Yep. Not every game needs to be a huge open world (or in this case galaxy.) Give me tight well written games that are complete on launch, that’s all I’m asking for.
I got this on sale, because I liked the original games premise but didn't want to buy a MP-only game. I've yet to play it though. XD I hope it lives up to expecations.
Helpful hint, it's not just video game programming. Those hijacked gas pipelines in the US, unsecured SCADA systems weren't because every sysadmin was falling asleep, it's because nobody pulling the trigger wanted to listen to the sysadmins screaming that blindly deploying shit without audits, was a bad idea.
In pretty much every single technological failure, there's usually a common thread. Someone did (or forgot to do something) in the name of profit.
Have a VP wanting to ram a newly acquired Europe entity through a migration and I am just yelling in every meeting about regulations. No one gives a shit so I’m just making them sign everything they say. CYA in full deployment.
On the acquired side, currently going through integration. We had a looking date to cutover a major portion of our systems and it was absolutely only a fail forward situation if it went south. Surprisingly, they recognized and listened to us saying it wasn’t ready and needed more time…got us six more months but definitely a rare moment from my experience in IT. Hopefully a sign that the new company knows what they are doing.
I can side with what you’re saying, but I don’t understand how forgetting something in the name of profit in other industries has anything to do with the pace of game development.
It fails downwards. And I know that doesn’t make sense but when you push something through as fast as possible everything below it falters.
QA is garbage, QC is garbage, development becomes garbage because of those fast timelines because something has to be cut. You can’t do everything you need to do with shorter timelines - and that’s where it becomes “in the name of profit”.
Just that it’s fairly similar across other industries. It’s a pretty common thread in most industries when people try to force things through without planning properly.
Also I wasn’t ranting about other industries, just making a note that it occurs everywhere. Profit for profit sake has made a lot of industries worse, including the gaming industry.
Edit: do you think QA/QC and development work only occurs in the gaming industry?
Many modern AAA games has become glorified toilet paper rolls. They tried to keep manufacture then in hopes to milk everything possible, then when you are at the end of roll they hype and sell you a new one. Make them feel like you absolutely have to play the next installment to get a closure or something new branching out.(prequel/sequel/reboot/timelines/etc.)
It was unsustainable at the pace and amount pre-covid, unhealthy for hardcore gamers as well. We have to actively not buying and playing new games cause I can play certain amount per day/week.
With covid and post covid, I actually finished more games compare to before. Well, the extra 2 hours not needed to commute I can do whatever I wanted.
Didn’t a mod get it kinda working not that long ago? The trains were still moving and the stations were there on release, CDPR just put walls up or disabled the doors to the stations/trains. They’re a little jank to ride but it was doable. Felt like CDPR just decided focusing on cool cars was more worth the effort
So, do people actually play Pay Day? All I know is that it’s a game. Haven’t seen trailers, haven’t seen anyone play it on Twitch, it’s like a “fake” game that’s a joke that’s been going on for a really long time
I mean the last one was released in 2013, it’s not exactly super relevant but if you’re that unaware of it I assume you were playing habbo hotel or whatever little kids played 10 years ago.
Holy shitballs. It feels like just yesterday we were firing up payday 2 on release day with a bunch of friends and risking having a seizure at any moment on the “start heist” page.
I figured yeah payday 2 was like 5 years ago, time for a new one. 10 fucking years… i need a drink!
Oh man, I feel old now. It was so fun when it came out. I remember the first time I solo stealthwd the nightclub. I kinda got burnt out when it went more absurd. Like after John wick.
Some people, like me, are probably just waiting to see what happens. Payday 2 was awesome, but after release it got microtransactioned and piecemeal DLC'd to high fucking heaven. I don't care if the beta is good, I want to see what it'll become before I get invested.
That is a pretty substantial subscription base, no wonder it’s profitable even if it at times feels like a really good deal. Like now when Starfield launched on Game Pass.
I am truly fortunate to work for a game industry studio, also Montreal, that has not seen fit to do this. A good thing, as I was hired on fully remote from halfway across the country 😆
Even if I were local, working remote has been transformative for me to the point that it is a criteria in my job seeking. I won’t, can’t take a role without it.
If done right, with the right trust and understanding, remote work increases productivity for most butt-in-chair jobs.
This again is why modern gamers are just fucking impossible to please. Bethesda gives you BOTH options. If you need to get to a planet from one solar system to another, you CAN just press a button and be on that other planet, or in its orbit if you haven’t been on it yet.
But that’s just it, you CAN instead pull up your starmap once that mission is active, see the star you’re at, and all the little dots youll follow to get where you’re going. You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission. Doing this, you’ll often get sidetracked with another mission, the choice is yours. They dumbed down interstellar travel as hard as they could without it no longer resembling what interstellar travel would be like.
I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do, and the fast travel is just for people who want to level/“beat” the game quickly as its own end instead of taking it all in, possibly and understandably due to player time constraints.
Fast travel is a convenience feature. People would be bitching if it wasn’t in there. Sometimes you just want to zip back to Whiterun Diamond City New Atlantis to sell some crap.
I think (for me atleast) the larger issue is the fact that I have to engage a cut-scene to land on a planet. I don’t have an issue with a loading screen in order to get into the system, or even just outside of the planets atmosphere, but it’s kinda weak that I also have a loading screen when landing.
It’s not really “both” from a space simulator perspective. There’s no option to fly down to a planet and skim the surface, there’s no option to fly from planet to planet without a loading screen (or even just to a moon), etc.
Starfield is a good RPG set in space and I’m enjoying it, but I think it’s fair to criticize that it was marketed like it was going to be a space sim by Bethesda and that’s not really what we got. If you were excited about the simulator part you are going to be disappointed.
I really have no idea where anyone got the idea it was a space sim from. They showed a good bit of gameplay that made it very clear that it was a traditional Bethesda game, with much more modern mechanics, set in space.
The issue would be believing anything not explicitly said or shown in a pre release showcase. You don't expect anything not extremely, extremely obvious or you just let yourself down and then blame the studio for underdelivering.
A bunch of that is of course the fault of marketing itself, but this goes for almost anything marketed ever, beyond video games.
I got a slightly better (though slightly harder to run on steam deck) version of what I expected after watching the direct. It's exactly what I wanted it to be.
It's just silly how people turn unsubstantiated wild speculation into some kind of unmet feature set.
I mean, there are parts of the game's major criticisms that are understandable and do impact the game experience in a way. The worst one for me is the lack of a local map. I've gotten lost in cities or complexly laid out buildings a number of times already, which is, suffice to say, not enjoyable and nigh on unforgivably clumsy to experience repeatedly.
I'll forgive, or even enjoy, say, Dark Souls for the same thing because it's not as complicatedly laid out and the world is smaller and much more visually distinct in its areas to make it up on the back end, along with the entire design ethos being very hands off in terms of delivering info to the player, which sets a standard compared to Starfield's polished to a sheen experience, which suddenly becomes less so in other spots, creating a negative contrast.
Others, like the lack of seamless planet to space transitions were never advertised, and though having them certainly increases immersion, visual spectacle, and thus perceived enjoyment and value of a game, is not really important in the grand scheme unless you wrongly expected it. I don't have enough time to worry about a planet transition, I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do there and what I'm gonna do next within the gameplay itself. With this sort of criticism, the game would be undoubtedly better with such a feature if it wouldn't have delayed development too significantly to implement, which no one can really say for sure.
Then there are criticisms like the fact that planets are limited in scale and you can't fly your ship close to the ground on the surface, which is just wildly beyond the scope of what Bethesda would be able to deliver and still say it's the same game. That would've been so complex it would've sacrificed other features undoubtedly, and shows more about a given player's desire for "Starfield 2: We Added all That Space Sim Stuff People Wanted that we couldn't before because we'd end up like Star Citizen" than it really does about Starfield's successes or failures in the features it explicitly attempted to deliver.
Back to the reviewers primary issue that in a traditional Bethesda game you experience the journey of going from one place to another, at least for the first time. Starfield has none of that. You never experience the journey of traveling to a new location, you just teleport. So effectively you are constantly disoriented, with no Tru sense of scale or journey.
It’s not a space sim and was never intended to be one. They made it clear almost a year ago that it didn’t have stuff like surface flying or atmo to space transitions. If you were still thinking it had this stuff at launch your weren’t paying attention.
The actual act of doing it gets old, but I do like the fact that you can't fast travel out of a situation in ED, it means if you go on a deep space expedition to make discovery money you are gonna be in DEEP SPACE, and you better be fucking prepared with a ship spec'd specifically for it because you do not want to turn around and give up because you couldn't fuel scoop or make a jump.
You definitely get a feeling of being a very small person in the galaxy with lots of things going on far away that you'll never see, and having limited fuel and constant frameshift jumps allows for more mechanics and complexity like fuel scooping or being interdicted.
Starfield lets you go wherever at a moment's notice which makes the galaxy feel very small comparatively and lacks stakes for exploration and jump range (along with the infinite fuel), reducing the need to have specialized ships. It also allows you to miss out on some random events that only happen when a ship in orbit with you hails you on comms. You miss those experiences if you fast travel past them all, which is echoed in other Bethesda titles with their own random encounters during travel that can be missed due to fast travel.
That being said, it's a Bethesda fantasy version of space, you want to do fun space opera things and having hardcore travel might clash with that, I can understand why it wasn't implemented that way. For example, no one mentions this, but I fucking LOVE bethesda's save system of saving the exact state of everything in the universe in that exact moment. Im a filthy save scummer and I love it. I like being able to save scum difficult space battles, and I don't think you can do that in most other hardcore space games, but I'm so grateful that I can here.
Maybe it’s because I’ve only just made it to Mars, but I didn’t know there was any other way to travel except for clicking and fast traveling. Click load click load click load planet. The tutorial tells you to do just that… is there something later on that says differently?
Hard disagree. For no other reason that it’s impossibly difficult to find/sort missions by proximity. You got one blue blip on the map or hud, maybe a white blip if it’s not active, but no options to make it active or to even find the mission in your mission list.
Not to mention, all travel is menu based. In space when you target a planet as your next destination, all it does is bring up the menu to fast travel to a location on that planet instead of… giving you the option to fly there yourself at warp speed.
Sure, you could do it one planet at a time instead of skipping systems… but it’s all the same experience You never truly experience the part of exploration involved in experiencing the space between origin and destination. So it might as well all just be exploration by menu, even if you pretend you aren’t.
I can agree that you absolutely can navigate without fast travel, but the whole design seems to be guiding you towards just fast traveling. From the menus always offering a “show on map” option, which then pulls up the prominent “land” prompt, to the fact that even fast traveling you’re apt to hit 4 loading screens completely killing any sense of continuity, and that only gets worse if you try to actually navigate.
It feels like a big series of set pieces broken up by a ton of liminal either loading screens or menus, depending on your preference of poison. I’ve never felt like I was discovering cool things, just going to the next set piece.
I don’t think fast travel is the problem. The problem is that there is an actual “exploration” part of the game, where you wander around planets scanning things and looking for points of interest, but it is by far the most boring part and I have not had much fun when interacting with it. There is nothing exciting to find, and it primarily rewards materials that I mostly haven’t had a lot of use for, because when I need something specific for research or crafting I can buy it at the store, because materials are nearly worthless in terms of credits.
The mini-dungeons and other points of interest you can find need to be way cooler for the wandering-around-on-planets to be worthwhile, and the actual exploration gameplay needs something more than walking across plains and hills in order to be interesting.
The best parts of the game are when you pretend it’s Fallout In Space and hang out in cities doing quests for randoms.
I mostly agree and have been defending it from haters recently myself. But there is one thing in the way of “You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission… I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do.”
Starfield is a “looter shooter RPG” like other Bethesda games. And like other Bethesda games, your time off-leash is limited by your inventory size, with valuable items dropping that take up to 10% of that or more a piece. Awkwardly, ship storage is just not that incredible, until/unless you either go all-in on outposts or all-in on megaships. Which means you do end up having to stop and go to a city often, probably the one with your next mission goal.
It’s not a huge gripe, but I think Bethesda has always used inventory to drive people back to populated centers to pick up quests.
Basically your choices with travel are “how many load screens do I want to see between here and my destination.” And that’s not really what anyone wants. It is not the same as being able to walk from Solitude to Dawnguard. Not even remotely close. You can’t even walk from settlement to settlement on a planet because they only ever have the one settlement.
Oh lord what a bunch of cringe. Who fucking cares? About any of this? There’s so much awful shit in the world and so many people spending their time worrying about the absolute nothing issues of the world.
Kind of the flip of the question but far cry 5 was particularly infuriating when it came to bullshit plot devices that override the players choices/skills. The boss fights were rigged with fixed outcomes regardless of what you hit the boss with. The fact that you could hit an unarmored human in the head with a rpg and see the explosion but the game was just like “yeah but the story says he’s alive so he’s alive. Also he is about to wreck your shit for… reasons…” drove me crazy…
This kind of stuff was what turned me off the Armored Core “Spiritual Successor” game Daemon X Machina. So many fights involved scripted foes where it wasn’t obvious they were scripted as undefeatable until I’d burned out half my ammunition.
That’s kind of normal, isn’t it? There are often immortal characters, that simply can’t be killed or lost or whatever. Like the dog companion in fallout 4.
It's not uncommon, but can be very grating depending on the circumstances. Dogmeat and the other companions are immortal because Rule of Fun - losing them would suck, which is why it's limited to the more masochistic (not that there's anything wrong with that) difficulty settings. Far Cry games generally try to seem realistic apart from some trademark trippiness, so when you blast someone with a rocket and they just ignore it, it's a bit jarring.
In-universe I think the idea is that you're tripping balls, it's a go-to excuse for "why is this boss fight behaving weird" in the Far Cry series.
Exactly this, Far Cry 5 did "ludonarrative dissonance" in a big way. Also, fake open world. 3 and 4 just had a bunch of annoyingly stupid story developments: you going into some Obviously Bad Idea or Diabolus-ex-machina shit - which is still really grating if you're otherwise playing methodically and cautiously, but they happened during missions and didn't intrude on the rest of the game. 5's stupid unwinnable kidnapping parties and stupid mandatory "drug trips" sure did, though.
Modding that shit away, it's still a reasonable game, but ye gods the story was terribly executed.
That is part of why I liked New Vegas so much, they were just like “yeah you can kill Caesar in camp, go ahead, the story is now differerent and you don’t get these quests but oh well, your choice”
I was under the impression that ludonarrative dissonance was when you purposely try to subvert the way the game “wants” to be played, rather than you trying to do what the game wants and the game failing to interpret your actions in a realistic or satisfying way. Like the people who try to be law-abiding pacifists in GTA V or people using armor stands to turn Minecraft into multiplayer chess.
It’s when there’s a disconnect between the storytelling and the gameplay. Usual example is Uncharted or the last Tomb Raider reboot: the main character wrings their hands over the possibility of having to kill a person, but the gameplay is you mowing down an army.
The open world itself is not fake, but IMO the game is "No True Open World Game" as long as it keeps hijacking you all the time. The world itself is pretty deec. If you're on PC you can try the Resistance mod, it lets you customize the game a lot including how intrusive the main quest is.
Duly noted, I’ll check that out the next time I get the itch to play. I disliked that about the game. It’s actually my main gripe. I didn’t like being careful of not blowing up too much stuff so that I didn’t hit the “main quest threshold” or whatever.
I just want to enjoy the outdoors and kill peggies.
Are there any weapon mods? I found the variety lacking, beyond the broken dlc guns.
Tons. I think some are included in Resistance, or at least you can tweak certain things to be less airsoft-y. Haven't played in a while. Nexus has a bunch of stuff anyway.
CS is what got me to finally open a steam account too. I can’t remember if it was the only way to play, or if it was a considerably better way to play. Either way, everyone playing CS was on Steam so I finally opened an account.
I played cs 1.6 at a few LAN parties, but didn’t own it. I didn’t actually join steam until after CS:S had been out a while. I actually bought a hard copy of it.
I hated the idea of an installer to install programs that had their own installers. It seemed like a pointless extra program to me, so I resisted getting it until I wanted to play Counterstrike and Steam was the best, or maybe the only way to do that. So I broke down and opened a Steam account.
There’s never been a CS2. Other than a version of the name of the set of Adobe programs (ie, Photoshop CS2)
CS 1.6 is the popular one. That version is about to turn 20 as well.
You’re probably thinking of Counter Strike: Source, the name they gave it when they released it built on the Source engine.
Then there was the current one, Global Offensive.
However, there’s a new one about to be released that I think is still being called CS2. Not sure if that’s the final name or not, I haven’t been following it very closely. But I think it’s due to release this month. Or sometime soon.
I saw at least 2, maybe 3 other comments mentioning CS2, so you’re not the only one. Unless you were talking about it elsewhere in these comments and that was you.
I was beginning to think there was another OG stream game I hadn’t heard of.
Fellow sept 12th here! Never would have thought that the simple looking launcher would turnout to be one of biggest juggernaut of selling digitale games!
Had to make a account so I could keep on playing CS 1.6. good times.
Its an open world first person shooter but with magic instead of guns, it happens in a Shibuya where all the humans have banished and the city is taken over by spirits/yokai both good and bad and the protagonist has to find its sister while posessed by a spirit that has his own goals but at the same time is what gives him powers, all around the story is simple but decent but the open world and lore is where it shines, a lot of missions where you get to know classic japanese folklore and help spirits trapped in this world for a reason or another. All around i enjoyed my time with it and the “gunplay” is pretty decent after the free dlc that they added when the game was released on gamepass which added a side ability to all three different guns/powers.
No problem! It didnt get the best reception when it was released as it was a sony exclusive that didnt get much marketing at first, but its a nice experience all around and if you decide to go for the story it doesnt overstay its welcome and if you have gamepass you can play it there as i did, so glad i made it interesting for you!
I had just never heard anyone speak about it, the premise and Japanese mythology already interest me, and it's developed by Tango, the studio ran by Shinji Mikami, so I'm definitely interested to check it out (though I know he's not directly involved, it lends a pedigree to their studio, to me.)
Scathe… got “scathing” reviews. Articles were written about problems with the environmental design, weapon designs, lack of imagination in aesthetic appeal in the enemy designs, the AI… but not once did anyone point out a problem with it being in a sub genre called “boomer shooter.”
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin not only duplicated Quake by using the Quake engine, having amazing level design, and the 90’s appeal of run n’ gun, but it also matched Quakes failures in that the Dev team left and had to be replaced. Right now Wrath is stuck in perpetual Early Release with no completion date in site. I’m sure the reason for that is its sub genre of “boomer shooter,” right?
How about Amid Evil? I spent a couple hours streaming that last night. It was an absolute blast. I haven’t been on a caffeine bender like that in years. I’m looking forward to streaming it again as soon as possible. I can’t wait to play it and its new DLC that’s about to drop. Obviously Amid Evils success is going to be because of the term, “boomer shooter.”
That term has obviously done so much harm or good….
Or it doesn’t fucking matter at all and this is a frivolous waste of time to whine about (as I’ve pointed out in more than one article I’ve posted).
We could be discussing something useful, but what matters to people is their egos. How important it is what term is used for a class of FPS games? People tried to argue with me about the fact the term “boomer shooter” is years old. Something that two seconds on google would make clear. But ego… I have had several people tell me they’d KILL people for using the term… I guess that’s acceptable behavior?
Okay, you win. Focus on trivialities while the industry moves on shaking it’s head while you shake your fist at clouds. But please, don’t forget to complain about not being taken seriously and for damned sure point out something trivial in what I wrote here, because that will matter.
Thank you for defending him. I’m sad to see you were the only one. I had an ulterior motive for my post. I apologized to him and explained my motivation.
Whoa calm down, While I was a bit harsh, I definitely didn’t mean any hostilities you might have picked up from this.
Genre names are just names of the genres. They have no bearing on the actual quality of the games that they categorize. There are good games in poorly named genres and bad games in aptly named genres.
I was just sharing my thoughts on what the industry calls them and wondering what other people thought about them
And I’m sorry for using you as the sacrificial lamb.
You have every right to ask the question, and you even did it reasonably.
I find it interesting that when I spend time writing an article and cross posting it, this is the level of vitriol I receive. It’s over the top and no one deserves this, especially someone that is just asking…
“Hey, what does anyone think about X?”
Least of all anyone that took their own time to publish something to spark discussion. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for not just posting a link to an article. Thank you for spending some time, considering, and then engaging.
I wish more people were inclined to do that. More people should rush to your defense for what I posted. Some people should even learn from it. Sadly, I doubt that will happen.
I honestly wish you well and hope you will post again in the future. I look forward to what you have to say.
games
Aktywne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.