I don't think you'd ever want an engine level monopoly to that degree, even Unreal isn't by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so, and not every studio would perform those modifications necessary to complete their game's vision, and then just give all of that to everyone else to piggyback off of for free, there are a lot of reasons to not do that, specifically, what Unity is doing now.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven't pulled anything like Unity... yet. Not having done that yet doesn't preclude them from doing it, that's the scary thing about the Unity debacle, anyone engine could turn around and make a horrible change, we just have to trust that they won't, and being given monopoly power makes it too tempting to trust forever.
Well, I also count Hitman 3 since it delayed my ability to complete the trilogy I'd been playing for years at that point by another year without having to deal with the storefront content transfer issues that weren't guaranteed to be handled by IOI as well as they ended up being after some struggle.
For me, the one time with Metro and the deal with Hitman were two distasteful deal executions too many.
He's a diva to the public, but I'm curious how he is to work with professionally. I think the guy's actually very rogueishly charming in his online persona. He just hasn't plain directed anything in a while, mostly just supervising direction, but he's still been involved in good stuff with regards to Bayonetta 3 or Astral Chain.
Still, though, it's been a while, but I think he has a very solid foundation of ideology for his direction in games, I'd trust him to direct something else, but maybe he's not interested in that anymore.
I also think the problem is how they executed some of their exclusives. There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn't be able to.
Even though that doesn't change the end result of what you're getting, the feeling that the timing and method of the exclusivity deal left you with was... a surprise that forced the buyer to reevaluate their expectations and have to consider the purchase all over again on a different storefront, because of that storefront's direct monetary intervention.
It came off as a corporate bribe that lessened the consumer's options, for no benefit to the consumer. The pure taste that actions like that left in my mouth got me to never even claim any free Epic games and to wait an entire year for Hitman 3 to drop on Steam even though the reboot trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time, and I won't even get into the snafu that game particularly had with transferring trilogy content paid for on Steam to Epic.
If they hadn't gone about purchasing exclusivity deals in that fashion, I may have bought some things on sale from them, or at the least claimed some games allowing their launcher to live on my machine, but instead it drove me away.
I don't think they're necessarily wrong but I'd love a nice ELI5 answer that's not just "there's one kind of hardware and the developers try really hard to make it run good"
About 50 hours into Starfield, wrapping up the pirate and corpo questlines, enjoying it quite a bit, but there are issues that I'd love to mod out eventually.
Finally played the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, probably almost halfway through the first one. A pretty good Uncharted-like experience with a bit more of a serious
tone, but I have to say, it's pretty good!
Interesting, but he has been with them for a long time now. I'm curious if he'll have any interest at joining Tango since Shinji Mikami founded it and they share a history of mentorship and alignment on directive philosophies, or if he's more interested in doing something totally new. I'm eager to hear about it
There is a fix you can apply to fix the glitching ragdolls. If I recall correctly if you don't fix it there will eventually be a physics related puzzle that won't work right because the physics won't be responding correctly and you'll get stuck, but my memory could be wrong.
It's pretty easy to fix and will increase your immersion
Indeed, that's the worry. It sometimes seems like AAA game development is learning just how far you can push the average gamer and still get good word of mouth online by way of leaving choice aspects incomplete and compromised
I'm surprised I don't hear more people talk about this, maybe because they seemed to strategically handle bugs and content more thoroughly in the early game so that a lot of players would gush about that and be more forgiving by the time they got to act 3, along with everyone who didn't even make it that far and only praised it online instead.
Starfield gets dragged through the mud for both deserved and undeserved reasons, almost universally without nuance, and BG3 gets blanket praise and acclaim, almost universally without nuance, and then I see this comment thread where there are apparently some serious issues grouped within a specific portion of the game and I'm not sure if that's better or not.
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it's less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don't think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
I'm appreciative of some of the stuff they've done. Of the newer games I've only played Odyssey, but having an open world game that fully supports stealth is something I can't get somewhere else.
Other open world games feature very light stealth mechanics, but not to the degree that Odyssey deliberately designed its world and outposts to have spots to hide and maneuver in stealth. It's the only one where I've been able to actually play an open world game as a stealth game where combat only happens if I mess up (or it's one of the unique bosses).
The stealth genre is almost on its deathbed compared to the 2000s, so I'm glad there's a few big games still carrying the torch, or maybe just this series when it comes to the AAA space.