KiDisaster Posted October 4, 2016 Share Posted October 4, 2016 Old thread has reached locking age so here we go. In news that has me unreasonably excited, Alexis Kennedy has announced his next project, a single player digital board game called 'Cultist Simulator'. He was previously the writer for Fallen London & Sunless Sea and is now working at Bioware on a "Secret project". I loved Sunless Sea, the writing was brilliant, and I'm a big fan of board games as well so Cultist Simulator sounds right up my alley. Quoting Wert from the last thread. (How do you do proper quotes across threads now?) Quote I'm going to get it. Remedy are one of the most interesting, offbeat developers working in the industry, certainly in the AAA sphere, and make splendid, smart games that are usually fun even when they fall short of their expectations. They also have a weird, Finnish sense of humour that makes their games feel a lot more self-deprecating and winking at the audience that they're as bored of AAA bullshit shooters as you are and are trying to mix things up a bit.They also perfected action and gunplay in the first two Max Payne games and virtually no game has come close to that ever since (Rockstar's Max Payne 3 made a half-decent fist of it though). And Alan Wake is incredibly underrated. A very clever game, much-improved when you realise that Wake is supposed to be a god-awful hack bullshit novelist rather than the literary stylist he clearly thinks he is. I love Remedy as well which is why I didn't wait to pick it up, but this isn't as good as Max Payne or Alan Wake were IMO. It's beautiful (one of the best looking games I've ever played really) and the story is interesting with a fairly unique take on the whole time travel business. But there's holes and things that don't quite make sense which honestly I think is unavoidable when you're doing a game about time travel. Like why do the elevators still work when everything else is frozen in time? (In an area where it's made clear that 'Stutter Proofing' has been disabled). The gameplay though is just nothing special. It's smooth, solid gun play with your usual third person shooter mechanics although guy takes cover automatically when you're near a wall rather than having to press a button to snap to it (which I like) and there's no blind fire (which I also like because not every game needs to be Gears of War). The powers are kinda cool but again there's nothing groundbreaking here. Blinks, explosions (I'm not sure how time manipulation is causing explosions but I'm willing to go with it because Rule Of Cool) and stasis bubbles. Some bullet time but less than you'd expect considering it's a Remedy game that's literally about time manipulation. Around midway through the game I was already bored with the combat and wanting to get it over with so I could get to the next part of the story. Also, play on hard. It's extremely easy on normal. I only died once the whole game (up until the final battle where I think I died twice). Although the enemies are pretty bullet spongey on normal as it is... Quote I believe it's because the PC version is a masive install anyway and including the videos would take it to over 100 GB (!!!). Although they could have still offered the option for the hardcore. True, the PC version is a 75GB install which is probably the biggest single game I've ever seen (except for WoW maybe which I think is up to about the same now actually). But I can spare the extra 50GB for videos and would have much preferred that to the constant buffering and having to hit "Retry" every 10 seconds or so because it keeps losing connection to the streaming server. And I have pretty damn good internet. I feel sorry for anyone trying to play the game on a crappy connection. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted October 4, 2016 Share Posted October 4, 2016 I'm really enjoying the game. It's splendid SF shlock pulp fun, the actors are all actually really bringing their A-game - I think Aiden Gillen is putting way more effort into this than he ever has into Game of Thrones - and the writing is a lot of fun (and Sam Lake does his writer cameo thing! And does The Max Payne Face!). I also quite like the difficulty level. On Easy you might as well have godmode on and is great if you want to just play through the story, on Hard it's pretty challenging and on Normal it's pretty straightforward with the occasional peak which makes you think about things. Overall, solid. £30 (£10-15 down on a proper new game price) seemed pretty reasonable for this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clueless Northman Posted October 5, 2016 Share Posted October 5, 2016 Actually, WOW is 49G right now on my HD. A new game by Remedy sure sounds interesting, considering how awesome Max Payne 1 and 2 were. (but then I'm already on the record stating that MP2 is one of the very few love stories done decently in any video game, with To the Moon and possibly a couple others) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jace, Extat Posted October 7, 2016 Share Posted October 7, 2016 Playing some DA: Inquisition for the first time since the first time. Do we know anything about the next installment? A googling turned up nothing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fez Posted October 7, 2016 Share Posted October 7, 2016 33 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said: Playing some DA: Inquisition for the first time since the first time. Do we know anything about the next installment? A googling turned up nothing. Not yet, as far as I know. We barely even know anything about the next Mass Effect yet, and that's coming in just a few months. Best guess is that it'll be set in Tevintir, but that's based on context clues in the game, not statements by the devs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasta11 Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 Yeah, the last DLC implies Tevinter is the next setting, but we have absolutely nothing official, and since Bioware is very tight-lipped these days, I doubt we'll know more until it's far along in development. I mean, they even closed the official Bioware boards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A True Kaniggit Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 Two more weeks until Civ 6 releases. Haven't decided if I'm going to get it at launch yet. I am really liking the idea of having the cities spread across multiple tiles as they grow though. If its done right it could make sieges/ urban warfare a much greater risk in later parts of the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jace, Extat Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 I'd love a Tevinter game, I was inspired to ask 'cause I just got done talking to Dorian about Tevinter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 Based on the Traditional EA Chasing Coattails Timeline, the next stage is that BioWare will announce that their new game will be a multiplayer, microtransaction-focused arena game, no-one will give a shit, there'll be a long, drawn-out death rattle over several years and then the company will be closed down. A few months later some of the devs will regroup to launch a Kickstarter for a "Dragon Age spiritual successor" or something. Well, some of the ones who've left have already done that with Banner Saga. But the rest will follow, unless Mass Effect Andromeda does incredibly well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fez Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 47 minutes ago, Werthead said: Based on the Traditional EA Chasing Coattails Timeline, the next stage is that BioWare will announce that their new game will be a multiplayer, microtransaction-focused arena game, no-one will give a shit, there'll be a long, drawn-out death rattle over several years and then the company will be closed down. A few months later some of the devs will regroup to launch a Kickstarter for a "Dragon Age spiritual successor" or something. Well, some of the ones who've left have already done that with Banner Saga. But the rest will follow, unless Mass Effect Andromeda does incredibly well. That seems rather pessimistic. EA does love killing studios that underperform, but Bioware has not had a flop in a very long time. ME3 and DA:I both had issues but both sold incredibly well and there seems to be quite a lot of excitement about Andromeda even though we know nothing about it. Its pretty safe bet that it'll do very well too. Even if it turns out to be a bad game that falls off quickly, the preorders alone will probably put it in the black. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KiDisaster Posted October 8, 2016 Author Share Posted October 8, 2016 Put together a new PC for my brother and got a free copy of Gears of War 4 as a thanks His new GPU came with a code for it and he didn't want it. This'll be the first game I play through the Windows store so we'll see how that goes and if the issues it had are still a problem. Currently waiting to see how Mafia 3 is performing after this patch the devs are trying to rush out. Really want to play that game but I'll wait until it's fixed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 5 hours ago, Fez said: That seems rather pessimistic. EA does love killing studios that underperform, but Bioware has not had a flop in a very long time. ME3 and DA:I both had issues but both sold incredibly well and there seems to be quite a lot of excitement about Andromeda even though we know nothing about it. Its pretty safe bet that it'll do very well too. Even if it turns out to be a bad game that falls off quickly, the preorders alone will probably put it in the black. ME3 did reasonably well, but DA:I did not. It didn't hit #1 on the charts, which is unusual for such a high-profile game, and the best figures I can find for it suggested that it has sold maybe 3 million physical copies, maybe 5 million including digital. That's not great going for a AAA game from an established franchise. Reportedly BioWare have actually done a pretty good job of keeping their budgets restricted for the size of the games (the best suggestion I can find for more ME3 and DA:I is between $60 and $80 million), so it probably scraped a profit but it's not really the level of success EA would be looking for in one of their games. Compare that to Skyrim, which sold 7 million in its first month on sale (or Fallout 4, which sold 12 million in its first month!). The general consensus is that DA:I was comprehensively obliterated in terms of both critical acclaim and financial success by The Witcher III, which for a relatively obscure franchise (before that one, anyway) is not good going for EA. Mass Effect Andromeda I suspect will do a lot better, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some hard questions being asked at EA of the future of the Dragon Age franchise right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasta11 Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 6 hours ago, Werthead said: Based on the Traditional EA Chasing Coattails Timeline, the next stage is that BioWare will announce that their new game will be a multiplayer, microtransaction-focused arena game, no-one will give a shit, there'll be a long, drawn-out death rattle over several years and then the company will be closed down. A few months later some of the devs will regroup to launch a Kickstarter for a "Dragon Age spiritual successor" or something. Well, some of the ones who've left have already done that with Banner Saga. But the rest will follow, unless Mass Effect Andromeda does incredibly well. That was mostly old EA management, however. New EA is a bit less trigger happy when it comes to killing studios, cripes they even kept games like SWTOR and Battlefield 4 going on for a long time. Also, EA no longer releases sales numbers for any game including the wildly popular EA Sports ones, so any numbers are basically pure speculation. They did say Inquisition had a surprisingly great launch (the best Bioware ever had), enough that it boosted their quarterly numbers significantly. That's the closest to actual, confirmed information about the game's sales we got, and it's pretty far from being pessimistic. Unlike for DA2, they also didn't shoot down the game's DLC program either. So I don't think Inquisition sold badly at all. It WAS probably outsold by TW3, sure, but given the massive budget and marketing campaign that game had, it's not really a big shame. CDPR is far from being a small studio now. And Bioware games are never going to outsell Bethesda's at this point. They are in a league of their own when it comes to selling RPGs, and a lot that (IMO) is because they sell baby's first RPGs with the depth of a puddle. Sure, it makes bank with people who play occasionally. But I don't want Bioware to try to emulate Fallout 4 (please don't Biower. pls.). Their attempts to emulate Skyrim were already the worst parts of Inquisition. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 The Old Republic is pretty successful and has made both EA and BioWare an absolute ton of money (over $130 million in 2013 alone). TOR hasn't done very well if your point of comparison is World of WarCraft, but apart from that it's probably the most successful MMORPG of all time. The sales figures for DA:I come from the retailers. Even if you allowed for massive margins of errors, it's hard to spin that the game was a massive-selling mega-success by AAA standards. BioWare games have never been in the CoD/GTA (and now Bethesda) bracket, of course, but as budgets go up they can't really afford to be satisfied with those kind of sales figures. That said, I anticipate Mass Effect: Andromeda to do a lot better. And it'll be interesting to see what they do next with Dragon Age. Which reminds me that I do still need to play DA:I. Quote It WAS probably outsold by TW3, sure, but given the massive budget and marketing campaign that game had, it's not really a big shame. CDPR is far from being a small studio now. CDPR aren't a small studio any more, but they're nowhere remotely on the same level as EA. EA's marketing spend would have been much higher and the game budget certainly was a lot higher for DA:I. Being whomped by The Witcher III is certainly quite embarassing for BioWare (especially since they helped enable the franchise to exist in the first place). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jace, Extat Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 I didn't realize DA was so hated. I loved it and thought others did too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferrum Aeternum Posted October 8, 2016 Share Posted October 8, 2016 15 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said: I didn't realize DA was so hated. I loved it and thought others did too. I think as a franchise it's still well thought of. And for what it's worth, I really liked DA:I. I'd be surprised if they didn't make another DA game. I also think ME: Andromeda is going to sell like gangbusters. I hardly ever pre-order but I can't see not pre-ordering that one. 20 minutes ago, Werthead said: The Old Republic is pretty successful and has made both EA and BioWare an absolute ton of money (over $130 million in 2013 alone). TOR hasn't done very well if your point of comparison is World of WarCraft, but apart from that it's probably the most successful MMORPG of all time. Jeesh! If TOR made that much money in 2013 (arguably the game's worst year in terms of fan interest) then it must have made twice that or more in the last 12 months. The gameplay improvements and enhanced storylines with the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion took the game experience to another level IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KiDisaster Posted October 8, 2016 Author Share Posted October 8, 2016 54 minutes ago, Ferrum Aeternum said: I hardly ever pre-order but I can't see not pre-ordering that one. Just out of curiosity, why? I mean unless EA do some more bullshit like they did with From Ashes in 3 where if you don't pre-order it you have to pay an extra $10 for an important part of the game, what's the benefit to pre-ordering it? 1 hour ago, Pony Queen Jace said: I didn't realize DA was so hated. I loved it and thought others did too. I love Origins to pieces and I thought Inquisition was pretty good. Didn't care for 2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferrum Aeternum Posted October 9, 2016 Share Posted October 9, 2016 2 minutes ago, KiDisaster said: Just out of curiosity, why? I mean unless EA do some more bullshit like they did with From Ashes in 3 where if you don't pre-order it you have to pay an extra $10 for an important part of the game, what's the benefit to pre-ordering it? It's new Mass Effect. I guess that is reason enough. I don't know, maybe I'm just a sucker. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KiDisaster Posted October 9, 2016 Author Share Posted October 9, 2016 I wouldn't say you're a sucker. I've just been burned too many times by shitty ports and games not living up to expectations to ever consider pre-ordering anything again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jace, Extat Posted October 9, 2016 Share Posted October 9, 2016 6 minutes ago, KiDisaster said: I love Origins to pieces and I thought Inquisition was pretty good. Didn't care for 2. 2 might be my favorite as far as cool ideas for a story go. Anyways, glad to see I'm not the only DA lover about, I generally find Wert quite knowledgeable and felt half the fool by his dismissal. Anyways, the DLC was mentioned. I haven't played any of it. Is it worth paying the game'a weight in gold for? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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