A lot of little things in the trailer really felt like it was a pre-animated demo. Things like using thermal vision to see arriving soldiers, the attentive scan mode in the streets, smooth civilian NPC actions (When you think about it, not many game studios make a calm, populous city street actually coded believably).
Maybe that’s too many years going back to the Killzone 2 trailer making me feel paranoid. Just not sure this game has truly exited development hell.
Crystal Dynamics have a really strong track record with the exception of Avengers but I’d put the blame on the publishers for pushing a game on them that isn’t their specialty
IMO, the ex-DLC developers Deck Nine (who are doing this) do a far better job with LiS True Colors evoking the feelings and moods of LiS1 than the actual devs did with LiS2 or Tell Me Why.
that’s good to hear. all of the existing ones are already in my backlog for if things at work ever go as planned ever again. I own #2 and can play the rest via family share… ‘family’
I had a good time with Before the Storm and True Colors. The Expanse was less exciting (despite it being based on one of my favorite properties ever), mostly because the episodes were too short. That doesn’t look like it’ll be an issue here since it sounds like it’s a one-time release again like True Colors.
I didn’t like them as much as the first LiS but I see that game as lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways, especially for someone like me that used to live in that part of Oregon.
If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur’s Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they’re doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as “our Baldur’s Gate 3”. In a worst case, I’d imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.
Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?
I don’t know if a higher up will see the numbers on PoE 2 and decide they should invest like 20 times the game’s budget to match BG3 on a sequel. Specially a Microsoft higher up. Even if they made a CRPG I think they’d go for a different franchise.
Come to think of it, that will depend on how well Avowed does.
You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I’d be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here’s hoping. I’ll bet it happens, even if it isn’t the BG3 competitor version.
Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you’d eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren’t going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it’s anyone’s guess.
The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.
And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.
A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.
My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.
Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I’ll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:
GOOD voice acting
Significant “choice” and branching narratives
Plenty of content that players will “never” see.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.
And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.
It’s funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we’ve had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn’t launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it’s still one of the best of those.
I don’t think we need transformers and flying in doom tbh, but it looks like we’ll have to deal with it now.
Otherwise this joke on a hexen reboot is the ultimate meme of the reboot. And is much more intriguing than doing “doom eternal plutonia experiment”.
The ancient holy wars part of the lore that you read in sentinel prime is the most intriguing part of the doom guy’s story. Links back to seraphim too. Walking through sentinel prime and reading all those things I really felt like I’d like to have seen those days. Oh boy, here we come!
The examples of games that made a comeback were No Man’s Sky, a sandbox game missing features where, development-wise, it’s very feasible to add in missing promised features; and Cyberpunk, a game with good bones that didn’t function a lot of the time. Starfield’s problems are deeper than that, at least from my perspective.
The tech tree and leveling system is “improve by doing”, which runs into the same problems those systems always run into, which is why no one else does them anymore. It incentivizes me to get shot in combat on purpose so that I can improve my healing, and other stupid behaviors like that. So many of the quests are thoughtless fetch quests with nothing interesting along the way, and the game would actually be better with their omission than their inclusion. The endgame mechanic is an interesting one on paper, but seeing as the major quest lines only really play out one or two slightly different ways, there’s not much that’s interesting about going back to them, and you can also do all of them in a single playthrough, so there’s no need to engage in the endgame mechanic to see it. These are some of the problems that can be fixed but will likely be so costly and time consuming when there are Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to be made that I doubt it’ll ever happen.
The more fundamental flaws are that you can’t spec your character to interact with the world in wildly different ways and get clever with its systems; the universe doesn’t flow together the way that one of their terrestrial open worlds from before do, and fast travel is now mandatory; and the story walks right up to an interesting sci-fi story and stops just short of being good. To change these things sounds a lot like making an entirely different game.
I absolutely agree. Even with skyrim, I could mod every aspect of the game, I could make combat and the graphics good add lots of new mechanics and quests. But I still couldn’t make it good. The story, the copypasted dungeons and lifeless NPCs the game is rotten to the core and even if I can fix some of it I can’t just replace the core that would be a different game like Enderal.
You’re not wrong, but I feel that level of support for one of their releases would be a bit out of character for Bethesda (Without the long-term monetization present in games like Fallout 76). Especially so with the trend of Bethesda’s comments indicating that the consumers are the ones who are wrong for not liking some of the more problematic game design decisions.
I think they mean more about reworking core mechanics of the game such as the planet generation and the fact that space flight is basically pointless outside of ship combat. I don’t foresee them being able to allow ships to fly down to planet surfaces in Creation Engine.
cyberpunk was buggy but fundamentally sound. starfield is flawed in its core, no amount of bug fixing or system tweaking is going to fix it. they’d have to cut out space and planets entirely.
That looked far better than I expected. It had a lot of Horizon Forbidden West vibes to the gameplay, but the graphics definitely felt like being in the Star Wars universe.
Don’t have an Xbox but I remember these games really fondly. This looks cool, but like, kind of insanely polished for a Fable game? Interested to see what the vibe of the finished game is like.
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Aktywne