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


Gorn

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7 minutes ago, horangi said:

I think that Starfield gameplay video finally got me hyped up.  If it lives up to whats promised *cough Oblivion Radiant AI* it would be quite a game.  Now the question, do you buy it on release, or wait a year for it to be debugged?  I gotta wonder if Star Citizen is feeling any pressure at all, since scope-wise, this sounds similar, albeit without the multi-player.  With Starfield's release, we will have seen two generations of space exploration games released without so much as a projected completion year for SC.

Star Citizen I think is somewhat different, in that it's primarily a spaceship game with a sub-mode where you can walk around in first person. Starfield reverses that, with you probably spending 80%+ of the game in first-person and using your spaceship primarily as a means of conveyance. The space combat doesn't look particularly more advanced than Freelancer, and that game is twenty years old now. Starfield will also be narrative-heavy. I doubt there'll be enough to do with visiting empty planets to make it really interesting beyond a few hours, whilst Star Citizen will use its MMO side of things to make travel and planet exploration more incident-packed.

But yeah, it is going to be embarrassing that Starfield didn't even start pre-production until 2013, two years after work started on Star Citizen, and full development didn't start until 2015, and it'll be out long before Star Citizen because Chris Roberts is spending resources on "convincing blanket deformation in 3D."

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56 minutes ago, Ran said:

I've not played a Bethesda game since messing a little bit with Daggerfall years ago when a friend had it, but I find that for whatever reason despite my love of fantasy and history that medieval fantasy type games don't do it for me, whereas Fall Out always seemed a bit too silly for my tastes. 


But this... this might be interesting. I guess science fiction settings appeal more for me for RPGs, what with Cyberpunk 2077 having taken a couple hundred hours of my life (and more to come once some DLC or the expansion arrives).

Oh, and for those who missed it, here's the trailer for Obsidian's Pentiment:

 

That looks completely bananas. Sign me up. Apparently Josh Sawyer is the lead director. I thought this game might be his baby when I started the trailer given the medieval armour all over JS's tumblr page

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22 minutes ago, dog-days said:

That looks completely bananas. Sign me up. Apparently Josh Sawyer is the lead director. I thought this game might be his baby when I started the trailer given the medieval armour all over JS's tumblr page

Yeah, I was a bit surprised this ended up being his project. I was expecting Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny but as a medieval RPG.

This looks more like a modern King of Dragon Pass, which is great but very much not what I was expecting, especially since they first started talking about it 3 years ago.

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18 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Yeah, I was a bit surprised this ended up being his project. I was expecting Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny but as a medieval RPG.

This looks more like a modern King of Dragon Pass, which is great but very much not what I was expecting, especially since they first started talking about it 3 years ago.

No, it's definitely come out of left field. Due in November 2022. I'm not going to read the hype about it and get too psyched up, but I am curious to see how the mechanics will work. The tone looks a bit tongue-in-cheek without being overly zany. Damn it, I'm auto-up-psyching without the help of the gaming press or Twitter. 

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Most exciting news for me was probably that Persona 5 Royal is coming to PC so I can finally play it. Starfield looked basically like I expected it too, but with the added bonus of ship customization, so that's neat. None of the other big games grabbed me that much; but I am curious about Pentiment and The Last Case of Benedict Fox.

I am also super excited for Silksong, but I'll believe it actually releases in the next 12 months when I see it.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Starfield looks simultaneously like every single Bethesda game every and also not.

The fact you can land on every single planet (presumably excepting gas giants) and moon in the game and explore all of them is nuts. More than 1,000 planets in over 100 systems. I'm going to guess a lot of procgen and a fair number of those planets will be dull and worth doing only for crafting and base-building, but that's still way more than people were expecting in their most optimistic scenarios.

Having 100% customisable spaceships is also very, very cool.

Can't wait for the follow-up article to the one you linked earlier with even more horror stories of crunch and disregard for their employees health and sanity after Starfield releases.

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15 minutes ago, dog-days said:

No, it's definitely come out of left field. Due in November 2022. I'm not going to read the hype about it and get too psyched up, but I am curious to see how the mechanics will work. The tone looks a bit tongue-in-cheek without being overly zany. Damn it, I'm auto-up-psyching without the help of the gaming press or Twitter. 

It was leaked some time ago that Josh Sawyer and a small team were working on a "medieval CRPG." It came out because he wasn't working on Grounded or Outer Worlds or even Avowed (despite Avowed taking place on a world he'd mostly created) and they finally admitted what he was doing. Everyone suspect it'd be a small-scale game, just not this small-scale (but cool-looking).

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Can't wait for the follow-up article to the one you linked earlier with even more horror stories of crunch and disregard for their employees health and sanity after Starfield releases.

I'm hoping not. FO76 was unusual for Bethesda in a lot of ways and it sounds like most of the nightmares came from QA having to test an online game that BGS had never made before and wasn't taking advice from either the Texas team in charge of the netcode or Zenimax trying to give them them tips from The Elder Scrolls Online.

Starfield is much more business as usual, and the crunch present on Fallout 4 and Skyrim was reportedly very light (mainly with FO4 because they didn't even announce the game was coming until it was already 100% finished).

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6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Starfield will also be narrative-heavy. I doubt there'll be enough to do with visiting empty planets to make it really interesting beyond a few hours, whilst Star Citizen will use its MMO side of things to make travel and planet exploration more incident-packed.

I'm also seeing features that I last saw in...*gulp* Mass Effect: Andromeda. Mainly the "identify resources to mine them" feature with the wrist scanner. And we all remember how, uh, "exciting" and fun that was, yeah?

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The Diablo IV developers discuss the gameplay and its mechanics, systems, and what we can expect. It's...slightly worrying. Especially as it's been revealed that the game will feature an in-game shop. 

 

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The announcement of "1000 planets in Starfield" had the opposite of the intended effect on me - it makes me far less likely to play it, not more. I don't want to waste my time on crappy procgen "content".

Looks like PC Gamer agrees with me:

https://www.pcgamer.com/theres-no-way-all-1000-explorable-planets-in-starfield-are-actually-interesting/

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"Spore promised us the Moon, and several years later, returned with some big boring rock," Rick Lane wrote in a retrospective a few years ago. It's a perfect summation of what I expect from Starfield after today's presentation: a truly massive galaxy, bigger than any RPG Bethesda's ever made—as long as you're cool with it mostly being full of a bunch of big boring rocks.

I thought of that Spore presentation when I first played Mass Effect, driving the Mako over ugly, bland procedurally generated planets. I thought of Spore when No Man's Sky promised an infinite galaxy, though at least those planets could be quite striking. I thought of Spore when Mass Effect Andromeda promised this time it'd have more interesting planets to explore (it didn't).

And again, today. Who's falling for it this time? In Starfield's grand gameplay debut, Bethesda chose to highlight a bland grey-and-brown moon, a prefab research lab, and enemies simply labeled "Pirate" in the stark UI. Starfield has no interest in who these pirates are, other than dudes to shoot. I get sad imagining that if this game had been made 20 years ago, there'd be piles of flavor text to pull me into this world. But instead: "Pirate."

 

 

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3 hours ago, Gorn said:

The announcement of "1000 planets in Starfield" had the opposite of the intended effect on me - it makes me far less likely to play it, not more. I don't want to waste my time on crappy procgen "content".

Looks like PC Gamer agrees with me:

https://www.pcgamer.com/theres-no-way-all-1000-explorable-planets-in-starfield-are-actually-interesting/

 

I think Bethesda has taken their series more in the sandbox direction than the narrative direction for several installations now.  For me the plot is just an excuse to get out there and explore, mine, build, and choose my own narrative.  Heck, most of them have mod's that skip the whole plot and start you in a random part of the world.  Depending on how well its developed, procedural generation does an adequate job of setting up the sandbox (see Minecraft or, now heavily updated No Man's Sky).  In Fallout 4, I've spent at least as much time building settlements and connecting them with supply convoys as raiding.  I am hoping that the next Elder Scrolls allows us to 'paint the map' as far as taking over each Mine and Fortress and slowly taming the wilds.  But, I totally understand that's not everyone's cup of tea, I personally bounced off of Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, but realize that they are fan favorites here. 

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I think that procgen worlds can work if they do a few things:

- make sure that every world has some custom stuff on it, whether it be small 'dungeons' or special items or quest-related bits that you can go to

- make sure that there are some secrets or other discoverability things on each world, so it feels like you could find something if you know where you're looking or if you get lucky

If they're just random rocks without any real stuff on them then yeah, it'll suck - but this isn't Spore, where the entire universe is constantly regenerated every time you play. In theory the same planets will be there in every game, with the same locations, and while I'm sure they use a lot of procedure to generate most of that it doesn't mean that they can't customize a whole lot of it too.

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I would say the 1000 planet thing gives them plenty of room for future DLCs. The planets may be procgen at first, but overtime they can be given unique features along with new narratives, thus giving the game more longevity with players.

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They did confirm today that Starfield will not have a voiced protagonist, you will choose your dialogue properly and you stay in first-person for conversations, taking care of some of the most common complaints about Fallout 4.

There's also around 160,000 lines of voiced dialogue in the game, which is interesting as FO4 had 120,000 but that was including your voiced dialogue. Skyrim had 60,000 (but your character wasn't voiced in the game).

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1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

I would say the 1000 planet thing gives them plenty of room for future DLCs. The planets may be procgen at first, but overtime they can be given unique features along with new narratives, thus giving the game more longevity with players.

If it were up to me I wouldn't do it like that; there's a whole host of bugs that happen when you change behaviors of existing things and how you interact with saves that really suck. 

It's easier to just create new destinations with stuff instead for DLCs for a variety of reasons. 

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I had assumed from the stuff about the alien artifacts and the images suggesting they play a part in the story that this would be the central quest of the game... but do Bethesda games not have central quests?

I guess I was approaching it like Cyberpunk 2077, because more important than bells and whistles is an actual strong core narrative.

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3 minutes ago, Ran said:

I had assumed from the stuff about the alien artifacts and the images suggesting they play a part in the story that this would be the central quest of the game... but do Bethesda games not have central quests?

I guess I was approaching it like Cyberpunk 2077, because more important than bells and whistles is an actual strong core narrative.

I've only played the last three Elder Scrolls games, and each one has a central quest. So yes, Starfield likely has one. In fact I was even thinking how those alien artifacts are the game's elder scrolls.:laugh:

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2 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I've only played the last three Elder Scrolls games, and each one has a central quest. So yes, Starfield likely has one. In fact I was even thinking how those alien artifacts are the game's elder scrolls.:laugh:

I have read a lot of memes and jokes about how they've literally just shifted the setting while the gameplay looks to be pretty much what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls game. 

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12 minutes ago, Ran said:

I had assumed from the stuff about the alien artifacts and the images suggesting they play a part in the story that this would be the central quest of the game... but do Bethesda games not have central quests?

I guess I was approaching it like Cyberpunk 2077, because more important than bells and whistles is an actual strong core narrative.

Bethesda games have central quests, but they are usually pretty short and not that interesting. When the games have interesting quests at all, it's usually in the optional faction quests (e.g. the whole chain of Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion). But Bethesda games usually aren't that strong on the writing. The last time I thought they had some legitimately interesting stuff was Morrowind, but even then it was less the quests and more the background lore in some of the conversations and books (at it's core, the Elder Scrolls setting is crazy in a way most players are not aware of or ever engage in; which is a shame).

Deep Elder Scrolls lore spoilers

Spoiler

Basically, the foundational layer of the setting is that all of reality is the dream of a primordial god. There's a complex creation mythology filled with gods that is more like classic real world mythology, but all of that is within the dream as well. And there is a mental state that characters can reach, called CHIM, which is where they realize that they are simply figments of a dream. This gives them basically unlimited power to alter "reality" by changing the dream around them. However, they almost never use that power because they stop having goals/ambitions after realizing that nothing is really "real"; in fact often times they simply disappear from reality, retroactively as well. Only two characters in the setting ever didn't, and actually used their power.

There's even some super meta-y/easter egg layers hidden in the early games suggesting that the dream is actually a video game. So in other words reality is actually the game you are playing, and characters who achieve CHIM realize that they're in a video game. That aspect has I think has entirely been dropped though.

I'd love if Starfield got trippy like that, and put it at the forefront of the game. But I really doubt they will.

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