Gamepass has already hiked their prices up, and is severely hampered on PC by offering “Xbox” versions of games that are often older builds with more bugs, fewer features, and if they’re multiplayer games, don’t allow you to play with friends on Steam.
Years after all the Gamepass hype and I still fail to see how Gamepass is really that much of a value. The only really defining characteristic of it is the day 1 releases, but more often than not those late disappointing on their own.
It’s still very active seemingly, after making this comment I started a new play through lol.
Basically each sub region starts off as “disconnected from the network”, so your first expedition to a new area you’ll have no help from other players, only what you bring with you. Once you connect the region to the network, that’s when other players items can start appearing in your world and vice versa. Now it’s instanced so you won’t see everything every single player has placed, just a subset. Now there’s also a concept of “bandwidth”. When you first connect an area to the network, the bandwidth is low so only smaller, lower level things will show up in your game. You’ll start to see some conveniently placed ladders and ropes mostly. So you go from being 100% on your own, to having a little help here and there. Which each new completed delivery though, you increase the bandwidth available, and you’ll see more / bigger objects enter your game world. Bridges can that span a river, timefall unbrellas that let you wait out a storm with some music, watchtowers that can give you a Birds Eye view, things of that nature. When you get the bandwidth really high, you’ll start to see bigger structures like sections of floating highways allowing truck travel, and even underground bunkers that function just like private rooms do in the big locations. So the more time you spend in one area completing bigger deliveries that need to be delivered faster, the game very gradually adds more player support to the game. So the game retains its challenge when you’re first entering an unexplored area, but makes it less tedious to deliver follow up deliveries as time goes on. It’s really brilliant in my opinion. Because while it’s fun to man vs wild your way to new places, it wouldn’t be as fun to keep treading the same route the same way over and over. The way they’ve implemented this system keeps things relatively fresh.
Another factor is that the timefall rain will degrade both your and other players structures over time. So without maintenance, things placed down will eventually be destroyed. You can haul resources to both your own structures as well as other players to keep them repaired. Bigger structures require more resources and collaboration to maintain. You can also favorite certain players and then their stuff specifically might show up in your game more so than random players, so you can almost have an asynchronous “friendship” with someone you never see.
The sudden surge in journalism coverage he’s gotten in the last 5+ years are because of his dramatic departure from Konami and the Metal Gear series which his name was practically synonymous with, and he struck out on his own and made his own game studio where he makes very good, high production value AAA games that are extremely unique and experimental in nature.
Like it’s perfectly understandable to not like Death Stranding because of how niche its appeal is, but the thing is the gaming industry has become such a homogenous mess of samey, formulaic, safe games. Kojima is so relevant right now because he’s now one of if not the biggest studios that’s just making games out of passion, and not just the biggest return on investment.
Ultimately it’s a logistics simulator, like Euro/ American truck simulator or Snowrunner, but instead of hauling things around in trucks, you do it on foot, via motorcycle, and even sometimes trucks. In the beginning you grab a couple packages and hoof it in foot from A to B. The further you get, the more you can transport at once, and the more complicated the routes get, more difficult the terrain gets, and the more you have to strategize your overall route. A big portion of the game is exploring alternate routes and laying down tools to assist yourself in future deliveries or even other players like ladders, bridges, ropes, rain shelters, ziplines, canons, and more. It’s post apocalyptic, and so in addition to harsh weather and unforgiving terrain, you also frequently have to haul your goods through hostile enemy zones who will attack you and steal your cargo, or areas where you must sneak by the games primary antagonists, the ghosts/monsters known as BTs. A secondary focus of the game is the Dark Souls-esque “multiplayer” where the things you put down in the world can be used by other players or vice versa. You can make an entire side game out of DS by simply finding other players lost cargo in the world and recovering it/ delivering it for them, leaving helpful and informative messages and motivations, or even using stealth combat to sneak into enemy encampments and liberating other players stolen cargo for them.
If I had to distill it down into a single distinct vibe, think about post apocalyptic/ zombie type movies, I am Legend for example, where a lonely survivor/ wanderer has become accustomed to their new world and despite the hostile conditions is able to move around freely via the use of various tools and structures they’ve built up around the area to cleverly outwit the elements and whatever monster ended the world. Thats who you play in the game. You’re Will Smith in I am Legend but instead of being a lonely drunk locked away in a compound, you’re the neighborhood mail man.
Absolutely nothing like Majora’s lol. Majora’s Mask took everything expected about a Zelda game and put a put a twist on it. It switched up the formula while staying true to its legacy. It was a fresh new experience but everything you could want as a Zelda fan was there.
BOTW just abandoned everything good about the franchise and replaced it with insultingly generic Ubisoft inspired busywork. Whatever Zelda DNA that was left is just window dressing.
I WISH we could one day get a spiritual successor to MM, but I guess we have to wait for Nintendo to kick its Ubisoft / Fortnite phase.
Zelda: BOTW is a soulless Ubisoft game clone shamelessly inhabiting the dead shell of the Legend of Zelda franchise. It contains little to nothing that makes the Legend of Zelda games what they are. Gone are fascinating cities and towns, no colorful cast of characters, no real dungeons or temples, no progression system so the entire game is just 50 hours of the game exact same copy-pasted things over and over and over with no change in difficulty or approach. It’s like the first Zelda game in history without a memorable score, in fact there’s hardly any music in it at all. Theres no plot to speak of. It introduced some novel systems, and they deserve credit for that, but it’s just not a Legend of Zelda game at all.
RDR2 is a bland on-rails march from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with an incredibly lifelike and immersive world that… doesn’t really give you anything to do. And what it does give you, there’s no reason to do. The game revolves around your camp and allies but the camp hardly serves any purpose. You can’t customize it in any significant way, keeping everyone happy and supplied does very little besides reduce the amount of audible complaining. And the game shoves so much money in your hands from the word go, that you never have a reason to do any money making activities, and it upends the plot of the whole game “We just need a bit more money” Dutch says as I have $10,000 stashed in my saddlebags. Everyone seems to love Arthur as a character but he’s just such a bland, indecisive milquetoast guy who doesn’t hold his own opinion on anything. He doesn’t have any personality to speak of until the last third of the game, and then they expect you to have an emotional reaction to him by the end. John was hands down a better protagonist and it’s not close.
In CS 1 I purposely poisoned the entire city and it took a remarkably long time for that to have any real repercussions and can be immediately and cheaply fixed. Like you can tank a city, but it takes a concerted effort. If you just keep building roads and painting RCI the game just kinda plays itself.