Videogames: New Year, New Thread

[Werthead]

RPS has a Waylanders review. Lots of potential, but a shitload of bugs and jank as well.

[RumHam]

37 minutes ago, Toth said:

who is somehow half his age 

Cryosleep? Though I think that puts their actual age in (). There is a device you can build that allows for a "reverse aging cycle" but it's a DLC item. 

the tooltip makes Joywires sound really scary, but I do employ them sometimes. Not on anyone who needs to be intelligent. But on a problem colonist who you don't have a replacement for, I'd consider it. 

[Toth]

2 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Cryosleep? Though I think that puts their actual age in ().

Probably, but it's still a bit weird all around. The father is 25 (with 155 in the brackets) while the son is 55 (with that being his true age). I guess it somehow awkwardly fits his backstory as a mad scientist, but then again, the father is just a musician.

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Fez said:

I had not heard of it before. But it appears to be one of the rare games to hit "mostly negative" on the Steam reviews. Sometimes that can be a sign of review bombing, but much more often it means a game's real bad.

Possibly!

I know that, like any game, it'll probably have some unforeseen bugs upon release, which will get patched up quickly enough. It looks like a game that sits somewhere between Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, World of Warcraft, and Dragon Age: Origins in terms of design - so it at least has some character, if nothing else...

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

RPS has a Waylanders review. Lots of potential, but a shitload of bugs and jank as well.

Thanks @Werthead!

[Fez]

11 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Possibly!

I know that, like any game, it'll probably have some unforeseen bugs upon release, which will get patched up quickly enough. It looks like a game that sits somewhere between Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, World of Warcraft, and Dragon Age: Origins in terms of design - so it at least has some character, if nothing else...

I adore party-based RPGs, they're my favorite genre of game. Unfortunately, for every homerun, like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, there's a bunch of disappointments. Fortunately, there's always more of them coming out these days. Here's just the upcoming ones that I've marked on Steam:

Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness

Broken Roads

Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game

Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

Dark Envoy

Fabled Lands
Marvel's Midnight Suns

Project Haven

The Hand of Merlin

The Iron Oath

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters

Wartales

Zoria: Age of Shattering

 

Most of these will probably be forgettable if not outright bad, but at least a few should end up being bangers. I don't know if The Waylanders is actually bad or just needs more development time to work out the jank. But with so many more such games in the coming months, I don't think anyone needs to rush to find out.

[IlyaP]

41 minutes ago, Fez said:

I adore party-based RPGs, they're my favorite genre of game. Unfortunately, for every homerun, like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, there's a bunch of disappointments. Fortunately, there's always more of them coming out these days. Here's just the upcoming ones that I've marked on Steam:

Most of these will probably be forgettable if not outright bad, but at least a few should end up being bangers. I don't know if The Waylanders is actually bad or just needs more development time to work out the jank. But with so many more such games in the coming months, I don't think anyone needs to rush to find out.

I've invested in Black Geyser, as that is my style of game. But when it might go gold is anyone's guess. 

[Fez]

15 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

I've invested in Black Geyser, as that is my style of game. But when it might go gold is anyone's guess. 

Yeah, that's the curse of indie games (though honestly AAA games too these days). Different genre but I've had my eye on Last Epoch for almost 3 years now. But I've been burned by early access too many times, I don't touch games until they release.

[Werthead]

About bloody time.

Take Two revealed a while back they have a massive $100 million+ marketing spend pencilled in for financial year 2023-24, later revised to 24-25, so my guess is they envisage GTA6 dropping no sooner than autumn 2023, but maybe more realistically autumn 2024.

It'll be interesting as the first game in the series with a new creative team (franchise director Leslie Benzies and writer Dan Houser both left Rockstar some time ago), which will hopefully freshen things up a bit.

[Werthead]

Cloud Imperium Games confirming they are making future development timetables on Star Citizen more vague because fans get too angry when they miss their targets, as they have done continuously for almost a decade.

Fans and backers getting annoyed when they keep missing development targets given the game has been in development for almost twelve years with more than $434 million spent on it (making it easily the single most expensive video game ever made in human history, but a factor of at least two) appears to be baffling to the company.

[RumHam]

That's insane. Are we sure they're not secretly building an actual spaceship? 

For that amount of money after ten years I'd just hire someone competent to make the game and walk away. 

[briantw]

26 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Cloud Imperium Games confirming they are making future development timetables on Star Citizen more vague because fans get too angry when they miss their targets, as they have done continuously for almost a decade.

Fans and backers getting annoyed when they keep missing development targets given the game has been in development for almost twelve years with more than $434 million spent on it (making it easily the single most expensive video game ever made in human history, but a factor of at least two) appears to be baffling to the company.

Game has been in development even longer than Martin has allegedly been writing Winds of Winter.

[Werthead]

34 minutes ago, RumHam said:

That's insane. Are we sure they're not secretly building an actual spaceship? 

For that amount of money after ten years I'd just hire someone competent to make the game and walk away. 

They could actually do that. If they forgot all about the "accurately modelling people picking up trays in the space mess" bullshit, they could make a perfectly competent space combat sim in the Unreal 5 Engine for about $30 million, with a fully voiced and competently mocapped storyline and cut scenes, probably in under two years.

I suspect it would be a far more time-efficient and money-efficient way of moving forwards than trying to bring the project as-is to a kicking, screaming conclusion.

[Fez]

23 minutes ago, Werthead said:

They could actually do that. If they forgot all about the "accurately modelling people picking up trays in the space mess" bullshit, they could make a perfectly competent space combat sim in the Unreal 5 Engine for about $30 million, with a fully voiced and competently mocapped storyline and cut scenes, probably in under two years.

I suspect it would be a far more time-efficient and money-efficient way of moving forwards than trying to bring the project as-is to a kicking, screaming conclusion.

But if they finish the game then the gravy train stops rolling. Another way of looking at this is that Chris Roberts has found a way to continuously extract money from people with too much of it and use it to support ~600 working developers. And made the whales happy about the whole process.

Eat the rich.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Trevor makes GTA V so much fun to replay. Did they ever fix the issues with the remastered version of the older games that came out a few months back?

 

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, Fez said:

Different genre but I've had my eye on Last Epoch for almost 3 years now.

That's also on my wishlist. And it's...still in Early Access?!

[Poobah]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Cloud Imperium Games confirming they are making future development timetables on Star Citizen more vague because fans get too angry when they miss their targets, as they have done continuously for almost a decade.

Fans and backers getting annoyed when they keep missing development targets given the game has been in development for almost twelve years with more than $434 million spent on it (making it easily the single most expensive video game ever made in human history, but a factor of at least two) appears to be baffling to the company.

I said it over a decade ago when some friends/acquaintances on various gaming boards were getting mega hyped and talking about buying in to this game at the insane price points that were being thrown around and I stand by it: this whole thing is a huge fucking scam.

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Cloud Imperium Games confirming they are making future development timetables on Star Citizen more vague because fans get too angry when they miss their targets, as they have done continuously for almost a decade.

Fans and backers getting annoyed when they keep missing development targets given the game has been in development for almost twelve years with more than $434 million spent on it (making it easily the single most expensive video game ever made in human history, but a factor of at least two) appears to be baffling to the company.

This game is just never coming out, is it? Or its Squadron 42 (?) spin-off. 

 

[IlyaP]

55 minutes ago, Poobah said:

I said it over a decade ago when some friends/acquaintances on various gaming boards were getting mega hyped and talking about buying in to this game at the insane price points that were being thrown around and I stand by it: this whole thing is a huge fucking scam.

Tell them to load up Freelancer instead. It's more fun and it's, y'know - real. 

[kungtotte]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

That's also on my wishlist. And it's...still in Early Access?!

I got in on it when it was kickstarted, and at that point the whole dev team was 13 people. I'm sure they've expanded by now but for most of its existence Last Epoch was being made by a pretty small team.

So it stands to reason that it takes a while longer for it to ship. It also hasn't been in development for that long in total, the demo that shipped in April 2018 as part of the funding campaign was one of the earliest builds of the game. Five or so years for an ambitious product from a small team is not surprising.