Videogames: All Valves on Deck

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Darryk said:

I don't see them ever deviating from World of Warcraft as the seat of their Warcraft lore.

Especially since anyone who played Warcraft III but not WoW wouldn't have a clue what's going on story-wise.

The last instalment of the franchise I played was Frozen Throne, followed by approximately 25 minutes of World of WarCraft in 2004 before I noped out of that.

I would play a WarCraft IV tomorrow but I have zero interest in the MMORPG. I've tried looking at the plot summaries but they are almost completely unintelligible. The only thing I've learned is that Chris Metzen should have been fired without a nanosecond's hesitation no later than 2004 and not let anywhere near a word processor ever again.

Elder Scrolls Online got around this problem by making the MMORPG a sequel set thousands of years in the past, and leaving the definitive telling of further lore to the single-player, mainline RPGs.

[Relic]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The only thing I've learned is that Chris Metzen should have been fired without a nanosecond's hesitation no later than 2004 and not let anywhere near a word processor ever again.

I mean, say what you want, but you're talking about a game that has made 11 billion dollars, has been alive for almost 2 decades, and stole 3 trillion years from the global population in play time (the actual number is 6 million years, but you get what im saying). 

[Werthead]

Finished Last of Us and Left Behind. It was okay. I get the impression mouse+keyboard makes the combat waaay more trivial than it originally was, as I was acing whole levels in stealth or in combat even on Hard without much bother.

Fired up Weird West and I'm not sure what I think of it so far. The stealth seems incredibly unreliable, the combat is really unsatisfying (the line of sight indicator is terrible), the story is so barebones it might as well not exist and the systems for changing weapons and junking extra equipment seem unnecessarily laborious. I know it had nothing like the same budget, but as a follow-up to Dishonored 1 and 2 from the same team, this feels very undercooked. It should have been a first-person game with proper immsim mechanics or more of a turnbased game (or even realtime with pause).

19 minutes ago, Relic said:

I mean, say what you want, but you're talking about a game that has made 11 billion dollars, has been alive for almost 2 decades, and stole 3 trillion years from the global population in play time (the actual number is 6 million years, but you get what im saying). 

I suspect the reasoning for that is much more "having fun with my friends in a highly accessible fantasy game which they marketed the everloving fuck out of" rather than "this backstory is so rich and compelling, give me more, wait why are you saying what happened in the last expansion now happened differently?"

Edited January 17 by Werthead

[Toth]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I would play a WarCraft IV tomorrow but I have zero interest in the MMORPG. I've tried looking at the plot summaries but they are almost completely unintelligible. The only thing I've learned is that Chris Metzen should have been fired without a nanosecond's hesitation no later than 2004 and not let anywhere near a word processor ever again.

The words of a review of the Lich King expansion still stuck with me forever as it encapsulates my everlasting ire of WoW: "If I wanted to watch a bunch of colorful power rangers beat up a beloved character, I'd go to a Mexican child's birthday party."

My mind was running wild after Warcraft 3 of the opportunities it had created ending on so many dangling plot threads. I wanted to see Arthas return to Lordearon, ffs. And then it's just "beloved character gets mad and needs to be put down by a of bunch of randos using him as a loot pinata" over and over and over again.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Microsoft owns blizzard now so if they want them to make Warcraft 4, we will get one regardless of what activision or blizzard execs think. I’m glad they restructured at Activision, they need to do a similar kind at Blizzard as well.

Edited January 18 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Microsoft owns blizzard now so if they want them to make Warcraft 4, we will get one regardless of what activision or blizzard execs think. I’m glad they restructured at Activision, they need to do a similar kind at Blizzard as well.

Yeah, that's not really how Microsoft works nor is it how game studios work. 

[polishgenius]

I like how that was said so confidently even though it doesn't work that way but even if it did there's no particular reason to believe Microsoft would force Blizzard to make what is at this point a relatively niche concern over one of the greatest commercial behemoths in gaming history. 

 

Also why would you even want Warcraft 4 made by a team that doesn't want to make it.

 

 

eta: that doesn't mean I think there will never ever be a Warcraft 4. In the end I think it's probably inevitable. But I think it was inevitable whether Microsoft took over or not.

Edited January 18 by polishgenius

[Ser Not Appearing]

I'm going to front load this (because I've upset people in the past) by saying these are my opinions and how I relate with the content and it's not universal truth and you can have a totally different relationship with it and that's valid and cool. But this is how I feel when I play the game.

...

I'm playing Elden Ring again and it's interesting because I'm rediscovering all the little things I love but also rediscovering where I think FromSoft should improve. There are significant annoyances despite that I still think it's better than every one of the excellent slate of games from 2023, of which there were many.

Chief in my mind this evening is the fact that I love mysteries and hidden things and I love figuring them out but Elden Ring has so many things that you would never, ever figure out in a million years without a guide or through sheer happenstance and it takes the joy out of the discovery.

Even something simple like getting Blaidd to come down and talk with you that first time. You're in an area and he's howling and he's up on a roof and your attention is called to him so that he can't be missed. There's all sorts of stuff to explore and little things to investigate in the area but none of it is useful.

The entire investigation is completely worthless.

You have to...

Spoiler

... go back to the very first area of the game and talk to a specific merchant (that you wouldn't otherwise have a reason to go to) and then you have to prompt him about the howling ... a prompt he never had before ... and he'll tell you the secret signal to get Blaidd to come down.

It's no real mystery. It's intentionally disjointed so that you're unlikely to figure it out except through accident. It's a Scooby-Doo mystery. The whole time you might think you'll figure it out if you pay enough attention but the reality is that they withheld key information and the surprise reveal is only achieved through absence of evidence. It's doesn't feel like earned depth or discovery. It feels fabricated and hollow. And it's incredibly frustrating to search around and try to figure it out only to come up empty handed.

And getting Blaidd to come down isn't remotely difficult compared to some of the more convoluted, nonsensical mysteries on offer.

Just changing this about the game, where you could actually piece your way through things and solve a mystery through thought and observation would honestly make the game significantly more enjoyable.

Edited January 18 by Ser Not Appearing

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, that's not really how Microsoft works nor is it how game studios work. 

Didn’t EA force BioWare to make Anthem ? And Sony force naughty dog to make a last of us multiplayer before ditching it , or Sega forcing CA to make hyenas  ? There are countless examples of the owners/parent company/publishers forcing the devs to make a game. In this case,for Warcraft 4,it will actually be a good thing, while usually it’s a negative. Microsoft can dictate what blizzard or activision makes now, their hands off approach clearly isn’t working given the state of MW3. I feel they should intervene at Bethesda/Zenimax as well, given the reception of Starfield. 
 

Finally finished RDR2 , since you bought it  I think you should definitely see it to the end @Ran this games ending is a great example of how to do bittersweet endings right, unlike Cyberpunk which makes the whole thing feel pointless.  If GTA6 turns out to be of the same quality I’ll happy pay the 70 bucks when it comes out on PC, after 80 hours RDR2 was definitely worth it ! 

Edited January 18 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[IlyaP]

14 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Didn’t EA force BioWare to make Anthem ?

Casey Hudson and a few folks at Bioware were the ones who came up with the initial project, independent of EA. Kotaku have a sizable write-up of it that goes into more depth on the matter, which you can read here: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/02/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong/

(Don't know if you've played it. It's not...bad? It's fine for an hour or two, but ultimately very unfocused, with very limited and repetitive gameplay loops. Honestly, Sarah Schachner's gorgeous score is probably one of the best things about the game.)

[Ran]

59 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

unlike Cyberpunk which makes the whole thing feel pointless

No, it doesn't. For you, maybe, but please stop claiming your subjective view is objective. Repeating the same thing over and over just feels like a sign of immaturity.

[Relic]

11 minutes ago, Ran said:

No, it doesn't. For you, maybe, but please stop claiming your subjective view is objective. Repeating the same thing over and over just feels like a sign of immaturity.

You don't hang out with very many Z-illenials, do you?

Edited January 18 by Relic

[Caligula_K3]

9 hours ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

I'm going to front load this (because I've upset people in the past) by saying these are my opinions and how I relate with the content and it's not universal truth and you can have a totally different relationship with it and that's valid and cool. But this is how I feel when I play the game.

...

I'm playing Elden Ring again and it's interesting because I'm rediscovering all the little things I love but also rediscovering where I think FromSoft should improve. There are significant annoyances despite that I still think it's better than every one of the excellent slate of games from 2023, of which there were many.

Chief in my mind this evening is the fact that I love mysteries and hidden things and I love figuring them out but Elden Ring has so many things that you would never, ever figure out in a million years without a guide or through sheer happenstance and it takes the joy out of the discovery.

Even something simple like getting Blaidd to come down and talk with you that first time. You're in an area and he's howling and he's up on a roof and your attention is called to him so that he can't be missed. There's all sorts of stuff to explore and little things to investigate in the area but none of it is useful.

The entire investigation is completely worthless.

You have to...

  Hide contents

... go back to the very first area of the game and talk to a specific merchant (that you wouldn't otherwise have a reason to go to) and then you have to prompt him about the howling ... a prompt he never had before ... and he'll tell you the secret signal to get Blaidd to come down.

It's no real mystery. It's intentionally disjointed so that you're unlikely to figure it out except through accident. It's a Scooby-Doo mystery. The whole time you might think you'll figure it out if you pay enough attention but the reality is that they withheld key information and the surprise reveal is only achieved through absence of evidence. It's doesn't feel like earned depth or discovery. It feels fabricated and hollow. And it's incredibly frustrating to search around and try to figure it out only to come up empty handed.

And getting Blaidd to come down isn't remotely difficult compared to some of the more convoluted, nonsensical mysteries on offer.

Just changing this about the game, where you could actually piece your way through things and solve a mystery through thought and observation would honestly make the game significantly more enjoyable.

I'm playing this game for the first time and the hilarious thing is that I somehow managed to figure all of this stuff with Blaidd out by pure luck. Yet I then spent about twenty minutes trying to do the gesture and it never actually worked. Such an exercise in frustration.

I completely agree with you, by the way. Elden Ring is a fantastic game. I'm working through the Mountaintop of the Giants, which is not my favourite area, but I'm still having fun. The game is let down by a few things, which I think make it fall short of classic status for me. My main criticisms are some very random difficulty spikes, but especially the main and side quest design that you point to. Even for the main quest: I was trying to get the second half of the medallion to get up to the Altus Plateau. Gideon told me to go "find the Albinauric woman" near Liurnia. I looked for her for about two hours, before looking it up and realizing that the woman he was referring to was a woman who became a spirit Ash that I had picked up ten hours earlier. Maybe she had given a clue about the location of the second half of the medallion when I met her. But there was no way in hell I remembered any of that. I ended up looking up where the medallion was (on the other side of the map, as it happens), and since then, decided that I am very ok using guides for all quests.

I know Souls fans love the esoteric style of storytelling, but it also just doesn't work for me at all in terms of producing any emotion. Characters die or go through things and I just don't care. And I've said before in this thread that I think going with this style of storytelling for such a huge game was a mistake.

 

Edited January 18 by Caligula_K3

[Corvinus85]

8 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Didn’t EA force BioWare to make Anthem ? And Sony force naughty dog to make a last of us multiplayer before ditching it , or Sega forcing CA to make hyenas  ? There are countless examples of the owners/parent company/publishers forcing the devs to make a game. In this case,for Warcraft 4,it will actually be a good thing, while usually it’s a negative. Microsoft can dictate what blizzard or activision makes now, their hands off approach clearly isn’t working given the state of MW3. I feel they should intervene at Bethesda/Zenimax as well, given the reception of Starfield. 

In depends on the company, but no that is not how the industry works typically. As @IlyaP said, it was execs at BioWare that pitched Anthem. The same for SEGA and CA. It was CA upper management that pitched Hyenas to SEGA, without realizing the complexities of the project and not doing a good market analysis. What these parent companies force their developers to do is make them money, but often developers themselves try to find ways to do that.

[Ser Not Appearing]

1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I completely agree with you, by the way. Elden Ring is a fantastic game. I'm working through the Mountaintop of the Giants, which is not my favourite area, but I'm still having fun. The game is let down by a few things, which I think make it fall short of classic status for me. My main criticisms are some very random difficulty spikes, but especially the main and side quest design that you point to. Even for the main quest: I was trying to get the second half of the medallion to get up to the Altus Plateau. Gideon told me to go "find the Albinauric woman" near Liurnia. I looked for her for about two hours, before looking it up and realizing that the woman he was referring to was a woman who became a spirit Ash that I had picked up ten hours earlier. Maybe she had given a clue about the location of the second half of the medallion when I met her. But there was no way in hell I remembered any of that. I ended up looking up where the medallion was (on the other side of the map, as it happens), and since then, decided that I am very ok using guides for all quests.

 

Somehow it rises to classic status for me despite the gripes ... but, yes. I literally wouldn't have been able to complete this game without the internet. I simply ran into too many things that I couldn't figure out.

It's the only open world game I think that's true about. There's just so much stuff locked behind randomness or non-logical and very much not obvious solutions.

If you want a specific ending, btw, you'll need a guide. Especially the Ranni one. And if you want to avoid a certain, potential unsatisfying ending that you can accidentally trigger, you'll need a guide.

[Ser Not Appearing]

@Caligula_K3I think, btw, that the Blaidd action needs to be done in a certain place.

Spoiler

You've gotta see what direction he's facing and get right under him.

Or at least that worked for me last night.

[Kalbear]

10 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Didn’t EA force BioWare to make Anthem ?

No. Mentioned above. 

10 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

And Sony force naughty dog to make a last of us multiplayer before ditching it

No. In fact it was almost precisely the opposite. 

10 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

, or Sega forcing CA to make hyenas  ?

No. Again, this is a better example of the owner cancelling a game that did not look like it would make money, not telling them to make a game.

10 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

There are countless examples of the owners/parent company/publishers forcing the devs to make a game.

There are a lot of examples of the owning company forcing devs to change games and meddle quite a bit, and there are a lot of examples of publishers killing games before they launch - but there are not a lot of game studios where the owning company says that you MUST make a game. 

10 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

In this case,for Warcraft 4,it will actually be a good thing, while usually it’s a negative. Microsoft can dictate what blizzard or activision makes now, their hands off approach clearly isn’t working given the state of MW3. I feel they should intervene at Bethesda/Zenimax as well, given the reception of Starfield. 

Microsoft could in theory dictate what the studios do, but that's not how Microsoft has ever worked with game studios - even the ones they own outright like 343. Interestingly there's a fair amount of evidence that this is how Activision worked with Blizzard; Blizzard had been notoriously independent for a long time and work on whatever they wanted, and grumblings were that Activision was telling Blizzard to be more profitable and focus on bigger franchises - which is why we got Diablo IV so fast after D3 (comparably at least). 

But again, Microsoft doesn't work that way with their studios. For Starfield they pushed back against the studio and told them to take MORE time to launch to fix bugs and issues. 

[Ser Not Appearing]

I don't recall who asked but I've continued thinking on and trying to put into words why I object so strongly to MS banning people for sharing unedited clips of games (BG3) on the native MS console infrastructure, even if set fully to private. I don't want to give an inaccurate or flippant answer but much of what I feel seems like it should be self-evident so it took awhile to step back and describe it without mansplaining into oblivion.

Ultimately I think it comes down to my belief that this is an infrastructure / design issue and the burden is inappropriately being placed on consumers. In my view, if you sell a console and a game and have designed a way to capture and share videos of gameplay ... doing exactly that shouldn't require thought on my part. It should be designed inherent with whatever protections are necessary. Putting the burden on consumers feels, to me, a toxic and anti-consumer approach.

Right or wrong, I think that's a fair way to phrase my objection.

[polishgenius]

On 1/17/2024 at 8:15 PM, polishgenius said:

New 2D (metroidvania) Prince of Persia drops tomorrow, but my local shop had it out early. So I've started that.


First impressions, which pretty much follow what we expected from the trailers, is that it's going for a 'Metroid Dread but with melee combat' feel, and it looks like it's nailed it. Very smooth. 

 

This game rocks.

[Ran]

I did not expect it to be primarily first person, but then again that's Machine Games' bread and butter. But I also suppose they were also afraid third person would draw too many comparisons with Uncharted. Troy Baker (Joel in The Last of Us games) seems to be doing a sort of "notes of Harrison Ford, but just notes" approach to the voice, which is probably the right way to go if he can't sustain a full-on impersonation.