Videogames: The Sequeling

[Impmk2]

BG trilogy finished. I think I'd only ever played through ToB a couple times. It's more focused which is both a good and bad thing, I missed the meandering side content of BG/BG2 and the combat kinda devolved into boss fights using the high level summons, sequencers loaded with pierce magic, then and dropping whirlwinds / level 9 damage spells on to the fight. OTOH there was much more of a narrative push, and after 160hrs+ of Baldur's Gate I was kinda ready for it to be over. Still I think it held up very well for a 20+ year old game. The writing is still excellent. Might do an evil playthrough at some stage, though I'll give it a while.

On to Subnautica: Below Zero.

[Werthead]

The Ubisoft E3 show was total bullshit. They needn't have even bothered showing up. So pointless. And what was the point doing a big thing on Far Cry 6 just a few weeks ago? They might have held back for this.

The Avatar open-world game at looks half-decent and Massive Entertaining doing a single-player-focused game again is actually good news (they used to be great at them before being trapped working on Division stuff for years). But the licence restrictions are not encouraging.

I'm not particularly interested in the games, but the Devolver showcase was at least funny.

Gearbox's was also crap. The only thing they really did was scare people by saying that Homeworld 3 was only just entering development, which turned out to be highly erroneous; I thought I'd had a stroke hallucinating all the dev updates on the game for the last eighteen months. Still on track for late 2022, thank fuck.

This E3 is, so far, a hysterically poor non-event even by recent standards. Bethesda-Microsoft need to deliver tomorrow.

[Fez]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Ubisoft E3 show was total bullshit. They needn't have even bothered showing up. So pointless.

It wasn't a total waste. The new Mario + Rabbids game looks dope as hell. That first game was shockingly good.

[Ran]

For the science fiction city builder fans, Surviving Mars is free at the Humble Bundle website for about... 31 more hours.

[Red Tiger]

Decided to drop ME Legendary edition. I forgot just how dull an tedious the combat was.

[Werthead]

Some other things in the Microsoft presentation that might show up: more on Avowed (Obsidian's Elder Scrolls-alike set in the Pillars of Eternity world) and possibly a formal announcement of The Outer Worlds 2. There's also a third Obsidian CRPG in development which sounds like it might be an outright historical CRPG with a smaller scale, which could be interesting.

I'm not sure they'll announce anything new for inXile, who only just dropped Wasteland 3, but presumably they are working on their next project by now and their first with that sweet Microsoft $$$ backing them up.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Got ff7 remake for ps5; 87gig install! The lack of hd space on a ps5 is shocking. There are longterm games like ff14 and Elite Dangerous that its too much hassle to constantly reinstall. 
I’d hoped to install Conan Exiles but it’s too big. Also want to start Mass Effect, but I’ll need to uninstall ff7

Should probably finish Assassins Creed Odyssey; its a big install too.

Edit: And I’ve 70mbs download speed; God help anyone with shit broadband trying to manage space

[Werthead]

So, Starfield.

Nice.

Also a bit more.

[Werthead]

Redfall, a new, hitherto unannounced game from Arkane Austin, looks pretty smart (the French Arkane have been working on Deathloop), potentially a much more involved Left 4 Dead style of gameplay with a deeper story, featuring a team fighting various supernatural horrors including vampires. Redfall was the rumoured name for The Elder Scrolls VI after Bethesda copyrighted it, but obviously that was wrong.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl looks pretty good, but nowhere near janky enough to be true to the STALKER experience.

[dog-days]

Outer Worlds 2 trailer gave me a good laugh. Keeping meaning to see if my laptop can cope with Outer Worlds 1. 

[Werthead]

Age of Empires IV still looks crap. Genuinely bemused why Relic are putting out a game with worse graphics than Dawn of War, 17 years ago. Obviously most of the real talent left years ago to set up Blackbird, but you'd have thought they had enough talented artists left behind so it wouldn't look like a mobile game. Company of Heroes 2 and Dawn of War III, as meh as both ended up being, at least looked good. Hoping the gameplay is a lot better, but given how long it's been since Relic released a really good game, that might be asking for a bit too much.

[Proudfeet]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Age of Empires IV still looks crap. Genuinely bemused why Relic are putting out a game with worse graphics than Dawn of War, 17 years ago. Obviously most of the real talent left years ago to set up Blackbird, but you'd have thought they had enough talented artists left behind so it wouldn't look like a mobile game. Company of Heroes 2 and Dawn of War III, as meh as both ended up being, at least looked good. Hoping the gameplay is a lot better, but given how long it's been since Relic released a really good game, that might be asking for a bit too much.

It's been clear since the initial preview that it is a design choice. It won't look different closer to completion. The official explanation is that it is to be accessible (system requirements), and distinguishable (team and unit type). 

For reference, minimum specs on Steam for AoE4 : Intel HD 520, CoH2 : GeForce 8800 GT, DoW3 : GTX-460. I don't know how critical the difference between integrated graphics and a separate video card is, but isn't that why you have graphic settings? 

I've felt that the key cause of the AoE4 looking crap is because of team colours and not the models. I think that they could look a lot better if they were more muted and not so bright and garish. The models could have greater detail to look better, but I think the primary offender is still the choice of colours. And the difference in detail is minimised when you zoom out for a better field of view anyway.

As for the game itself, I've mentioned in before, but I'm not a fan of it being increasingly asymmetrical. Hopefully it isn't as pronounced as it is being hyped to be, with most of the technology tree being shared. I feel like it would be even harder to balance otherwise. I'm not much of a campaign player, so I place more emphasis on the multiplayer experience.

[Werthead]

WarTales looks superb. Waiting for this one to leave early access.

[Werthead]

Roundup of Starfield details:

• Release date: 11 November 2022. Platforms: PC, Xbox, Game Pass.
• Set just over 300 years in the future.
• You play a member of Constellation, the "last" human organisation interested in space exploration.
• You have your own ship, a Nova Galactic-class vessel called the Frontier, which is customisable and you fly from planet to planet. The ship has a robot called Vasco (possibly the one in the trailer) who works on the ship and is named for explorer Vasco de Gama.
• Multiple planets, including: various wasteland worlds with little or no settlement; a Tatooine-like frontier world with a ramshackle town; a world with a huge, advanced city; an ocean with settlements located on stilts above the water; a lush jungle world; and obviously tons of subterranean caves, because Bethesda.
• Relatively low-tech but with some high-tech flourishes, like a gun where the ammo count doesn't appear on a screen on the gun or your HUD, but the actual surface of the weapon (or the power cell) shifts to show the count.
• A more "optimistic" view of the future to contrast with Fallout.
• It's also a "relatively" realistic take on space exploration. No FTL communications. There will be sound in space (possibly simulated by the ship) and lasers, because there are also certain expectations (probably artificial gravity as well, as someone mentions that in the trailer).
• First and third-person gameplay.
• The team have "reversed course" on the streamlining of CRPG elements over their last few games. They have brought back CRPG systems they haven't used for many years.
• In-depth character creation with much deeper background choices than they've done for a while. It sounsds like you can't play as an alien species, but aliens will be in the game in some fashion.
• There will be various factions to befriend or annoy.
• Every button and toggle in the ship has a purpose and function. You can't necessary flip every switch, but the designers had a thought behind each one.
• The artistic direction to the team was called "NASApunk" and the general gam design was "Han Solo simulator."
• The design team did field research at Space X HQ and their rocket factory.
• Bethesda had the rights to do a Traveler CRPG in the early 1990s and a Star Trek CRPG a few years later, and produced a detailed design document for a game called The 10th Planet in 1997. Each time they cancelled the project because the tech wasn't remotely there.
• The team noted it was a relief to get away from Fallout having worked non-stop on that franchise from 2011 to 2018. Though they do love Fallout and will get back there eventually.
• Four times as many people are working on this as on Skyrim.
• There probably won't be a Fallout Shelter kind of companion game.
• Most of the team is working hard from home, though the Maryland team-members are currently besieged by circadas.
• A note of caution: this is a Bethesda CRPG and anyone going in expecting Elite: Dangerous levels of freedom will be disappointed. They are calling it "Skyrim in space". There will be scope for exploring new worlds and going to new places, but it sounds like at the moment it may be a lot closer in format to a super-sized Outer Worlds (except each planet map is a massive, Skyrim-or-larger-sized open world, and there may be more of them than you'd expect) than Elite: Dangerous's eleventy billion planets. They are, however, designing the game to be playable for many, many years, way more so than they did with Skyrim or Fallout 4.
• Unconfirmed things: companion characters, a voiced protagonist, whether the spaceships are flyable in space or if they're glorified loading screens. Obviously, more to be revealed over the next 17 months.
• The Fallout TV show remains in development at Amazon with Jonathan Nolan. Bethesda have rejected several Elder Scrolls pitches which they feel were not faithful to the property.

[Corvinus85]

47 minutes ago, Werthead said:

• Unconfirmed things: companion characters, a voiced protagonist, whether the spaceships are flyable in space or if they're glorified loading screens. Obviously, more to be revealed over the next 17 months.

This statement about spaceships flyable in space contradicts some of the above points, like useful toggles on the ship and sound in space. Or is your character doing EVAs/fighting on asteroids, and the ship is just there?

49 minutes ago, Werthead said:

• The Fallout TV show remains in development at Amazon with Jonathan Nolan. Bethesda have rejected several Elder Scrolls pitches which they feel were not faithful to the property.

I wouldn't mind seeing a TES show (probably not movie) but I'm glad that Bethesda cares enough about the property to not just hand it off to the highest bidder.

[Werthead]

8 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

This statement about spaceships flyable in space contradicts some of the above points, like useful toggles on the ship and sound in space. Or is your character doing EVAs/fighting on asteroids, and the ship is just there?

In The Outer Worlds, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, your ship has moments where it's in orbit or flying to another planet, but you can walk around the ship and talk to people, do some character-building or research or something, and then cut scenes where you see the ship in combat or flying through space, but you don't control those moments directly.

So the question is if it's just that, or if you have much finer control over the ship and can fly it from world to world, engage in combat where you have direct control over the ship and so forth.

The workable toggles on the ship might just be "Map Screen" where you select where to go next, the ability to look out the window etc.

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

In The Outer Worlds, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, your ship has moments where it's in orbit or flying to another planet, but you can walk around the ship and talk to people, do some character-building or research or something, and then cut scenes where you see the ship in combat or flying through space, but you don't control those moments directly.

So the question is if it's just that, or if you have much finer control over the ship and can fly it from world to world, engage in combat where you have direct control over the ship and so forth.

The workable toggles on the ship might just be "Map Screen" where you select where to go next, the ability to look out the window etc.

This is only speculation but: I could see them including space combat as a minigame that occurs on a different map than the rest of the game. That's the way The Old Republic handles it and it works pretty well.

[polishgenius]

Sweet.

Also new BotW sequel footage; brief and the game's not out till 2022 earliest but although I'm still sceptical of reusing the same overworld, it's got islands in the sky which is usually a good time and should be a good fit for the feel of the world, and Link's new abilities look cool.

[Rhom]

48 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Sweet.

Also new BotW sequel footage; brief and the game's not out till 2022 earliest but although I'm still sceptical of reusing the same overworld, it's got islands in the sky which is usually a good time and should be a good fit for the feel of the world, and Link's new abilities look cool.

The game that put the "Metroid" in "Metroidvania."  I'm 100% in.  Loved Fusion on the GBA.  Can't wait to play this next one.

[Kalbear]

It's cool, but all I can think of is how much better Ori looks.