They don’t have a history of developing system heavy games / immersive sims.
They seem to specialize in very linear narrative experience that are extremely light on gameplay systems. Walking sims is what people like to describe them as.
These highlight videos are so frustrating, they hype the synergy combos then seem to struggle or avoid executing them consistently. The Blind Beast went virtually unscathed for the first 25 seconds and I only saw 1 wolf, 2 clear debuffs (the icon could have been covered up by the body or blended in with the red flesh), and 4 stuns in that whole fight. But even so out of ~11 attempts at the combo 3 of them did over 60% of the damage.
Are they serious with this? This is a joke right? No way someone looks at that and say “yep, this looks awesome for 2023”. I’ll pay $10 for this, only because I’m a huge lotr fan, but $10 is my upper limit for what I just saw.
Well if that gollum game is any indication, and the Amazon show, the rights owners for LOTR don’t give a fuck about how their property gets used and abused. I expect a lot more shovelware in the future.
Copyright for the first Middle Earth starts running out in 2032, 95 years after The Hobbit was published. Probably want to milk this out of money while they still can, even if it's for scraps.
Remember when they heavily implied mw2 waa going to be a 2 year game up to launch, then quickly back pedaled a month in to launch? Remember when they had multiple multiplayer maps in the game from day 1 launch that STILL have yet to appear in multiplayer? Remember when they filled warzone with at least 6 throwback maps that have still never been added to multiplayer?
Do not buy this game. If you are going to buy it, do not pre order it. If you’re determined to get early access beta then wait until the very last second to pre order it, then cancel your pre order after the beta. Speak with your goddamm dollars and stop throwing money at the largest video game conglomerate in the world just to bitch about the half assed product they’ll have waiting on you.
I always enjoyed the single player campaigns during the Xbox 360 era, so the “remade” trilogy is making me a bit nostalgic. Not nostalgic enough to pay 60 (?) Euros for a maximum of 8 hours of game time though.
I’m gonna go on record and defend the Deus Ex remaster. There’s no way to play it on modern hardware. The only game console that can run it is the PS2, and not even then. The PS2 version was a whole other game because DX1 was too powerful for consoles. So it was basically DX1 dumbed down. Maps were smaller, everything was reduced… it was like a “de-make”.
You can run it on Windows PCs with some tweaking, but if you don’t have a computer with spyware, you can jump through bigger hoops. Linux has Proton. On my Macs I can do it with Whisky. It’s really not hard, but I did need a third party tool called Deus Exe because the original DeusEx.exe was a complete no-go. I think it was made for Windows 98? Anyway, once I got Deus Exe up and running, I was even able to run Shifter, which was a mod for DX1 that tightened a few things up and added “legendary” versions of each weapon to various places around the world. I actually ran a mod of the mod, one I made myself that had more hacks to the game, like you could update your cyber link to rifle range, i.e. to use computers from across the room. Like V can do in Cyberpunk. Except DX1 wasn’t made for that so it was kinda game breaking. But fun. I mean the game was never hard.
Anyway, they’re bringing DX1 to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. And PC, of course. Hopefully Mac — the developer, Aspyr, has done Mac ports, but they were doing Mac ports of Xbox 360 games when Macs and Xbox 360s used the same PowerPC architecture, so that’s kinda cheating. That said, anybody porting to Switch is a stone’s throw away from porting to Mac since they’re both ARM64, and that’s part of why we even have Cyberpunk on the Mac now.
I haven’t checked Deus Ex specifically but my general experience is that Wine actually makes older games easier to run. In large part because you aren’t having Windows 10 use compatibility mode to Windows 8’s Vista’s 98 compatibility mode and are instead just tricking it into thinking those libraries are just there.
That said, I have no issue with the remaster. If it is good? Awesome. I’m willing to throw another 20 bucks down the hole if I want to replay that without needing to google for unofficial patches. And if it is crap? I don’t buy it.
Very good video that lines up with a lot of my own thoughts (yay).
That said? I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea that everyone should be able to beat every game for narrative reasons. My preference is for something similar to what Nine Sols did (AMAZING boss fights. Dogshit metroidvania and traversal), but I don’t fundamentally believe that everyone needs to be able to experience every game. Like, you can make an “easy mode” for DCS but… the point of that game is the fidelity and turning all of that off just feels “wrong”? At the end of the day, it is up to the devs and what they want people to consider “accomplishment” to be.
And we live in the internet age. I remember beating Arkham Knight, having fun, and then deciding there was zero chance I would ever want to get all the riddler keys or fight deathstroke a dozen times and just went to youtube.
But I 100% agree with the back half of the video. The game is very much designed to just take a break and wander off when you get frustrated. Which is where I DO wish there were more QOL features to make it clear what areas might still have a mask (preferably one you can reach) rather than needing to find a guide or try to guess. Especially when you don’t even get map markers for a decent chunk early on.
Yes. If you know ahead of time you’ll prioritize those.
If you are new to the game/genre and are struggling and even wiping occasionally? It isn’t a priority.
But there is also a big difference between having a few different pin types and just having “Well, SOMETHING was there?”. Hell, I still need to get around to figuring out which of my oranges are NPCs because I wasn’t sure if quest NPCs would be auto-tagged (they are, once you have a reason to talk to them again).
Which is another factor to all of these discussions. I fairly regularly push back on Dark Souls (and its successors) being a “difficult game”. It really isn’t. What it is is an incredibly well designed (first half of a…) challenging game. Everything up until Amazing Chest Ahead is designed to teach you how to play the game and how to approach encounters. And once you know that? You are in really good shape for the entire genre even if it is a game that emphasizes parrying (Lies of P), blocking (Sekiro), or beautiful beautiful loot (Nioh! Aka “Best Souls”). You don’t learn character builds (mostly “pick a single stat and work with it”) but that comes later.
And… some of that applies here. I know I made it WAY farther than I should have with no meaningful upgrades because I am a sicko/idiot. But for people who don’t know the idea that “Hey, this crypt full of skeletons is a mofo. Maybe go somewhere else”, they might be slamming their head against a wall trying to fight Last Judge for far longer than they should (although, questionable balancing decisions means that upgrading your health doesn’t matter all that much but that is a different rant).
But it is still the idea of a first game versus a fifth game as it were. And we all start somewhere.
Phew im glad they showed her get off that bike Im not sure I'm confident an open world metroid would work well. But who knows, maybe it'll be a Breath of the Wild moment for the series.
I’m skeptical as well but they already restarted the game once when the original development team wasn’t producing a quality game. I suspect at worst it won’t be the worst game ever but it would be subpar for a Metroid game. Nintendo is usually pretty good at taking chances and making it work. Hell, I never thought Metroid could work in 3D and they proved me wrong. I guess my main issue is that Metroid traditionally is a cramped corridor style game, the opposite of an open world.
Metroidvanias are at their core based on having areas closed off without specific abilities, while open worlds are about having the worl not be closed off. I don’t see how you can make a game that attempts both without failing at being good in either domain
BoTW did pretty good. Prime 1 was relatively open world. In BoTW, you could get to a lot of places, but some were still semi-gated by damaging cold, damaging heat, inability to climb slippery walls. In Prime 1, you could get to a lot of places, but some were still semi-gated by damaging heat, damaging radiation, inability to climb spider ball tracks. But in both games, if you knew the tricks, you could get around those gates (though in BoTW this was intentional, in the Prime games it was not).
I suspect it won’t work for them, but I think the idea that they can’t work is wrong. With a really passionate and talented team, I think it could be done very well. It’d take real innovation though, unlike BotW. BotW was innovative for LoZ, but almost everything it’d done had been done before. I would say currently the closest formula they could copy is Elden Ring, and it isn’t as much of a Metroidvania as previous more enclosed entries were.
The problem with the divine beasts is the entire trip to them is part of thier dungeon.
Someday I'd like to group a bunch of temples together, add environmental art to them, and release them as proper dungeons.
I haven't looked into modding the game yet though.
Elden Ring, the game where people choose to play the PS4 version on the PS5 because the PS5 version isn’t optimized well, doesn’t run that great on the Switch 2?
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