I played one zoi through most of the idol career track. The career gameplay is very similar to Sims 4, in that you go to your work lot and try to perform all your work tasks before the end of the day. Similarly to Sims 4, I didn’t feel like there was a meaningful sense of progression in my skills and career. I went from having 0 in the career relevant skills like singing and dancing to having them maxed out in, IIRC, a little over an in-game week, in which time I didn’t perform in any idol shows because that didn’t seem to be implemented: work was always training, never performing. (It’s possible this has been updated since I played, which was in April, or that performing is hidden behind the very last level of the career track, which I don’t think I reached.) Like Sims, you never struggle to advance a skill or have any kind of challenge to overcome, you can improve at anything indefinitely by practicing alone. I started a romance with a coworker, but it wasn’t very interesting: it didn’t cause drama at work, it didn’t affect how my other coworkers thought of me (which was mostly “not at all”), and it wasn’t clear to me if the other zoi had any skills, interests or hobbies outside of work. Similarly to the Sims, I think we were at the point where I could have proposed after only one date, which mostly consisted of hanging out at the park. It seems like, similarly to Sims, the actual game mechanics are fairly basic and you need to invent a good deal of your own fun.
I liked being able to customize items by importing textures. The AI texture generator isn’t any good, but the option to noodle around in GIMP and then put my texture on something in the game is neat. I also imported images to make custom posters for my zoi’s room. There is also an option to turn a photo of an object into a 3D model of a decoration to place in your house or wear as an accessory, which I had mixed results with but was at least novel.
I have so many good memories of playing Rock Band in college. I just picked this up for PS4 for like $10, but it looks like the instruments are going to cost an arm and a leg…
There is a section in this video where he talks about game elements he thinks are “bullshit” and I don’t know if I agree about any of them. But I will also admit that playing NetHack at an early age, where
You fall into a spiked pit! The spikes were poisoned! The poison was deadly! You have died. Do you want your possessions identified?
was a completely normal and expected way to lose a run, may have warped my sense of what counts as a fair game mechanic. ^_^;;
With regard to vehicle combat, I find it very strange that the very first NPC we meet has a man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, but there don’t seem to be any anti-vehicular weapons that players can use.
Or at least I think there aren’t; I’m not nearly as far as you are, but I looked ahead in the research tab and didn’t see any.
The videogamey parts are really funny to me. I laughed my ass off when I saw Thufir Hawat standing around in the heat outside the Leto residence in Arrakeen because I guess players have to talk to him at some point, and the interior of the residence doesn’t exist in the game, so he has to stand around under an awning in the parking lot like a valet or something.
I am about 4-ish resource tiers in out of 7-ish or so, and I don’t feel like it is especially grindy by the standards of survival crafting games. There is obviously some grinding for resources, but there is also a good amount of exploring and doing quests, during which you can pick up a lot of the things you need. Getting through the iron tier was a little bit long because you don’t have access to a large vehicle inventory yet at that point, but I also took that time to reveal a bunch of the map, clear out bandit camps, etc. so it didn’t become too monotonous. There are a good variety of secondary resources that will keep you visiting different kinds of locations (wrecked ships, old mining operations, etc.) so that even if you just want to farm resources, you won’t just be spending all your time running between ore nodes.
If your friends would be playing together, they could also do things more efficiently by sharing bases so that they don’t each have to build their own infrastructure, and eventually you get access to a mining buggy that is faster to operate with two players (a solo player has to switch between the driver and mining laser seats).
IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.
The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.
I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.
The cars make contact so much in this game that it feels like a missed opportunity to not have damage, at least visually. I want to see those cars crumple!
I know it’s typically because of licensing issues, though.