Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.
You keep asking this in this thread. What answer do you want? The game has a shitload of content in it. I’m 35ish hours in and I have so many random quests and things to do. I’ve spent hours wandering around planets. Around cities. In space stations. Scanning things, reading stuff.
It’s completely fine if what the game has to offer doesn’t appeal to you, but if you truly cannot comprehend how anyone could enjoy it, then I’m afraid you just don’t have much perspective.
This is, objectively speaking, a large scale open world game with hundreds of hours of content. It should be self evident that what it has to offer will appeal to some and not to others. How can you think that because it doesn’t appeal to you, it shouldn’t appeal to anyone? That makes no sense.
It’s the same shit across every industry. Successful company goes public, investors demand yearly double digit growth, and after a few years they are imploding.
Investors do not care about the future, sustainability, or anything except immediate profitability. What you described is exactly what happens, in gaming and everywhere else. It sucks.
Pretty simple root cause analysis to conclude that the game’s brokenness was the ultimate reason though. Like, why was the game being massively refunded?
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
It was straight up broken for many console players.
Some PC players had performance issues.
For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Nonetheless, it didn’t really feel finished, y’know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.
The performance issues seem to be what every article and blog post focuses on because it’s the easy thing to talk about, but I think this right here is what the actual biggest issue was and the real reason people shat on the game.
I didn’t hate it by any means. And I, like you, ran it without issue. I just sort of lost interest because it was janky and super unpolished. Like I was playing an early access game. It wasn’t big bugs as in the game breaking and not running. It was just lots of little annoyance that felt unfinished or half conceived, or like they didn’t undergo full play testing.
The massive performance issues experienced by some just compounded those issues that existed even when it did run perfectly well.
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
Good. I hope it is longer than that. Fragmenting the platform will do no one any good at this stage in its life, and its performance is completely adequate for what it is.
I used to like open world games that would take 50+ hours to beat but I feel like as I get older these games can be intimidating to even start and I often get sidetracked with other games frequently only getting half to three quarters of the way through....
I don’t think I could pin down a universal number. I really enjoy when a game understands the staying power of its gameplay loop and finishes up before it gets stale.
I’ve got 180 hours into TotK and I’m not sick of it yet because I discover something new every time I play.
Conversely I 100%-ed Dredge in 20 hours and that felt like the exact right amount of time. Any longer and I’d have been sick of it.
Or we can go even lower with something like Untitled Goose Game, which was under 10 hours and also finished up just as it got old.
So yeah. I’m all about the self awareness of a game with regards to the experience. Whatever amount of time that takes is cool with me.
I’m late to the party, but just wanted to say that your list of purchases and recommended to purchase are just monumental lists of games. So many amazing choices.
I want to add two more if you have room.
Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2. They won’t get you as much in the way of epic set pieces, but they are dripping with charm and very well crafted games with some of the most interesting levels I’ve seen.
Interestingly, the demo was apparently running ray traced visuals, and was utilising Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) in order to offer playable frame rates that will make enabling such fancy effects actually worthwhile.
I’ve played the switch more hours than I think any previous console. For all its flaws the switch is home to so many quality Nintendo experiences at this point that if someone finds that this is the generation that they’ve tired of Nintendo then it’s possible they simply don’t like Nintendo style games anymore.
Mario Party indeed was a pile of shit. But there are so many incredible games.
This feels like a very natural progression to me, I really don’t see a problem with it as long as they continue to make sure their games are the core of the model and use other media as supplemental ways to build up brand and character awareness. I think anyone would agree that some types of stories are better told via games and others via movies, shows, or books. Broadening their scope allows for more stories to be told.
And theme parks or things of that nature are just cool ways for people to tangibly experience Nintendo IP.
No it is not the best they can do. I haven’t played starfield yet, but it should be obvious that no company with shareholders to whom they need to answer is ever going to do “the best they can do”.
That isn’t even their target, at least not overall. Their target is maximum profitability. Putting forth maximum effort for the best graphics is not going to result in max profits, so they were never going to do that.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that graphical showcases just aren’t what Bethesda does in the first place. No one should have expected that. This isn’t an id game.
I don’t care about Bethesda. As I said I didn’t even buy or play this game. Sorry about the wording.
I just feel like it’s asinine to say things like “is this the best they can do?” when literally no company puts out their best. And it’s asinine to say things like “but they own id software” when id isn’t the developer making this game. And it’s asinine to expect a company whose games have made gobs of money and sold tens of millions of copies not being a graphical showcase having above average graphics, because why would they suddenly spend time and effort on something they haven’t had to do before and still had success?
Focusing on wording is nitpicking. I’m quite sure you understood my point.
It’s not treading new ground from a genre standpoint.
But the combat is a style that isn’t really very common in open world games, and the commenter you are replying to specifically was talking about the story, characters, and world building…all three of which set Horizon apart from other games, IMO.
It took me several hours to get into HZD, but once it hit its stride it really hooked me. The opening few hours are quite weak, IMO. It takes that time for the story to start to reveal, and for the more deliberate pace of combat to make itself apparent.
I’m really looking forward to playing it (I’ve promised myself to fully beat TotK before I pick it up). I played a ton of BG 1 and 2 when I was a kid and even for me they are hard to pick back up now. A slightly more accessible version of that sounds amazing.
I’m really excited to hear that. The real time but actually not combat I think is what really killed me when I played them. I was only like 15 years old but I think I just didn’t “get” it and tried to just go for it in real time which made many encounters incredibly difficult.
I’m excited for BG3 but I guess I struggle to see why it needs to be compared to TotK at all. Feels like that is selling both games a bit short. They aren’t really that similar.
My argument would be that one doesn’t transcend over the other. It’s probably obvious but I also think numbered review scores are inherently flawed, because the metric is subjective and meaningless.
I much prefer a tiers system. These are both top tier games. Anyone can agree they are of exemplary quality and represent some of the best their genre has to offer. Any argument beyond that very quickly devolves into squabbles over subjective preference and that is a bit pointless to me.
As an example, a few of my favorite games of all time are Earthbound, Half-Life, Super Mario World, Metroid Prime, and Skyrim. I would rank all 5 of these games in my top tier. But what point is there in trying to rank them amongst each other? They have nothing to do with one another, so I have no meaningful way to compare them. If I use numbering, would I rank Earthbound a 9.7 and Metroid Prime a 9.5 and that means Earthbound is a better game? 2 tenths better? What does that even mean? I just don’t find value in that kind of arbitrary comparison.
Honestly, good. I don’t think every game needs to be this massive, sprawling open world that takes a hundred hours or more to complete. There is plenty of room for a more focused experience. And that’s coming from someone who is a big fan of open world games in general.
What unusual genre mixing video games would you recommend to try?
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