And so the endless cycle of the borderline CD projekt games continues. Everything is hyped beyond realistic expectations a decade before launch, the masses whipped in anticipation. The game developers are kneecapped by suits making technical changes and demands they don’t understand. The game is launched after sorely felt apologies for delays, as a messy distasteful buggy disaster. Then the devs get to finish the game during thn next five unars after sorely felt apologies for the buggy mess at launch. 5 more years later the game is hailed as a creative masterpiece, despite being held by bubblegum and paperclips under the hood and still being a subpar experience. Then CDPR announces a new game, and the cycle repeats.
We didn’t learn anything from “Bethesda’s magic”. What a mismanaged company.
Yes, you did. The last step of the cycle is that everyone forgets that this already happened before. The witcher, then the witcher 2, then witcher 3, then cyberpunk. Each was such a mess at launch that the press at the time thought the games would flop. Each time devs, not suits, pulled the games out of PR hell after the fact.
People forget that the console port of the first witcher game nearly bankrupted them.
Just look at this thread people are talking like cyberpunk was always a perfect masterpiece since launch and negative comments are being buried in down votes.
The difference between CDPR and Bethesda is CDPR games always end up being all time greats though. That’s why I don’t get influenced by the hype, and keep faith in them as developers, as well as their move to unreal engine
Bethesda’s games are also celebrated as all time greats.
Games are good, eventually, in spite of the mismanagement, not because of it. At one point they will run out of magic, just like Bethesda did. For said magic is just a ton of good writing and developers putting up with crunch.
Agree to disagree on that, I haven’t played a Bethesda game I’ve considered “good” since Morrowind personally, and on the other hand Cyberpunk is top tier for me.
Bethesda delivers just good enough for the modding community to pick up the rest and fix their shit. Unofficial patches, Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, and all that.
CDPR fixes their own shit.
Both end up with solid games for patientgamers but damn you gotta be really patient.
I played Witcher 3 a few months after it released, and it was nearly bug free, and certainly lived up to most expectations. It had a massive world, every inch of which was crammed with fleshed out interesting stories and characters with character. It was a breathtaking experience from the start, and if it had a few things to work out in the initial weeks, I can understand that.
I just got 2077 after however many years. 50 hours, I know the end is like the next mission or two but I don’t want it to end. Easily my favorite game ever. Guess I’ll get another play through in 5 years before I play the sequel after its released and has a couple years of debugging.
I thought I saw somewhere that it was 150 hours for a full play through. I’m down to just a handful of cyberphycos and side gigs before the last mission. Almost 60 hours now. I’ve been trying to do literally everything but there’s not much left.
When phantom liberty goes on sale I’ll probably get it and do another full play through. I know there are multiple endings, tons of different builds, but its all still the same story that I know what’s going to happen so there’s only so much replay value after you know the story, kinda like skyrim.
This would 100% be the game I would choose to completely forget so I could experience it again.
There is no evidence that Guillemot or Deraine were directly involved in sexual harassment or bullying at the company, they are being accused of complicity.
Which has been said from the very beginning. They didn’t do it themselves, but they knew of it and didn’t do jack to stop it.
I thought Game Key Cards, while not something I would ever buy, weren't the end of the world if they were just meant to replace the existing practice of code-in-a-box for games that won't fit on a cart. It's actually less bad than that, so I didn't get out my pitchfork just yet.
But the sheer number of games being released in this format is alarming. Code-in-a-box was rare, this is looking like it's outnumbering proper physical games. And many of these games don't even make sense to be key cards, they can fit just fine on a cart. There are ports of Switch 1 games that already fit on Switch 1 carts in here!
Switch carts are proprietary and expensive. Rumor has it that 64 GB is the smallest cart you can buy for the switch 2. And corporations will do anything to save a buck.
I’m hoping that at least Nintendo will release their full games on the card. The truth is I’m probably not buying many third party games on Switch that aren’t exclusives.
Afaik, they are. It’s just that third party developers would need to optimize their file sizes heavily for the great pay off of reducing their profit margin. They already didn’t want to do that for the Switch and Nintendo now enables them to not do it to incentivize more ports.
At least in Japan, I think, every 1st party game comes on the cartridge, pretty much every third party game except for Cyberpunk comes as a code.
Yes, Nintendo! Please paywall my nostalgia of the very first game console I ever played! Charge me an exorbitant price during an economic crisis to satisfy my childlike need to regress to a time before I understood what money was!
Hang on, Nintendo fans are into findom? That would explain a few things. On a related note, I think I finally understood why people keep giving Chris Roberts money for Star Citizen.
I mean, I bought the starter ship for SC which was 40€ I believe and I still play occaisonally. I’d say I definitely got my money’s worth out of that game.
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.
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
Same, though interested is an understatement. Prey is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. I enjoyed Weird West, but it left me feeling more like a POC of what the studio wants to do than anything up to the actual standards of Arkane’s best.
If WolfEye fills the void of Arkane’s deplorable closure, they’ll get all the support I can give.
So long and thanks for the early lockdown memories! Warzone was never more enjoyable than in those first few months, when everyone was just messing around, wins meant something and the ‘meta’ wasn’t something that everyone looked up on YouTube after every patch.
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