There’s this open-source, Diablo-like game/engine, called FLARE, which I find interesting in that regard, because the basic gameplay is there. My monkey brain is having fun with it, i.e. getting an endorphine rush, because big numbers go brr.
But they obviously don’t have the budget of Blizzard, to try to hide that that’s what it’s doing.
I think, around 4 times throughout the campaign, you get the same spider model, but this time it’s five levels stronger than last time. 🙃
Apparently, it’s like Smash Bros in the Ubisoft universe, except it’s a first-person shooter.
So, you got different factions from Far Cry, Splinter Cell etc. with which you can play…
They’re not really for me, as I find it difficult to relax while playing them, but I’m glad they exist.
Gaming had a real identity crisis around the 2000s, when every other game was a brown military shooter.
Now we’ve got cute games and cozy games and artsy games, and I feel like that opens up the genre to more people and enriches the whole medium.
Cozy games are more difficult to make, though, because the gameplay is not anymore just “point cursor at screen and click in the right moment”. So, yeah, you will get some worse examples, especially as the genre is still figuring itself out.
I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.
More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.
RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…
As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.
In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…
I feel like this problem might be somewhat endemic to the US?
In my experience, US culture in general is a lot more positive about everything. Like, if someone from the US is not praising the living shit out of something, that means they didn’t like it.
Whereas here in Germany, it’s usually the other way around. If you don’t find anything to grumble about, that’s the highest form of praise.
Obviously, US culture isn’t one massive blob, the extremely positive folks are probably just those I notice the most, but maybe that’s also what the video author is fed up with.
Well, and then people from the US tend to also be a lot more positive about companies in general, presumably a remainder from Cold War propaganda. The journalists/entertainers from Germany and the UK that I watch, do criticize games quite directly…
Well, jokes aside, I’m not of the opinion that humans are either gross idiots or non-gross idiots. I rather think that their social context brings out the gross that lives in all of us.
Reddit is big enough that people feel even more anonymous there, and that there’s enough people willing to share their gross interests to form communities. When those communities exist, you also get an influx of users specifically looking for all of that. Lemmy is just not big enough.
I’m still curious to see, if the Microsoft leadership pushes them to do that, especially with the more recent titles being duds, but in general, I don’t expect them to do it, because:
As others said, mods and community remakes like OpenMW, Skywind, Skyblivion etc. reduce the value that an official remake would have. They would need to deliver something much better, otherwise they’ll get ridiculed.
They don’t have an amazing story or anything like that, where there’s a strong argument for playing an old title rather than a new title.
Their engine hasn’t made that many amazing advances since Oblivion. To make things look better, they’d pretty much need to update all the textures, which is a lot of work.
At first, I thought this was a screenshot from Lemmy and thought what the hell. Then I saw that it’s Reddit and all my questions got answered. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
At first I thought, they’re releasing this news now to drown out the Concord news, but 30 year anniversary, maybe they did have this planned a little longer. 🙃