It is too big when the density of reasons to go there and explore becomes to little.
Personally, I don’t really care for games that have huge maps just to pass through while traveling around. There needs to be a reason in the story for every place to be there.
Every village, town or city needs to be filled with quests and stories, and the space between them as well to a lesser extend. They serve as immersive distractions. They need to be alive.
The map is too big if it cannot be filled with enough stuff to explore and experience. And I don’t mean climbing yet another tower, or doing yet another variation of the same puzzle.
TBH, I am not much of a sandbox game player and the JC 2 and 3 maps looked nice, but didn’t really invite me to stay and explore a single area for a while, because the areas didn’t have much depth. I prefer a much higher density of things to do. Each village should have a couple of hours of content, exploring it and the neighboring area. And larger towns or cities even more.
I want to minimize the ‘just cruising through’ parts of maps.
Cyberpunk as well had too much dead space when it comes to stuff to do in many parts of the city. Some parts of course act as just the background for other parts, which is fine. But other parts where beautifully handcrafted and interesting, but there is not much to interact with or people to talk to there.
To me it is important to have enough content and depth that the player learns to get to know their way around a place, and gets to know characters and develop relationship with each place.
On a separate note, the BG3 native Linux version is so strange. Larian is threating the SteamDeck like a console. As if it is a bundled OS+HW system with only one available game store and only one useable OS. So they are only releasing it in steam, not on any other store. As if that means it can only be installed on SteamDeck and not on other Linux systems on different Hardware. They forget that anyone can install other Linux distributions or even windows in SteamDecks or use other game stores.
This decision is so strange, because it disadvantages people that bought the game for PC elsewhere and own a SteamDeck.
Like will they make performance patches to their games gated behind which which store the game was bought from?
Maybe, but in the Kimmel case there could have been other reasons too. Like Hollywood people not wanting to make business with a company that would just cancel contacts when they have opinions on public. Disney needs those people, arguable more than subscribers.
IMO, consumer boycotts don’t really work in general, here it might have worked, but it is also possible it worked for other reasons.
I also don’t know what “Fallout 3 Remastered” entails, but if it means forward-porting the content to Starfield’s engine, that’d be pretty cool, though I do wonder how much effort will be required for mod-porting.
I think all their previous games will eventually get the Oblivion Remaster treatment. So a frankenstein’d UE45 renderer + gamebyro backend.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.”
What? Where am I saying that?
Yes I would complain about all kind of stereotypes. Even the “white muscular tough guy” could be considered sexual objectification. IMO CoD is sometimes pretty gay coded.
Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
I wasn’t saying that. You can have games without a single character. Or where the character doesn’t really matter, because it just an empty shell you are driving around and not more.
But IMO I mostly play story driven RPGs, where you are someone, and where you want the environment to react to you. It would be awesome if when you run around with colorful hair or tattoos, it would slightly change the disposition of the NPCs or cause them to comment on your appearance. Don’t let this stuff be just cosmetics, it should be more meaningful, and embedded into the game world.
I don’t think representation is the main issue, it is more about how they are presented.
Striding for a perfect 50/50, doesn’t really sense if they are all just stereotypes and sexual objectified. Also there are many other underrepresented population groups.
IMO, it is more important to focus good well written and complex characters, that represent real circumstances right.
I don’t complain that AAA studios have gone ‘woke’ because they now include choices to select from marginalized groups, I complain about them because they are often do not offer a deeper perspective of people in that group and are just different skins.
In some way, I can understand, games often happen in a Fantasy world, but I would wish that selecting different characters would do more than just exchanging the player mesh, texture and voice pack.
Wherever Stanley Parable is a game or not, isn’t really important. Someone could make the argument that open ended games, without a clear winning or completion state aren’t games, but instead simulations.
Someone could argue that the winning or completion state of Stanley Parable is seeing all endings.
Other people say that to be a game, you need some kind of adversary or challenge to overcome, but that would depend on the definition of challenge. Is figuring out what to do in order to see a ending you haven’t seen before a challenge? If not, that would exclude many other genres.
So I just do not want to down the road of making useless distinctions, and be liberal in my understanding of words, and just ask if something is not clear.
I just call Stanley Parable a game, because the creators call it a game, you can buy it and games similar to it for game consoles and on Steam under the game category. Wherever you can or cannot find enjoyment in experiencing it, does not depend on wherever it is a game or not.
I would say many games with procedural generated worlds, like Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, etc. Where the main task is deciding where do I go next, where do I settle down, maybe there is some better place over the next hill, next planet, etc.
There are other games, where it is also sometimes not quite clear what to do next. Like games have a lot of progression and rebuilding of stuff that was done before because of it. Like Satisfactory, Factorio, etc.
And on a more literal sense, where you actually redo the game over and over to progress, like The Stanley Parable or Outer Wilds.
Some games have a very labyrinthine level design, where it also isn’t really clear what to do next, like Dark Souls, Subnautica, etc.
Or environment puzzles, where you have to figure out how to progress, like the Myst series, Riven, etc.
To someone that can upgrade a Nintendo switch to have 8GB of RAM, can install RPCS3 and play PS3 games on it, I would say: “Do whatever you want, you are a god amongst us. I am the peasant that lives the easy life with a SteamDeck”
I would agree about getting buying the cheaper version, if it doesn’t also might mean buying an EOL product.
If Nintendo stops providing updates and new games of the old switch (soonish) then (what I suspect from console gaming) then suggesting to buy the old product from Nindendo looks like they just want to empty their Switch 1 stockpile.
If Nintendo just treats the Switch 1 and 2 as the same console, with just different performance and price, but get the same support period and games, then I am fully with you.
I really hate most subscriptions, because the prices are often too high, they rely on locking stuff behind paywalls, instead of providing a good service.
Here is the difference, I am ok paying monthly for storage space, servers, and hosted/managed open source web services, because there is competition and standard interfaces there. They do not hold you (or your data) hostage to their service, what they provide is good on its own.
For example, if GOG invests money into writing open source libraries, apps and APIs to efficiently and easily share save games between devices. Let people self host the open source backend, but offer up a subscription for a managed instance, with maybe some voting rights for new features or support for games/platforms to be integrated into the open source front & backend, then I would be willing to support this.
And other stuff like this.
Use subscriptions to offer good services, which also allow you to improve the whole ecosystem, while also not putting yourself as the gatekeeper, and locking people into their service.