Videogames Killed the TV Star

[polishgenius]

I've been playing another indie, a charming little open-worlder called Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, and it makes me think two things: one, I really enjoy the smaller open world games which sometimes maybe then put more thought about fitting that world together as an intricate little environment to explore rather than big open swathes of space in some of the big ones,  and two, if an indie developer can make a free-roaming game where the main gameplay mechanic is photographing wild animals, and make it work, why the fuck did Nintendo/GameFreak settle for another on-rails game for New Pokemon Snap? 


Anyway, this isn't as good as A Short Hike, which is a fantastic game that everyone should play, but it's been a nice little dose of sunshine.  

[IlyaP]

9 hours ago, Werthead said:

I was going to play something else, but then decided to put the franchise to bed with the divisive Death of the Outsider.

I salute your bravery. That game was such a steaming pile of player-hating turds. 

[polishgenius]

Nintendo did one of their Indie directs today, and while there weren't any huge new announcements, there was a surprise drop for Axiom Verge 2, on the Switch today. I admired the first one more than I really loved it, but there was enough about it that I'm excited for this, especially since early looks suggest it's done some to fix my main complaint of the first one being a bit lifeless and uncontextualised in its world design. 

Also a surprise today release for Garden Story, which doesn't have the sequel reputation but has had some attention as a Zelda/Animal Crossing-influenced game about a warrior grape, and a next-month release date for Eastward, another top-down indie adventure in a rustbucket future which has been generating buzz for ages. . 

[Werthead]

First-person mod for The Ascent looks pretty cool.

This is actually really odd. Most isometric games don't need to look this good at this level of detail. It looks like they have multiple LOD settings well above that of the default, which would be completely wasted (especially for a game with a core design team of 12, with 60 freelancers mostly doing asset-building). Possibly they're planning their own first-person mode for a future update and future-proofed the graphics build (Cloudpunk did something similar) or they thought modders would want to do something with it and they had the time to spare in the schedule.

[Fez]

Yeah, The Ascent looks incredible. It's the main reason I'm still playing it off-and-on; since the actual gameplay never really got above "okay." It's super impressive what such a small team accomplished.

[Werthead]

This looks genuinely extremely impressive. They've redesigned some of the outdoor areas to make the ruins more ruin-y, and the names make more sense (so the Gold Coast is now genuinely impressive). A few of the cities have been redesigned as well to be less copy-paste in terms of assets than the original game, with more unique structures and designs in each town.

[RumHam]

40 minutes ago, Werthead said:

This looks genuinely extremely impressive. They've redesigned some of the outdoor areas to make the ruins more ruin-y, and the names make more sense (so the Gold Coast is now genuinely impressive). A few of the cities have been redesigned as well to be less copy-paste in terms of assets than the original game, with more unique structures and designs in each town.

I would really love to play that. Why is it that sometimes these things get shut down and other times they're allowed to continue openly for years. I've never wanted to get my hopes up about this.

In other news your GTA series replay may have been poorly timed:

The GTA Remastered Trilogy Appears To Be Real, And Coming To Switch

[Werthead]

9 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I would really love to play that. Why is it that sometimes these things get shut down and other times they're allowed to continue openly for years. I've never wanted to get my hopes up about this.

In other news your GTA series replay may have been poorly timed:

The GTA Remastered Trilogy Appears To Be Real, And Coming To Switch

Obviously this was going to happen, and Rockstar held off on release and announcement until I was already done with them. Sigh.

This does make the RDR1 remake rather more likely, however.

As for Skyblivion, Bethesda's position has always been that as long as you're not directly copying stuff and selling it, they've been very happy to let things go. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they reached out and did a Black Mesa-style "officialising" of the project at some point, since people have been crying out for an Oblivion remaster and these guys have effectively done it for them.

[RumHam]

42 minutes ago, Werthead said:

As for Skyblivion, Bethesda's position has always been that as long as you're not directly copying stuff and selling it, they've been very happy to let things go.

I wonder if being owned by microsoft might change that? I hope not. 

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I wonder if being owned by microsoft might change that? I hope not. 

I would think not, but it's possible. For Minecraft, the answer is that MS didn't shut down the java version and the mods, but they stopped actively supporting it and ported it to a more modern API - and are selling mod packs and whatnot on that. I would bet going forward that they might have something like that, but I doubt that they'll say 'no' or do a C&D letter for this work. 

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Obviously this was going to happen, and Rockstar held off on release and announcement until I was already done with them. Sigh.

This does make the RDR1 remake rather more likely, however.

As for Skyblivion, Bethesda's position has always been that as long as you're not directly copying stuff and selling it, they've been very happy to let things go. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they reached out and did a Black Mesa-style "officialising" of the project at some point, since people have been crying out for an Oblivion remaster and these guys have effectively done it for them.

Also, it would be REALLY bad optics for them to shut it down knowing how long it's been in production alongside all the other TES total conversion projects out there. 

[Werthead]

Death of the Outsider is odd. You have a very small number of powers but nothing like in the other games. Fair enough, you're trying to kill the Outsider so him giving you his mark and his full powers suite wouldn't make sense. You have a really good gadget collection to make up for it, and the level design is pretty good.

But there's some really weird shit going on. So in the second map I sneaked into the private club through the side-house, located a guy I needed to knock out, did that, and splendidly that was overheard by the barman who came charging up the stairs, who I also knocked out. He was another mission target. So my plan was to sneak both out through the side-house. The problem is that the game won't let me transition between zones whilst carrying an unconscious body. Which is really weird because Dishonored 1 definitely let you do that (never tried in DH2). So you have two bodies and no way to get them out of the building except through full-scale, all-out combat with a dozen people in the bar. And there's no other way in or out of the building.

Very WTF and very un-Dishonored.

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

So you have two bodies and no way to get them out of the building except through full-scale, all-out combat with a dozen people in the bar. And there's no other way in or out of the building.

Very WTF and very un-Dishonored.

Infuriating, isn't it?

[Inkdaub]

So I started FFXIV last night to play some MMO.  I am early in...level five I think...but it was pretty fun. It was definitely an MMO.  There seems to be a lot of players as the city I am in is fairly crowded.  It is not as good as WoW so far, but I am biased.  Still, it's fun enough that I'll keep going for a while anyway. 

I still have some games and pre-orders I bought and forgot about as I was taking classes for Summer Term and didn't play any games. 

I played Death of the Outsider for a bit.  Until you head up to the other part of town from the ship after you rescue the guy.  I stopped about then as I cannot stand first person because first person sucks and anyone who likes it is bad and any developer who makes it is worse.

 

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

I stopped about then as I cannot stand first person because first person sucks and anyone who likes it is bad and any developer who makes it is worse.

Come on, don't stop! Tell us how you *really* feel!

[Werthead]

Dishonored TV show probably not in development at Netflix, but interesting timing anyway.

[Kalbear]

Interesting to me at least - Phil Spencer has come out and said that xcloud works great on Steam Deck (presumably through the browser). Others are wondering if you can actually get Windows to run on it. I still think that's a driver hell thing waiting to happen, particularly for the controls, but if that works - having a Switch that can play gamepass games and xcloud games is pretty sweet.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Noob question, is PS Now a good investment? I really want to try RDR, but it seems like that's the only way to play it at the moment.

 

ETA: F it, I still have a 7 day free trial. Back to the old West!

[polishgenius]

Been playing Axiom Verge 2 since it surprise-dropped last week on Switch. Enjoying it a lot, it's improved on basically every aspect of the original that I had a problem with. Where the world there was abstract, felt disconnected and a bit bland, with no good reason to explore beyond 'have to to get further', this has a much more integrated, feels-like-a-world design (as evidenced by the fact that the map in the first was just old school style squares on a grid but here the map is basically a picture). It also encourages exploration via plot hints guiding you one way or another, without restricting or locking you in. It's also got far smoother movement and integration of the movement and combat, and a dual-world mechanic that works wonders in a Metroidvania and opens up some really cool paths for new upgrades and stuff.

The one place it lets itself down is boss battles. It almost feels like they haven't been playtested- I've only found one you can't just get in close to and spam the attack button to beat them very easily, a couple can be outwitted by standing in a specific spot where its attacks can't reach you at all but you can hit them, and that one exception to the spamming is a boring job where the boss is only hittable in a predictable, specific moment and the rest of the time you're just waiting for it to get back into that position in a room far bigger than it needs to be.

That's not a gamebreaker because you just blast through and it's not really lowered  my enjoyment, but if memorable bosses are a big reason you play this genre, it's gonna let you down a bit. Still defo worth it from where I am so far, though.

[Proudfeet]

4 hours ago, Kaligator said:

Interesting to me at least - Phil Spencer has come out and said 

Quote

Playing Halo and Age feels good

 

Playing an FPS feels good? Okay, maybe. 

Playing an RTS without hotkeys, control groups and bindings feels good? I have to doubt your taste in games. Even if you have insane APM and/or playing on the lowest difficulty, I'd imagine constantly scrolling the map for every menial task would be the height of frustration. It'd be interesting to see how they mapped the default controls though.

He's the head? of Xbox and those are Microsoft games, so there's that aspect to consider as well.