Hell yeah. Never played AC before as well–picked this one up on launch day and have been having an absolute blast. It’s FromSoft, so it kicks your teeth in a little bit, but once you get the hang of the combat system and make sense of the info on your screen it’s a ton of fun. If you like the dark souls style of combat (heavy emphasis on dodge-and-punish, demands near-perfect execution), you’ll like AC.
It’s a compromise between the classic AC games that were a bit more mech-y and a Soulslike (note that even the classic games were very fast-paced, we’re not talking about Mechwarrior here). Some people call it “Sekirobot” because it’s moved away from a few of the mech-y aspects and is more about high-speed soulslike combat but with a rocket-pack, guns, and homing-missiles.
Decrease grinds. I want to play the fucken game not do chores. I drop games nowadays as soon as I have to grind. Grinds aren’t fun, they are methods of artificially increasing playtime and engagement. That doesn’t mean hand everything out, it means make the things you do for stuff varied. I didn’t think this would be so hard but over the last 20 years grinds have gotten worse not better. We should be doing away with them in favor of engaging mechanics. Instead everything is more or less the same game with different flavor texts and models. But they all have grinds.
A grind is a lapse in content. A grind is a hamster wheel in place of interesting mechanics. To grind is to toil, all in the name of throwing it away next season to start it again. If I’m purchasing entertainment, I expect to be entertained and not simply convinced I am entertained. It is not a problem that it is possible to do in a game, that much is fine if you wish. It is a problem when the developers expect you to grind hours to achieve something. It equates to nothing but a long days work at the long day factory.
Example: AC6: Fires of Rubicon allows you to purchase mech pieces in a shop for credits. These credits are handed out at mission end. You can grind “The Wall” mission in under a minute to recieve a hefty sum. Or you can just play through the story again. Thats fine within the context of the game and I can choose to grind if I want.
Diablo on the other hand expects us to literally restart every 3-4 months and do everything all over again (except the campaign itself). Which in itself is alright cause the “Immortal Realm” exists. But that effectively turns each season into a massive grind. So if you want to participate, you have no choice but to grind. Its just a little upsetting I bought a grinder and not a game.
Yeah I played for 2 hours this season, saw that I have to unlock every waypoint and do a lot of the side quests and fortresses and whatnot. On top of having to get back to certain levels so I could actually start playing the game on T3… I kinda just noped outta there
Yayay! The game has run smoothly, mostly. But every few hours my GF and I restart our LAN to fix some stuttering. Also had some FPS issues with super large battles, but the game is SO DANG GUD that we don't even consider those speedbumps. Easily the best triple A in a long while.
One thing that I don’t understand is: if they have a day one patch ready, why leave it as a patch and not directly integrate it in the game before launch?
I think it’s kind of just an archaic holdover. They have a deadline for publishing the game physically, and while it usually extends to digitally as well, you can update the digital thing. If you get the game directly on Steam or something, you probably won’t even notice the day 1 patch being installed on top of the game, since in many cases it is integrated with the main download and not separate patches you get sequentially.
All day 1 patches truly mean is that they continue working on the game even after the deadline to begin printing the physical copies in time for release.
Which is really dumb. I wish they would just wait to release until the game is done instead of sending a bunch of patches over the first few months after release. It’s that kind of crap that makes me not want to buy games at release or even for the first few months because I know if I wait, I’ll get a better product.
Before digital was a thing, game companies had to fully test their games before releasing because there was no way to patch it later. I wish we would’ve kept the same mindset today, but with the ability to patch in case they missed something.
I remember things like… Different ammo types in Fallout not actually working correctly. Armor Piercing rounds actually do less damage because the calculation is fucked up in the code. Or the biggest fuck up: The slides playing incorrectly if you manage to solve the Gecko/Vault City issue flawlessly. It still plays the ending cards as if you sided with Vault City, instead of getting them to work together peacefully by replacing the president of VC.
Many infinity engine RPGs have game breaking scripting bugs that needed patching or still haven’t been fixed even through user mods.
Anarchy Online straight up couldn’t be installed because the physical media was screwed up. Bought it day 1; didn’t play it until a full year after release when they finally put a fixed installer up for download.
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade had an issue much like AO’s, with physical media being printed incorrectly and not working.
Just go and find playthroughs of some of these old classics. They just work around the issues. That’s what you had to do. In some cases, like soloing BG1 and 2, these issues were the only reason challenges were possible. lol
Aah, I must have been to young to spot those then lol. All I could remember off the top of my head is driver issues (specially audio, ugh) and reinstalling Windows because install corrupted the system and such.
Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
Dark Forces
Lords of the Realm 2
Command and Conquer - most titles
Warcraft - 1&2
Age of Empires
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.
Literally every game has a day one patch. They don’t just throw their hands up, say “yay, we did it!”, then stop working. They continue working on the game to push out more fixes because they can and society has accepted it.
I haven’t run into too many bugs in the game, but in combat it’s frequent for the game to have to sit there for several seconds thinking about what an enemy should do next. Hope that’s one of the performance improvements they’re working on.
I’m hoping they fix it so it will actually use all my power. Both my graphics card and processor sit at ~50% usage and low temp, while I drop frames when locked at 30fps. I’m still in act 1 but as it is now, I am concerned about when I reach act 3, since they say that is much harder on performance.
I went from pretty much a locked 60 to mid 20’s in act 3. 5900x 2080S and 32G ram with a nvme ssd. Put BG on pause for a few days while armored core kicks my ass. Hopefully the patch improves performance quite a bit. I don’t think I’m maxing out cpu or GPU either but haven’t really been monitoring it.
Isnt this the end they did on D3 and it made it just a flood of huge numbers and nothing was fun, nothing was this one drop can break the game for your build. If everything gets you there, getting there isnt a challenge. I mean I like ARPGs and I like when they have those moments like can I make it thru this fight. This dosent sound like that. But it also sounds like they are not dealing with the grind issue, that I thought a lot of their players were complaining of. And the grind here was for leveling not for gear (if I understand correctly).
I think the D3 model is fun. I was actually disappointed at how different D4 is, once I got through the storyline. I do agree that the grind is too great. I basically stopped playing after I finished the storyline. I tried a couple of different builds after increasing the world tier, ran out of gold and got stuck with a build I didn’t enjoy, and quit logging on. It’s worth noting that I’m just a casual player who would create a new character each season in D3, get to GR100ish, and then get bored and stop until the next season.
Well if you could fix it what would you wanna see? I figure you are the demo they are trying to get a hold of for the longest, the hardcore players some times can be whales, but the mtx on the everyday nerds brings in the good seasonal money. I think that the grind shouldnt be there at all, yeah the leveling should slow but the rates I saw were wow levels of grind for no real gains, sure you could place a node or two but I didnt see those being build defining (yet?), I play for the gear, sets or what ever, when I can finally spec out that uber break the fricken game build and then maybe farm up some gold for trading.
The MMO side of this game kinda makes tainting the world areas hard but they could offer dungeons that go odd places or something like candy on the map that you see once or twice in 8 hours. But for real, what would you like to see?
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.
I understand that Beth delayed the review codes, but I don’t quite understand why. The subtext of this article seems to suggest that they expect higher reviews from other outlets. Is that the case?
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
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