I criticized your chosen abstraction. “go there talk to somebody and come back” is basically the definition of most interactions. That describes “going shopping”, “going to work”, “going to a customer” and in extension describes almost every quest in every game. That discriminates nothing of value.
I agree only a little. The game got more flak than it deserved. It was mostly a good game.
BUT CDPR brought this on themselves by building up massive hype with excessive promises they in the end were not able to deliver on. In addition they stubbornly tried to get a next gen game on last gen consoles which also failed hard.
I think a lot of the stuff that went wrong was management and marketing related and could have been avoided.
I also enjoyed it playing on GeForceNow. I didn’t build up any game specific hype. I only looked forward to the next CDPR game and avoided most trailers and footage. Going into the game without expectations likely helped a lot.
Which is, literally, not every major version. I didn’t say “all Unreal Engine versions are evolutionary steps over their predecessors”, I said “they don’t get rewritten from scratch for each major version”.
Someone else also brought up the Quake engine, which has even more evolutionary steps; even with forks like the Source engine.
I disagree. The UX design is a critical part of the design language of a game. The Settlers has a completely different setting than Assassins Creed or The Division. For The Division a “cold” and technical UI feels fitting, since this matches with the world it plays in. For Assassins Creed it’s a mixed bag, but since the back story in AC is also extremely futuristic and technical, it still fits. It would likely still be better if the UI was more aligned with the main-setting of the game than with the background-setting, IMO. And finally The Settlers doesn’t fit at all into this theme, yet the UI still looks like it.
Re-using the engine and the development tools is completely logical and a good thing. But the UX should be in line with the setting of the game, not the company that it was developed from. Because that breaks immersion.
Even the UIs of their games look similar, even though they are from different genres (Division looks similar to AC looks similar to Settlers). IMO that alone shows that they are not about making unique games, but about hammering their franchise into the heads of gamers. They don’t foster creativity, they try to apply the same formula to everything.
I think the game is full of different emotional triggers. The one that got me was the revelation why the person in question actually wanted to the moon. All the mysteries in the game around weird behaviors and circumstances suddenly made sense and the implication of what the moon really meant to this person made me cry. That was so damn sad. It still makes me cry just thinking about it.