Creation is built on code over 20 years old at this point, and it shows. If they could have upgraded it to handle modern needs, I think they would have. Sarah Morgan looks like plastic in just about every lighting environment I've seen so far except for the room you meet her in. The conversation system may be an upgrade over what they were able to do with Daggerfall, but compared to its contemporaries from the likes of CDPR and Larian (even BioWare's old Mass Effect trilogy), it really feels lacking when they can't implement proper directed camera angles or performance capture.
Their side quest designers (referring here primarily to "activities" and non-faction quests) are either terrible at their craft or confined to an engine that can only easily spit out fetch quests where nothing interesting happens on the way to fetch the macguffin, once again, like their contemporaries can and do; the bar has been raised since the days of Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
When flying, the game loads you into an area where you always have to fly the "last mile" and dock, and the only reason I can imagine you would build it that way is that they couldn't make their engine load the space they need to load in a seamless way, like their competitors making other space games.
The game isn't bad, but it does feel like it came out of a time capsule from over ten years ago with a bunch of features they tried to implement that their engine couldn't handle. If you have to tell your customers, one on one, why your game is actually fun, you're doing something wrong. Hopefully Microsoft finally makes them throw out Creation and start from scratch for ES6 on Unreal or something, taking a hard look at what their competitors are doing better than them in the RPG space.
As long as it requires a server to operate, then yes, it will go away one day. That it failed to turn a profit even before the economic downturn, according to that Reuters article they cite, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that it's going to run for very long.
UNI and SG are themselves far more successful than most games. So yes, not as successful as those two, but still more successful than most. Evo is also a kingmaker, and you can see spikes in all of the announced Evo games when they're announced and present at Evo.
Nah, even out of the gate, it's done far better than the likes of Punch Planet, for instance. They just made a good game, and people paid attention; perhaps not as much attention as they wanted or needed. If you ask me, they appeared to have started overscoping once they got their initial success. The Salt Mines mode seemed like a big money sink that had a detrimental effect on the matchmaking, for one.
To be fair, it was always priced accordingly, and it wasn't in "early access", even though they still had something to deliver there. What they delivered for the story mode for this game had some really neat ideas that I'd love to see other fighting games steal from them. It also lacked a compelling call to action and got bogged down with traversable area maps with NPCs that you could talk to for no benefit or interesting story reasons.
Really? There's not much to get. It's just turn-based but harder to wield, in most cases. PoE just assigns lengths of time in seconds to particular actions rather than turns (or "rounds") like old D&D games did. You can also set the game to auto-pause when certain events happen, like when a spell is done casting or a target is killed, so that you can immediately assign a new action when the thing happens.
I'm going through the story mode of Backpack Hero, and I wish it was better. If I get too frustrated with being unable to tell how to progress, maybe I'll just stick to the classic roguelike mode. It does do a decent job of walking you through the various play styles the game offers though.
I started and finished Cocoon. It's a puzzle game that works a bit four-dimensionally, but it's also a very linear experience, so even though it seems like there are so many options in front of you that you can never figure it out, they actually keep the possibility space small and manageable. I can't imagine what the QA effort must have been like to make sure that you didn't get yourself into an unwinnable state, but they seemingly pulled it off.
I started Starfield. $54 on sale felt like a good price. It meets expectations for what you're getting out of a Bethesda game, with the exception of a lack of city maps (which I knew going into it was a complaint, but I really feel that criticism now). It's still early goings, but I'm enjoying it so far. I mostly had to put it down for Thanksgiving weekend, because I knew I'd have games that would run better on the Steam Deck while I was out of town.
Wargroove 2 has been a satisfying continuation of Wargroove so far. No complaints. It scratches that Advance Wars itch, arguably better than Advance Wars itself.
Speaking of which, in an effort to start carving through my RPG backlog and prevent myself from starting another long playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I started a game I picked up on sale this week, Pillars of Eternity. I never picked this one up back in the day due to its real time with pause mechanics, which always felt like a sloppier way to handle an RPG than just doing real time or turn-based. I still stand by that, but at least the game's mechanics seem to work with it in a way that matters with its "interrupts" where the casting time of each ability really matters. I'm still very early on in this one too, but the game does me the favor of showing me all of the dice rolls like any good CRPG should so that I can start to deduce the things I should be prioritizing. I want to get through this game and its sequel before Avowed comes out, since it's set in the same world.
It's worth remembering that the business model always affects the game design. 6th gen consoles were arguably the most "pure", since obtuse games with strategy guide and hint hotline revenue streams were just about dead thanks to free GameFAQs, and DLC had yet to be introduced. Still, their incentives were to cheaply make as much "value" as they could, which meant churning out levels so that they could put a higher number on the back of the box for how much content you got for your $50 (a little over $80 in today's money). They also knew there was a good chance people would rent the game and decide to buy it off of that experience, so the best content was typically front-loaded, and then you'd get a lot of padded levels in the later parts of the game. It was rare that I would finish games back then, because often times a game would start strong and then end up filling big rooms, that look a whole lot like earlier big rooms, with trash mobs repeating the same simple loop over and over.
LODs take up a lot of space. If it were just a matter of compression, everyone would be compressing their assets. In this case though, Tekken is going to have a lot of story mode cutscenes that wouldn't have a prayer of running in real time on modern hardware, much like MK.
Platform lock-in sucks, and it would be nice if a ruling on one of these became legal precedent so that console players also got a choice on their digital purchases.