Videogames 2023: Dreams of the Sandbox Kings

[Rhom]

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Meanwhile, some updates on both Dragon Age 4 and the next instalment in the Mass Effect series, courtesy of Garth over at Dark Horizons.

Quote

Our studio is focused on creating the best Dragon Age: Dreadwolf while the core Mass Effect team continues their pre-production work. We continue to iterate and polish Dreadwolf, focusing on the things that matter most to our fans.

And by that they mean “Getting the horns just right when %}&@ing a Qunari in the @$$.”  

I know we’ve been round and round in these parts about what went wrong with DA3 and MEA.  They were both the same game IMO with the exception that Andromeda’s gameplay was actually fun.

Both games were big and empty for no reason and lost the entirety of what made the originals in their series a classic.

Dreadwolf is apparently essentially an action RPG.  So it has finally shaken off the last vestiges of the original game’s strategy.  Maybe it can be something unique and original.  But I don’t have high hopes.

[Ran]

On 3/26/2023 at 1:17 AM, Werthead said:

Multiple venues repeated the allegations against Avellone instantly, but, despite the news breaking hours ago, none of them apart from Forbes seem to have updated the news that the allegations have been retracted.

Kotaku has now done so with some additional details including one of the accusers having contacted them requesting that they note she retracted her previous statements, and Avellone confirming that the seven figure payment was to him after some cast doubts on the original reporting from Forbes.

 

 

 

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Rhom said:

I know we’ve been round and round in these parts about what went wrong with DA3 and MEA.  They were both the same game IMO with the exception that Andromeda’s gameplay was actually fun.

*shrug*

I actually really enjoyed Andromeda, and it's my favorite in the series. I really enjoyed the whole "go to a brand new galaxy where everything is weird and crazy" thing. 

[Rhom]

30 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

*shrug*

I actually really enjoyed Andromeda, and it's my favorite in the series. I really enjoyed the whole "go to a brand new galaxy where everything is weird and crazy" thing. 

I did too.  My repeated lament was forcing it to be big for bigness sake. It suffers from Open Worlditis like much of its generation.  Just not a lot out there in the wide open spaces.

It took a glorified hallway shooter with a tight narrative and lost that focus.

There was a lot under the surface I would have loved to follow up with in a Quarian Ark DLC and a subsequent sequel.

[Darryk]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

Kotaku has now done so with some additional details including one of the accusers having contacted them requesting that they note she retracted her previous statements, and Avellone confirming that the seven figure payment was to him after some cast doubts on the original reporting from Forbes.

 

 

 

 

The whole Chris Avellone episode just kind of emphasizes the need to bring back this thing called due process.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I've got a tech question. My four or so year old laptop (Lenovo Yoga) had been more sluggish than normal for months. I was using it Friday with no major issues, but on Saturday it would not start up. The keyboard would light up for a second and then nothing. Checked it a few more times throughout the day and nothing. Same thing on Sunday so I went out and bought a new laptop. They said at the help desk they think the motherboard needed to be replaced, but wasn't worth it. Nothing changed over the last few days, but today it randomly started up and is working as if nothing happened.

What gives? 

[Werthead]

The PC port of The Last of Us is fucked up, from the sound of it. Bad show from Sony, who own Nixxes, the best PC porting team in the business. Unfortunately they were booked, so they chose instead Iron Galaxy, best-known for screwing up the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight so royally a few years ago.

I'm hoping Nixxes were working on Horizon Forbidden West instead.

Guess I'll be holding fire on that until it's been saved in patches.

[Ran]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Nothing changed over the last few days, but today it randomly started up and is working as if nothing happened.

Are you sure nothing changed? Did you unplug USB devices from the laptop that you moved to the new laptop, like a mouse, USB speakers, webcam? It could possibly be that it has a malfunctioning USB port and once you removed a device from it it was able to start up.

[polishgenius]

Short gameplay demo of Zelda.

Still doesn't actually tell us anything, but hey ho.

[Raja]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

The PC port of The Last of Us is fucked up, from the sound of it

Yup

 

[RumHam]

That's crazy. It's one thing when a new game comes out and they fuck up a version. But they had one job and still failed miserably. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Are you sure nothing changed? Did you unplug USB devices from the laptop that you moved to the new laptop, like a mouse, USB speakers, webcam? It could possibly be that it has a malfunctioning USB port and once you removed a device from it it was able to start up.

Yeah, I unplugged everything on Saturday and haven't touched it since I brought it in Sunday. If that's behind it why would it take a few days to suddenly turn on?

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Yeah, I unplugged everything on Saturday and haven't touched it since I brought it in Sunday. If that's behind it why would it take a few days to suddenly turn on?

Good question. And when you say it turned on, it just turned on by itself?

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The PC port of The Last of Us is fucked up, from the sound of it. Bad show from Sony, who own Nixxes, the best PC porting team in the business. Unfortunately they were booked, so they chose instead Iron Galaxy, best-known for screwing up the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight so royally a few years ago.

They did OK with the Uncharted port, in their defense. 

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, Rhom said:

I did too.  My repeated lament was forcing it to be big for bigness sake. It suffers from Open Worlditis like much of its generation.  Just not a lot out there in the wide open spaces.

It took a glorified hallway shooter with a tight narrative and lost that focus.

There was a lot under the surface I would have loved to follow up with in a Quarian Ark DLC and a subsequent sequel.

Oh but to have that quarian ark. I played the hell out of Andromeda. Part of the appeal was also having voice actors that didn't sound so flat. I played both as Male and Female Shepard, and found the latter to have more dynamic voice acting - but even Jennifer Hale, gods love her, could not compete, in my book, with Tom Taylorson, who did a fantastic job as Scott Ryder.

But that's completely a side note. I loved the exploration, and still play it now due to that. Yes, it's too open world for its own good, and the initial procedurally generated worlds concept explored at the beginning of the game's inception was an abjectly bewildering one, but post patching, the current version available on Steam and elsewhere hit all of my happy buttons - including Joe Paesano's terrific score, which is just *loaded* with what I call "sensawunda". 

Cool trivia for you: Paesano was also the lead composer of the TV show Daredevil. 

I really, really wish we could have gotten that quardian DLC ark and a sequel, as there's so much there to be explored with the right writers, who're able to tap into the ethical implications and body horror elements of the Kett and move away from forcing us to fight guys with toilets on their heads (Andromeda really failed to give the Archon proper depth, which players only really got by reading all of the various notes and texts scattered across the game, which - yeah, ok, I did, but I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. If there's a text about intergalactic tooth paste, you're absolutely gonna have my attention).

I'd love to just sit and have a beer with Mac Walters, and pitch him ideas for a sequel, as I have so, so many bouncing around in my skull, including exploring in greater detail the fallout from the Nexus rebellion - which is covered in one of the novelisations (yes, I own it, and an interesting read), and playing up the factions that resulted from the rebellion. There's just so much there to explore thematically around frontier justice, colonialism, body modification, etc. 

[IlyaP]

16 hours ago, Rhom said:

And by that they mean “Getting the horns just right when %}&@ing a Qunari in the @$$.”

Do you know why Qunari in DAO look so different from every other game? I never did understand that. Sten (sp?) looks nothing like the ones in Exodus^* or in Inquisition.

* Exodus was the original subtitle for DA2.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

52 minutes ago, Ran said:

Good question. And when you say it turned on, it just turned on by itself?

Pretty much. The light that indicates it's in sleep mode was on and when I opened it the thing just started up. When I entered my pin it crashed again, but turned on just fine when I manually started it. It's pretty weird. 

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

Do you know why Qunari in DAO look so different from every other game? I never did understand that. Sten (sp?) looks nothing like the ones in Exodus^* or in Inquisition.

* Exodus was the original subtitle for DA2.

I just always assumed that they hadn’t really established the Qunari as an entirely separate race as if DAO.  I know I just always thought of Sten as a big human.  

[Jace, Extat]

In DA2, I think, the Captain (or whatever) of their little refuge place says something like the Qunari breed folks without horns to be like ambassadors or something. 

That could be in the 3rd game, but I don't think so - I DEFINITELY know that that bit of dialogue exists somewhere in one of those games though. 

And I'm a big big fan of DA2. I like its story better than DA:O, again with acknowledgement of a lot of cracks in the final product. It just feels so much more interesting and novel than DA:O or DA:I 

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, Secretary of Eumenes said:

In DA2, I think, the Captain (or whatever) of their little refuge place says something like the Qunari breed folks without horns to be like ambassadors or something. 

That could be in the 3rd game, but I don't think so - I DEFINITELY know that that bit of dialogue exists somewhere in one of those games though. 

And I'm a big big fan of DA2. I like its story better than DA:O, again with acknowledgement of a lot of cracks in the final product. It just feels so much more interesting and novel than DA:O or DA:I 

From a story standpoint, I agree that I liked what they did with DA2.

From a gameplay standpoint it was a bit of a mess.  Massively reused locations (how many places can all have the same cave map?!!?) and then throwing out any real strategic approach to combat as waves of enemies drop in from above.

Even so, I liked it far more than DA:I.