Video Games: May the force of your wallet be with you

[Rhom]

52 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

So what do y'all think about Final Fantasy 7 Remake being released in multiple installments? Is it just a cash grab? I prefer to believe them when they say they want to do the story justice, and are unable to do so in only one game.

Either way they're getting the money out of me. 

 

44 minutes ago, aceluby said:

It's a bunch of bullshit and they won't see a dime from me.

 

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Why?

A lot of these older games - FF7s and the older games in the series, the Baldur's Gate titles and so on - are as big and expansive as they are because they were also relatively straightforward to make. Paint lots of backgrounds and scan them in. Create 2D sprites or 3D character models and drop them into the backgrounds. Very easy, very fast and very cheap by today's standards.

Take those same flat, 2D environments and turn them into 3D game spaces and you immediately increase your workload by an exponential rate. A 3D model or asset in HD takes many more man-hours to create and fine-tune than a low-res 2D sprite. BioWare have often said that they will never be able to make a game as big as Baldur's Gate II, it's simply impossible in a modern 3D engine (which is why BG2 is still their biggest game and dwarfs all of their other titles with handmade content: DA:I and ME:A are arguably bigger, but rely on procedural content, to some extent, and repetitive use of assets and took between 2 and 3 times each as long to develop than BG2).

FF7 isn't a mega-long game - you can polish it off inside 25 hours easily and even a completionist run outside of going really crazy (doing chocobo racing, fighting Ruby and Emerald etc) is still going to take about 45-50 hours max. But it's a hugely detailed game with an absolute ton of environments (including some very elaborate ones that were created just for you to run across the screen). Translating all of that into state-of-the-art high-res 3D is insanely expensive. Plus it sounds like they are expanding some missions/quests, adding some new elements and adding voice acting for very line of dialogue in the game (which is a lot).

So, especially given the rate of return on the likes of FF13 and 15 was apparently dubious given their development times, I can see Square's rationale.

Unless your argument is that the FF7 remaster should just be exactly the same game with the backgrounds blown up into high-res and the character models redone, not the total ground-up remake which Square are doing, in which case fair point.

Everything Wert says is true, but I'm more with Ace on this one.  I'm going to need to see it and need to see what their realistic schedule is to release it.  Blizzard claimed they'd be getting StarCraft 2 released one chapter per year and it wound up taking closer to six.  

What it really comes down to for me however is what are they doing to the gameplay?  If this is some sort of bastardized version of FFXV; then I definitely won't spend a penny on the game.  FFXV is the first main game in the series I was unable to finish.  I even enjoyed FFXII where the game would essentially play itself.

I know they are wanting to abandon the windows and such of the original, but if the gameplay is crap... then I really won't be interested in the game at all.

[Ded As Ned]

I'll still buy the first installment just for the nostalgia... but if they ruin the gameplay that will likely be it.

[Rhom]

5 minutes ago, Ded As Ned said:

I'll still buy the first installment just for the nostalgia... but if they ruin the gameplay that will likely be it.

Yes, and back to Wert's final point... yes, they absolutely should have just upgraded the graphics and kept everything else the same.  Add some sidequests and maybe some new areas within the world map if you want... but I am extremely wary of everything I've seen.

[Pliskin]

Wait, so now Deus Ex and Tomb Raider (reboot) are considered linear games?!
When I read linear, I understand Uncharted/The Last of Us, not games where there is an open environment to explore... I don't understand how a Deus Ex would be considered more linear than an AC game...

[aceluby]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Why?

A lot of these older games - FF7s and the older games in the series, the Baldur's Gate titles and so on - are as big and expansive as they are because they were also relatively straightforward to make. Paint lots of backgrounds and scan them in. Create 2D sprites or 3D character models and drop them into the backgrounds. Very easy, very fast and very cheap by today's standards.

Take those same flat, 2D environments and turn them into 3D game spaces and you immediately increase your workload by an exponential rate. A 3D model or asset in HD takes many more man-hours to create and fine-tune than a low-res 2D sprite. BioWare have often said that they will never be able to make a game as big as Baldur's Gate II, it's simply impossible in a modern 3D engine (which is why BG2 is still their biggest game and dwarfs all of their other titles with handmade content: DA:I and ME:A are arguably bigger, but rely on procedural content, to some extent, and repetitive use of assets and took between 2 and 3 times each as long to develop than BG2).

FF7 isn't a mega-long game - you can polish it off inside 25 hours easily and even a completionist run outside of going really crazy (doing chocobo racing, fighting Ruby and Emerald etc) is still going to take about 45-50 hours max. But it's a hugely detailed game with an absolute ton of environments (including some very elaborate ones that were created just for you to run across the screen). Translating all of that into state-of-the-art high-res 3D is insanely expensive. Plus it sounds like they are expanding some missions/quests, adding some new elements and adding voice acting for very line of dialogue in the game (which is a lot).

So, especially given the rate of return on the likes of FF13 and 15 was apparently dubious given their development times, I can see Square's rationale.

Unless your argument is that the FF7 remaster should just be exactly the same game with the backgrounds blown up into high-res and the character models redone, not the total ground-up remake which Square are doing, in which case fair point.

There are multiple reasons.

1) Square has published multiple games they've developed from the ground up utilizing 3D techniques for years.  The last FF games didn't need to be split into chapters.  You've even stated it's not a very long game.  This is as obvious a cash grab as I've seen.

2) The excuse they are giving that it needs to be done for the story's sake sounds like hogwash.  Everyone knows the story.  More cash grab nonsense.

3) I won't support the industry going the way of splitting popular games into incomplete chapters, just so they can rake you over the coals for more content.

So yeah... I'm not going to get this and have no qualms about it.  I'm not going to spend $1-200 on a single game.

[Werthead]

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Wait, so now Deus Ex and Tomb Raider (reboot) are considered linear games?!
When I read linear, I understand Uncharted/The Last of Us, not games where there is an open environment to explore... I don't understand how a Deus Ex would be considered more linear than an AC game...

 

I think there's probably three ways you can go:

1) Have a linear game where every time you play it you're going to go to the same places, do the same things. Most FPS games are like this, Call of Duty, Half-Life etc. You can vary some things (what weapons you use to kill what people etc) but there's one clear path forwards. RTS games which have strict, linear mission progression (like StarCraft and Homeworld) are in this bracket as well.

2) "Hub" games where you have a choice of what mission/quest to do next and in what order. You will still encounter all the same content but the order you can approach it in will vary and you may have a choice of taking different characters on different missions etc. There is some optional content but not a huge amount. Most of these games will not allow you to create a character from scratch due to cut scene and narrative requirements, or if they do they'll cleverly get around it. Most old BioWare games are like this, but most strikingly the Mass Effect titles, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire etc. Some (if not most) of the Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider and the new Deus Ex games fall into this bracket as well.

3) True open-world games where there is a story but you can completely ignore it. You can usually (but not always) create a new character from scratch and the game is somewhat reactive to your choices. The game has multiple outcomes and relies a lot on emergent gameplay, systems and storytelling. The Bethesda games, Fallout: New Vegas, The Witcher 3 and a few others fall into this category.

 

I'd say that 2) falls much more closely to the "strictly linear" side of things. There is some freedom there but not a huge array of options to change things up. I'd also say that there's probably a space between 2) and 3) where maybe you could place something like Dragon Age: Inquisition and the original Deus Ex (which wasn't open world, but you could completely miss about 20% of the game if you made different choices).

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1) Square has published multiple games they've developed from the ground up utilizing 3D techniques for years.  The last FF games didn't need to be split into chapters.  You've even stated it's not a very long game.  This is as obvious a cash grab as I've seen.

2) The excuse they are giving that it needs to be done for the story's sake sounds like hogwash.  Everyone knows the story.  More cash grab nonsense.

3) I won't support the industry going the way of splitting popular games into incomplete chapters, just so they can rake you over the coals for more content.

So yeah... I'm not going to get this and have no qualms about it.  I'm not going to spend $1-200 on a single game.

 

I agree the story thing is hogwash, unless they are radically expanding the story (in which case the question arises of, why?). The first point I think is not quite fair. From what I've seen of them, FF10-15 do not have the diversity of environments needed in one game that FF7 had (11 and 14 might, but they had much greater development times).

As for the latter points, I think we are approaching break point for the industry, and it is their fault. AAA games are not sustainable at current costs of development. They can't push up prices too much because most people (especially in the US and UK) have not had significant real-world pay rises in 20 years, which is why the RRP of video games has not significantly risen in 20-25 years. But it's clear that the market now cannot sustain that RRP any more. Developers either need to make sure each game sells 10 million+ copies (which is not realistic), they need to drop development costs and make fans understand that future games may not be as graphically amazing as they are expecting (which people who've just dropped top dollar on a brand new PS4 Pro or XB1S or whatever wont't want to hear) or they need to raise prices, which the market can't sustain either.

Looking at what they've been saying about FF7 Remake is that each of the three games will be about the size of FF13, which seems a bit extreme. From the sound of it, the first game will be set entirely within Midgar and will allow you to travel around the entire city and pick up lots of side-quests that weren't in the original game.

[GallowKnight]

I went back and re-played Jade Empire. It was still enjoyable even if it didn't quite hold up as well as I hoped it would. The fighting system in particular is a little simple and feels kinda unrewarding and the alignment-system is pretty poor too and ends up being way too black-and-white despite the game itself telling you that is isn't.

Still, I really wouldn't have minded a sequel to this. Too bad we probably never getting it.

[Pliskin]

@Werthead I don't understand that classification...
For instance, why would The Witcher 3 be in 3) while Bioware games are in 2)? In the latter, you can create a character from scratch (you can't in The Witcher) and you can make choices and take different routes (even if it's a very superficial and you always end up in the same situation more or less).

For me, it's much more simpler. You can take missions/quests/whatever in a custom order and explore an open environment => not linear. Deus Ex is not linear. I can understand that Tomb Raider might be considered linear since the side missions are very anecdotic, if not non-existent, and even though you can go back and explore previous levels, you still follow the story and unlock the said levels in a linear way. But Deus Ex? No. Even the missions themselves allow you to take various routes. If one game can be deemed not linear, it's Deus Ex (and MGS in terms of the same liberty given to beat a given mission/level).

[The Anti-Targ]

9 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

So what do y'all think about Final Fantasy 7 Remake being released in multiple installments? Is it just a cash grab? I prefer to believe them when they say they want to do the story justice, and are unable to do so in only one game.

Either way they're getting the money out of me. 

Did they not do the story justice in the original, single game? If by doing justice they mean for a single game to cover the whole story they would have to release a 500GB behemoth, then sure, perhaps releasing in bite sized 50GB installments does make sense. But for now I err on the side of it being a cash grab. If it isn't a cash grab, then get people to pay $80 up front for all installments, upon release of the first installment. If they charge $60 per installment (or even $40, or $30 then they are being greedy arses.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Pliskin said:

@Werthead I don't understand that classification...
For instance, why would The Witcher 3 be in 3) while Bioware games are in 2)? In the latter, you can create a character from scratch (you can't in The Witcher) and you can make choices and take different routes (even if it's a very superficial and you always end up in the same situation more or less).

For me, it's much more simpler. You can take missions/quests/whatever in a custom order and explore an open environment => not linear. Deus Ex is not linear. I can understand that Tomb Raider might be considered linear since the side missions are very anecdotic, if not non-existent, and even though you can go back and explore previous levels, you still follow the story and unlock the said levels in a linear way. But Deus Ex? No. Even the missions themselves allow you to take various routes. If one game can be deemed not linear, it's Deus Ex (and MGS in terms of the same liberty given to beat a given mission/level).

The Witcher 3 is a true open world game. You can ignore the main plot and focus on side missions and optional activities and never even look at the story, the same as Bethesda RPGs and the Ubisoft ones (up to a point, as certain content/areas are walled off until you hit story markers to proceed). In all of the pre-Inquisition BioWare games you can't do that. The story unfolds in a very straightforward way. You can mess around with the order of quests in the "Chapter II" part of each game but the exact same story events happen.

Later on they did try to change this by making more impactful choices so the Mass Effect games can vary the details quite a lot - entire races can be alive or dead in the final battle, you might have different allies, you might have chosen a good or evil route to get there - but when you step back the broad story arc is exactly the same each time you play it. The Reapers show up, Reapers bad, Reapers neutralised. Same for KotOR, Jade Empire, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age 1 & 2, BG1 & 2 etc. None of these games are really open world (BG2 might come close, the optional side-quest content on that game's second act is gargantuan).

I mean, EA clearly consider this paradigm too linear for their tastes, as they ordered BioWare to abandon it after Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2 and move in a somewhat more open-worldish direction. The problem is that BioWare isn't very good at this and DA:I and ME:A aren't quite open-world in the same sense that something like Skyrim or GTA5 is.

Deus Ex is an interesting one because the sheer variety and freedom in how you approach missions is exceptional, but again none of them are open world games, all of their stories unfold in more or less the same fashion (Human Revolution has alternate endings but they're so similar that Mankind Divided doesn't even need to account for them) and Invisible War, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided are pretty linear in story; it's irrelevant if you do side-quest C before side-quest A because where the game ends up is the same. The original is a different kettle of fish. It's not open-world either but the branching game choices can result in some radically different gameplay experiences and there's what, a dozen quite different end-states for the game?

That may be a very unique kind of game situation, impossible to replicate now as the effort involved to craft 12 genuinely different endings with radically different storyline outcomes at AAA standards would be ruinously expensive and from the developer's point of view, rather pointless.

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I went back and re-played Jade Empire. It was still enjoyable even if it didn't quite hold up as well as I hoped it would. The fighting system in particular is a little simple and feels kinda unrewarding and the alignment-system is pretty poor too and ends up being way too black-and-white despite the game itself telling you that is isn't.

Still, I really wouldn't have minded a sequel to this. Too bad we probably never getting it.

 

I love Jade Empire. Highly underrated game, and I have way more fun with it than I ever had with NWN, ME1 or DA:O. Really BioWare's most underrated game, despite its issues. The story is pretty good and some of the missions and characters in the game are really memorable. It's also very funny. Actual John Cleese showing up to rip the piss out of World of WarCraft was exceptionally entertaining.

 

 

[Kalbear]

I think there's also a difference between open world gameplay and open world plot. DX is decidedly not open-world plot but is arguably quite open gameplay. Dishonored is the same. Witcher is much closer to everything being open. GTA even more so. 

[Werthead]

12 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think there's also a difference between open world gameplay and open world plot. DX is decidedly not open-world plot but is arguably quite open gameplay. Dishonored is the same. Witcher is much closer to everything being open. GTA even more so. 

Witcher 3, anyway. Witcher 2 is much closer to the old BioWare model of having three chapters (more or less) which are linear. W2 just has that quirk that entire middle third of the game changes location and faction depending on the choices you made earlier on. There's a lot grey areas there.

[briantw]

9 hours ago, Pliskin said:

Wait, so now Deus Ex and Tomb Raider (reboot) are considered linear games?!
When I read linear, I understand Uncharted/The Last of Us, not games where there is an open environment to explore... I don't understand how a Deus Ex would be considered more linear than an AC game...

The two Tomb Raider reboot games are absolutely linear.  They may have a few semi-open world segments, but they are by and large Uncharted clones...linear third-person action.

The Deus Ex reboots are slightly less linear, and have some open world stuff, but are largely still pretty linear when it comes to missions and story.  They don't have a massive open world like Elder Scrolls or Fallout, or even Witcher 3, where you can spend tens of hours doing whatever you feel like.  They have smaller open areas where you are free to explore a bit, but ultimately you'll have to come back to the main plot if you really want to do anything.

[Jace, Extat]

Jace loves games with the Tomb Raider or (to a shittier extent) Assassin's Creed controls. Being able to run and climb on shit is pretty awesome.

[A True Kaniggit]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Looking at what they've been saying about FF7 Remake is that each of the three games will be about the size of FF13, which seems a bit extreme. From the sound of it, the first game will be set entirely within Midgar and will allow you to travel around the entire city and pick up lots of side-quests that weren't in the original game.

I've heard they want all the games to be around FF13 in size, but I hadn't heard that the whole first game will be set in Midgar. I've been wondering where the cut off points would be. Thinking second game might end when :

MAJOR SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!! Don't read if you ever have any intention of ever playing FF7

Aerith dies

[A True Kaniggit]

Finished my playthrough in Europa Universalis IV I started as Brandenburg a little while back. 

I began in 1444 and finished in 1821.

At the end of the game, in Europe the German Empire consisted of pretty much all of North and South Germany (except for 5 provinces held by Poland, an unbroken German ally for 377 years (a later German ally was France, who only became an ally after both countries became Protestant))

In the America's Germany had one colony on the west coast that stretched from Baja Mexico to Vancouver, with the Rocky Mountains being the eastern border. On the east coast Germany had a small colony roughly in the shape of a triangle, with the points being New York, Toronto, and the north tip of Maine. Another colony was centered around Columbia and included the Panama Canal. Germany also completely controlled the continent of Australia.

Smaller parcels of land owned by Germany were the Galapagos Islands, Hawaii, Taiwan, Mogadishu, Nizwa, and the northern tip of the Philippines. 

 

[Lady Winter Rose]

I'm expecting Nine Parchments in 3 hours! Already purchaced gog.com wallet founds just for this game...

[Slurktan]

6 hours ago, A True Kaniggit said:

I've heard they want all the games to be around FF13 in size, but I hadn't heard that the whole first game will be set in Midgar. I've been wondering where the cut off points would be. Thinking second game might end when :

MAJOR SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!! Don't read if you ever have any intention of ever playing FF7

 

  Hide contents

Aerith dies

 

I haven't played FF7 in 20 years but doesn't Aeris die in Midgar?  I would think that would be the end of the first game.

[Fez]

1 minute ago, Slurktan said:

 

  Hide contents

I haven't played FF7 in 20 years but doesn't Aeris die in Midgar?  I would think that would be the end of the first game.

 

We really using spoilers for a game from the '90s? Okay,

Spoiler

 

Nah, Aeries dies a long while after leaving Midgar. There's a pretty long pursuit of Sephiroth, through Kalm, Junon, Nibelheim, Rocket Town, and a bunch of other places before her death in an Ancients temple (or wherever it is). Before her death, you spend much more of the game outside Midgar than inside it.

Her death is around the halfway point of the game, which means if Square wants to divide the game into three, it'd be hard to end one of them at her death.

 

 

[Werthead]

Finished a replay of Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak with the new patch installed. The tactical pause option is useful, but mainly for checking on your resource operations and getting them to move on to new resourcing areas whilst your front-line units are in the thick of the action. The AI is quite a bit better on both sides: my railguns were less likely to get themselves killed rushing into battle and instead held back and fired from long range as they should have done, which was a lot less frustrating.

Overall, a superb game made a fair bit better by the latest updates, with a still-outstanding storyline, atmosphere and music.