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Videogames: Perfect homies for the great indoors.


Red Tiger

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44 minutes ago, Rhom said:

That was pretty damn impressive.  I may have missed it, what game were they running there?

Just a game-like tech demo Unreal made, not an actual game.

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3 minutes ago, Ran said:

Just a game-like tech demo Unreal made, not an actual game.

Interesting.  It looked like a mix of Tomb Raider with Horizon: Zero Dawn and a bit of Uncharted thrown in for good measure.  :lol:

Oh... and a dash of StarGate!

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Just now, Rhom said:

Interesting.  It looked like a mix of Tomb Raider with Horizon: Zero Dawn and a bit of Uncharted thrown in for good measure.  :lol:

Oh... and a dash of StarGate!

I should say the Unreal Engine team at Epic, but yes, the tech demos tend to be pretty derivative. :)

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The entire Mafia trilogy is getting a re-release as "Definitive Editions" and a collection called Mafia TrilogyMafia III, being only four years old, hasn't had much done to it but the ten-year-old Mafia II has had a much more thorough graphical remastering that looks pretty cool.

The big news is for the eighteen-year-old, original Mafia, one of my favourite video games of all time. The game has been completely remade from the ground up in a new engine. Same story, city and characters, but completely new gameplay. It's unclear if they have changed anything else (like dropping the linear missions in favour of an open-world setup), but we should learn more next week.

Huge and fantastic news. Mafia I had incredible graphics on release, but it also had excellent writing and characters, and a really powerful story that was really well told. It also had great combat and driving. It was a much better game in almost every way (apart from the soundtrack) than the near-contemporary GTA: Vice City, and it always felt like the game never got its due, not helped by the somewhat underwhelming-but-okay sequels. I'll be snatching this up in August.

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So videogames are effectively dead as an art form. Even more dead than movies. As dead as network TV, I'll say. You don't even get pig slop anymore, just a market so starved that repackaged nostalgia is the highlight of the gaming year.

I say that in full self-awareness as I go to play Halo 2. Because WhatTheFuckElseIsThereThat'sBeenMadeWorthPlayingLately?

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14 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

So videogames are effectively dead as an art form. Even more dead than movies. As dead as network TV, I'll say. You don't even get pig slop anymore, just a market so starved that repackaged nostalgia is the highlight of the gaming year.

I say that in full self-awareness as I go to play Halo 2. Because WhatTheFuckElseIsThereThat'sBeenMadeWorthPlayingLately?

I'd argue... but this year already I've played FFVII Remake, the Tomb Raider trilogy on PS4, and the rerelease of Star Ocean on the Switch.  :lol: 

To be fair though, I've also been catching up on a backlog of games.  I mean, the entire last page of this topic was all about people having hundreds of games in their library they have not played.

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1 minute ago, Rhom said:

I'd argue... but this year already I've played FFVII Remake, the Tomb Raider trilogy on PS4, and the rerelease of Star Ocean on the Switch.  :lol: 

To be fair though, I've also been catching up on a backlog of games.  I mean, the entire last page of this topic was all about people having hundreds of games in their library they have not played.

Must not be very good then. Because I often tie the quality of a game to how eager I am to play it. Could just be me though.

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56 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The big news is for the eighteen-year-old, original Mafia, one of my favourite video games of all time.

Man, eighteen years? I knew I was a kid when I played it, but yikes.

Outside of Madden and Diablo 2 as a kid, Mafia was my favorite game. It's a super hard version of GTA 3, and the game play was excellent. And yes I also hope it's open world. 

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1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

So videogames are effectively dead as an art form. Even more dead than movies. As dead as network TV, I'll say. You don't even get pig slop anymore, just a market so starved that repackaged nostalgia is the highlight of the gaming year.

I say that in full self-awareness as I go to play Halo 2. Because WhatTheFuckElseIsThereThat'sBeenMadeWorthPlayingLately?

Clearly you didn't watch the trailer for Scorn at the Xbox event last week; what with its endless parade of wall dicks.

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Basically video games have kind of destroyed themselves. We can't have the era from the 1970s through to the PS2/OG X-Box back, when people could create even a relatively top-line game in 18 months for well under $10 million. When that was possible, we could have multiple thriving tiers of games, and players were happy to spend a reasonable amount of money even on games that were going to last them maybe 15 hours. Companies, even big publishers, were willing to take chances and experiment. Now they can't. Every single development studio seems to be 1 flop from going bust, and even the big publishers can't really handle more than few under-performing games before getting into trouble.

These days pretty much any game with cutting-edge graphics, lots of writing, recorded dialogue etc is going to be costing you $60 million and taking three years at the absolute low end, often twice that. The market has also moved to this demand for everything to be some kind of open world or multiplayer game with 50 hours of content at the low end or the game gets shat on, no matter how good it is (as said before, the number of people dumping on The Outer Worlds because it wasn't half as big or as long as New Vegas because - guess what - it had a quarter of the budget, if that, was absolutely ridiculous). So we just have this ridiculous gulf of the top-tier AAA space and then indie games and not a huge amount inbetween (Kickstarter for video games was supposed to help cure that but way too many broken promises and hugely long development cycles seem to have killed that).

It's why remasters and remakes have become so common. They were hits once, so they can be again, and developers can skip the design, prototyping and writing stages, which are pretty expensive (often pretty much everything apart from re-texturing everything, but in Mafia's case they have genuinely had to rebuild it from the ground up as a new game, which is a lot more work).

In Mafia's case I do have some more respect for completely remaking it: it's almost 20 years old and it's, by light-years, the best game in the series but no one will play it today because it looks like arse. Updating it for modern audiences is fine. Same argument for FF7. Remastering and updating games that are much newer is a lot weirder (then again the first game I ever remember buying from a shop was Elite on the BBC Micro, so there's part of me that still gawps at any game with filled-in 3D graphics and doesn't take 7 minutes to load from a tape deck).

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Eh. The converse to that is that it has never been a better time to be an indie developer. You don't have to worry about major publishing deals, you can send things out for cheap, get beta and alpha testers in early, and get a lot of word of mouth. One of the biggest games on the planet was Rocket League, and it ain't like that had a crazy budget. Untitled Goose Game got huge amounts of success too, with a similar vibe. 

Yeah, AAA games are like AAA movies - you either get them made by someone who has made bank for eons (Kojima comes to mind) and can do whatever they want, or they are entirely play-it-safe franchises with no real risks. But there's a lot more than AAA games out there. 

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The graphics part is what gets me. Is there really a demand for it? What percentage of people can even run games at the highest settings? How many people have or aspire to a 4k monitor? Has anyone even released a game without going for it? Fortnite isn't an RPG but seems to be beating out COD and BF without the shiny ultra realistic graphics. Doesn't seem impossible although not sure how relevant it is as its a different genre.

 

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5 hours ago, Proudfeet said:

The graphics part is what gets me. Is there really a demand for it? What percentage of people can even run games at the highest settings? How many people have or aspire to a 4k monitor? Has anyone even released a game without going for it? Fortnite isn't an RPG but seems to be beating out COD and BF without the shiny ultra realistic graphics. Doesn't seem impossible although not sure how relevant it is as its a different genre.

 

I dunno... go back and look at the crushing ME:Andromeda got for its graphics or look at a FFVII Remake message board and read all the bitching about textures.

I can appreciate great graphics, but I seem to play games 2-3 years or more after release and always enjoy the scenery just fine without pushing the edge. :dunno: 

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1 hour ago, Rhom said:

I dunno... go back and look at the crushing ME:Andromeda got for its graphics or look at a FFVII Remake message board and read all the bitching about textures.

I can appreciate great graphics, but I seem to play games 2-3 years or more after release and always enjoy the scenery just fine without pushing the edge. :dunno: 

Not sure what the FFVII Remake problem is but I thought that Andromeda's problem was more the consistency with it glitching out and not the detail of it. Its not that they were ugly right?

You do have to wonder how much is spent on the cinematic scenes or the models and textures or the engine with shadows, transparency and lighting and how much they can save if they don't aspire to be cutting edge and merely regular high definition.

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1 hour ago, Proudfeet said:

Not sure what the FFVII Remake problem is but I thought that Andromeda's problem was more the consistency with it glitching out and not the detail of it. Its not that they were ugly right?

You do have to wonder how much is spent on the cinematic scenes or the models and textures or the engine with shadows, transparency and lighting and how much they can save if they don't aspire to be cutting edge and merely regular high definition.

A lot of people made fun of the facial expressions and such for the lead character (especially Sarah Ryder) and many of the NPCs.

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On 5/14/2020 at 2:06 PM, Proudfeet said:

Not sure what the FFVII Remake problem is but I thought that Andromeda's problem was more the consistency with it glitching out and not the detail of it. Its not that they were ugly right?

FF7 Remake shipped with some seriously below-par textures and LoD problems. The sort of thing a lot of people might not notice, but jump right out at other players.

Fortunately they're problems that can be fixed in updates.

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