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.
Having now had firsthand experience with this, I’m very happy I didn’t buy it myself. It is so soulless. And the characters feel nothing like their inspirations, while they are distinct, their distinctions just aren’t between Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang and so on. They’re just “random asymmetric abilities we tossed in”.
Ah well, GaaS ruins another in-theory solid idea for a game.
Watched a few reviews now and … it seems very disappointing. Some good ideas in there, but the characters aren’t who they are, guns are all anemic and samey stat vessels, enemy variety is inexistent, and the core endgame loop is boring and clearly just exists to sell you mtx.
What a shame.
At least with the tepid reviews (60/100 at time of writing) plus the low player count, there’s a good chance this’ll not be long before it is put out of its misery.
Still in early development, probably not that suited for a kid. The bespoke and enclosed experience of Minecraft would be better, assuming you can turn the shop off or limit it in some way.
I’ve finally got and sat down to play Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.
And I had not played since around release when I beat the game. I will say this: If this game had come out in this state - including the content from the xpack - I would have loved it. It’s still buggy and janky, but little enough to be funny instead of grating. All the new interactions they added like romances visiting you is amazing and adds a lot of details and atmosphere, and the new story being far more on-rails helps so much in establishing and keeping tension.
My one big criticism I’d still have is for how much the game sometimes struggles against it’s underlying design. The whole map being a city feels weird, because like the countryside in Witcher III, vast areas of it feel dead and empty. Luckily with the xpack being centered on the very dense and compact Dogtown, that is largely solved for the new content.
8/10, would recommend if you enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077.