Well, I’m at least not surprised. They didn’t achieve good face animations through technological advancement, but rather by throwing tons of money at the problem, i.e. hiring actors and motion-capturing them.
When it stops being your unique selling point, you’re not gonna get as much budget anymore, at which point it’s either scrapped or you might use worse equipment, worse actors and give the actors less time to practice and redo scenes.
In general, the problem with realistic graphics is that reality is your upper bound. It’s difficult to inch closer to it and it’s easy to regress when you don’t pay as much attention to some detail…
You see, the problem is that game publishers have been innovating hard…
…ly, so modern games are barely an improvement over old games, except in terms of graphics. In particular, they want to continue not innovating by re-releasing those same old games with new graphics slapped onto them.
If everyone could just play those old titles, then they wouldn’t need to play the new titles, which would be very bad, because it would mean game publishers would need to innovate.
So, a few years back, I checked out this game made by a community of AoE2 fans.
I figured, I’ve played RTSs before, normal difficulty for the AI should be fine.
Man, never have I gotten my ass handed to me so quickly. The AI rushed me before I even had the thought of building defenses. It just slaughtered my whole village.
Anyways, I did enjoy the game after setting the AI to very easy and giving myself an AI ally. 🫠
The game is free, no strings attached, so here is your legally required ad segment: play0ad.com
Yeah, that’s fair. I assume whomever headed this remake steered it into this direction, because they also liked it better that way. I also know some people find graphical fidelity a lot more important than I do. I’d rather have pixel graphics and the right vibe than hyperrealistic graphics.
Man, you almost feel bad for them, because clearly some effort went into this. It’s not like they just slapped high-res textures on and called it a day. You can tell, because that would’ve looked better.
But I don’t actually feel bad, because no one forced them to remake such a recent title. You don’t run that risk, if you remake something that actually looks bad in the first place.
I mean, trailers are going to pick the best-looking scenes. The comparison video linked in the article seems like it’s trying to be neutral and lots of scenes just look worse in it. I haven’t seen the actual game either, though…
Man, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, much less its title, but when I heard “Throne and Liberty” for the first time, it immediately sounded like something lazily slapped together. I guess, it makes sense that specifically the localization is lazily slapped together.
All the initiatives I’ve read so far, did have pretty concrete suggestions for how laws should be changed. In my experience, law makers will gladly consider a suggestion, because making laws is hard. Yes, that means lobbying is rather easily possible, but consumers are the group that does the least amount of lobbying.
Yeah, I had to figure out what it really is from Wikipedia and my two reactions were:
Ubisoft has a ‘universe’? Huh, I guess, they do have a few franchises there.
That actually sounds reasonably interesting. At least it’s not just yet another uninspired shooter.
And like, yeah, lacklustre marketing puts it quite well. I had heard of XDefiant before, but all I got from that was that it’s a shooter, which made me fall asleep immediately.
Had they sold it as “You ever wanted to pit the Splinter Cell guy against the Far Cry bandits?”, I would have at least remembered it.
But to be fair, a lot of games are currently coming out. It is difficult to be seen for pretty much all titles…
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…