Because it’s in a genre that has no good alternatives?
EVE is spreadsheet simulator, Elite Dangerous is space-truck simulator, NMS is all planets not space, StarField is StarField.
The only viable alternative I found was X4. Even that is slightly different from what Star Citizen promises (it’s more empire management than solo flying in the endgame, vanilla balance is also questionable: you can “luke skywalker” a destroyer with a scout with pure dogfighting skills)
My personal complaints (despite enjoying the gameplay):
Input lag. It’s negligible compared to other games, but comparing it to DDDA it feels much higher (meh vs “oh wow this is smooth!”)
FSR. There is definitely something wrong with the FSR implementation here, because there are minor traces of ghosting that are not present in other games. Rotate your character in the character selection screen, or look at a pillar with water as the backdrop with light rays nearby. That being said, it becomes less obvious during actual gameplay. I do hope that this will be fixed though.
Been playing it since release and I have to say I quite like it. The mtx is less intrusive than Dragon Age Origins’ DLC (no mention in game at all versus “There’s a person bleeding out on the road, if you want to help him please go to the store page”).
So far, the game is a buttery smooth 60 fps at 4k max graphics + FSR3 w/o ray tracing except for inside the capital city (running 7800x3d with a 7900xtx). The only graphics complaint I have is the FSR implementation is pretty bad, with small amounts of ghosting under certain lighting conditions. There’s also a noticeable amount of input lag compared to the first game: not game breaking, but if you do a side-by-side comparison it’s pretty obvious.
Sure the game has its issues, but right now this looks like something that I enjoy. Games don’t need to be masterworks to be fun (my favorite games are some old niche JRPGs that have been absolutely demolished by reviewers at the time), and right now I think it’s money well spent.
Final Fantasy is like Black Mirror, there are common themes, plot points, and names that persist throughout the series. However no two numbered titles share the same worldbuilding, lore, and characters.
It’s like what happened with Quake I-IV but on steroids. Very different games held together by a promise of what emotions you’d expect.
It doesn’t have to be turn-based. FFXI and FFXII are also great. I feel the bigger issue is that making a story heavy game while everyone else is also making story heavy games makes it no longer unique.
I wouldn’t mind going back to ATB, but I don’t think that would win back an audience except for nostalgia points.
When I said small I was referring to portable (kinda forgot the word), as hunts can be completed in 15min or less. I think I would still prefer World though, probably because I did 300 Narwa hunts in one week before they fixed the “loot drop tables” bug.
Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It’s relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.
Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.
And that’s fine. Plenty of authors are great at writing the journey and terrible at writing endings. And from what we’ve gotten so far at least he now knows what not to do when writing an ending.
The problem is that hardware has come a long way and is now much harder to understand.
Back in the old days you had consoles with custom MIPS processors, usually augmented with special vector ops and that was it. No out-of-order memory access, no DMA management, no GPU offloading etc.
These days, you have all of that on x86 plus branch predictors, complex cache architecture with various on-chip interconnects, etc… It’s gotten so bad that most CS undergrad degrees only teach a simplified subset of actual computer architecture. How many people actually write optimized inline assembly these days? You need to be a crazy hacker to pull off what game devs in the 80-90s used to do. And crazy hackers aren’t in the game industry anymore, they get paid way better working on high performance simulation software/networking/embedded programming.
Are there still old fashioned hackers that make games? Yes, but you’ll want to look into the modding scene. People have been modifying the Java bytecode /MS cli for ages for compiled functions. A lot of which is extremely technically impressive (i.e. splicing a function in realtime). It’s just that none of these devs who can do this wants to do this for a living with AAA titles. Instead, they’re doing it as a hobby with modding instead.