Carighan

Carighan, rok temu

At this point it feels like Tim Sweeney is a generative AI which has been exclusively trained on taking a data set from Steam’s and Gabe’s decisions and inverting them. And that’s it.

Carighan, rok temu

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I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.

Bold of you to assume anything wil ever change with their total lack of QA.

Carighan, rok temu

they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2

And yet their successful games were SR3 and SR4, when the games could stand on their own instead of needing to tag along with GTA for publicity.

Carighan, rok temu

Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.

And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a “I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it”. It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.

Carighan, rok temu

I mean just looking at Elden Ring here:

• The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
• Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
• Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
• Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
• The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
• The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.

All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

If this one was that bad we’d hear about it.

Sorry to say this, but CP2077 was raked because it was Bethesda-levels of broken. What was oustandard for that game is entirely the norm for a whole company. It’s all relative, and for Bethesda, “entirely unplayable and broken on all levels of game” is the normal.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

Oh, that’s already out?

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.

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

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. 😑

Carighan, rok temu

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.

Carighan, rok temu

Uh, is it dead right now? Or why would it live, soon?

Carighan, rok temu

Oh. Oh the original “article” just accidentally the verb. I get it now. The “go” is missing. 😂 This is what I get for reading headlines during meetings.

Carighan, rok temu

If you want to try it before you but it, both GOG and Steam have a demo.

The demo is very good. I love how quick-saving is fully part of the story this time.

Carighan, rok temu

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. :)

Carighan, rok temu

Well yeah, LTT has long gone fully corporate. This was a problem years ago already, it was just always weird seeing so many flock to their channel when it was clearly a rote production like a 15 years ongoing weekly crime drama, not an actual tech channel.

Their production value is often stellar, don’t get me wrong. But that’s it. That’s all they have. It’s all about optimizing the production to maximize ad revenue.

Carighan, rok temu

Both share the actually relevant bit: The item went from LTT having it to them not having it, having not given it back to the owners either.

Carighan, rok temu

I will say that I hate to call something like Cyberpunk an RPG at all. It feels almost entirely like a shooter, with the RPG parts somewhat tacked-on. This is more evident even with the missing 6th spec tree and how, even after massive rebalancing, the whole level-up and spec-system are entirely irrelevant without a lot of mods.

Don’t get me wrong, modded the system works well.

But as installed, it’s just all rubbish and feels almost forgotten by the devs.

Carighan, rok temu

Yeah true, you’re right. Nevermind my comment. 😅 Especially on the background of wanting an RPG for non-RPG players.

Carighan, rok temu

Off-topic question, but I see this tagged as being cross-posted. How do I do such a cross-post?

Carighan, rok temu

The newest Spellforce was fantastic, so I’m tentatively interested now.

Carighan, rok temu

Interesting, for me that is opposite. 😅

I suppose what mostly the me for a loop is the per-character-per-statistic progression that results in another type of badge? Leading to multiple hundreds of individual progression bars now, all for some badge that I haven’t even yet seen anywhere except the post-game screen.