Fair enough, tbh. A little bit of hype is always nice.
I struggled a fair bit. Performance hit me hard with really bad stutter in particular during some early boss fights, I also had weird CTDs after the first patch, and of course it has the good ol partially-hardcoded key bindings were trying to use alternative input schemes such as cursors, ESDF or truly alternative input devices is a no-go. Though these days I find it difficult to criticize any specific game for that, I hate how ubiquitous this problem has become. Like CP2077 still has it after so many years, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora has it, etc etc.
Oh, and one big one I just recalled: The online would disconnect, but without telling me. This wasn’t always bad, but the game would not realize it’s no longer online, so sometimes it “stalled” trying to check something online. Never found out what caused that, it was gone after some patch. Long story short I waited a fairly long time, then played it after a bunch of patches when it was mostly - sadly not entirely - fine. And loved it. :)
Why would you preorder while you don’t know whether it even runs on day 1? Especially with From, where the main game had serious technical flaws initially, too?
Interesting, but the implementation feels a bit meh. This implies traded items are sub-par, right? Since you get better items if you join the faction that causes them to be non-tradeable.
Should note that AFAIK there’s no confirmation that their project was in fact an actual Disco Elysium 2 (instead of a spiritual successor or something), and neither do we know whether a DE2 is not being worked on, just without people that made the first game.
Of course, it really does not bode well for any such game, but ever since Life is Strange 2/Tell Me Why vs True Colors where the former DLC-studio made a far better mainline game than the actual company making them managed, I am being more careful with considering a game “ded” just because the people involved with the game left.
🤷
To focus on the more important part: People got laid off. Which sucks. Hard.
Even in the very game, CP2077, as impressive as it can be, it can also be just as disappointing. It’s still a nice technical marvel, but it’s not at all the gamechanger it wanted to be.
And there’s games such as A Plague Tale Requiem where the baked lighting looks flat-out better in most scenes than the raytracing, since unlike the “realistic” raytracing they hand-crafted it to be unrealistic but fitting for the tone and atmosphere of the scene. So I turned it off again.
I’ll be honest, so far the only game where RT universally made me go “I’ll leave that on, that’s awesome!” is Riftbreaker. And it has a comparatively minor effect there, but at least a purely positive one (CP2077 I prefer at native rez over RT + DLSS which gets a weird pseudo-blur even with carefully tweaked resharpening, it’s just part of how it renders I think as other games don’t have this issue).
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.