I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?
But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.
Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
Create other games worth mention.
Have memorable characters.
Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
Have a story worth mentioning.
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.
It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.
And it’s a really interesting use case in fact, pre-filter a lot of input somewhat better than other tools could, but also much faster than the human reviewers could that can then do the actual review of the pre-filtered samples.
Disco Elysium for a 10er. Really, if you’re someone who has even the most passing interest in CRPGs, story-centric games or strong character dialogue, you owe it to yourself to play this. It’s beyond fantastic.
I kinda mentally dropped away from it when I saw the graphics, no way I can run that remotely usefully on a 3070. And from the reviews on Steam, it seems performance is bad in general. I’m curious to try it, but not if running it would just be frustration.
Yeah as much as I’d like to take credit, donate a few bucks to Open Critic if you enjoy this. They offer a readymade format for this, and they’re a fantastic service in comparison to Metacritic anyways.
More importantly, as a consumer you really ought to not be bothered whether CEO #1 gets 100% of the money or has to split 30% with CEO #2. Either way, some rich old farts are getting richer and fartier.
Yeah, sure, indie games and all. That’s nice. But it’s all the company side, and as a consumer we ought to look at consumer values, in which Steam is just strictly superior. It has features that are actually useful, a far far far far larger library, and most of us have a significant portion of our library there already.
Plus, hey: It doesn’t log you out every 2-3 days for not reason. 😑
Super hyped for this. It’s exactly my kind of thing, the gameplay being so reminiscent of Chrono Trigger and Seiken Densetsu 3, and the art style being so beautiful.
That sounds promising, because like you I really really really do not like the DnD system. But to hear that the game is decent in spite of that makes me curious about trying it soon, TYVM. :)