I didn't expect this, but I honestly don't even care about this game anymore.
I feel like they've squandered any hype I had by just totally disappearing for like 5+ years.
all that said, if you're still into it, I hope you have fun!
Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.
Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.
I wonder what the public response will be when Silksong releases and turns out to be just a good game and not literally curing cancer and resolving world hunger.
Half-Life 3 was already made and it was a VR exclusive. And it was REALLY good. And nobody cared.
People like to meme. They don’t like to think. Silksong will probably have a wave of “is it as good as it was supposed to be” or “DISAPPOINTED BY SILKSONG” and then just go back to being like Hollow Knight: a REALLY good metroidvania with souls-like aspects (also souls games ARE metroidvanias but…).
Personally? I am more excited for the chuds to lose their mind once they figure out Hornet is fem.
I’m just hoping for some good games moving forward that aren’t trying to milk us for everything we have with slop we don’t want.
… There is plenty of that?
The thing to understand is that influencers pretty much always fall back to the “us vs them” mentality. We could see it with early youtube where they accused magazines/websites of all being corrupt and getting paid for reviews (never forget Jon “It’s about ethics in games journalism” Bain…). And we saw it in twitch when they instead said it was the youtubers and their sponsor deals who were doing the same. And we saw a huge rise in “I need to watch tiktok because that informs me about things that mainstream outlets don’t want me to hear!”
Some outlets go political. Most are aggressively “apolitical” and all that entails. But that means that “the game devs are trying to screw you over” is a solid talking point. It is why everyone and their mother needs to say they hate live service games (with the added bonus of avoiding any chance of having a regular game they arer expected to stream) and so forth.
But if you actually PLAY games? It is still a golden age where basically every sicko gets their fetish in game form (and Microprose and Kitfox are apparently the sleazy club I slink off to…). We are in for a pretty bad drought after the past two years or so of funding drying up and studios being gutted. But if you actually are looking you are gonna find a LOT of games that know what you want.
I’ll also add on that “game devs want to ruin gaming” is a great excuse to play “retro” games. Which drastically reduce operating costs for the part timers because… even IF they are showing you their console and cartridge, you can bet your bottom dollar they are running an emulator with a game they grabbed from their local internet library.
Standing and Seated VR are both a thing that are both supported in Alyx.
To be clear: I am not saying everyone should go buy a facebook quest 3 (I would NEVER say that… even if that is usually my begrudging suggestion to anyone who wants to try VR) and that everyone needs to play Alyx.
But if the obsession over Half-Life 3 were anywhere near as big as the memes pretend they are… people spend more to play a tweaked re-release of a game they already have on a new console. We buy new GPUs when we find out our performance will be too low on fricking Dragon’s Dogma 2.
But spend 300 bucks (usually closer to 200/250 on sale) to play their “dream game” ? Oh, nah, I’m washing my hair that… five years. Uhm… oh, I don’t like the head strap. That is why I can’t play it. Yeah…
And… for those of us who really ARE Half-Life sickos? Alyx is GOOD.
It’s not “nobody cared” it’s “not enough people can afford to keep a roof over their heads, let alone afford an extra holodeck room in their house with an expensive holodeck setup”
I’d love to play HL alyx. I didn’t and don’t live in a place where I can have a perpetually empty room I can drill holes in the wall of, or drop $1k on a valve index (after shipping and imports) plus a new $2k gaming rig.
People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.
Can EVERYONE? No. But this is a luxury hobby and plenty of discourse online is “I bought a PS5 for Demon Souls” or “I love Welcome Tour” and so forth.
Nah. Alyx was just completely ignored. Likely due to a mix of chuds not wanting to acknowledge women and… people don’t ACTUALLY care all that much about a new Half-Life. They just love meming about it.
People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.
The difference is that you don’t need an entire room to play the Switch 2 (hell, you even need a TV). It’s easier to scrape together the $500+ required for a console than it is to afford a down payment and a mortgage, or the extra rent for a two-bedroom instead of a one-bedroom apartment.
Consoles and VR are both luxury goods, but the barrier for entry with the former is much lower than with the latter.
Space will always be the most expensive peripheral of all.
Sitting and standing VR are both a thing and are both supported in Alyx. All you have to be able to do is rotate your chair 180 degrees away from your desk and you can play it. Hell, you can play it AT your desk but I would not recommend waving your arms in front of a monitor…
And if you can afford to walk one step away from your computer chair? Now you can do Standing VR which, honestly, I have always preferred over room scale because I can never get comfortable walking around. But moving with an analog stick (or teleporting) and then moving my body to dodge things and interact? That is the shit.
Or, to put it in Nintendo terms: If you can play Welcome Tour and the game that is totally not wheelchair basketball, you can do seated VR.
Not that it invalidates your points at all but I played HL Alyx sitting down on an original oculus quest on a computer with a 1060 and an r5 2600. It was great but it and Beat Saber were basically the only two VR games that were fun enough for me to play for more than a few minutes at a time.
That quest has been collecting dust since I beat Alyx.
Really hard for me to recommend spending several hundreds of dollars on hardware when there’s really only one game worth playing. But if you can find a cheap used quest or WMR headset it might be worth picking up and then selling just to play Alyx. Alyx is probably one of if not the most well optimized VR games out there. You really don’t need that powerful of a rig to play it.
Ooh can I suggest games? There are definitely a bunch that are great to play sitting down, or standing up but in place. I haven’t bought new VR games since alyx came out, but I def have plenty
I’ve said this plenty of times but this stigma of VR is a REALLY REALLY weird one, especially since I keep seeing it. There are so many arcades and whatnot you can try VR where it’s just tethered in place. So many VR experiences are designed such that you can absolutely play them sitting down in a chair. The idea you need a “holodeck room” breaks down the second you look into it all.
Not only that, but the Quest can play VR games, and it’s running a phone processor. You don’t need top of the line hardware, just enough to run a normal video game, which I’m willing to bet if you’re a pc gamer, you literally have more than enough.
I beat Alyx on a $250 headset and a laptop with an underclocked 1060. In my shitty 800 sq ft apartment’s dining room. And it was still an absolutely phenomenal experience. Was it top of the line? No. But it was still plenty playable. These days my pc is in my bedroom and I just hook it up and play in the empty space in front of my bed. You absolutely CAN sink thousands of dollars and a dedicated space into it if you really want to. But it’s hardly a requirement.
Definitely agree with everything you said… Except that Souls games are Metroidvanias. Backtracking is really the only thing that most souls-likes share with Metroidvanias. Unlocking gameplay abilities that also function as environmental keys is the main defining feature of Metroidvanias IMO.
Alyx honestly lived up to the hype. The only things that bugged me were that enemies were too slow (the fast zombie was removed entirely) and certain objects like coats weren’t able to be picked up like they could in Boneworks. I wanted to throw a coat over zombies and beat them like a pinata with a crowbar. :)
Spoilers for Alyx for all those without VR headsetsHonestly, all it’s doing is retconning the ending of Episode 2 in a slightly different way while still presenting that cliffhanger. It made me lose a lot of faith in their writers, and it will be hell to explain such a janky twist to non-VR players.
It's definitely not going to live up to the hype. We already know what Hollow Knight is like, and we've seen a demo of what Silksong will be like from last year's E3, and... it's really not that much different. Not that that's an inherently bad thing, since Hollow Knight was already really good, so any improvement on that is only going to be better.
I worry that it'll suffer a similar fate to Duke Nukem Forever. In a vacuum, DNF isn't necessarily a bad game, but it suffered from being overhyped for years. So when it came out and just turned out to be "okay", that was the final nail in the coffin for the Duke Nukem franchise. I hope I'm wrong, though.
Overhyping aside, I’d say that not being much different from Hollow Knight is exactly what people want. HK was amazing. If Silksong is just HK but with a different map and enemies, I’d be ecstatic.
This is my take. I have ~50 hours in Hollow Knight, which is insane for a platformer. If all team cherry ever did was expand the map and add new enemies/bosses I’d be stoked.
Story trailer for an action game is wild 😂 You'd think among KOEI TECMO, Team Ninja, and Platinum someone would think to drop a Combo MAD trailer or something to showcase the cool action—the freaking selling point—instead.
This isn’t an upstart trying to make a name for themselves. It is the fourth game in one of the most legendary sub-franchises (that is part of one of the most legendary franchises) by two of the most established and tested developers out there. Like, Platinum have had a rough few years but the actual combat of their games is still almost universally praised and Team Ninja are arguably even bigger at this point.
I would love to see more actual gameplay. But nobody is going to decide to buy this, one way or another, based on gameplay footage. We already know what the game is. And a story trailer is a better sizzle reel for the keighleys audience.
Disco Elysium is the kind of game I’d love to sit down with the developers/producers and try to play it, and ask them questions about it.
I own it on Steam, but I can’t remember if I bought it because it was on Mac, or if I bought it before I switched. Either way, I’ve tried to start it a few times and I just don’t get anywhere. It’s the kind of game I should like, but I don’t have the patience to learn it.
This post made me buy and play the game through. I did my first playthrough in about 4 hours and… Wow … My brain is going to be contemplating the story for a while. Incredible. Just incredible.
it is really good and I’ve been meaning to do another playthrough since they put out the free update over a year ago. I always laugh when people put up low rent “modern games aren’t good” when there are brilliant indie titles out the wazoo these days.
I bought this game on a whim after reading that the devs had said they’d rather people pirate it than have it spoiled for them. I don’t usually buy games full price, so this was a rare thing for me, but I have no regrets; it was one of my favourite games of that year.
I just love how ripe for thematic analysis it is. For example, I’m a woman who has read a bunch of feminist and queer theory, and some of my interpretations of the themes were drastically different to a friend’s. I found it really cool that I didn’t necessarily disagree with their takes, nor they mine, but we both resonated with the game is strong but different ways
Yeah, it sits at this very satisfying cusp where it is clearly saying something, once you get over the "look at this upsetting thing I'm showing you" level, but I can also totally believe people coming to totally different conclusions about what it is saying. It's wild.
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