Interestingly that’s the exact thing I loved about Hollow Knight. I got so immersed in the exploration specifically because I got lost. On my first playthrough I ended up sequence breaking the game and cleared out deepnest, ancient basin, hive and kingdoms end before the city of tears. I was way out of my depth and I loved every moment of it.
Considering Xbox already announced Silksong releasing within a year a few years back I’m not even going to believe the release announcement unless I can put the game in my shopping cart.
I didn’t know the original game was remade. I assumed you meant layers of fear 2 because the original layers of fear wasn’t even on Unreal Engine and Layers of fear 2 is on UE4. Nothing I said was explicitly wrong. It was wrong in the context only because you weren’t precise with what you’re saying.
And how nice of you to pick out the one thing I was wrong on while completely ignoring all the other examples. For instance how the fuck can you put Subnautica 2 on that list when it’s not even in early access?
Well that’s a pretty shit list. You have there games that aren’t using UE5 (Layers of Fear 2), that are known to have poor performance (STALKER 2), that just released into early access (Inzoi) and that haven’t even released into early access (Subnautica 2).
I’d throw half the list out the window, actually probably more because the other half of the list are mostly games I don’t know enough to evaluate their performance.
I haven’t see how the level scaling works, but I’m assuming it works exactly like OG Oblivion for two reasons. First is that the underlying game logic is OG Oblivion and second, whether you liked it not, the level scaling was very much in the DNA of Oblivion so it kinda has to be there to feel like Oblivion. That said, the new leveling system looks like it might make the level scaling less horrid.
And so far from what I watched others play, the world is still as barren and boring as OG Oblivion. Personally I’m going wait for Skyblivion because the barren world was the main reason I didn’t enjoy Oblivion.
And if we were all smart people we would have far less laws. Sometimes laws protect us from ourselves. Anyone who has experience with addiction knows how hard it is to just stop. Instead of blaming people for their inability to stop we should emphatize and understand that this needs an intervention. If these predatory practices were illegal those people wouldn’t need to stop themselves because they wouldn’t be put in that situation in the first place.
I don’t think it’s even necessarily that the GPU pricing has ballooned. I think the main reason is that that every new game has to compete with pretty much every other game ever made. For example I enjoyed Death Stranding and I am interested in Death Stranding 2, but I’m probably not getting in on launch because there’s a big chance I’ll probably start playing Stardew Valley for the n’th time, because I feel like that’s what I want to play. I’ll probably play DS2 when I get the Kojima itch.
I’ve been saying for some time that the biggest reason ray tracing looks lackluster is because it’s being held back by games needing to support rasterization. We’ve mastered rasterization which means any scene you can rasterize will look almost identical to a ray traced scene. And you don’t see scenes where ray tracing would blow your mind because those scenes most likely can’t be rasterized, which means they don’t added to the game. So for the end user ray tracing looks kinda meh because you don’t really get any significant benefits and the marginal differences between ray traced and rasterized scenes are not worth the performance cost.
It’s like having a 3D engine but you can only use it for 2D games.
Rise isn’t a good for comparison because Rise was designed for the switch. Or course it’s going to run exceptionally well on the Deck. It probably runs better than World, because World was designed for X1/PS4.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not defending the poor performance of Wilds, they did the exact same shit with World. I’m just clarifying that Rise performance was probably never going to happen.
But the story beat is static, it always gives you the same enemy in the same situation. The nemesis system turns that story beat dynamic. Every time you hit that story beat you get a different enemy in a different situation. It doesn’t give everyone the same story, it gives everyone their story. It’s innovation is how the system sets up stories and ties them into the gameplay. The system is designed to draw you into an encounter with a nemesis, there are multiple outcomes to that encounter. Those encounters become callbacks in the next encounter and so on and on until you’ve create a storyarc against that enemy.
For example I remember having a nemesis I couldn’t kill with a sneak attack (which was very much my preferred way of getting rid of nemesis I wanted to get rid of). So I had to fight him head on and I set him on fire. He managed to escape while I was being overrun by grunts. One of the grunts slayed me and became a new nemesis. Meanwhile the one that got away gained a new weaknesses to fire. One storyline branched into two storylines. Not only did my individual story born from the nemesis system branch out, the gameplay encounters with those nemesis also changed from the previous encounter. The next time I fought my old nemesis I had a new trick up my sleeve, I could use fire against them. As for the new nemesis, well get to him.
That’s the innovation of the nemesis system. It’s a story generator that gives you your story and each encounter alters the gameplay for the next encounter. But that’s only the foundation of the nemesis system. The Nemesis hierarchy and relations between them is an extra layer of storytelling. For example that grunt who killed me turned out to become a really annoying nemesis, I really struggled killing him and every encounter only made him stronger. So I devised a different strategy. I ended up turning other orks that surrounded him in the hierarchy and started using them to do my dirty work. In the end I wasn’t the one to slay my new nemesis, it was a different ork (under my control) who challenged him and killed him.
And final note on what really makes all of it work is the presentation. The orks aren’t just a randomized collection of traits, they’re voiced and somewhat visually unique and whatever randomized outcome they get to at the end of the encounter gets properly presented in the next encounter. The presentation is the glue that ties all those encounters together into one story. You’re presented with an actual nemesis and not just some generic mute and they “remember” the things you did to them before. They feel like a nemesis and not just some randomly generated grunt.
If you tried it and didn’t see the appeal I’m guessing the game was too easy. I wasn’t impressed by the nemesis system until the orks had a chance to escape or I was forced to retreat or I got killed. The system really opens up and gets interesting when the game gets so challenging that you’re no longer certain what will happen in any encounter.
And I’m going to say more people wanted official ultrawide support. Now what? Are we supposed to poll every time someone wants to do something? If I feel like important for me to jaywalk and I step in front of a car and the driver feels it’s more important for them to not stop what then? Are we supposed to block traffic to until we figure out whose action is more important so they’d have right of way?
This is why we have laws, because everything does not need to be looked at case by case and sometimes we can collectively agree that one way is always better than the other way.
Right. So whoever did the update at Bethesda found it important to do that update. The developers of FO:London found it important to release their mod. If you ask the Bethesda employee they’d think their work was more important. If you ask the FO:L team they would say their work was more important. How do you determine whose importance was more important?
Saboteur is one of those games I’m afraid to replay because I have such vivid memories of it being really fun and I don’t want to lose that.
I already somewhat ruined Morrowind with modern hardware doing distant rendering. Back in the day Morrowind had perpetual fog and you couldn’t see far, so all the places felt so far apart. It felt like a journey going from Vivec city to Ebonhart. But modern hardware has no problem with distant rendering and now I can see that I could spit from Vivec City to Ebonhart. It’s no longer a journey, it’s just an annoyance because “it’s right there”. The magic of traversal is lessened because things no longer feel like they’re far away.
And that’s what I’m afraid of, that some illusion of Saboteur gets shattered and with it the game will also feel lesser than it was.