Right?! Watching it get worldwide acclaim was this strange experience, because Act 3 was nearly unplayable. Meanwhile, Acts 1 and 2 were such masterpieces that it’s hard to call the game anything other than amazing. Criticizism felt misplaced, but the widespread acclaim it received was toom
I am glad it is a much more polished, finished feeling game now, and we can look back at it as the standard games should be held to, moving forward, but I’ll still be disappointed in the way we failed to get what was initially planned.
Fucking Amen. Again, I am disappointed, but it is a great game in its current form and, particularly because WotC is involved, I do not blame them at all for their decisions regarding BG3.
I had some really, really poor experiences with Act 3, and it was only later that I learned 90% of my issues were direct results of the Upper City being scrapped.
Karlach, Gortash, Wyll’s father and Cazador are perhaps the biggest cases of this, with their stories feeling incomplete, buggy (at launch), and painfully linear relative to almost every other plot point in the game. In almost every case it’s because a series of their events, triggers and event flags were placed in or tied to the upper city, and the events needed to be replaced, rewritten, and reflagged in something of a hurry.
Larian is a great studio, and they’ve made some of my favorite modern games, but they do this with every release. I’m a little disappointed that this is the one time they’re not going back and “finishing” the final act a year later, the way they did with Original Sin 1 and 2. I won’t quite say I’ve been burnt by the purchase, or that the game is currently unfinished or doesn’t deserve the praise it gets, but seeing what the game could and should have been is a bad aftertaste after an otherwise mostly satisfying meal.
Simplify the situation to lol defending the EULA all you want, but “I’m not bound by your NDA because I pressed ESC instead of clicking okay” is the kind of thing I expect a spoiled 14 year old to say while wearing a shit eating grin.
Act unprofessionally in a professional industry and you get dragged by professionals. And rightly so.
While I normally check both locations and buy from GOG if it’s available there, you would be surprised how many Steam titles are completely DRM free.
I needed some DRM free games for the classroom last year and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the smaller, indie games I own Steam, the ones I was most interested in bringing into the classroom to begin with, run perfectly well on a machine without Steam even installed just by copying the folder to a flash drive. Some required deleting a Steam.dll or adding a text document that states the SteamID of the game, but most of the games I wanted I was able to run from a flash drive, DRM free, no Internet, Steam or game install required.
Steam offers DRM to devs that want it, but it is not a DRM platform in of itself.
A couple titles that deserve mention and I don’t see in any other lists:
Children of Mora - Narrative driven action RPG with some light Roguelite-ish elements. Amazing world building and story telling, good character choice/building and gameplay.
Cassette Beasts - Pokemon, if it were good. Much more mature story, tons of quality of life systems that makes building things fun, a weakness system that matters a lot more than “number big” and the entire game is double battles. I’ve played the game start-to-finish in couch co-op and it was incredible. They’ve recently added online multiplayer, but I cannot say with 100% certainty that the online allows you to engage with the story together. Couch co-op has one player play as the companion character in an otherwise unchanged experience whereas online has one player character hop into another player characters world.
Weird enough, the Monster Hunter franchise - I’m not sure how this isn’t anywhere else in this thread. Use large weapon to hunt large monster. Build bigger weapon to hunt bigger monster. World and Rise are both on sale on Steam right now. World is dumb to move through the story together though, despite the fact that most fans who aren’t me are likely to call it the better game.
I mean, a small part of me dislikes the lost potential for satire. Dead Rising was always an over-the-top franchise, and Frank always came off as a kind of “wants to be taken seriously, but often finds himself selling candid shots of celebrities to tabloids to get by” kind of photographer. But the presentation was too serious and felt ultimately creepy, rather than being funny or coming off as social commentary.
Hopefully slinger won’t have the same softening mechanic as in Iceborn.
Speculatively, they seem to have replaced the mechanic with monster wounds and focus strikes, as shown in the focus video. I’m glad to have them keep some kind of mechanic to emphasize the importance of hitting certain parts of the monstet, because base world was far too forgiving with Weakness Exploit and ignore hitzone builds.
You’re right, but at least there are challenges to be found in FFXIV. Attempting to run past monsters and click the thing will result in death. There are clear bosses where taking you hands off the keyboard for 5-10 seconds means you won’t make it. I am sure the high-end of ESO has genuine challenges, but I couldn’t find them. This is a game where you can genuinely ignore enemies and afk during combat and you’ll still survive. o
To be clear, I think it’s devs really hit on a specific market: there are a lot of people out there who genuinely want a “wind-down, complete quests in vibrant world and feel like a hero” MMO. I was just bored out of my tree after a few days because I am the furthest thing from that audience. Casually getting into ESO, it is truly a challenge-free landscape, far more so than even the intensely story and social driven FFXIV.
It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.
For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.
I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.
BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.
Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.
Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.
Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.
A strictly anti-capitalist fever dream adventure RPG getting completely consumed and milked by greedy capitalists who added nothing of value to its creation is peak this timeline.