Video Games- Game of the Year

[Fez]

17 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Any recommendations for games that make good use of RT apart from Cyberpunk 2077? Control looks interesting and I did enjoy the Max Payne games. 

Honestly, it's Minecraft is my understanding.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I don't have any missions on the map for either character. Best I can guess is the game wants me to go to the firing range or just explore the random stuff on the map. 

You didn't get a "mission disrupted" message? If so you can just move away from the last mission until it reappears.

Otherwise I have no memory of there being a moment without an icon to go to, but it was six years ago that I last played the game. 

Spoiler

Both? I'm guessing this is before you get the third character?

I do fancy a GTAV replay but I'm holding fire for the PS5/XB1 re-release later this year, because that will likely bring a host of improvements to the PC version as well (including a major engine upgrade, reportedly to the RAGE iteration used by RDR2).

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And another as Lucasfilms Game announces another new game: Ubisoft Massive are developing a open-world Star Wars game. Notably, Massive is yet another Swedish company (and one I forgot to mention directly when rattling off a few of the notable Swedish game developers). Given that the Battlefront games come from DICE, that's a major chunk of Lucasfilms IP that Swedish developers are behind. Pretty cool.

Looks like creative director Julian Gerighty is behind The Division 2. Wonder if this means the game will be in that vein, or if they'll look more at the open world titles Ubisoft puts out like Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed, etc...

 

Massive also created the Ground Control games and the splendid World in Conflict (and it's expansion/remake, Soviet Assault), which were far ahead-of-their-time RTS games. The original Ground Control is 21 years old but has some absolutely outstanding mission and UI design innovations that no other RTS games followed up on, sadly.  I replayed it recently and it's held up well.

I suspect this will be very much The Division: Star Wars. A reskinning of the game engine will save them a lot of time and the Battlefront games have seen long-term player dropoff because of a lack of focused, story-driven content, which is what The Division does really well, in a superb engine.

I do suspect a SP-focused open-world Star Wars game will follow, but if so it'll likely be from one of Ubisoft's other studios.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

You didn't get a "mission disrupted" message? If so you can just move away from the last mission until it reappears.

Otherwise I have no memory of there being a moment without an icon to go to, but it was six years ago that I last played the game. 

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Both? I'm guessing this is before you get the third character?

I do fancy a GTAV replay but I'm holding fire for the PS5/XB1 re-release later this year, because that will likely bring a host of improvements to the PC version as well (including a major engine upgrade, reportedly to the RAGE iteration used by RDR2).

No, I got "mission complete" and no new ones appeared. And yeah, it's fairly early on in the game. I just checked because I'm for lunch and I've played 11 missions total. I think the game wants me to go to the gun range like I said and maybe do a tow job, but there's no obvious next mission for either player. 

ETA: I'm a dumbass. I forgot this game has some missions that don't trigger unless you actually click on a text message rather than just reading it.

[Luzifer's right hand]

I got Control an it looks damn fine. Unlike in Cyberpunk 2077 you see reflections of the main character and that works really well in some scenes.

It is really hardware hungry with maxed settings but ~60-70 fps is good enough. I find the DLSS makes things quite a bit worse at least on my 35" 3440*1440 display(I hit 90-100 fps with that on). Might look better on smaller displays but DLSS looks a bit shit in Cyberpunk 2077 too imho.

The prerendered cutscenes look worse than the game itself. 

[Inkdaub]

3 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I got Control an it looks damn fine. Unlike in Cyberpunk 2077 you see reflections of the main character and that works really well in some scenes.

It is really hardware hungry with maxed settings but ~60-70 fps is good enough. I find the DLSS makes things quite a bit worse at least on my 35" 3440*1440 display(I hit 90-100 fps with that on). Might look better on smaller displays but DLSS looks a bit shit in Cyberpunk 2077 too imho.

The prerendered cutscenes look worse than the game itself. 

Control is one of my favorite games.  I loved every second of it.  Have fun!

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

2 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

Control is one of my favorite games.  I loved every second of it.  Have fun!

 

I'm enjoying it so far. 

[Fez]

Control is great. So much care and detail was put into the world-building; it's the only game I can think of where I took the time to read the text/listen to the audio of all the collectables.

[Slurktan]

I've decided to start up one of Werthead's games that he keeps talking about... Tyranny.  I've not played it before and not really read up on anything so not sure how I want to build my character but I've decided if I'm to be the bad guy I will be a Roman style badguy so pilum and shield and all haughty taughty.  I really liked the pregame stuff like choosing how your forces conquered this place or that but I'm honestly not sure which side I should be favouring.  At point thus far (only a couple hours in) I like stuff from both sides and dislike stuff from both too.  Very interesting.

[Toth]

Lol, I'm going to melt my laptop out of morbid curiosity. Thanks to that Epic Games giveaway I'm trying to download Battlefront II now. XD

Edit: Well, my laptop will live for another day, it seems. The download is saying "Come back in 22 hours".

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

Control is one of my favorite games.  I loved every second of it.  Have fun!

I really need to get back to it. I got sidetracked by something else after just starting and lost track of what was going on.

Remedy are one of my favourite game developers and have basically done no wrong in their career: Max Payne 1 and 2 (probably the best third-person shooters ever made); Alan Wake; Quantum Break; Control. All very interesting, original and with offbeat tones and stories, basically traditional American stories and tropes filtered through this wryly amused Finnish perspective. They also make fantastic-looking games.

I get the impression Control being such a huge hit took them by surprise, because it was a bit of a departure from their previous games, focusing on gameplay over narrative and with a lighter story touch, but still a lot of depth to what was going on. They seem a bit baffled about why it took off when some of their other games didn't (Quantum Break, being a weird TV show/video game hybrid, I can understand not having mass appeal despite being really good, but it always felt like Alan Wake should have been bigger and the first two Max Paynes should have been stratospheric rather than merely very good). 

I'm also intrigued by the Remedy Connected Universe and want to check that out further, especially since since Control DLC explains a bit more about what happened in Alan Wake (after Alan Wake 2 was cancelled and left the character in a bit of a bind) and reportedly once the Quantum Break IP returns to them (which might be this year) they'll be integrated that into the mythology as well.

[Soylent Brown]

I tried to play Alan Wake a couple of years ago on PC and thought it was awful.

[Fez]

20 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I get the impression Control being such a huge hit took them by surprise, because it was a bit of a departure from their previous games, focusing on gameplay over narrative and with a lighter story touch, but still a lot of depth to what was going on. They seem a bit baffled about why it took off when some of their other games didn't (Quantum Break, being a weird TV show/video game hybrid, I can understand not having mass appeal despite being really good, but it always felt like Alan Wake should have been bigger and the first two Max Paynes should have been stratospheric rather than merely very good). 

Well, there's much less competition in the AAA (maybe AAa) space for single-player, narrative focused games than there used to be, but still a ton of demand for it. Which I think makes it easier for them to big hits when one does release.

[Werthead]

3 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

I tried to play Alan Wake a couple of years ago on PC and thought it was awful.

It's a very idiosyncratic and Marmitey game. If you lock into what it's doing, it's amazing. If not, it's weird and unlikable.

Something that's a shame is that modders have never actually done a full map unlock of the game. It was supposed to be an open-world thing where as Alan you'd be investigating things as you wanted and moving around the entire area, but at some point they realised they couldn't make the engine work in the memory limitations of the X-Box 360 and walled off the open world map, turning it into discrete mini-zones where each mission takes place. You can sometimes stand on the edge of one mission area and realise you're looking into the map from like three missions earlier, you just can't cross over into it. I think that model would have been more successful, since the released version feels very constrained and on-rails at times.

[Mexal]

I loved Control too. Just throwing that out there.

[briantw]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

I really need to get back to it. I got sidetracked by something else after just starting and lost track of what was going on.

I do this with basically every game.  I'll start it, be way into it for ten to twenty hours, then the next shiny thing releases and I rinse and repeat.

Games are too fucking long these days.  I appreciated Miles Morales being relatively short, although in that case I actually wanted five more hours because the side characters just don't feel as fleshed out as characters in the first game were, and that's doubly problematic because I'm nowhere near as familiar with the Miles Morales' comic origins and rogue's gallery as I am Peter Parker's.  My only previous experiences with Morales were in the first game and Into the Spider-Verse, both of which were fantastic.  The game suffers for the lack of development of characters like Miles' Uncle Aaron or his childhood best friend, Phin, and also because Simon Krieger is a shitty, boring villain.  It needed a few more set-pieces and a couple more boss fights too, and it would have been nice to see more of the old Spidey villains, most of whom are absent here.

The positives are that the combat is a bit more enjoyable than the previous game, and because I played that one there wasn't much of a learning curve here.  Miles has a few new abilities that add a bit more flair to the game's fights, and his ability to turn invisible for short periods of time means that you aren't locked in to a long, drawn out fist fight the second you hit the wrong button, or the game decides to do the opposite of what you intended to.  Now you can go invisible and quickly zip to safety and wait for things to calm down.

It's also very pretty.  I only have the PS4 version, as I have yet to buy a PS5, but New York looks gorgeous in the winter snow and there are some nice little details, like now individual snowflakes land and stick on Spidey's suit for a few seconds during cutscenes.  

Other than that, it's just more of the first game.  Which, in this case, is just fine.

[Werthead]

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I do this with basically every game.  I'll start it, be way into it for ten to twenty hours, then the next shiny thing releases and I rinse and repeat.

Most of the time I don't do this. A game has to be really crap or tedious for me to give up on it. I made a mistake with Control in that I got it just before something else I really wanted to play came out (might have been Red Dead Redemption 2) and it got superseded.

For replaying games, it's more common. I have a replay of BSG: Deadlock on standby as that got put on hold for CP77 (and I made the mistake of replaying the original campaign before playing the new expansions, which resulted in a bit of overload). I'll try to get back to that soonish.

2 hours ago, briantw said:

Games are too fucking long these days.  I appreciated Miles Morales being relatively short, although in that case I actually wanted five more hours because the side characters just don't feel as fleshed out as characters in the first game were, and that's doubly problematic because I'm nowhere near as familiar with the Miles Morales' comic origins and rogue's gallery as I am Peter Parker's.  My only previous experiences with Morales were in the first game and Into the Spider-Verse, both of which were fantastic.  The game suffers for the lack of development of characters like Miles' Uncle Aaron or his childhood best friend, Phin, and also because Simon Krieger is a shitty, boring villain.  It needed a few more set-pieces and a couple more boss fights too, and it would have been nice to see more of the old Spidey villains, most of whom are absent here.

 

Yup. The length of games is a big debate, especially after seeing some games that would have been unimpeachable classics get drawn out and become far too long and end up becoming worse because they were too long (the gold-standard example being Alien Isolation, a five-star classic at 7-10 hours which was overstuffed and boring at 20+; if you want to make a really long game, a tense horror title is not the genre to do it in).

I get the fact that games are really expensive now (in some respects they're not really, given inflation, but they feel more expensive) and companies are paranoid that people won't even look at a game at full price unless they're guaranteed about 50 of content as a minimum, but I do feel we're getting over-saturated with open world games padding their length not with interesting content but with bullshit collectibles and endless fetch quests (hi, all Ubisoft games ever). EA making Squadrons pretty short but also very cheap was an interesting experiment, which I don't believe they've relayed the findings of yet.

Control doesn't have that problem though. I believe you can mainline the story in under 15 hours and a completionist playthrough is more like 25 hours, and that's pretty reasonable. Slightly related, but the best short AAA game I ever played was Max Payne 2, which you can beat in literally 5 hours, but that's actually so short that it's fun to immediately play it in New Game+ mode, which unlocks new story points and a different ending (that only works once though, it's not the Hades of 2003).

After I do the Metro trilogy I might tap back into Control, actually.

[briantw]

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Yup. The length of games is a big debate, especially after seeing some games that would have been unimpeachable classics get drawn out and become far too long and end up becoming worse because they were too long (the gold-standard example being Alien Isolation, a five-star classic at 7-10 hours which was overstuffed and boring at 20+; if you want to make a really long game, a tense horror title is not the genre to do it in).

I get the fact that games are really expensive now (in some respects they're not really, given inflation, but they feel more expensive) and companies are paranoid that people won't even look at a game at full price unless they're guaranteed about 50 of content as a minimum, but I do feel we're getting over-saturated with open world games padding their length not with interesting content but with bullshit collectibles and endless fetch quests (hi, all Ubisoft games ever). EA making Squadrons pretty short but also very cheap was an interesting experiment, which I don't believe they've relayed the findings of yet.

The Assassin's Creed games are the biggest culprit to me.  Does anyone ever actually finish those games?  The last one I actually beat was when Ezio was the main character.  I'm enjoying Valhalla but it seems unlikely I'll ever make it to the end.  There's just way too much shit to do.  Same is true of Odyssey.  Played the hell out of it for a real long time, got burnt out, never went back.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, briantw said:

I do this with basically every game.  I'll start it, be way into it for ten to twenty hours, then the next shiny thing releases and I rinse and repeat.

I'm guilty of this too, but the games I've tended to play don't have an end. Sports games, D2 and D3, LoL etc. RDR2 was the first game with an end point I've finished in ages, and the reason I'm on GTA5 now is because I made it most of the way through without finishing. I hate bypassing missions I can't beat and that's what stalled me out last time.

BTW, playing GTA5 right after RDR2 has dramatically improved my driving skills, even if I didn't beat a mission by accidentally hitting something that flung my car into the air and landed me on the roof of a house.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, briantw said:

The Assassin's Creed games are the biggest culprit to me.  Does anyone ever actually finish those games? 

The Assassin's Creed games feel overstuffed to the point of excess, and have since at least Assassin's Creed III - which remains the only entry in the series I've ever managed to finish, and even that game felt over-long, with the main campaign taking me 28 hours to complete. Friends have related stories to me about spending in excess of 50 hours on Assassin's Creed: Origins and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. With side-quests, those games can reportedly consume as much as 100 hours. 

As historian Bret Devereaux discussed in a recent essay, some gamers don't even finish playing Assassin's Creed games through to the end. Looking at my Playtime tab in Steam, aside from a few absolutely massive games like Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, most of the games I've enjoyed over the past few years have been around the much more reasonable 15-20 hour mark (the Tomb Raider prequel trilogy, Jedi: Fallen Order, Half Life 2, Halo, Unreal, Planescape: Torment, Mass Effect, Icewind Dale). As one gets older and has less free time, 10-20 hours is a far more reasonable amount of gameplay time. It just gets too hard to expend hundreds of hours on a game or a game series. 

(I spent a decade in university, so the last few years have been all about catching up on what I missed out on between 2000 and 2010.)

[Centrist Simon Steele]

I'll take hundreds of hours please. You don't have to play them.