Jump to content

Video Games: Keanu Re3ves Is Breathtaking


KiDisaster

Recommended Posts

On to more musings about the Uncharted movie. How can this movie not just be received as a young Indiana Jones clone?

One assumes with it being Young Nate the story will be an original story and not an adaptation of one of the games. Though it is entirely possible that an adaptation of the original game could see Tom Holland playing Nate as an early 20's Nate (as opposed to a 30-something Nate). For all it's faults as a game, one potentially interesting element that can differentiate it from Indiana Jones is that Nate and Elena are separated for a significant period of the game, which means a movie based on the first game could spend half of act 2 following what Elena is doing (armed only with a camera her segment would become like an homage to Beyond Good and Evil), which the game never does, but obviously there's a lot Elena would have been doing while Nate was climbing around walls and shooting dudes. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

30 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

On to more musings about the Uncharted movie. How can this movie not just be received as a young Indiana Jones clone?

One assumes with it being Young Nate the story will be an original story and not an adaptation of one of the games. Though it is entirely possible that an adaptation of the original game could see Tom Holland playing Nate as an early 20's Nate (as opposed to a 30-something Nate). For all it's faults as a game, one potentially interesting element that can differentiate it from Indiana Jones is that Nate and Elena are separated for a significant period of the game, which means a movie based on the first game could spend half of act 2 following what Elena is doing (armed only with a camera her segment would become like an homage to Beyond Good and Evil), which the game never does, but obviously there's a lot Elena would have been doing while Nate was climbing around walls and shooting dudes. 

I have Beyond Good and Evil downloaded to my PS3.  Always meant to play it and never made time.  Really should do that.

I am also concerned about Holland as Nate.  I like Holland just fine, but really Drake is too obviously Fillion that it’s hard to picture anyone else in the role.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I have Beyond Good and Evil downloaded to my PS3.  Always meant to play it and never made time.  Really should do that.

I am also concerned about Holland as Nate.  I like Holland just fine, but really Drake is too obviously Fillion that it’s hard to picture anyone else in the role.

BG&E is actually really good, for a PS2 era game. I played it on PS3 and it's actually one of the few PS2 era games I was able to bring myself to start and finish in the PS3 era. IU bought quite a few PS2 era games on PS3, with good intentions of playing them, but never managed to fit them into the play schedule.

Fillion is unfortunately getting a bit on the old side to be Nate at the start of what could be hoped to be a movioe franchise with some longevity. I think he'd make a very good middle aged Sully to Holland's early / mid-20's Nate. I know Bryan Cranston is rumoured to be [probably] Sully, but one thing I am certain of is that Fillion would bring his own passion for Uncharted to the film project, which can only be a good thing for video game adaptations, as they need all the help they can get to try to break the curse. Det Pokemon could have been a steaming pile of shit if Ryan Reynolds had phoned in his Pikachu. So I would really hope that the producers find some way for Fillion to be a significant and potentially recurring character. He could also potentially play Sam. Fillion can definitely do Sam's personality just as well as he can do Nate's.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

The problem with modern games - particularly AAA games - is a crossover of many issues. The primary one is cost: to make an AAA game, with near-cutting edge graphics, a full custom score, fully voice-overed etc, you need to now spend ~$100 million.

Would be interesting to know how much the cost of graphics factor into the total cost. It looks fantastic but it doesn't seem as if it scales well as compared to the cost of the score and voice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anthem's high production costs came from crappy Bioware management, which faffed around for four years without a firm plan of what kind of game they actually wanted, and only actually made the game during the last two years. A competently-managed Bioware could have made a better game at half the production cost.

Many other AAA games do not cost anywhere near $100 million to make. Ubisoft, Bethesda, EA and Activision all re-use assets and build upon the previous iterations of their long-running series. This was taken to an extreme with Fallout 76, where Bethesda wanted to take the series into a completely new genre, without putting any serious effort into developing new mechanics.

In any case, as a customer I absolutely don't care about their production costs. All I care about is the end product and whether it's worth the money.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm more on board with the Final Fantasy VII remake. The graphics are impressive, the character updates look pretty good and combat looks more solid, especially with the optional pause and order mode, and being able to switch between characters more dynamically.

What needs further clarification - somewhat urgently - is the scale and scope of Episode I. They've said it's going to be the size of a "full game" and they see the whole release package as being similar to FF13, which took four years to complete in full. But how much new content will there be? Will Midgar be a full open-world environment with lots of new side-missions and optional content? They seemed to be saying that in much earlier interviews, but not so much in recent ones.

There's also the fact that Midgar takes up about one-quarter of the original game, so does that mean this will be four episodes or the more heavily-rumoured three?

5 hours ago, Gorn said:

Many other AAA games do not cost anywhere near $100 million to make. Ubisoft, Bethesda, EA and Activision all re-use assets and build upon the previous iterations of their long-running series. This was taken to an extreme with Fallout 76, where Bethesda wanted to take the series into a completely new genre, without putting any serious effort into developing new mechanics.

If a game is actually AAA with high-quality graphics and audio then it will be costing close to or in excess of $100 million to make, or twice that in the case of DestinyGTA5Red Dead Redemption 2 and so forth. The Witcher 3 still managed to cost well over $80 million and that's with far lower cost and salary overheads in Poland versus the USA. Cyberpunk 2077 is more expensive still. Even Bethesda, using 17-year-old core engine technology, has been unable to prevent their costs rising towards $100 million (or way over with marketing included).

The Call of DutyBattlefield etc series all comfortably cost well north of $100 million for each instalment. And the unholy production times means that Blizzard games cost considerably more.

Fallout 76 is an interesting one as Bethesda have refused to reveal the budget for the game. We know they reused not just the Fallout 4 engine but many assets from the game (some tweaked, some not), but they also needed to come up with a lot of new stuff, and a whole new net infrastructure, which likely eclipsed the cost savings from not having as much writing or dialogue. If FO76 cost significantly less than the $120 million of FO4 or the $90 million of Skyrim, I'd be surprised. It is clear it's been an unmitigated commercial disaster for Bethesda, with some estimates of total sales across all platforms at the 6-month mark of being around 3 million (which is less than what Fallout 3 shipped on it's first day on sale in 2008).

 

Quote

 

Battlefront 2 is a kind of awesome game with a fairly fun single player and really awesome multiplayer modes. And it is just gorgeous.

 

Well, for a 2005 game, yeah, not so much anymore.

Unless you mean Battlefront 2 (2), which is very gorgeous with some fun multiplayer, but a decided dearth of content on release compared to the original Battlefront 2 (1). The SP material is also solid but brief.

I would also like to strangle the people who started this kick of making games with exactly the same title as an already-extant, very popular game released barely a dozen years earlier. It's moronic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hell yeah. Finally an Animal Crossing announcement and the teaser for Breath of the Wild 2 was an awesome surprise. Banjo in Smash was expected but still very cool to see. 

Great stuff coming from Nintendo. 

God there are too many games coming out in the Fall of this year and Q1 2020. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Square Avengers game looks proper bollocks. Okay, they decided they didn't want to pay the actors the exorbitant fees for their likenesses, but these look genuinely horrible, like from a cut scene in a game aiming a bit above its ability from ten years ago.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh you fucking morons.

Shenmue 3, a game crowdfunded with a promise of a Steam release on Day One, has been announced as an Epic Store exclusive, probably for the standard 12 months. The publisher has refused to offer refunds.

This has not gone down well. Backers are now cancelling their crowdfunding payments by reversing their CC charges, and some are threatening legal action (the legality of this move in the UK, for example, is highly dubious, as it could constitute fraud).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, KiDisaster said:

Hell yeah. Finally an Animal Crossing announcement and the teaser for Breath of the Wild 2 was an awesome surprise. Banjo in Smash was expected but still very cool to see. 

Great stuff coming from Nintendo. 

God there are too many games coming out in the Fall of this year and Q1 2020. 

Nothing has me hyped like Breath of the Wild 2. I know it's still probably years away, but oh man am I excited. And for Metroid Prime 4, whenever that happens.

Banjo in Smash is also excellent- the only one of the DLC fighters so far I'll be buying.

Pokemon Sword and Shield also looks surprisingly good (this is coming from a person who only ever played Red and Blue, though I did enjoy Let's Go Eevee). If it's a good port, I may also be tempted by The Witcher 3 on Switch- it's amazing that this is going to exist. Between that, Skyrim, and Breath of the Wild, imo the three best open world games of the past decade, I'll always have a game I want to play on the go,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Oh you fucking morons.

Shenmue 3, a game crowdfunded with a promise of a Steam release on Day One, has been announced as an Epic Store exclusive, probably for the standard 12 months. The publisher has refused to offer refunds.

This has not gone down well. Backers are now cancelling their crowdfunding payments by reversing their CC charges, and some are threatening legal action (the legality of this move in the UK, for example, is highly dubious, as it could constitute fraud).

Wow. Okay then. I haven't been one to get mad about the EGS, but that's really stupid. I don't think its exactly Epic's fault though, it's not on them to have to care about their business partners' other commitments and promises. However, the developers/publishers absolutely have to care and should not be making deals that broke those promises.

Of course, it's still all really silly because this is just a different PC launcher. It's not like the game is becoming a Switch exclusive or something that would incur an additional cost on backers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Deep Silver is the same company that pulled Metro: Exodus from sale on Steam even though it had been available for pre-order for months already. Though at least in that case the people who ordered it on Steam could still get it on Steam. 

Clearly whatever they lost in chargebacks, refunds, etc. did not add up to the fat check Epic cut them for the exclusivity deal so they're going for it again. This time around is more egregious. I'm not anti-Epic store like most people on the internet seem to be but this absolutely sucks on Deep Silver's part. 

Fuck 'em. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Phoenix Point also had the same issue, but at least in that case the designers said, "Look, they've offered us enough money to keep the studio going for another five years if this game doesn't sell a single copy, and we have employees to look after." It sucked, but they were upfront about the reasoning. The Outer Worlds team also appeared to be really unhappy about it, but there was nothing they could do as it was a publisher decision.

The Shenmue 3 excuse is a lot more corporate bullshit, though, and given it was crowdfunded from nothing from the ground up (Phoenix Point at least had separate investment from the profits of Chaos Reborn), it's a lot more of a direct slap in the face of fans.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On the topic of cost of games, Venture Beat had this last year which was pretty interesting.I was thinking about Hellblade from Ninja Theory, and how they basically managed a triple-AAA game for under $10 million with a time a fifth a size of their previous games. Now, that was a relatively short game -- 10 hours or so -- but it shows that you can manage a lot with a much smaller development budget if you stay focused and have a strong vision of what you want to achieve without "mission creep". I mean, Wolfenstein II: The New Order was not much longer unless you insisted on all the extras, and I suspect that game was much more expensive to make. 

The problem with most of the big studio AAA games -- especially the franchises -- is that the marketing side of the publisher tends to have a big say on game development. It's clea  when you look at something like Anthem that being pressured by a publisher and pulled this way and that to try and please them is generally not a good thing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

On the topic of cost of games, Venture Beat had this last year which was pretty interesting.I was thinking about Hellblade from Ninja Theory, and how they basically managed a triple-AAA game for under $10 million with a time a fifth a size of their previous games. Now, that was a relatively short game -- 10 hours or so -- but it shows that you can manage a lot with a much smaller development budget if you stay focused and have a strong vision of what you want to achieve without "mission creep". I mean, Wolfenstein II: The New Order was not much longer unless you insisted on all the extras, and I suspect that game was much more expensive to make. 

The problem with most of the big studio AAA games -- especially the franchises -- is that the marketing side of the publisher tends to have a big say on game development. It's clea  when you look at something like Anthem that being pressured by a publisher and pulled this way and that to try and please them is generally not a good thing.

All good points. Hellblade is pretty much a walking simulator with a couple of combat moves added on, so yes, you can aggressively control the budget when you are making an incredibly linear game. But incredibly linear games don't sell tons of copies any more, unless you have a really interesting angle (like Hellblade's take on mental illnesses).

BioWare/EA's relationship has been fraught with decisions made for marketing reasons rather than gameplay ones: both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda suffered from the publishers demanding "open-world games like Skyrim" and Anthem suffered from the demand for "something a bit like Destiny."

Apparently they didn't learn the lesson from The Witcher 3: just make a really good, narratively-focused, single-player RPG with good characters. Which is insane as that's what BioWare used to be so good at, and what you'd assume EA bought them for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm more on board with the Final Fantasy VII remake. The graphics are impressive, the character updates look pretty good and combat looks more solid, especially with the optional pause and order mode, and being able to switch between characters more dynamically.

What needs further clarification - somewhat urgently - is the scale and scope of Episode I. They've said it's going to be the size of a "full game" and they see the whole release package as being similar to FF13, which took four years to complete in full. But how much new content will there be? Will Midgar be a full open-world environment with lots of new side-missions and optional content? They seemed to be saying that in much earlier interviews, but not so much in recent ones.

There's also the fact that Midgar takes up about one-quarter of the original game, so does that mean this will be four episodes or the more heavily-rumoured three?

If a game is actually AAA with high-quality graphics and audio then it will be costing close to or in excess of $100 million to make, or twice that in the case of DestinyGTA5Red Dead Redemption 2 and so forth. The Witcher 3 still managed to cost well over $80 million and that's with far lower cost and salary overheads in Poland versus the USA. Cyberpunk 2077 is more expensive still. Even Bethesda, using 17-year-old core engine technology, has been unable to prevent their costs rising towards $100 million (or way over with marketing included).

The Call of DutyBattlefield etc series all comfortably cost well north of $100 million for each instalment. And the unholy production times means that Blizzard games cost considerably more.

Fallout 76 is an interesting one as Bethesda have refused to reveal the budget for the game. We know they reused not just the Fallout 4 engine but many assets from the game (some tweaked, some not), but they also needed to come up with a lot of new stuff, and a whole new net infrastructure, which likely eclipsed the cost savings from not having as much writing or dialogue. If FO76 cost significantly less than the $120 million of FO4 or the $90 million of Skyrim, I'd be surprised. It is clear it's been an unmitigated commercial disaster for Bethesda, with some estimates of total sales across all platforms at the 6-month mark of being around 3 million (which is less than what Fallout 3 shipped on it's first day on sale in 2008).

 

Well, for a 2005 game, yeah, not so much anymore.

Unless you mean Battlefront 2 (2), which is very gorgeous with some fun multiplayer, but a decided dearth of content on release compared to the original Battlefront 2 (1). The SP material is also solid but brief.

I would also like to strangle the people who started this kick of making games with exactly the same title as an already-extant, very popular game released barely a dozen years earlier. It's moronic.

And so what if game production costs are going north of $100 million for a AAA title? The video game market is plenty big enough that if you produce a good game you will still make a very health profit at $60/game. The problem is if you put out a series of shit games at a cost of >$100 million each then you are going to lose a lot of money. But also, so what? Should the consumer have to fork out for higher game prices because studios keep making expensive unprofitable crap?

Gamers having a high addiction rate to games helps the industry in that gamers spend too much on games, but it's still a finite pool of money. What predatory monetisation in $60 AAA games does (fee to pay as Jim Sterling likes to call it) is concentrate gamer spending into fewer games. The result of which is inevitably fewer game purchases, which does then start to affect the profitability of good AAA games that in a time before fee to pay games would have made a return for the studio. the death of single-player games isn't a phenomenon that would happen naturally, it's a phenomenon that AAA publishers desire so that consumer spending can be concentrated into the high margin, high volume lootbox and other predatory monetisation practices for a lower volume of new game output.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/10/2019 at 7:55 AM, KiDisaster said:

Old thread is at locking age. 

Some important news to kick us off: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-06-10-cd-projekt-gives-free-copy-of-cyberpunk-2077-to-guy-who-shouted-youre-breathtaking-at-keanu-reeves

I think the announcement I'm most excited for so far is Elden Ring. I'm 125% on board for anything From bring out, and I can't wait to see their take on a bigger open world game. 

Looks like Microsoft is hungry again after having their lunch eaten by Sony this generation. I wonder if they'll try to get their next console to market a year early again. Having Halo as a launch game will be huge. 

I loved the 360, and I think launch time has little to do with the success of a console. In my opinion, Microsoft did the same thing as Sony did with the PS3. They had too much hubris. They thought they could do no wrong, and, in many ways, these companies do have a ton of leeway when coming off console successes. But they typically make decisions that are fundamentally annoying (and sometimes outright hostile) to gamers. The Xbone had numerous moments like this that I remember. Games that only worked if you had internet (they must have changed this later?), a convoluted trading system, and hot off the heels of Snowden's release of classified info that we are being upon (in the U.S.) perfectly collided with the Xbone's inclusion of an always on camera that required internet access to work--and again, when announced, was mandatory. 

Sony's responses sealed the deal. I still remember their little "ad" at some conference where they showed how you trade games on the PS4. One guy handed his physical game to another guy. I mean these were big deals. Xbone could have come out early/late/exact same day as the PS4, but their choices on that console made many gamers feel like choice was being taken from them.

I think the biggest coup for Sony was the same one for Microsoft on the previous generation: price. Because of the mandatory Kinect, Xbone was 499 at launch, and the PS4 a hundred bucks less. Very similar to PS3 being 600 bucks and nothing they could do because they added a blueray player to the machine while the Xbox 360 made the HDD drive optional (therefor they could sell their units cheaper). All the reactive responses from Microsoft when they saw the tides had turned were too late. They'd lost the fight right out the gate.

I'm not saying Microsoft won't come out ahead on this new round, but it depends on if they learned from previous mistakes. I think the most important rule is that whichever new console is cheaper, that's the one that will win. I know when those 600+ price tags start getting reported for the next console, I'm going to say, "No way." So when the second console announces something like 500-550 dollars, I'll grudgingly accept. Even though that was way out of any price range I was willing to pay back in 2013. Hell, if they're over 500 bucks, I'll be honest, I may not even buy another console. All they do is collect dust. I could put that money toward a new PC.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm more on board with the Final Fantasy VII remake. The graphics are impressive, the character updates look pretty good and combat looks more solid, especially with the optional pause and order mode, and being able to switch between characters more dynamically.

What needs further clarification - somewhat urgently - is the scale and scope of Episode I. They've said it's going to be the size of a "full game" and they see the whole release package as being similar to FF13, which took four years to complete in full. But how much new content will there be? Will Midgar be a full open-world environment with lots of new side-missions and optional content? They seemed to be saying that in much earlier interviews, but not so much in recent ones.

There's also the fact that Midgar takes up about one-quarter of the original game, so does that mean this will be four episodes or the more heavily-rumoured three?

I was thinking about this too. I read that they've greatly expanded character interactions and the story. So now I have some more worries than if it's four or five games (which they would never finish...here comes our second ASOIAF...). I think my concerns are the "expansion" stories they've already done actually being really shitty and ultimately retconning some of my favorite things about FF7. In FF7, AeriS was named Aeris, and she seemed patient, wise, kind, and intuitive of what others were feeling. She had a kind of agelessness when compared to someone like Cloud. In Crisis Core, she turned out to never really love Cloud, or not so much as Zack, and [Crisis Core Spoilers below]

When Zack leaves (or dies), she sends him like 80 or 90 letters to him. That's...not romantic or cute. It's creepy. When I was deployed in 2005, my wife and I said we'd write everyday. We didn't (arrested development narrator voice). And if we did, it would have gotten really old and probably annoying.

Aeris became a flirty teen--and I'm not against that type of character, but it just kind of ruined the mystery surrounding her as the last Cetra. Any love she had for Cloud could only now be confused feelings for Zack. That's not how I played the original game at all.

I was okay with some of Advent Children because it was nice to see the characters again, and any expansion of Vincent's character in the new game will be great--though, same as Aeris, any expansion of his character ruins that mystery surrounding him. 

I'm worried because this is a true remake. It's like Total Recall or Robocop the remakes. They are a new story, and often, remakes miss the point of the original entirely (not always). 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...