Player numbers aren’t that great daily on steam (considering most owners bought the epic version anyway), but all of the developer tracks plus most of the community tracks have leaderboards in the tens of thousands, even the hundreds of thousands for the seasonal track releases. There’s also a daily community highlight where players can race and compete on a community track hand-picked by Nadeo staff, so that really bolsters numbers on community tracks.
Multiplayer is kinda dead compared to the older games, but I also don’t think a lot of players play the game for the multiplayer anyway. There are even community playlists of tracks that you can play in singleplayer that go up to I think 50 tracks in size. So you can just pick one of those and play through a bunch without ever having to connect to a community server.
What I’m saying is that if a game doesn’t look interesting then don’t buy it. If you’re on the fence then at least wait a little bit for the reviews to “simmer down” if you will. I’ve seen it with basically every AAA game of the past few years. Some people hate it, some people absolutely love it, so they bombard reviews with those going in both directions. Wait til you start seeing more reviews from normal people, rather than those trying to seek attention and you’ll see reviews that weigh both the pros and the cons.
But yeah I mean if the game really doesn’t look that interesting to you then just don’t buy it! I’ve never been interested in RTS games, so you know how many RTS games I own? Zero!
A new one was released in 2020 on epic games and I think it’s on steam now. It’s a remake / remaster the TMNF/TMUF games. It’s just called Trackmania but most people call it TM2020. It’s a subscription based game with tiers, which sounds shitty but the prices are pretty normal. Like the best tier is $60 for 3 years and that’s how long most people play $60 games anyway…
I really don’t want to use this comment to shame people for getting their start in game design.
But it’s really weird to me to see a semi-major internet publication like this highlight comments from a guy with a youtube channel that has 508 subscribers and who has only been a professional game designer for 2 years as head of an indie studio, according to his LinkedIn. Sure, anybody can teach game design and even teach it well. You don’t have to be the next John Carmack to do it properly, but it’s weird that this guy was highlighted for an article in this way.
Also his first game with the indie studio is some sort of indie MMORPG that’s a parody of RuneScape.
I don’t want to spoil it too much, but let’s just say that the developers of Dishonored 2 knew some players would love exploring so they gave those players an amazing reward in the final boss fight.
It’s not really buggy anymore. Just unfulfilled. If you choose to play, I wouldn’t go in expecting anything promised at E3. I thought it was a stunning game, but it’s just different from what I expected. Also it’s not a GTA-like, I don’t know why people thought it would be…
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I will say though that I was (and still am) disappointed by how remarkably dead the city felt. While GTA 4’s traffic density slider did prove that it’s really really frustrating driving through traffic jams, even when I turned up the ped and traffic density as high as I could manage, it still felt like I was traversing a city of like 200 thousand instead of over 6 million which was kinda frustrating.
I also disliked the lack of things to do in a lot of the areas outside of the city. I felt like I’d get rewarded for exploring but it was really just more desert / oil fields / protein farms / solar farms. I know those areas are used for some of the main quests and a couple side quests, but it just was annoying not being rewarded for exploring when you are rewarded in the inner city for doing just that. There are a lot of unmarked goodies though, but the density of them really tapers out once you leave city limits.
Also I don’t wanna spoil anything but there are a couple cybernetic upgrades that straight up break the game. IDK if they’ve changed anything since I last played about 6 months ago… but some of them making missions incredibly easy and others allow you to just go out of bounds which I thought was funny.
Yeah elite just played a graphic on repeat for its loading screens to show seamlessness. If you have a really slow PC you can tell they’re loading screens because the graphic stutters a lot and it’ll take an insanely long time for what should be a quick transition.
Yeah. The worst case of it I’ve seen is in the “Come Fly With Me” quest in New Vegas. The indoor area is split into two sections each that are both multiple floors, and both of the floors vary surprisingly not at all in the way they look. Especially the underground section. The quest has you navigating the whole building about a dozen times too, so it just becomes a nightmare.