I was actually surprised to see Ultima Online is still up and active recently. It must have a pretty decent sized population for EA not to shut down and repurpose the servers for Battlefield or something.
It wasn’t intended to be like it, but in a way it did have some of the same ideas. It did have the camp clearing parts with what was supposed to be a pretty sophisticated AI faction system. But the system never really worked as intended without mods, so the whole faction battle system just felt super scripted (like, nobody would come and take back control points after you capped them, even though they were supposed to until you completely destroyed the opposing faction). It’s even more fleshed out (and actually works) in Clear Sky. Which is why CS has been my favorite STALKER since it came out.
Oh yeah this isn’t a complaint, because I think it looks good. It’s just I notice it, and it probably is from almost everything being made on UE5 these days. However, I think MGSV was one of the first games to have this particular look to it, and that’s on its own in-house engine (FOX Engine). It could just be how the lighting and shadowing are done. Those two things are getting so close to photorealism that it’s the texturing and modeling work that puts things (usually human characters) into the uncanny valley. A scene of a forest can look so real… And then you put a person walking through it and the illusion is lost. lol
Has anyone ever really noticed how samey everything looks right now? It’s a bit hard to explain, because it’s not the aesthetics of any kind of art style used, but the tech employed and how it’s employed. Remember how a lot of early 3D in film just looked like it was plastic? It’s like that, but with a wider variety of materials than plastic. Yet every modern game kinda looks like it’s made using toys.
Like, 20 years from now I think it would be possible to look at any give game that is contemporary right now and be able to tell by how it looks when it was made. The way PS1 era games have a certain quality to them that marks when they were made, or how games of the early 2000’s are denoted by their use of browns and grays.
Is Counter-Strike a sports game by virtue of being an e-sport? 🤔
I wish there were more sports games like Rocket League, though. Something that is akin to real sports and played in a way that your movement and handling of the controls is the skill needed and not hidden stats behind the scenes like a Madden game where your handling of a ball is dependent on the character/dice rolls not the player.
I have the exact opposite opinion of procedurally generated continuity (because I play for the gameplay and that stuff keeps the game going well after the story ends), but share the same opinion of Warner Bros.
I had made a script that would allow me to set timers for my stickies as a demo. Spray a CP or doorway with 'em, set the timer to, like, 60 seconds and then go spam regular nades somewhere and just wait for someone to explode a minute later.
It did. You’ll start to see “mudcrabs” become, like, “diseased mudcrab” and other various divider names as they scaled up with you, the same as they do in Oblivion and Skyrim. It has the same problem of “oh no, I leveled up to 25 by only jumping and now everything is too strong for my wimpy combat skills to handle.” Though because the game is already tougher from the start, it may not be as noticeable.