Do it like Remedy does for Alan Wake: Pattinson acts and reads out the lines in (presumably butchered) French, but then have a separate native French actor do the voice and dub over him.
I’m still hoping for a “Definitive Edition” type update eventually. There are some parts that could definitely do with a retouching or restructure, the final act in particular.
I never really got the feeling of reverence for the originals personally, down to the references made feeling like lip service created by someone browsing a wiki who has never played them in the first place.
Choosing to set the game a 100 years later (so that they wouldn’t have to incorporate much of the original cast or story) but still shoehorning in two fan favourite characters never sat right with me either.
Also who replaces ::: spoiler spoiler Viconia. Though the whole character assassination of Sarevok and Viconia in itself is a travesty. :::
Studios like Remedy and Sandfall have shown you can have mocap done by an actor other than the voice actor and still end up with a great product. Stuff like this is just one of the many little things that make me feel like Larian had very little regard for the original games, and only used the IP for brand recognition and marketing. Which makes me sad.
That clip of Jim Cummings talking to a fan and telling them “please remind Larian that I exist” still breaks my heart. I guess Matt Mercer is a cheap PR move or something to boost sales but I wish Jim got to come back to do Minsc.
Ooh I remember hearing about that game last year. I was intrigued by the appeal of the premise of like, playing a bit part character in the universe so to speak. The idea of the “real conflict” happening between massively powerful factions and creatures in the background while you scuttle in their shadow felt very interesting.
Slogging through Cronos: The New Dawn, probably around the 60% mark now, maybe a bit more? I’m at the Hospital area, which I think is the final main area out of three. I have a lot of things to say about this game, and not too many of them are positive sadly. I’m really on the verge of dropping it and have actually taken a break from it today playing other games.
And it’s a shame because Cronos does have its qualities. It’s beautiful to look at, both visually stunning and with environments displaying immaculate art direction. The atmosphere is on point, and both the alternate-reality Poland with its brutalist nightmare architecture and the sci-fi future tech is fantastically realized - with the caveat that the “Travellers” the protagonist belongs to might be a tad derivative of Bioshock Big Daddies.
Where the game falls flat, sadly is the gameplay. First of all it’s a survival horror with a heavy emphasis on survival and a very weak “horror”. The game is not really particularly scary, even accounting for the occasional cheap jump scare. Instead it’s an absolutely gruelling action slog where the real horror is inventory management and ammunition scarcity. And this would have been fine if the action gameplay was good, but it’s just… boring, stale and uninspired.
The enemies are just the blandest garden variety zombies you can imagine, the touted “merge” mechanic feels cosmetic at best and doesn’t factor in as much as you’d think and without a dodge button a lot of the fights are just running around kiting and waiting for a chance to charge up a shot and repeat. Most enemies are slow enough that it doesn’t even feel particularly thrilling, you’re not really in danger and are just waiting for them to go into an animation you can punish.
On top of that the ammo scarcity is so ridiculous that I often feel compelled to reload my last save if I miss more than two shots in a fight as I don’t want to risk getting soft locked. I know I’m not a god gamer and my aim isn’t the best, but it feels too harsh. And yes, I’m charging every shot to conserve ammo already.
On top of that the body-burning mechanic combined with the restrictions on flamethrower fuel dispensers leads to repeated situations of running back-and-forth between bodies and a dispenser for like 10 minutes straight, which feels like an enormously unfun waste of time and just adds to the endless tedium and frustration the game delivers constantly.
And it’s a shame because the story is actually kinda intriguing. It’s what’s kept me going this far. I do like the world building, the mysterious “Collective” you belong to has me interested still and when the story delves into some more philosophical musings occasionally I am enjoying myself. It could still all fall flat though, as this is a time travel story and those often devolve into timey-wimey messes full of plot holes that fall apart under close inspection. But so far I’m still wanting to see how it ends.
Yeah I agree. I never used Gamepass as I am not the target audience, but the value proposition made sense to me and I understood why some people paid for it.
This new pricing makes no sense at all, wouldn’t you rather just buy the games you want at that point? $360 a year gets you a lot of games, even accounting for a couple of AAA day one purchases every year.
Argo Tuulik along with Martin Luiga were players in Robert Kurvitz’s Elysium TTRPG sessions, perhaps less important than Robert in the creative process and world building but still definitely participating enough to be considered co-creators of the setting. Torson and Mcclane were characters created and played by Argo and Martin during the tabletop sessions, for example.
Argo Tuulik was also a writer for Disco Elysium who was hugely important to the game, and wrote several iconic parts of it like the Hardie Boys. His involvement in trusting the people who betrayed Robert is something he personally regrets, and has talked about in his extensive interviews with the 41st Precinct YouTube channel.
For me that was the first ending I got, Rogue’s path followed by the Sun. I felt like absolute shit afterwards personally. I took Johnny’s offer because I was appealed by the idea of redemption, but instead he dragged Rogue down with him one last time. And then in Path Of Glory V had learned nothing, discarded all the character growth and ignored every lesson to instead let Night City consume her like it does everyone else that fails to realize it’s a festering swamp you must leave behind at all costs. That’s why the two endings that have a positive undertone - The Star and Temperance - involve the main character leaving Night City behind.