It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.
Would branching out into spectacle brawlers work for you?
In that case, check out Bayonetta 3 on the Switch and Armored Core VI on PC/whatever!
For something closer in combat feel to Elden Ring, Atlas Fallen maybe? But I haven’t personally played it and reviews are mixed, so can’t really say how enjoyable that would be.
The problem is more that generative AI is trained on the actual work done by other, actual people. And we have no legal framework so far how those people should get paid in turn.
Plus, let’s not for a moment imagine that Sweeney is saying this out of a firmly held personal belief. He’s entirely based on his reactionary stance to Steam. Steam goes against generative AI -> Sweeney is in favor of it. If Steam would say they’re against eating live babies, you can sure as hell bet he’d sing praises for that, too.
At this point it feels like Tim Sweeney is a generative AI which has been exclusively trained on taking a data set from Steam’s and Gabe’s decisions and inverting them. And that’s it.
The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.
And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a “I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it”. It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.
I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?
But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.
Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
Create other games worth mention.
Have memorable characters.
Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
Have a story worth mentioning.
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.
It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.
And it’s a really interesting use case in fact, pre-filter a lot of input somewhat better than other tools could, but also much faster than the human reviewers could that can then do the actual review of the pre-filtered samples.