Just glad to know it’s still kicking around. Ape managed to kickstart an entire generation of cozy games, while remaining the best among them. As long as its still cooking, I’m sure it’ll be great when it comes out.
oh man, I’m really tempted to recreate my Lawful Good Hexblade Warlock. I guess the opportunities to roleplay an insane fallen paladin aren’t as prevalent though.
I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is great for newcomers to the series, but I can understand if a fan of the original was disappointed that it’s basically just the first game again.
Kinda wild they’ve now done this for nearly every game in their portfolio though. We have multiple flavors of World of Warcraft Classic, Hearthstone had a Classic mode for about a year, D2R is basically Diablo Classic, now there’s gonna be Overwatch Classic. I guess we just need a Heroes of the Storm Classic and a remake of Brood War to complete the set.
You don’t even need to go sailing, you can just stop at not buying their games. Ubisoft has not put out any game I’d really consider a must-play in over a decade. The last interesting Ubisoft open-world game was Black Flag in 2013. Even if you’re an absolute glutton for open-world designed by committee slop, Sony basically ate Ubisoft’s lunch with Ghosts of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spiderman. Pirate those instead.
You don’t have to pay people to generate good reviews. You can also just only choose to give review keys to friendly media outlets you’ve already built a relationship and know will treat you uncritically.
Oh don’t get me wrong, the execs in the east aren’t immune to doing batshit insane things. Capcom is on some wild shit with their microtransactions. Konami really feels like they’re just taking a shovel to Kojima’s legacy and pulling out whatever they can. Nintendo is trying to find out if they can legally punch developers in the face.
But they aren’t putting out multi-million dollar flops. They’re not decimating their workforce to increase CEO compensation packages. They’re not getting swallowed up by the handful of fish who are too big for the pond. They’re just being kinda weird, which is a fine change of pace.
The issue with something like destructible terrain is that if your one and only goal is graphical fidelity, the only thing the AAA companies care about, then it actually becomes a massive resource hog. You’ll need to have artists render each photorealistic way that a piece of a scene could turn to debris. It’s the kinda thing that sounds simple, but could take a team of artists months or even years to accomplish.
If you look at an incredible game like Teardown which really delivers on full destructibility, you can see that they’re using voxels and the game looks a little blocky. It’s the kinda thing you can easily ignore with good art direction though, which Teardown has. The problem is that you need talented directors to conceptualize that, and most of the talent in the Western games industry is being wasted by corps that want to treat developers like single-use plastics and trash them once the current project is out.
Maybe the most fucking disgusting part of all of this is that it doesn’t even lead to more money. The shitty western companies are all fucking floundering right now because they have no institutional knowledge, there’s no way to become a veteran game dev at a company that churns through their workforce every 12 months, and suddenly you have out of touch execs at Ubisoft and EA wondering why people don’t play their games. All the innovation that comes from pouring your soul into a project for the long-term comes from indie developers now, and it’s left AAA games feeling as soulless to play as they are to make.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
Cyberpunk is very much not a shit game, it’s a pretty good RPG with a great variety of character builds and fantastic writing. The devs did an absurd amount of work in order to make the gameplay significantly more fun. I’d also make the argument that Witcher 2 is a really good game, and is what popularized the series enough for Witcher 3 to be such a colossally known hit. The two companies make very different RPGs to one another, for sure, but you’re just being a contrarian if you think the pedigree of the two companies is vastly different.
Bethesda’s game design is just too old. Playing Starfield felt like playing an RPG from a decade ago. Bethesda just got complacent from back when they were one of the only companies that could seriously do an open-world RPG, now we have CD Projekt-Red and FromSoftware with wildly different, significantly more innovative gameplay experiences. Hell, even other AAA devs like Capcom have been able to outperform in the open world space, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was a ton of fun.
Not too surprising, I imagine removing the PSN login was real close to just cracking the game entirely. Honestly not sure why people would buy the game and then use a third party tool to bypass the PSN requirement as opposed to just pirating the game to begin with.