At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a “you are here!” marker to help out.
This is actually new. They very rarely shut down studios until last month.
When THQ fell apart a about a decade ago, they bought the trademark and were doing business as THQ Nordic for quite a while.
Changed their name to Embracer a few years ago for clarity because, confusingly, one of their publishing arms is THQ Nordic GmbH.
As THQ Nordic (and later Embracer), they’ve been buying up studios (and IPs) for years. Being a holding company meant they were relatively hands off when it comes to development.
Being bought by them actually majorly increased job security, because they tended to just let studios do their shit, and kind of “understood” that a lot of their studios focus on relatively niche audiences, so they didn’t mind taking a financial hit here and there.
All that really mattered was whether or not the IP in general was profitable.
Then they had some sort of deal fall through or something earlier this year and that’s when things got a little shaky. Basically, they lost a couple billion dollars and now need to make “cost-saving measures”.
Now the commercial failures and lack of interest in certain IPs means less job security than it did about a year ago.
This makes me worried about Eidos Montréal and Crystal Dynamics. Particularly Deus Ex, since it was looking like Eidos might eventually get to finish its Human Revolution/Mankind Divided trilogy.
Yeah, I was really happy when they got Eidos and Crystal Dynamics out of Square’s hands. Deus Ex continuation finally looked like a possibility.
Losing Eidos would be especially bad for those of us who are fans of immersive sims.
And with Deep Silver, they excelled in giving us the great Eurojank RPGs we know and love (I’ll still die on the hill that Risen is an entertaining trilogy, probably because of the major tone shift after the first game).
New playthrough, got some .ini tweaks which seem to help performance quite a bit so far, not screwing myself with traits and character background like I did initially, and making gameplay priorities.
I was too overwhelmed the first time with all the different mechanics and forgot to do what I do with most Bethesda games: focus on a few select areas and ignore the rest, so I’m not going to bother with a lot of the mechanics I’m not interested in.
If they draw me in at some other point, might give it a shot. Otherwise, unimportant to me.
Other than that, I’ve been on a FIFA kick for a while. Still messing around with that. I really wish women’s football was more popular. I’d honestly pay for a game specifically focusing on it and ignoring the men’s side of things.
So far, Starfield is an awesome game, but now I have an urge to pick up my character on no man sky, and I’m having trouble putting that game down right now....
Not space, but it actually just makes me want to play Fallout instead. I love Bethesda games, but it just isn’t grabbing me in the way some of their other games did.
I’ve put in around 12 hours and I’m kind of done. Maybe it’s also because my CPU is limiting me to around ~45 FPS (or lower) in most areas regardless of settings, which isn’t unplayable, but it is distracting a lot of the time because it’s more “choppy” than just like a stable, if lower, frame rate.
I’ll probably wait to play it again until some more performance mods come out like they did with Skyrim.
I think, yeah, that’s another issue. It’s got a very disparate kind of approach with a bunch of mechanics that aren’t all related. I mean, that’s not unusual for Bethesda, but I think I also forgot how much I prioritize in their other games and was kind of overwhelmed here and didn’t really prioritize stuff like I do with Skyrim or Fallout.
And yeah, going to your example, boost packs was initially confusing to me. I get one from Constellation, telling me that now I should be able to get some height but then I realized I can’t actually use it until I unlock the skill.
As for how I spent my 12 hours, I absolutely missed out on a lot. The game is massive, but the performance issues kind of prevented me from really getting into it gameplay-wise. Also fucked myself with some of the traits I picked, which I know you can get removed in-game pretty easily, but since you can’t replace them, it feels like I might as well have not used any.
When it comes to mods, yeah. Problem is right now I’m on the Game Pass version, so Nexus has some but not a fortune of compatible stuff. I’ll buy it probably winter sale on Steam, which will have much better support for mods. Hopefully Creation Kit comes out early next year as well. When that happens, the quality and scope of mods is going to explode.
I mean, I might give it another chance before then, but I’m content to wait a while. I’m pretty patient with all games and usually only play them a year or so after release. Only reason I played this on release is because of my Game Pass subscription. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have bought it until like next year. Might still do that, buy it during the spring sale, rather than winter. No rush.
For me it’s probably Jazzpunk, but I liked Disco Elysium too. I’ve been looking for something to scratch that “Jazzpunk surrealist comedy itch” for a while and not many games have come even close.
IGN can exclusively reveal the details from IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions Survey, where the organization asked hundreds of video game developers about their pay, benefits, and working conditions.
I know it’s not much, but I hope that if you don’t already, you find some time for yourself to just make games for the fun of it.
Not if you’re already dealing with overwork stress, but if you have free time that you’d like to spend on something. No one has to play them or you could do game jams (even though that’s inherently crunch, it’s the choice of the dev rather than their boss and more of a self-imposed limitation) or do otherwise random stuff and just let people muck about with whatever you’ve created. No pressure, no deadlines, no expectations.
And since you know already know how production in general works, you’re well aware of the iterative process and won’t fall into the trap of “why is this taking so long and why can’t my graphics be as good as GTA V” or whatever, which a lot of new developers (and programmers and pretty much everyone) encounter.
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Don’t forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.
This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.
I’ll just be playing it on Game Pass and then probably buy it when it goes on sale on Steam in a few months. Probably Winter Holiday sale or whatever.
By that time, maybe the Creation Kit will be released (though, that’s more likely to be next year) as well, which makes for much more in-depth mods. Also any script extenders (which will very likely only work on the Steam version) and unofficial patches should be a bit more stable early next year.
Until then, I don’t really need it on Steam.
I keep forgetting to preload, though, which I should do when I get a chance, just to get the initial ~120 GB out of the way.
Kind of interesting that the vast majority of negative/mixed reviews are regarding gameplay/story rather than complaining about major bugs (although jank has been noted in a few, and I’d honestly be a bit disappointed if there wasn’t any).
We’ll have to wait until release (Cyberpunk’s bugs weren’t that prominent in reviews either), but I really hope this “lol Bugthesda” meme can die.
Regardless of how buggy it is, I expect Dunkey to somehow break it as soon as he boots it up, which should be entertaining.
You are right, but I just get tired of it sometimes as a “predictor” or that they should be lauded for not releasing something that falls apart at release.
Bethesda have a reputation for a reason, but the lack of QA (or at least publishers willing to listen to QA) in a lot of modern gaming has made some of Bethesda’s previous issues seem almost normal.
I guess that’s more an indictment of modern gaming than really a defense of Bethesda, lol. And for all the shit they get about “modders fixing their games”, they were the ones who actually went and fixed a lot of FO76’s issues after that launch disaster.
Either way, regarding the story… Yeah. I find that oftentimes the side quests (particularly faction quests or the FO4 follower quests) tend to be way more interesting than the main quest in some of their games.
As much as I love them, I’m about to be a hypocrite and say I don’t know if Bethesda will ever have non-janky AI. It’s the one thing that’s been fairly consistent over a very long time now.
Whether it’s enemies or your followers, or just pathfinding weirdness with NPCs, it’s like their AI is just kind of… there sometimes. If had a conspiracy theory about it, I’d say they’re doing it on purpose to get you to explore the world by finding your missing followers (of which I’m sure we’ll see many get stuck on different planets entirely now).
Sure. I don’t think I was pretending there weren’t any bugs. I think it’s more the dismissive approach toward their games before release that gets a bit tiring, even if it is often warranted in some respects.
Creation Engine is buggy as fuck, and I’ll always expect their games to have a fair amount of jank at the very least. Even Obsidian had troubles with it (though some of those bugs could also be attributed to lack of time and testing).
But I hope that if this does prove to be have better release than their others (admittedly, it can be a low bar), that it sticks.
I had forgotten about the previous games, but since Skyrim, I don’t think Bethesda has done a proper credits roll because the games don’t technically “end”. They’re designed to continue long after the main quest.
For a lot of players, the main quest ironically feels like a not-so-relevant side quest that can wait (moreso with Skyrim; things get weird in Fallout 4, where you can just fuck around for months in-game and never bother finding the son you’re supposed to be desperately looking for).
The closest of their recent releases is the ending of FO4 where after finishing the main quest you get a slide show showing the “consequences” of your choices.
In Skyrim, there’s nothing in-game. You finish the main quest and continue as if nothing happened. It doesn’t throw you back to before completing it, so you’ve still beaten everything (some NPCs might comment on it, actually, but I might be misremembering due to mods which add in stuff like that), but nothing else changes.
You can finish every single quest and side quest (actually this is technically impossible due to some side quests being never-ending repeatable stuff) and still never get a credits roll.
Lol, it’s kind of funny because the first time I played, I was hoping to get a credits roll with Skyrim and was confused when it didn’t happen.
Instead, I just one-shotted Alduin with a dagger or bow or some OP stealth nonsense, got teleported back to Paarthurnax who had a bunch of dragons with him saying their mourning stuff in dragon tongue, spoke to him and Odahviing, then they took to the sky and that was it.
After that, you can go talk to the Greybeards or the Blades (you won’t get to speak to best bud dragon Mariosnax on the top of the mountain if you killed him for those idiots) and they’ll acknowledge it, but they never really speak about it again.
If you haven’t killed him, the Blades will straight up be all “cool, thanks for that, but we still want you to kill dragon Mario so don’t come back until you do”.
Either way, you can then go off and kill a chicken in Riverwood and deal with all that nonsense. Or go and do some side quest elsewhere.
But never credits. Not in any of my several playthroughs at least.
FO4 at least has the slideshow. I guess it’s more necessary because you lose actual factions which can affect some stuff post-game. And also the Ron Perlman “War Never Changes” slideshow tradition.
In Skyrim, you can just be the guild leader for every faction simultaneously without any problem and dragons don’t stop spawning or trying to kill you after defeating Alduin, so almost nothing changes like it might in the Fallout games.
I actually liked Anthem and Andromeda. Had a lot of fun with them, if I’m being honest.
Granted, I played them after many patches quite a while after release back when EA Play was called Origin Access, so I didn’t exactly “buy” them specifically. Opinion might be different if I did, and probably would be if I played them on release.
Still, I enjoyed them for what they were. I guess I just wasn’t waiting in anticipation for their release or with any hype that could end up disappointing me, so I didn’t have to deal with unmet expectations.
Haelian published a video a week or so ago setting out the probabilities for why it was so unlikely that this difficulty configuration would ever be beat: youtu.be/S-VUzcJHWF0...
It’s funny, before they were everywhere, open world games were my jam. Now there are only a few where I actually pay attention to the world.
I typically treat open world games as linear in some way. Go from one story/side mission to the next without really bothering to explore. Especially for large games. Some exceptions, but not many. I’ve become a chronic fast traveler and I have no intention of changing that.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the work put into a lot of these games, it’s more that I simply don’t have the energy or time to actually get into it all and it doesn’t bother me that I’m “missing out”.
In general, I just crave linear and relatively short games. If howlongtobeat lists something as more than like 12 - 15 hours for a non-RPG/immersim game, I’m usually out. I’d have to really be enjoying it to stick with something for more than like 20 hours total.
Titanfall 2 is one of the best examples of a fantastic game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Everything’s tightly packed into a linear, but incredibly well-developed game. It doesn’t stop being fun, and throws new shit at you without being overwhelming, can be beaten in a few days (probably like two if you’re playing in long sessions).
I do sometimes go over that limit with stealth games, often because I play them very patiently and can spend a few hours on a level. But they’re really the exception.
As someone who loved BOTW, there’s no way I’m playing TOTK. Just for so many reasons.
I hate crafting and building. I can’t deal with such a massive world right now. And I think what it really comes to is that, while I can enjoy periods without narrative, I’m just not the kind of person who thrives in a “make your own fun” situation. Sandbox games never appealed to me, and TOTK is even more of a sandbox than BOTW was.
I think I was just lucky to be in the right frame of mind when it came to BOTW.
Yeah, this is a good one. Works surprisingly well for solo playthroughs, too. The base game for free is a great deal. Lots to do before you get to the later DLC.
Good writing, voice acting is miles above all other Elder Scrolls games, the magic and abilities are really fun (don’t know if it’s available with this free version, but Necromancer class is fucking awesome).
And so. much. lore. If you ever read the books in any of the games, there’s a particular individual who often comes up in necromancer books which sometimes net you a skill point in Conjuration in Skyrim. This game fleshes out that entire story.
You also get to discover areas we haven’t seen much of. Elsweyr, Black Marsh, Summerset Isles, High Rock, and more. Every province, basically.
Literally my only complaint is that I really loved Molag Bal’s voice actor in Skyrim and this new one doesn’t hit as hard for me. Actually goes for a few of the Daedric Princes. I know why people didn’t like his voice, but I fucking loved Hermaeus Mora in Skyrim. Also doesn’t hit as hard here, but it doesn’t matter much.
I should actually maybe get back to it. Kind of burned myself out, but now feels like a good time to jump back in.
There is some stuff (other than the story DLC) which essentially requires real money, but none of it is particularly necessary (although one could argue that the crafting bag is absolutely necessary, which I wouldn’t entirely disagree with).
When Todd leaves after TES VI, I hope someone from the ESO team takes the reins. They seem to care a lot about the world and lore. Lol, like I’m obviously not holding my breath for TES VII, but still.
Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?
Waaaaay back, almost two decades ago, I was super into the Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in. Played it almost every day. The only game I’ve actually fully 100% completed, which was a bit more difficult back then because walkthroughs weren’t as easily available. There were a lot of great cheat/guide sites that popped up around that time, and also physical cheat/guide books from before, but those were a bit harder to find where I lived.
(Speaking of physical cheat books, I used them a lot for for GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. The cheats these days don’t even remotely compare to the variety and fun of the ones back then.)
Anyway, Spider-Man 2 had legitimately the best swinging mechanics in a Spider-Man game (IMO). Not that the Insomniac games are bad at all, but I consider them to be the best since Spider-Man 2, which is still pretty high praise, honestly. Ultimate Spider-Man which was released around the same time was also pretty good, actually. The others were just less fun or completely dumbed down to the point where you didn’t even need to connect your webs to buildings.
I don’t live in a city with skyscrapers. So every time I’d either see second unit camera pans on TV or movies with a lot of skyscrapers in frame, or find myself in an area with a lot of high rise buildings, all I could imagine was swinging around through the area.
It was kind of like the Tetris effect (not the game, the phenomenon), but more of like… I guess I’d call it the “Spider-Man swinging effect”.
To be honest, this is why I’ve been of two minds regarding the whole thing.
ActivisionBlizzard needs a complete structural change. That’s not going to happen without someone else acquiring them, which they were seeking out themselves.
That it’s Microsoft who did that kind of sucks, but if not them, it probably would have just been someone like Embracer who’s also currently consolidating a lot of IP. Tencent is another option.
If Sony acquired them, it would have led to the same fight, only it’d be Microsoft complaining.
I understand why Microsoft is probably one of the worse options here, due to Game Pass and having their own console, but I don’t think there was ever going to be a good outcome for everyone here. It was ActBlizz who wanted to sell and it was never going to be a cheap acquisition.
Some other deal would have gone through (and be challenged), and I think people would still have issues with it regarding their market share.
I love obscure and overlooked games and want to share a bunch with all of you. Most “hidden gem” threads end up listing titles with thousands of reviews or that got some level of marketing. I aim to mostly avoid that. While you may see a few familiar games here, everything in the list below has under 1500 reviews on Steam...
Here Are Some ‘Starfield’ City Maps, Since The Game Doesn’t Have Any (www.forbes.com) angielski
Starfield's maps are not defensible, but fans are already starting to fix them.
Sweden’s Embracer weighs options for Borderlands maker Gearbox Entertainment (www.reuters.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.today/cxPph...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 10th
New thread!...
Starfield has made me obsessed with no man’s sky
So far, Starfield is an awesome game, but now I have an urge to pick up my character on no man sky, and I’m having trouble putting that game down right now....
What's the funniest game you've played? angielski
For me it’s probably Jazzpunk, but I liked Disco Elysium too. I’ve been looking for something to scratch that “Jazzpunk surrealist comedy itch” for a while and not many games have come even close.
New Survey Reveals That Many Game Developers Consider Their Career Unsustainable (www.ign.com) angielski
IGN can exclusively reveal the details from IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions Survey, where the organization asked hundreds of video game developers about their pay, benefits, and working conditions.
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry (www.eurogamer.net)
Starfield Review Thread
Game InformationGame Title: Starfield...
Starfield Day One Update 1.7.23.0 Patch Notes are now available (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
Dreadwolf's Delays Are Impacting The Next Mass Effect - Insider Gaming (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Speaking on a Giant Bomb podcast, Jeff Grubb explored how Dreadwolf's constant delays are also impacting the next Mass Effect game.
Starfield has housing system, player jail, and more reveals Bethesda in new Q&A (www.eurogamer.net)
Hades player beats unmodded 64 Heat difficulty run - "arguably unachievable in thousands of hours" (www.gamesradar.com)
Haelian published a video a week or so ago setting out the probabilities for why it was so unlikely that this difficulty configuration would ever be beat: youtu.be/S-VUzcJHWF0...
I used to be concerned about a game being too short. Now I worry that it will be too long. angielski
Title mostly describes how I’m feeling now....
Best "Lets Play" Series
What are the best Let’s Play series that you have seen? Looking for something to watch while I’m exercising.
Elder Scrolls Online is free on Epic right now angielski
Been playing this for the last few years. Helped me get through lockdown!...
How often have games made you do a double take in real life? (i.imgur.com)
Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?
Actual Hidden Gems on Steam angielski
I love obscure and overlooked games and want to share a bunch with all of you. Most “hidden gem” threads end up listing titles with thousands of reviews or that got some level of marketing. I aim to mostly avoid that. While you may see a few familiar games here, everything in the list below has under 1500 reviews on Steam...