Been playing the closed beta and I know it’s a beta but the game releases in 7 days. Not a whole lot you can do in that time.
The game is still really unpolished and feels jarring. The opening section has you in a rather large vessel but the thing turns on a dime. Only water craft able to turn like that is a jetski and even that didn’t have the super tight turning radius this thing did. There was also no time in turning. It felt really jarring, especially when Black Flag did it so well.
The voice acting of the characters you start with is extremely uninspired. I don’t blame the actors but the director who decided this was okay. It’s so jarring and disconnected. Characters aren’t even consistent on pronunciation of simple things.
The combat is hyper simplistic. It’s just hold left trigger to aim and then hold right trigger to fire. A quote I said to my buddy while playing was “Huh. My pirate ship is fully automatic.” The cannonballs just kept firing more and more until I needed a reload, then more and more. Everything is bulletspongey and nothing visually seems to change or update to sort of reflect the damage that you’re doing. Most vessels you fight against have multiple giant red boxes where the helm is located and those boxes are explosive and almost guarantee a one hit kill. It just feels so basic and simple and boring. When you complete the opening battle and get your own small craft, you start getting attacked by sharks who are leaping out of the water to attack the boat. Not you. The boat. Because that makes sense. And you have to attack and kill the sharks by throwing harpoons at it, also super simple point and click. Think the fish fight in Resident Evil 4 Remake or even RE4 OG.
Walking around on the ground is painful. You can’t sprint, for a start, and the character will either keep walking for another few feet when you stop or suddenly stop. This leads you to getting used to the trail so you stop preemptively and end up 5 feet away from the thing you need to do, forcing you to start walking again and that animation is also way too long.
One of the locations you have to go to at the start is called ‘West Island’. I’m sorry but how simple and boring do you have to be at the start of the game to just lazily call it West Island because it’s in the west?
This game is awful. It’s a patchwork disaster which is only made more concerning by that article saying that the third creative director just left the game before it even launches.
The last I heard about this game it was another article about it being delayed again and who knows if it will ever finish. Now I hear it’s out in 7 days? WUT.
Jesus, can’t blame the guy for ditching if that’s what they came up with after 7 yrs. I never had any hopes for it anyway but the increasing price tag for these so called AAAA games are infuriating.
I found Sea of Thieves already quite boring, but it did get the atmosphere right. Also the ships had to be properly staffed and controlling them felt like what I expect it to fell like. Also they managed to put out new content even though it was cheaper from the start. In other words: Ubisoft can suck it.
It felt like a f2p game. I play a decent amount of Star Trek Online and spend some time with some other free games. SnB has the same unpolished vibe. Like you’re seeing the framework of the entire game with posters hung over holes in the wall
Oof, thanks for the review, I was looking forward to this game but didn’t keep up with it past the trailer. Looks like a solid pass for me. I’ve been enjoying the safer seas from Sea of thieves after grabbing it on sale.
Always good to see a new pirate on the sea of thieves! Safer Seas is great for a basic tutorial, but don’t be afraid to jump to High Seas as soon as you are familiar with the mechanics. Do not wait until you’re level 30.
The new quest table in season 11 makes it safer and easier than ever to earn gold as a solo player, so there’s no point in taking the 70% reduction from Safer Seas.
The first thing you want to focus on is buying a captained ship. This will massively increase your convenience in selling loot, and is really the only thing you can buy that actually “upgrades” your character.
The next thing you want to focus on is … whatever you want! Progression is just cosmetics and getting better at the game. It’s a true sandbox.
If you want to get better at PvP, just fight every ship you see. You will sink a lot, but each time you will get a little better. Don’t be afraid to lose fights and lose treasure to other players. There will always be more loot!
For useful tips and tricks aimed at new players, I recommend Phuzzybond’s guides on YouTube.
I grabbed it because I can play in pve with friends. We’re all old people now and can’t take the toxic shit that came with the game from hardcore kids who play and fuck over new players. You probably won’t ever see me in high seas, it’s to toxic of a player base unfortunately.
Understandable. But for anyone else reading this and is interested in moving to High Seas, I should make it clear what is considered “toxic” in this game:
Toxic (actual bannable behavior):
Hacking.
Using slurs, verbal abuse, etc. (the common standards you will see for voice/chat interaction in modern online games).
Not toxic:
Attacking other crews for any reason, even if they don’t fight back or don’t have any loot on their ship.
Trash talking that doesn’t go into the category of slurs and personal abuse. (That being said, you can mute other crews any time with a hotkey).
One of the things that frustrates new players is the misconception that there are rules or standards for getting attacked by other crews.
Fighting, lying, stealing, and sneaking are all part of intended gameplay. They are the essence of the game, and are what leads to the most exciting and memorable player interactions. I say this as an almost exclusive solo player who is always at a disadvantage in PvP situations.
That being said, you can always choose to be nice, and that can also lead to rewarding player interactions. But you should never assume that the other crews are playing by your rules.
I only played the beta a couple months ago and I found it unbelievably boring and uninspired. I’ve never been so uninvested in a game’s world and this is a motherfucking pirate game. How is it this dull?!
Journalism at large is dangerously close to dying. People favour free click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism. The latter can’t compete because quality costs money, while cheap quality articles oversaturate the market. AI only exacerbated the issue.
Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.
Getting news off Lemmy is a shit-for-brains idea. It’s 70% bias saturated US politics links. I have no.idea how people keep lapping it up, but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
You can block keywords, though, so if anyone posts any interesting news, you may even get to see it.
The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.
If I had the money I’d definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I’m being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it’s not being run through a vote algorithm first.
Which is why the free democratic world has to keep subsiding quality journalism that sticks to the facts. Sadly that‘s dying along with private newspapers because governments believe people just don‘t want it and it‘s not worth keeping. They treat it as entertainment and that‘s a huge problem because it‘s a pillar of democracy. Defunding it is dangerous.
As for games… well, there‘s plenty of ways and different mediums to consume games nowadays so it makes sense magazines are vanishing along with game events despite the medium being bigger than ever. Most of the older game news outlets have overstayed their welcome.
I think these platforms need to adapt. They need to make short form, entertaining videos like The Washington Post or the break off with Dave Jorgenson called Local News International.
There is too much news for anyone to actually bother reading the long form articles that theyre used to having awfully agitating formats designed to get the reader to read the whole thing and scroll past ads.
Short form, entertaining, and factual is the best route. Do a little skit, explain the concept simply, bingo bango.
click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism
Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.
What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.
I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.
The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.
There are still Youtubers out there motivated by the same engagement goals as gaming journalists. Both need you to click the link. With Youtubers, you can at least identify what games they like, and would know more about those specific type of games.
Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.
You even see it here. People will post “quality journalism” and then it gets attacked because its nuanced and doesnt extrapolate into extreme claims.
People are so used to the rage-bait and bad journalism that its hard for actual reporting to break through. As well as it takes 1000x more effort to gather the evidence and story for quality reporting. Its bad, we need to start supporting journalists through gov subsidies and donations.
I’ll only address journalism as it relates to video games/reviews, but my opinion is that there are better ways to communicate information about a game than reading about it.
For me the big one is simply seeing it played. I’ve read beautiful reviews of games that when it comes time to play do not click for me. Watching someone else play it gives me way more context and appreciation. My go to for this is simply youtube. I skip the middle man entirely. I get a wide range of videos from different players in an easy to access format. Others I know use twitch to similar effect. As the options for providing this information grow, older media lose footing. I’m not surprised at all. I’m not sure we should lament it, truthfully.
Journalism at large died a while ago, gaming journalism has been an absolute joke for over a decade.
I have no respect for 99% of modern journalists, they just push 1%er propaganda and post mugshots while jerking themselves off as being self appointed “guardians of democracy.”
There are some who are trying to do some good and they have my utmost respect but they’re needles in haystacks.
They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.
Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.
Fair pricing means a reasonable profit on the base cost. Trying to gauge what people are willing to pay means that you want to maximise your profit at all costs, consumers be damned.
I understand that’s what Americans consider “fair”, but I don’t fully agree.
In most cases, yes. But you have to remember, this is Valve and not some ordinary company. They have extremely deep wallets and a lot of responsibility and expectations on their shoulders (importantly, not the stock market!). If they charged what it cost for hardware and what it cost them to do r&d, it would likely not be in consumers favor.
Like even just get off the American-bad thing for one second: pricing it as a standalone pc basically just means “the cost of the parts”. They’ve put a lot of time and effort into this across their core employees and likely outsourced stuff because they couldn’t, in-house. Actually listening to people and charging relative to that is actually a great way to be fair and make people happy, guaranteeing positive impact of your product. I guarantee they’re paying attention to what people say ALL over the place. Like… Why do you think “it’s done when it’s done” is their pace?
Research and development is probably very high when you consider Proton, SteamOS, and the semi-custom CPU and GPU. Something between $50 to $100 million would be typical. Silicone is famously expensive in R&D, Proton has continuous costs (and has for quite a while now) that rack up, and SteamOS is literally an operating system. That’s a lot of salaries to pay.
I reckon they’re taking advantage of being private and playing the long game. Very, very long game. They’re not really in danger as long as Steam is successful, but I can’t blame them for wanting a decent gross margin so they can at least cover hardware costs. Especially with memory prices right now, I wouldn’t be surprised at 1000€ here in Germany, though I wouldn’t be happy about it. I would happily buy at 900€ (≈$1040), and be ecstatic at 800€ (≈$920).
Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.
The hardware has to break even. The software already has.
Fair pricing means a reasonable profit on the base cost.
Under many circumstances, this is true. However, console makers have historically sold consoles either at or slightly below cost, expecting to make their real profits on game sales, online store sales, etc… In the business world, it’s called a loss leader. Meaning it’s something popular that the company takes a loss on, while expecting it to encourage more sales elsewhere.
The classic grocery store example is a rotisserie chicken. You can go get a whole rotisserie chicken from the grocery store deli for like $3. It’s so cheap because the store is selling it at a loss. It’s a loss leader. Very few people will simply buy the chicken by itself. Instead, they’ll buy a tub of potato salad, some roasted corn, a can of green beans, and a gallon jug of sweet tea to go along with it. By selling that chicken at a slight loss, they were able to get the customer to buy all of those other things at a profit.
That being said, Valve has already stated that they’re not planning on having the Machine be a loss leader. Which is why people expect it to cost as much as a prebuilt with similar specs.
If it is priced higher than $600 they won’t sell enough to justify their existence. It will just be a repeat of last time.
This is perfect for people wanting a new console with a large games library, but Valve seems to be trying to force the square block in the round hole by placing it in the PC market space.
Why? Look at how many people here say they want Steam OS, and Lemmy skews heavy toward Linux users. This is that, but OOTB.
I don’t think it’ll sell anywhere near as well as the Steam Deck, but it’s also a less exciting form factor. I do think it’ll sell a fair number of units though.
The cheapest equivalent prebuilt I can find with similar specs (RX 7600 is slightly better than the Steam Machine) is $850, and a DIY build is more like $900 (lots of corners cut), so there’s probably not much margin on the prebuilt. Valve is probably saving some cash with their custom CPU, and they’re probably shipping it with a Steam Controller, hence the $800 target. If component prices rise significantly before launch, I could see $1k.
It depends on how many Valve I’ve already manufactured. If they were smart they’ll be quietly manufacturing these and only just now announced it. You don’t announce a product until you’ve got some units sitting in a warehouse somewhere, or else a competitor might see the opportunity to make things difficult for you.
That’s a bad take. Look at PC prices. What equivalent PC could you build for $1000? This is going to be 800+ and still the best value in the PC market. Until they get steam OS on arm and you can put it in a 600 Mac mini.
Equivalent doesn’t mean much when it’s not a standard, upgradable PC. This device competes with consoles, not desktop PCs, and needs to be in that price bracket, as the equivalence is not on the hardware or performance, but just “can it play current-gen games?”
An equivalent PC would have a full fat non-mobile graphics card. They keep trying to claim it’ll do 60 FPS at 4K with AI upscaling. Which is the same as saying it’ll do 60 FPS at 1080p.
This would be a compelling product as a console, the PC capable parts are a nice bonus but no one’s going to be buying this to be their primary computer unless they are going to replace a potato.
Regardless of what the market is doing if it’s anything more than $700 it’ll flop. Which would be an incredible shame but it is what it is. No one is going to pay $1,000 for a PC that cannot be upgraded.
I don’t think this is accurate. The majority of IRL gamers I know are casual people with crappy Minecraft-level pre-builts (hugely overpriced usually; I know someone who spent 1.1k on a 3060 Ti pre-built) or 10 year-old computers built by their neighbors. A lot of casual gamers exist and the steam machine will be very appealing to them as an easy upgrade.
In a way, you’re right. A lot of people will be upgrading potatoes. Or replacing thin air next to their TV’s.
Even I, with a custom built with a 7900 XT running openSUSE TW, am considering this for doing stuff in the living room (or similar, I live in a tiny apartment lol) with friends or just casual-TV gaming and media. I don’t have that right now, and even 900€ sounds appealing for doing that with a Linux-based computer (and gamescope!!!, which I can’t get working on my device) I have full control over, but know will work.
I don’t know of something equivalently priced, but it there is something, please tell me. I think they have a market here. I personally, at least, have been waiting years for something like this to recommend to friends and to an extent to myself.
Samantha Béart (who plays Karlach in the game), Theo Solomon (Wyll) and Dave Jones (Halsin) were asked how the success of the game had changed their lives and careers.
Okay listen I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m not that surprised. Maybe Karlach deserves a bit more recognition but while both Wyll and Halsin were both fine and perfectly adequate, I can’t say that either was the kind of memorable performance that gets you tons of new roles. Though it’s also in part due to the script and direction of course.
Got to agree. The voice work that really stood out in my opinion was done by Amelia Tyler (narrator) and Devora Wilde (Lae’zel). Everyone else was good and I REALLY enjoyed Karlach. I even did a play through with her as the origin character but it was because of the character design and writing more than the voice acting.
The game had a huge cast with many memorable characters and moments. Not everyone was going to shine through especially with some fantastic performances like you mentioned.
I think the title of the post is just deceiving and should be changed to the title of the actual article. And perhaps the article title was changed too but it is a more accurate title of the situation.
Except it’s totally not. Maybe the only 100% legal in every single country way, but not the only way by half. Fuck Nintendo. Fuck $80+ for a game. And fuck the switch 2.
In the case of them rereleasing old games without doing a remaster, in Canada at least, it is legal to have a digital back up for any game you own, and running it in an emulator is legal.
(Edit: I’m implying here that classic games are $80 on the Nintendo store, they are not. Still legal to have digital backups of modern games, still legal to emulate them as long as you own a physical copy.)
Sure, but it wouldn’t be $80 for most of them. (Edit: classic games on the Nintendo store are not $80, statement retracted. The general sentiment stands.)
Game deals is in New Westminster. Not necessarily great prices, but you can get Super Mario Cart for $60. And that’s a proper reseller, definitely get a better deal for a loose cart online…it doesn’t even have to be working. Get a better deal on one that isn’t functional, physical media degradation is one of the reasons why you’re able to keep digital copies.
You think they’re going to sell repackaged SNES and N64 games for less than that?(Edit: incorrect, they are in fact less than $80) How bout switch 1 games? Those are “modern” so significantly cheaper, still legal to have a backup, still legal to emulate…and will be run in an emulator on the switch 2, no native backwards compatibility.
As for switch 2 games…just waiting for a while getting them 2nd hand means they’ll be cheaper, if you can actually get a hardcopy, and all the things I just said still apply…
Wasn’t intentionally spreading misinformation. Classic games, as you said, are cheaper. However switch 1 games are still $80. And my point about legally being able to emulate them stands.
I’ll retract my statements on the cost of legacy games here and go back through my previous comments and change them to reflect this.
I can't tell if you were intentionally trying to mislead, but you know that this discourse was never about CAD, right? You know that the article is discussing USD, right?
It's not nitpicking to say that you've been misleading, whether intentionally or not.
Buying it used? That used to be the norm. Or getting it at the library for free.
I believe Nintendo (and other industry leaders) are going to find out that their old games are the going to be the competition to their new games. If it’s too expensive and the old games are fun…there’s enough of a backlog for people to play.
Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.
One of the most egregious cases for me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. There was stuff for 40 hours aplenty, yet I spent most of those 40 hours killing the same goons over and over but with a different number over their heads, which meant I needed to spent more time in doing so.
If they had just aimed at making a memorable 30 or so hours, it would have been way better. This experience made me stop playing any Assassin's whatever games.
Opposite to this, there was "Still Wakes the Deep", which is a rather short but plentiful game.
"Indika, a nun looking to adjust to a monastic life. The twist in the tale comes in the form of her companion: she has a connection with the Devil himself"
That said, I never got bored of odyssey. It was was just a beautiful place to hang out. The game engine was amazing. With NPCs going about their business etc.
I wish someone would just use that engine for more stuff .
I meant it that I really enjoyed the setting, the characters and some game mechanisms. I just hated this need of making the game seemingly endless by repetition, and I wished I didn't have to be level X to be able to do Y, because the only way to level up was churning (for me that's a no bueno).
God of war and Jedi have done great jobs of finally showing AAA they can make a smaller game and still have a great following. I’m so sick of giant Ubisoft worlds that have nothing to do in them. They’re boring.
I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.
I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.
Things like these make might heart warm. They remind me of a time when video most games where about making a good experience for the users, not about endless MTX and soulless always online games that all try to be the same thing. Good to see that there are still some people in the industry, who carry own these principles.
well I guess it was because the person who spearheaded the game project was also someone who liked and knew what games were about. Now that it has become a lucrative industry, the whole dynamics has shifted to something else.
Normally these articles are slightly alarmist making it sound like a company will fall over becuase of one bad game release and when you look at the share price over time it is still up. but this one is interesting. EA are down 15% over the past 12 months because of this one drop.
Yeah most game news websites don’t understand stocks but in this case, DA Vanguard was a massive failure. In the press release, the game was played by 1.5 million people. Not copies sold, just played. This probably includes people that just bought a month of EA Play to check it out.
The newest fifa game (EA sports FC now) also under-performed but they didn’t say much about it beyond that. A few more flops and it sounds like EA could be following Ubisoft into crashing hard.
They won’t say that though, because they have a built in narrative of “we were too woke”; convenient excuse for a less micro transaction heavy game to be blamed, as well as an excuse to be more strict on themes in their games. None of the problems are solved, but they have a scapegoat.
I don’t think this is a narrative EA is leaning into. Frankly, even if it sold less than they forecast, I’m sure they were happy they sold as much as they did given the troubled production it was converted from.
I don’t particularly think it is either, just that’s it’s conveniently there. The prevailing narrative about failed games recently has been wokeism, and not just the simple fact that games are increasingly shitty as the point isn’t a compelling narrative or gameplay, but how many micro transactions can be squeezed out of a franchise.
I don’t think so, but it is “woke”, and that’s a good enough reason for many to stick their fingers in their ears and claim that’s why it didn’t sell well.
Another way to see that 15% drop is hinted at in the article:
EA FC generates around $2 billion annually, Reuters reports, with around $800 million of that made up by Ultimate Team.
Loot boxes made EA $800M last year. It’s easy to see why EA and other publishers demand MTX in games. Can we amend “Don’t preorder” with “and ignore micro transactions”?
@ChicoSuave Pretty sure that ignoring micro-transactions has always been "a thing" to take a stand against. But of course, when it comes to the general public, no one ever does.
“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”
It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.
Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.
And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.
Exactly. It’s a load of horseshit, and they got caught. Moving forward, there’s no reason to believe they won’t slowly add the policies back piecemeal after all of the outrage has died down.
I mean there’s nothing inherently wrong with that (if only they charged last-gen prices as well lol)
but anyways here’s a bunch more shit they’ve done:
charging full price for basic rereleases
removing reviews from the switch eshop
killing emulation projects
patenting basic gameplay elements
sued a man so hard he was forced to pay them part of his income for the rest of his life
and for a few older ones, just to show that they’ve been shitty this whole time, actually:
attempting to kill game cheating devices (like the game genie)
attempting to kill video game rentals
preventing 3rd parties from releasing games on competitor’s consoles, essentially giving themselves a monopoly
(also they’re partly owned by the saudi government, so, there’s that)
(and pls remember that, despite all of their shit, nintendo is far from the worst. it’s a systemic problem, not an individualist one. remember that ubisoft covered up sexual assault for years and that microsoft is literally engaging in genocide. the problem is that capitalism lets these companies get away with it.)
It’s ironic considering their early days in gaming. They were targeted by Universal over a BS lawsuit for using “Kong” in Donkey Kong and him being a gorilla like King Kong.
Now they’re pulling the same crap on smaller people/businesses and also working with the very company who did the lawsuit to bring their games to the movies.
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.
“We followed through on 60% of our promises, so you should pay us 200% of the value. If you want even more premium content, we’ll give it to ya! For a premium…”
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