Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.
Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.
Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.
I would consider Todd Howard to be part of development (since he directs the creative and narrative angle, from what I understand).
He defended bad performance with “get better hardware”. He defended criticism of the content with “you play the game wrong”.
Both are bullshit “excuses”. The first one was even debunked by modders who showed that there was potential for optimization. And modders are far more limited than engine devs. The game doesn’t look ugly, but there are far better looking games with more scene complexity out there that run better.
And “you play it wrong” is bullshit because if enough people play it wrong to have an effect on the rating of the game, then the game is badly designed. Part of game design is making sure the game explains itself or subtly pulls players in the right direction. Either they failed with that, or there simply is no clear direction. But that’s not the players fault.
Yeah but businesses typically don’t go out and rub that in their customers faces. That’s basically what most of the complaints are about: Bethesda should just shut the fuck up and swallow their pride. Is some/most of the stuff people throw at them unfair? Likely. Is it completely unwarranted? No. Should they defend it? Also no.
I can second that. Valheim has a very neat balance between exploring, fighting and building. If you don’t progress to quick, even your base is relatively safe. Although I now have turned off raids completely. So my base is always safe and if I want action, I can venture out into the world. I like that.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
Same here: if people play the game “wrong”, you didn’t design it properly and/or marketed it completely wrong.
Sure, there will always be “dumb” (or too clever) individuals who you simply can’t properly address and satisfy, but if the group is large enough to be loud, you failed your job.
I don’t blame the engine. There are other studios out there with custom engines that evolved over time. Also Creation Engine evolved a lot.
That they work with many connected scenes instead of a continuous world also has advantages … it allows them to easily change the “world” between scenes by simply linking you “back” to a different scene (for example city under siege which before the dialog was not under siege). It’s how they work. They could do the same shit with Unreal if they wanted to and if they believe this kind of game design is the only feasible for their story telling, they would shove it into another engine as well.
I also don’t think the game feels “old”. I do think it feels like it is conceptionally unfinished. They had many ideas and you can see a lot of different systems in the game (space fights, planets with different biomes, ship building, base building, and so on and so forth). Each of these systems in itself has some kind of concept, but all these systems together are missing a clear concept, IMO.
From what I know, game dev typically works in modules that get thrown together. And this also seems to be the case here. However the “big picture” wasn’t refined or they realized that it needs a ton of small adjustments all over the place (conceptionally AND technically) to make sense of it and it looks like they were not able to deal with the complexity of that.
As a result we have a game that is okayish. It tells some stories, and offers a lot of content, but it feels not nearly as stunning as it should have and it’s not on a single front ground breaking.
It’s a double edged sword. If the actual devs are exposed too much, they get bombarded with shit from so many people who have no clue and/or just want to vent, that they would not be able to do their actual work or would even burn out from all the toxicity.
Unfortunately people with actual helpful input are so rare that it’s likely not worth the hassle.
Would be cool though if the people triaging reports would have the knowledge to sort the wheat from the chaff. But same problem there: it’s likely so rare to encounter these reports that it’s not worth training people for it.
They also have different processes. Each report would start as a support request that goes through some customer care department or even call center first, that will triage the issue with some knowledge base or decision tree. So before a meaningful report makes it way to a department that can actually deal with it, a dozen other people are involved first.
Same. I also play Cyberpunk that way. Driving cars without the ability to control the speed is just a PITA. A binary input doesn’t cut it for me there.
OTOH aiming with anything but a mouse is also a PITA. Stuff like weapon switching also works better with dedicated keys vs a weapon wheel.
Now that I write it… all I would need would be one or two analog sticks/keys and I wouldn’t need the controller at all. It’s mainly the analog triggers that I need.