
I would have loved to have this game as a kid. It may be a 6 out of 10 but most of the other harry potter shovelware they shit out when the movies were coming was at best a 0.2 out of 10. The only arguably not that bad one was the prisoner of azkaban movie based game.
IDK. Most of the early games were actually pretty entertaining. I fairly recently played sorcerer’s stone on the gbc, and it was still pretty fantastic.
I’m curious, what open world games do you rate as a 9 or 10? I’m not saying Hogwarts did anything revolutionary, but it did most things pretty solidly. It’s been a while since Ive played an open world game that does a good job on making the world actually feel alive.
Subnautica gets a 9/10. Fallout 2 and 3, if we’re specifically going RPGs. NieR: Automata for action RPGs. Look at Persona for school influenced RPGs. I’d have geeked out so hard if we got even Persona-style class experiences in Hogwarts Legacy. Instead, all we get is completely contextless montage cutscenes.
Yeah I wish Hogwarts Legacy had taken more inspiration from Persona. Having a schedule, working on social links, engaging in fun activities outside of school, it all lends itself incredibly well to a Hogwarts game.
Unfortunately it sounds like the creators haven’t ever even touched a Persona game. I remember before the game launched they were asked if there’d be romance options, and they seemed almost offended by the thought since the characters are kids, despite Persona doing the same for literal decades.
Going to a ball in Hogwarts Legacy, or going on a date in Hogsmeade, would’ve been so much fun too.
Imagine that, teens dating… What a wild concept, they didn’t even had to play Persona, our own culture is filled with teen drama series, even DC made gotham academy.
Not the person you asked, but for me personally to rate some open world games:
Hogwarts: 4-5/10. It’s pretty damn bad IMO, beyond the fan pandering.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: 5-7/10, it’s a slightly worse Far Cry (which is already damn tepid) but looks insanely pretty which makes it a good braindead time waster.
Cyberpunk 2077: Originally 2/10, laughably underdesigned and so buggy it felt like industry-criticizing sarcasm. Nowadays 7/10 if including the expansion, still quite buggy but not in a bad way, and the redesigned combat and character systems feel artificial but pretty fun. City still too dead and underdesigned, sadly.
Skyrim: 6-7/10, damn impressive at the time, but only briefly as the game was shallow as all hell, even in its best moments. Still impressive but it’s all on the mods and hence the players, not the game designers.
Witcher 3: 8-9/10, essentially same design flaws as modern CP2077, but given its fantasy world suffers much less from it, of course the empty countryside is, well, empty.
Subnautica: 10/10, amazing horror vibes, good progression, not too open and not too confined, focus on exploration.
Outer Wilds: 10/10, completely open and pure exploration, reductive game design done perfectly right.
No like… it feels pretty obvious they weren’t that way originally, if that makes sense? That this got changed after the game was already out for a while, this wasn’t how it was designed at first?
I got Subnautica for free twice (PlayStation and Epic), I should really look at giving it a proper try. I have the feeling it’d be really good in VR, played No Man’s Sky in VR recently and I immediately loved it while on flatscreen it didn’t click with me as much.
Eh, people don’t buy for the gameplay mechanics most of the time, they buy for what they see in the trailers and read in the descriptions. Being the only videogame available for this IP, having the WB marketing juggernaut behind it, releasing at a time of the year without much competition, coming out on every single platform - it would have been weird if this game wasn’t the best selling one in 2023.
Exactly. You don’t know what the gameplay is until after you buy the game, unless you are savvy and watch reviews or something, which hardly any consumers do.
Also, it’s not like the gameplay was mind bogglingly terrible, just some bland questing and a serviceable combat system. The main thing the game had to do to sell well imo was sell the environment and vibe which I think it did decently.
My wife, whose entire history with video games is Sims 3, Animal Crossing: NH, and Pokémon Go, played through this game start to finish and loved it. It wasn’t really made for “gamers”, it was made for Harry Potter fans that wanted to play a Hogwarts game. It didn’t succeed as a gaming revolution, it succeeded in bringing non-gamers to buy it.
Personally, I love that she got into it whether it’s mid or not, because it introduced her to a lot of the mechanics necessary to play “real” games in the future. And she had a lot of fun.
Fellow HP fan, I was kinda weirded out by the whole “free access to unforgivable curses” and “canonically killing people” and the honestly kinda disheartening stance on goblin personhood but man flying around the grounds is so fun
Oh yeah me too. There are a lot of moments in the writing that make me go “wait… what? are you sure about that?” and some of the game design was iffy here and there but the main attraction is just the fact that they’ve given us a “full-scale” Hogwarts and surroundings.
Oh no kidding, I loved how they handled the curses. For the most part at least. Like, I would’ve been pretty disappointed if they weren’t usable in-game at all, but was never sure how they could introduce them in a realistic way. So HL literally having entire side quests devoted to you discovering the curses and learning how to use them honestly blew away my expectations.
My only issue with them is being able to use them in front of others so casually. They should’ve just made them unusable if you had another character accompanying you.
The IP was my only interest. Games like this I get bored with so I generally avoid. But the views of the school looked great and I’ve always wanted to walk around it, like the fantasy version of it. I’ve been to the real set and walked around that which is cool. My only complaint is I bought it on PC so I didn’t get to see Azkaban.
I found the combat to be serviceable, and at some points I had fun with it. But it kind of got repetitive really quick. Like once you learn the core mechanics, they didn’t really introduce a lot after that to keep you on your toes. But the main problem I had with the game came from the quests, they just felt so monotonous. I love exploring the castle, but finding every little collectible just felt tedious and didn’t really seem to have any payoff.
All things I hope can be improved with an eventual sequel, I’m definitely glad I picked up the game. But it’s not something I’ve ever considered revisiting once I beat it.
Yeah, agree with these points. It had that first entry vibe to it, similar to the Outer Worlds. Lack of enemy variety was a pretty big one, once you were a few hours in.
I much rather fix up some burgers and drink a few pints at home while playing helldivers 1 with friends than sit at the pub eating worse burgers and paying too much for the pints.
I don’t know of any popular games that have it anymore. It’s not something I’d actually expect to exist in a game anymore.
I think it used to be a feature in games back when computers were expensive, but these days that’s not so much the case and if I want to with my partner, well she has her own computer.
It’s not like only nerds have computers now. Basically everyone comes with at least a laptop.
Definitely rarer now, but four people sitting in the living room with controllers is still as fun. Helldivers, Magicka, Overcooked, Totemori, Gang Beasts and Genital Jousting are all great fun with some being easier to get into than others.
I really always prefer local coop but it doesn’t work well when it’s 3rd person over the shoulder and you have to split the screen into two different viewports.
I agree that their choice of perspective makes local coop harder to implement due to needing splitscreen, it also means I wouldn’t want to play it with a controller.
I just hope that they keep their Helldivers 1 servers up and about, or release a patch that makes the game work offline if they don’t.
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Aktywne