Ah, it’s good someone is looking out for the poor poor shareholders. Just earlier I saw a long line of them at the unemployment office, begging for food from passerbyes, destitute in their poverty. /s
To a healthy person, the current system is pricier and more aggressive. Things are constantly being shoved in your face, but they’re all purchase-only, and 20€/skin is just absurd.
But, I disagree that it’s more predatory. To a vulnerable person, the new system doesn’t elicit an addictive response, which loot boxes due to their gambling nature do.
Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.
If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.
And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!
Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.
The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.
If I had to pick one, Zenos from FFXIV. Incredibly overdone - even in a japanese-game context - hero foil, always used at moments where his presence doesn’t fit the tone and interrupts an otherwise consistent tonal progression.
He among other things wastes much of the catarsis of the story’s ultimate ending in Endwalker by adding a 6-10 minute incredibly boring battle with a ton of exposition for no reason right in the middle of it.
Yeah I don’t think his daughter is that hot on allowing a lot of people to do stuff with it. Last year’s animated Maurice movie was about the only thing in a long time, I think?
No like… it feels pretty obvious they weren’t that way originally, if that makes sense? That this got changed after the game was already out for a while, this wasn’t how it was designed at first?
How would that work? Considering I mean that past studies have always shown that this doesn’t work like that for kids learning things from fictional works.
(nevermind that there’s no way they’d have a gun except in some really ass backwards countries without any gun laws)
Not the person you asked, but for me personally to rate some open world games:
Hogwarts: 4-5/10. It’s pretty damn bad IMO, beyond the fan pandering.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: 5-7/10, it’s a slightly worse Far Cry (which is already damn tepid) but looks insanely pretty which makes it a good braindead time waster.
Cyberpunk 2077: Originally 2/10, laughably underdesigned and so buggy it felt like industry-criticizing sarcasm. Nowadays 7/10 if including the expansion, still quite buggy but not in a bad way, and the redesigned combat and character systems feel artificial but pretty fun. City still too dead and underdesigned, sadly.
Skyrim: 6-7/10, damn impressive at the time, but only briefly as the game was shallow as all hell, even in its best moments. Still impressive but it’s all on the mods and hence the players, not the game designers.
Witcher 3: 8-9/10, essentially same design flaws as modern CP2077, but given its fantasy world suffers much less from it, of course the empty countryside is, well, empty.
Subnautica: 10/10, amazing horror vibes, good progression, not too open and not too confined, focus on exploration.
Outer Wilds: 10/10, completely open and pure exploration, reductive game design done perfectly right.
I would - and I hate my saying this - rather recommend Avatar then. Yeah it’s a Ubisoft game. I know. Yeah, it needs a beefier machine to actually look really pretty.
But oh my fucking hell is it pretty when cranked up. And it helps the generic open world gameplay a lot to be this awesome looking. Fun to just wander around and take in the scenery, even when you leave the jungle areas and go to the plains and see the wind-swept grass and all.