I haven’t tried everything out there, but so far nothing I’ve tried is true perfection. The controller I use as daily driver for my PC is an Xbox 360 controller, which I find extremely nice - except for the D-pad. It also lacks the fancy tricks of the PS5 controller - a controller I Iike less for ergonomics but love for stuff like haptic feedback.
Completely agreed with all your points. Act 3 soured me on the game quite dramatically after being pretty high on it after the first two acts, and my only consolation (especially having also read that Steam page guide to cut content) was Larian’s habit of releasing Definitive Editions of their games.
It’s not as bad as the mobile version from 2014 (seriously, go look it up if you don’t believe me!), but I still prefer the original art and sprites. Butchered is maybe too strong a word though, that’s more fair to say about the mobile version.
EDIT: forgot to mention they used the GBA translation as a base and discarded many iconic Woolsey lines from the original, like “son of a submariner!”. There are obviously a lot more changes but I’m not going to be full purist and claim everything was objectively better on the SNES just because that’s the version I’m used to. You can look at the full differences here.
I recommend Woolsey Uncensored, I think it’s a really strong translation that combines the best of all worlds. The Dancing Mad mod was also recommended to me recently as a way to add uncompressed, higher quality music samples. I don’t have any experience using it, but it looks like it should work on top of Woolsey Uncensored. Your mileage may vary, though.
Great points. I also wonder if fixed crises and era changes will make every game flow in a very similar fashion, leading to repetitiveness? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
No surprise it’s FF VI. Absolutely peak final fantasy. Classic Uematsu soundtrack, great story with an iconic villain and a lovable cast. Active Time Battles and a phenomenal Esper system for customization. Square at the height of their pixel art powers with some beautiful sprites. Ultros, the opera scene, train suplexing…
It’s a shame they kind of butchered the pixel remaster. I’d try playing a romhack version on an emulator if you’re interested, preferably something based on Woolsey’s wonderful translation (son of a submariner!).
The combat gets better, FFXIV has a massive issue of most classes only playing the way they’re supposed to on max level. I guess that’s common for many MMOs, but it’s especially bad here imo. I also stopped playing during Endwalker, so I don’t know what’s been revamped since then.
Even if they’ve continued to simplify and homogenise the classes, the dungeons and raids will get better. Once you get into the expansions you’ll start having more fun mechanics to play around.
The game kind of lost me eventually, but I’ve had some amazing experiences with it and it has a lot of good qualities. The music is fantastic, especially the parts where Soken is riffing on themes written by Uematsu like Coils and Stormblood.
Despite my reservations about the game of late, the stretch of post-ARR into Heavensward into Stormblood and post-Stormblood patch quests was amazing. And the community is unreasonably lovely for being an MMO.
He… didn’t? Far Cry was not mentioned at all and he had this to say about radio towers:
You may be delighted to hear there are no towers to scale to push back Outlaws’ fog of war here: these open world areas - really a collection of entirely distinct biomes, separated by hyper space or fast travel - reveal themselves fully on arrival.
Maybe you were thinking of this in the conclusion, but I don’t think these observations are incorrect:
It speaks back to Outlaws’ issues with stripping away the bulk of the Ubisoft formula and finding so little underneath - or more broadly, a general misunderstanding of what you ought to be stripping away here and why. The Ubisoft open world functions so well because of how this clutter weaves itself together so intoxicatingly that you can’t help but flow from one to the next, from looting to crafting to combat to gear to unlocking another area of the world and more. The heist flick works because of its characters - their complexity, obsession or greed - as much as it does the sheer fun of actually doing a heist.
Star Wars Outlaws, by comparison, feels like it’s blagging it - much as Kay can, when regularly caught out by some far more worldly syndicate boss. The result is a series of quite painful comparisons: it lacks the branching, open stealth of an Arkham game, the systemic options of a Dishonored or the incisive, relentlessly satisfying speed of picking enemies off in Assassin’s Creed. It lacks the linear polish and charisma of Uncharted. Lacks the animation flow to its yellow-ledge platforming next to a Horizon, or the sheer joy of taking platforming and making it into an actual game in itself, as in Star Wars Jedi.
He definitely got worse over time. It’s sad, really. Despite always exaggerating and overpromising he still used to reliably put out good, fun games. I remember Bullfrog used to be a venerable company, the first Fable was a solid game (despite not being what he promised it would be) and Dungeon Keeper was a classic. And yeah, Black & White were great.