The funniest part of Ubisoft hate is when every other open world game uses “towers” (a logical high-altitude system to increase map coverage), for instance in Zelda, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, etc, while every Ubisoft game is banned from using them now.
They honestly weren’t even a bad system in Far Cry. They designed the climb to use different mechanics each time.
I’m certainly not expecting this game is amazing, but in terms of bringing a playable slice of a popular fictional world to life, I have a lot of respect for it. What I’ve watched doesn’t even fall too hard into the worst of Ubisoft formulas - and I would argue a lot of people can’t even identify what those are.
I don’t even expect to love it myself if I ever get it, but some of the hate towards the game seems so poorly formed and weird - stuff like “Looks like a mobile game” or “The main character is so ugly”. I can even get worries about it being a Ubisoft game, but just like EA, it seems like they do put out a game low on microtransactions every so often. I want to be sure they’re recognized for efforts when the game is decent.
Continuing this in the same thread as it’s a bit topical:
Are you a fan of Love Live! School Idol? Me neither! I basically knew nothing about it at all. Regardless, Gyakuten Live is an incredibly detailed cutesy Ace Attorney style game, in which the characters of the show gather for “school trials”. Though you may need to put up with a cutesier all-girl cast, and the stakes are much lighter and involve things like stolen possessions rather than murder, the mysteries end up having a surprising number of twists and even some heartfelt motives at the end. Features a fully custom soundtrack and LOTS of custom artwork, matched with some traditionally silly Ace Attorney humor.
So far, THREE cases are available, and each features a different prosecutor. The game’s page lists plans to continue up to 6 episodes.
In ItchIO’s standard, the game is “name your own price” - so you can choose to download it for free. It’s unlikely to come to Steam since it technically infringes on an anime/manga without permission.
One more coming if my AA recommendations are well received.
Surprised to see the downvotes (by which I mean, I’m surprised so many people know this, I’d never heard of it at all).
“Roguelike co-op game requiring close coordination” seems like a mega-fail by concept since I tend to think of co-op games as more relaxed. But, looking at gameplay videos, it reminds me of FFXIV raid mechanics in a simplified game format. I can see how that would appeal to some people.
It did pop up in my feed when it was in development. I think the time travel is neat in concept but just becomes too hard to wrap one’s head around - and from what I remember, the core RTS elements were a bit lacking.
In a way, I do feel sad about that game. Big AAA offerings take a lot of time for a studio, and the reviews say there wasn’t too much wrong with the gameplay. When they first started development, they probably didn’t know how bloated the hero shooter genre would be.
Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
It can be hard to encourage people to only do this for the obscure - and can sometimes lead to moments of “Witcher 3 / Factorio Unknown Indie Darling” moments. The dream is for threads like this to not contribute to successes that are already basically “lightning in a bottle”, but focus attention where developers haven’t seen so much of it.
I’d really like to see another time-based drama similar to The Last Express. It had a lot of time-based events where you could run into particular passengers of the train in the hallways, and gained a strong sense of physical “presence” as people pushed past you in the halls using detailed rotoscope animations.
The Invisible Hours comes close - it’s non-interactive, basically letting you play as a ghost cameraman watching the mystery.
I own Deception 4 on PS4, didn’t know what the original was like. I think there’s a lot of cartoony appeal in luring people into elaborate multi-stage death traps, but it’s tricky to garner appeal out of more than just a lot of animation work for each variety of trap.
The indie scene has focused on a lot of SNES/NES-style retro franchises, but I’d definitely like to see a return to PS2 aesthetic, especially now that we can render those scenes at 60fps.
I recently played Psuedoregalia, and it was a lot of fun.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
True - I think I meant to refer to it more as a generational issue; many people haven’t upgraded to either current-gen console yet because they don’t technically need them. PS5 might have few exclusives, but Xbox has basically none. (Many of their heavy-hitters like Sea of Thieves still run on Xbox One)
I’m aware that the PS5 is low on “exclusives”. A big part of the reason I got it was for simple things like being able to run old PS4 games at higher framerates.
We’re past the diminishing returns on visuals for games; not to say games can’t look ugly, but with a decent art direction, the capabilities of current consoles are more than enough. That’s why Nintendo was still able to sell Tears of the Kingdom for $60.
The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.