You know, you bring up a really good point, honestly.
My friend had a similar complaint about Baldurs Gate III.
“Why so much body horror and gore? When I was growing up and playing DnD, we were never exploring that kind of stuff. DnD can be so much more than just body horror and gore.” Not verbatim, but you get the idea.
As much as I love BG3, I don’t actually disagree with his sentiment at all.
There should be an opportunity for people to play similar style of games that aren’t so gory or depressing or both. Not every stealth game needs to be cyberpunk and depressing.
System Shock 2 is begging for a remake with actually functioning netcode for multiplayer way more than the original.
Bioshock would eventually iterate on this, but the RPG systems of System Shock 2 are so, so deep, and I always appreciated that you could still get attacked by enemies while trying to hack machines. It made doing things like hacking feel very dangerous. Bioshock literally pauses time for you it’s so weak by comparison.
Top-tier writeup. The original will always hold a special place in my heart but Mankind Divided was an excellent modern interpretation of similar systems of gameplay.
This is one of those things where Valve actually actively sucks and is actively ignoring a growing problem because the old game just isn’t profitable anymore.
Expect this to get zero interest or time spent on it from Valve because they’re knee-deep in trying to release a Hero Shooter (rolls eyes).
I have a lot of respect for Valve, but situations like this really need to make people step back and question how much Valve care about the community that uses the Steam service, or do they really care more about how much money they make?
The fact that they keep creating micro-transactions for a game that’s been completely taken over by bots says “They don’t give a shit, they just want the money.”
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Let’s not let Valve get away with shit just because they’re “good guys” compared to other businesses.
Anti-consumer is anti-consumer is anti-consumer. Valve doesn’t get a pass for being Valve.
EDIT: To be clear, I understand that they aren’t required to keep supporting a nearly-two-decade-old game, but letting it become a place where outright abuse happens is a different story. If you can’t control the abuse and you don’t want to do anything about it: do the thing nobody will like but will solve the problem: kill the damn game already if you don’t want to support it. That’s what I expect to happen before they face this issue, they’ll shut down official servers and make the game unavailable before they try to solve the bot problem for a game so old. Valve has made it clear for years that they don’t listen to or give a flying fuck about the TF2 community.
Seriously, good writing doesn’t happen with “lifehacks,” that’s how you get worthless shit like Max Landis writing Bright. (Don’t you love white people trying to write about racism… without writing about racism? Just plop in any old fantasy race and it works, right? Right!?)
I recall almost two decades ago I got into it with a woman who was going to school at Digipen, and she told me what Digipen taught students about writing a game.
She said the point was to create the most everyman main character, so you could have the most customers identify with them, and be able to sell more units.
Which I basically said “They’re teaching you the worst writing techniques possible. Literature students would faint at this idea.”
She didn’t care, she claimed this was “good writing.”
No wonder so many games have such dogshit writing if this is how we’re teaching game writers to write for fucks sake. Pick up a god damned book and get thoughtful, people.
Like seriously, let’s get game adaptations of weird, interesting books like Steppenwolf or Naked Lunch.
Mass Effect Andromeda is mostly hated, but hot damn, it’s disappointing that it was, because it brought back all the best aspects of the original Mass Effect and iterated upon them greatly. Open world planets to explore with a big, fun to drive vehicle.
I would say it’s main failing was the story and the companions, which was generally forgettable, but the world building was quite good and the environments were beautiful.
For all the failures of the facial animations and dead eyes upon release, the actual game itself is really beautiful when it comes to scenic vistas and so on. Part of the trouble is you spend a large mount of the early game stuck inside samey indoor environments with these dead eyed NPCs, so when it came out, the opening of the game gave people a bad view by focusing you on the games worst offenses right out of the gate. That’s a hard hill for a lot of people to climb over, understandably so.
I just think it was incredibly disappointing because it was in many ways a way stronger game (gameplay-wise and environment-wise) than Mass Effect 2/3. It was a huge step up in quality for the franchise, but because of a botched story and facial animations, it nearly killed the franchise entirely.
It was also one of those games that suffered from Gamergate bullshit. Complaints of Sarah Ryder not being attractive enough and complaints too many LGBT characters. I remember when I used to think EA was lying that they thought they won Worst Company from The Consumerist because they had anti-LGBT people doing write-in campaigns against them. I believe them now, even though it felt like they were hiding behind that at the time. Because those are bullshit complaints.
Also, is it just me or did Baldur’s Gate 3 prove you could do a modern version of one of these games in the classic isometric overhead view style?
I’d love to see a Mass Effect style game in a modern isometric overhead view turn-based tactical combat type situation, like X-COM but more like an RPG than a tactical combat game with minor RPG elements.
This just in: Shitty and unethical company known for shitty, unethical practices and absolutely bonkers PR statements like “AAAA games” unsurprisingly continues to be shitty and unethical company. There’s not more at 11 because that’s all there is to it.
Steam suspicously absent from this conversation, but I’m willing to be patient and see.
It’s a positive attitude for Spencer to take, but would have to see it in practice to be able to make judgment on if he really stands behind those words or if he is simply making a strategic business decision whose real motives are simply masked by these words.
The latter is par for the course for corporations, so we don’t have a lot to lean on in favor of him truly holding these values, sadly. One can hope, however, that miracles can and do happen.