The first remake is better than any other game in the series I’ve played so far, and I’ve played most of the mainline games at this point. It’s not the best because of its camera perspective, and I think it would be actively improved with an over the shoulder camera like the recent remakes.
Yeah, same, for all of the same reasons as you. But it would be nice if they cleaned up their store page so it was better at conveying features, like Steam. Or if I didn’t have to go to SteamDB to see what DirectX or Visual C++ runtime I need to install with winetricks.
Given the things I’d like to see GOG investing in, it sounds irresponsible to buy Times Square ad space, but that’s just a gut reaction that’s not based on any real numbers.
Diehard might be pushing it, but I liked PoE1 and loved 2, even playing through the second game twice so I could try it out in turn-based mode. I’m really enjoying it but for different reasons than I enjoy Pillars. Sometimes games are worth $70, and I’m personally finding this one to be.
Fair enough. The Outer Worlds definitely felt to me like it was as long as it needed to be and no longer, and that’s pretty rare these days, as so many games are ballooning in runtime.
I do find the exploration in Avowed to be rewarding, and those items you pick up and a few sentences on a note are exactly the same as what I tend to find in Skyrim, with lore that’s marginally more interesting; I’m kind of surprised that you find them to be meaningfully different and better in Skyrim. The thing that Avowed solves by being a smaller game is that when I find a dungeon, it doesn’t feel like the last three dungeons I explored, because they didn’t need to make as many of them, so they could spend more time making that one dungeon.
I think what I’m getting at is that, from my perspective, the only thing that’s really in Skyrim’s favor compared to Avowed is how big it is, because if I wanted satisfying RPG systems or such, I’d find them elsewhere. I enjoy both real time and turn based games, and nothing about Larian’s RPG systems require them to be turn based, so it would be nice to see more of those kinds of systems in games like Bethesda’s going forward, but given how Starfield turned out, I doubt we will. Bethesda gives all of their NPCs schedules, there’s physics at play, and NPCs will care if you steal their stuff, but those systems never seem to manifest in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on someone’s head so they can’t see you thieving, so I’m not really missing anything in Avowed when those systems are absent.
I think attributes and upgrades tie back into gameplay, but we also all ended up playing stealth archers, and even if you never put stats into something that made things like lockpicking easier, it kind of didn’t matter, because the minigame wasn’t difficult and lockpicks are cheap. I think Bethesda’s games at least up to Skyrim have been great evolutions of the medium, but it also feels like, for all the work they put into their systems, they never got anywhere close to what Larian has built since Skyrim’s release.
To each their own, but Bethesda’s games are all too often criticized for having breadth but not depth, and as time has gone on, I’ve agreed with that more and more. Avowed is scoped smaller than an Elder Scrolls, by a lot, but its depth appears to be in its combat.
I’m about 6 hours in, and I’m loving it so far. The combat is very unique and feels great. The way the levels wrap around vertically often reminds me of Dark Souls. You can see some vestiges of the previous designs the game went through before it landed on this one, but what they’ve got is very good.
I love proc gen stuff for how it can make each playthrough feel different or even just make yours feel different from your friend’s. I appreciated that the enemy would remember how you defeated them in particular, because it called out those unique events. I also don’t know that there are a ton of settings where this mechanic makes sense outside of the two it appeared in already, so I won’t miss it too badly.
The first one I had was a GPD Win 2, in like 2018/2019-ish. You could do some fairly recent 3D stuff on it at the time, but it was better for 2D games.
Definitely not Batman villains. If they were Batman villains, they’d be puns like Egsek Yutiv or something to go along with the Harleen Quinzels and Edward Nigmas of its world.
The games that survived are doing fine. There’s a lot of reason to believe that what we’re seeing can at least be partially attributed to just how many games are coming out these days, even good ones. I’m already falling behind on games I want to get to just out of the ones released in 2025.
I see a lot of people responding to this news with complaints about David Zaslav, but it was president David Haddad who ran Warner Bros. Games for the last decade and who was responsible for overseeing all of the studios and their output.
By the time David Zaslav took over WB Discovery in April 2022, Monolith had already gone almost five years without shipping a game and lost almost its entire leadership team under Haddad’s management