Video Games - Waiting for a New AAA Game (that isn't Elden Ring)

[felice]

2 hours ago, Toth said:

I'm at a point where I just hope they forget about me and won't ask and it's driving me insane.

Tell them you really appreciate the invite but that particular game isn't your cup of tea, but if they ever give something more casual a try you'd be keen to join them. Maybe give examples of the sort of multiplayer games you do like? Doing something you hate isn't likely to be beneficial for your limits, but not ghosting people is a good thing to push yourself on.

[Toth]

7 minutes ago, felice said:

Maybe give examples of the sort of multiplayer games you do like?

That's the issue: I never really played anything in multiplayer before. Even in MMOs I was always just doing stuff alone.

I did voice parts of my fears to the person who invited me. And oddly enough, she replied by saying she finds the game also immensely frustrating, but does it for the socializing aspect and to be able to laugh about her failures. Not really sure I can do this with all the pressure choking me up, but well... if they still ask, I'll try.

[Werthead]

Return to Monkey Island is out on Monday. Should probably replay Monkey Island 2 first to get into the headspace for it.

On 9/14/2022 at 11:49 PM, Corvinus85 said:

Yeah, I played it a bit and returned it. You are absolutely right about it being AoE2, and I already have the remastered version of that game.

Yeah, it's quite odd. There is zero reason to play AoE4 over AoE2 Definitive Edition beyond the cool mini-documentaries. I'm glad I only got it at two-thirds off the full price.

It's also still bugged: you can't place relics in a building if you've saved and reloaded on that map (you used to be able to demolish the building and rebuild it to fix the problem, but one of patches has stopped that workaround from working whilst not addressing the original bug!) and sometimes your villagers will just stop whatever task they're doing and just go into idle mode (where they're literally asleep!) for no reason. You can't just leave villagers to build a large wall whilst you do something else, you have to keep checking on them to make sure they haven't dozed off. Oh, and WASD is not the default camera control setup and remapping the keys is a fucking nightmare because you can't resolve key clashes instantly, you have to go hunting through 3 tabs of keys to find the clash and then try to fix it manually.

Also it looks like arse for a 2022 video game, it's at least ten years behind in its graphical quality which makes its performance all the more grating.

[IlyaP]

Finally finished the final chapter of the Tomb Raider Survivor trilogy: Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It's been nearly two months since I began my revisit of the Survivor trilogy, and this final chapter feels the most conflicted. For one - this was primarily designed by Eidos Montreal, and sought to explore far more complicated themes than its predecesssors - including play narrative, colonialism, history, and (half-heartedly) theology and myth.

It's not entirely success, and the cosmology set up in the first and second game seem at odds with the direction taken by this installment. But at least it tries. SotTR also openly criticises Lara Croft, her actions, decisions, etc. - and by proxy the player and (potentially) its previous designers/history, which introduces new questions that...are never fully explored.

Despite that, the art direction here is top notch, the coloring much richer than in the previous two games, and the return of the grappling hook is a welcome addition. It also features the strong score of the three games, with music from yet another new composer: Brian D'Oliveira, whose score features a variety of South American and European instruments and brings in several new themes whose composition styles are reminiscent of Bear McCreary.

Due to being produced primarily by a different studio, there's a palpable thematic disunion and exceedingly gamified and unrealistic world - particularly in the challenge tombs, which are overdesigned and rely on unrealistic perpetual motion machine mechanics to challenge players. The game tries very hard to make players reflect on their actions, but also brings more depth to Lara Croft and Jonah Maiava, but at the expense of internal consistency and logic.

[Werthead]

More than 90 videos from Grand Theft Auto VI have leaked online, from a hacker who claims to have not only acquired vast reams of development material but also parts of the game's source code.

Several sites are claiming this is the biggest, most unprecedented and possibly most damaging source code leak since the code for Half-Life 2 was leaked in 2003, which resulted in the game being delayed by months and partially reworked.

The leaks confirm most of the rumours: GTA6 takes place in Vice City, which more convincingly looks like Miami this time around (as you'd expect), including the Florida Keys, and there are two playable characters, one of whom is a Hispanic woman. Most of footage is pre-pre-alpha, so not very good quality with nothing like the final textures or animations applied. At the moment it looks about as good as GTA5, presumably as the same engine is running underneath. The videos show a lot of development work going on with car handling, physics and combat.

All of the videos appear to be from 2014-19, so are not representative of the current state of the game.

ETA: Yikes, almost an hour of Diablo IV beta footage has also leaked today.

ETA2: These lunatics are using the leaks to create a map of GTA6 and it's absolutely bananas what they've managed to figure out so far.

[Slurktan]

On 9/14/2022 at 6:18 PM, Werthead said:

It's also rather annoying that the historical advancement of the series has been thrown out the window for no apparent reason. AoE4 should really be moving forwards into the Napoleonic Wars, but we're suddenly back with the Normans, the Rus and the Mongols again because...why?

The reason is very apparent and you mentioned it in your post: faction variance. No one wants to play a AoE5 with 12 different races that play exactly the same and look exactly the same other than the colour of uniforms.

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

ETA2: These lunatics are using the leaks to create a map of GTA6 and it's absolutely bananas what they've managed to figure out so far.

Looks like that thread got nixed quickly! 

[Werthead]

10 hours ago, Slurktan said:

The reason is very apparent and you mentioned it in your post: faction variance. No one wants to play a AoE5 with 12 different races that play exactly the same and look exactly the same other than the colour of uniforms.

And yet many thousands of people are - right now - playing Age of Empires II Definitive Edition where the factions are reasonably similar with only moderate differences between them. In fact, AoE2 currently has around 50% more players than AoE4 on Steam.

An Age of Empires IV which had greater faction differentiation but also pushed the timeline forwards would have been fine.

[Proudfeet]

10 hours ago, Slurktan said:

The reason is very apparent and you mentioned it in your post: faction variance. No one wants to play a AoE5 with 12 different races that play exactly the same and look exactly the same other than the colour of uniforms.

I happen to like AoE2 because of the way the factions are similar. 

[Slurktan]

51 minutes ago, Werthead said:

And yet many thousands of people are - right now - playing Age of Empires II Definitive Edition where the factions are reasonably similar with only moderate differences between them. In fact, AoE2 currently has around 50% more players than AoE4 on Steam.

An Age of Empires IV which had greater faction differentiation but also pushed the timeline forwards would have been fine.

So you have said you didn't want aoe2 with aoe4 and now you want aoe2 with even less to differentiate the races. Cool. Seems smart.

[Werthead]

8 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

So you have said you didn't want aoe2 with aoe4 and now you want aoe2 with even less to differentiate the races. Cool. Seems smart.

My point was that making AoE4 about 95% the exact same game as AoE2 was completely pointless when AoE2 exists, is a more mature game with a ton more content and is still getting regular expansions and balance patches (far more than AoE4, which is still buggy as hell one year after release).

An AoE4 which was set in a different time period and could, from the off, offer a different experience to what already exists, better and at a cheaper price point, would have made more sense. Or if they wanted to do a full reboot of the series, maybe not call it a sequel and go back to the start of the series (AoE1 has not aged anywhere near as well as its sequel, even with its own remaster).

48 minutes ago, Proudfeet said:

I happen to like AoE2 because of the way the factions are similar. 

You can't have 40 factions (which is what AoE2 is now up to) where each civilisation is completely and totally different, there's no way people would be able to retain optimal strategies for each side unless you decide to only specialise in a couple of factions and never play anything else.

Having said all of that, now having played several different factions in AoE4, the faction differentiation is nowhere near what was advertised either. It's only slightly more noticeable than in AoE2 and absolutely nothing like, say, the StarCraft series.

[Proudfeet]

21 minutes ago, Werthead said:

(far more than AoE4, which is still buggy as hell one year after release).

Can it be modded like AoE2? It wouldn't be the first time fans fixed a game and introduced QoL improvements for the developers.

21 minutes ago, Werthead said:

You can't have 40 factions (which is what AoE2 is now up to) where each civilisation is completely and totally different, there's no way people would be able to retain optimal strategies for each side unless you decide to only specialise in a couple of factions and never play anything else.

Having said all of that, now having played several different factions in AoE4, the faction differentiation is nowhere near what was advertised either. It's only slightly more noticeable than in AoE2 and absolutely nothing like, say, the StarCraft series.

Yeah, it's a balance nightmare as well. Not to mention that there are only so many ways you can do it before it gets ridiculous. 

I haven't kept up with AoE4, but I was pretty turned off when it seemed like basic units and buildings weren't universal. It's nice to know that it isn't actually a big deal. Might get it in 5 years time. Will be exciting to see if they managed to implement 3d cliffs properly or if its all hills and slopes.

[Werthead]

This paves the way for VR mode and also for a hell of a lot of nausea.

 

[karaddin]

The talk about Deus Ex games a few pages back has me again disappointed I never got far with the original. My PC at the time it came out couldn't handle it, by the time I tried to get back to it graphical standards had moved on enough for me to be unable to back to it (I'm a shallow gamer, I really struggle with things below the current standards graphically). I'd love to be able to lift it into something equivalent to the Cyberpunk engine with its fantastic facial/eye animations but with the original story.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, karaddin said:

The talk about Deus Ex games a few pages back has me again disappointed I never got far with the original. My PC at the time it came out couldn't handle it, by the time I tried to get back to it graphical standards had moved on enough for me to be unable to back to it (I'm a shallow gamer, I really struggle with things below the current standards graphically). I'd love to be able to lift it into something equivalent to the Cyberpunk engine with its fantastic facial/eye animations but with the original story.

The frustration about that is that I think Eidos Montreal were moving to a remake of DE1 in their reboot series. Mankind Divided heavily dovetailed into the events of DE1, and I assume the cancelled third game would have taken them much more decisively up to the DE1 timeline.

Now they can do a remake, of course, and that might be the way forwards if they decide too much time has passed to continue Jensen's story.

[Derfel Cadarn]

20 hours ago, Werthead said:

This paves the way for VR mode and also for a hell of a lot of nausea.

 

You shoukd try Ace Combat 7 VR - almost puked doing evasive rolls and dives

[dog-days]

11 hours ago, karaddin said:

The talk about Deus Ex games a few pages back has me again disappointed I never got far with the original. My PC at the time it came out couldn't handle it, by the time I tried to get back to it graphical standards had moved on enough for me to be unable to back to it (I'm a shallow gamer, I really struggle with things below the current standards graphically). I'd love to be able to lift it into something equivalent to the Cyberpunk engine with its fantastic facial/eye animations but with the original story.

Oof, the nostalgia. I played Deus Ex as a demo from a CD-ROM that came with PC Zone magazine, fell head over heels in love with it, almost died of joy when the next month's PC Zone magazine came with a demo of the second level, and got the full game that Christmas. Even by the standards of the day it wasn't brilliant graphically, but I was blown away by how it let you use different strategies to complete the missions - which themselves could be resolved differently. Apart from Zelda: Ocarina of Time all the adventure/action-type games I'd played to that point had been very linear, and the glories of the Black Isle CRPG hadn't quite exploded across my horizon at that point. 

I would like to start drawing my pension now, please.

[Kalbear]

This still remains one of the most amazing moments in gaming freedom ever:

https://www.pcgamer.com/great-moments-in-pc-gaming-killing-anna-navarre-in-deus-ex/

There's no prompt, no specific dialog choice, no quest guidance. It is entirely a 'what if I do this' and the game just goes along with it. That's remarkable even nowadays, but 20 years ago that kind of freedom was entirely unheard of, and that kind of freedom that was actively supported by future choices and actions was crazy.

As it turns out it isn't freedom per se - it was planned - but giving you that kind of illusion and making it so you might not even know that it's a choice is just awesome.

[Ran]

I'm guessing the moment in Cyberpunk 2077 where you

Spoiler

Arasaka comes after you and Takemura, and you fall through the floor while Johnny yells at you to run for it is some sort of homage to this, since there's no prompt or guidance suggesting you can get back and save Takemura.

 

[Kalbear]

46 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'm guessing the moment in Cyberpunk 2077 where you

  Hide contents

Arasaka comes after you and Takemura, and you fall through the floor while Johnny yells at you to run for it is some sort of homage to this, since there's no prompt or guidance suggesting you can get back and save Takemura.

 

Probably! The 'secret' ending in cp2077 is also like that too to a certain extent. 

And to be clear it is something that happens now every so often. Dishonored has some parts like this too. But it's still very rare. And deus ex had this in spades, all over the place, in tons of places you never would have thought. All little rewards for playing like you would want to and doing things a bit outside the norm.