To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”
That seems pretty reductive IMO. Like RE7 and RE8 are genuinely good returns to form for the series. The RE2 and RE4 releases are remakes which by most standards improve the original releases and bring them into the current generation.
Then throw in the Phoenix Wright games, Monster Hunter games, Dragon’s Dogma games, Street Fighter games, DMC…
I would argue Capcom has been on a tear of very good games, especially in the last 5 years.
Yeah, I came to mention this one specifically. The Legends series was incredible at the time, and there was a lot of potential for a third game with more modern controls. But instead, Capcom has made it clear that they intend to simply sit on the IP and never do anything with it.
It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
Yesssssss. Our entire family loved The Dungeon so much. My father wrote a letter to the developers and got a response, with excited descriptions of upcoming games in the series that never came to be. The producer or developer, or whoever wrote him back was bragging about how the next game would have characters you could actually see while in combat! (E: referring to The Arena)
The Dungeon already sort of gave up on the original design. Philip Price wrote The City and the extension mechanism that things were supposed to plug into, but The Dungeon didn’t use any of it. So it was a one-way trip… Except you couldn’t actually transfer characters, it was broken. :-/
Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another ‘left-click on the target’ game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.
No, seriously, give Rivals a chance. It’s free so you have nothing to lose.
Two of the original OW developers were heavily involved in its development, so the game feels just like OW did back in 2016. Trust me, you won’t miss Overwatch 2 once you get used to it.
I liked 6v6, they should’ve made more tanks and healers.
I didn’t like role queue, sure it’s a strong team buildup but I don’t think it should’ve been forced. I really liked being able to flex between classes depending on what was needed. Sometimes five DPS and a healer will break through a point. Being a tank or healer with bad DPS makes an already limited role even worse.
Ow2 seems like they just trashed my game ($60aud) and added MTX.
I can’t get into marvel rivals, the time to kill seems too low, Overwatch was a bit more lethal.
Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say ‘They’re doing X. I’ll swap to this character and screw up their plans.’ The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn’t locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.
I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don’t win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?
Play Marvel Rivals now while it’s still fun. It’s free.
It plays just like 2016 Overwatch did, because it was made by some of the original OW devs. The same ones who left because they were tired of all the fun metas being made boring to please the hardcore players who have no life outside of video games. That isn’t an issue with Rivals yet. Enjoy it while you still can.
I was on the same boat as you forever. I came back to ow2 late last year. I’ll say this. OW feels better than it ever has. Very balanced and very fair, while maintaining that very chaotic and energized feeling. They added tiered perks which really break up the monotony of the game, and also brought back loot boxes.
It feels like they realized the game became stagnant, and they’re doing as much as they can to bring it back to peak, and past that.
They also are bringing back 'classic overwatch", and I’ll say this… After you play classic and go back to regular you can feel the difference. The only thing I miss is 6v6 but it seems like that’s coming back soon too
Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
I suppose you’re most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into Wasteland 2
and Wasteland 3?
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
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Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex First Assault
All due to capitalism ruining things as usual…
Fur me, it would be Beyond Good and Evil. I really wanted to see where the story went next
The Culling
Before the devs ruined it by throwing away the movement and combat system.
Wasn’t canceled but they might as well have because they lost 99% of their playerbase from that one change in Beta.
Revenant Hill, by one of the Night in the Woods developers. Cancelled due to health problems.
Megaman Legends 3.
“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”
I think a sizable fraction of the world’s population is still salty about that, and it’s been 14 years.
🤦
I haven’t bought a capcom game since this
To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”
That seems pretty reductive IMO. Like RE7 and RE8 are genuinely good returns to form for the series. The RE2 and RE4 releases are remakes which by most standards improve the original releases and bring them into the current generation.
Then throw in the Phoenix Wright games, Monster Hunter games, Dragon’s Dogma games, Street Fighter games, DMC…
I would argue Capcom has been on a tear of very good games, especially in the last 5 years.
Yeah, I came to mention this one specifically. The Legends series was incredible at the time, and there was a lot of potential for a third game with more modern controls. But instead, Capcom has made it clear that they intend to simply sit on the IP and never do anything with it.
I didn’t even know about it until I read this comment, but now I’m one of the salty.
I’m a battle network fan and never played Legends but I feel for you.
Legends was such a weird series. It felt like a Mega Man take on something like Ocarina of Time.
I should give it a try for sure.
It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.
I really miss Megalith. It was a VR MOBA. The small team had to drop the project to work on contracts that made money.
Prey 2
The cancelled suite of Alternate Reality games.
Omfg…
Yesssssss. Our entire family loved The Dungeon so much. My father wrote a letter to the developers and got a response, with excited descriptions of upcoming games in the series that never came to be. The producer or developer, or whoever wrote him back was bragging about how the next game would have characters you could actually see while in combat! (E: referring to The Arena)
The Dungeon already sort of gave up on the original design. Philip Price wrote The City and the extension mechanism that things were supposed to plug into, but The Dungeon didn’t use any of it. So it was a one-way trip… Except you couldn’t actually transfer characters, it was broken. :-/
I went back and played The Dungeon about 15 years ago and I just about cried because it was so fucking bad by modern standards lol
Wildstar
Mario 35
Might sound odd to some, but Overwatch.
Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another ‘left-click on the target’ game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.
I was there gandalf, I hated when they changed the game and balancing around the pro mode, only for their e-sports presence to implode anyway.
Yeah I used to be super addicted to Overwatch 1, but I bailed as soon as 2 came out. I can honestly say I’ve never played it since.
Nah, it’s pretty good now. Feels better than OW1 was, personally.
Marvel Rivals is better
Who asked?
No, seriously, give Rivals a chance. It’s free so you have nothing to lose.
Two of the original OW developers were heavily involved in its development, so the game feels just like OW did back in 2016. Trust me, you won’t miss Overwatch 2 once you get used to it.
I liked 6v6, they should’ve made more tanks and healers.
I didn’t like role queue, sure it’s a strong team buildup but I don’t think it should’ve been forced. I really liked being able to flex between classes depending on what was needed. Sometimes five DPS and a healer will break through a point. Being a tank or healer with bad DPS makes an already limited role even worse.
Ow2 seems like they just trashed my game ($60aud) and added MTX.
I can’t get into marvel rivals, the time to kill seems too low, Overwatch was a bit more lethal.
Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say ‘They’re doing X. I’ll swap to this character and screw up their plans.’ The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn’t locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.
I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don’t win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?
Man, I miss that game.
Play Marvel Rivals now while it’s still fun. It’s free.
It plays just like 2016 Overwatch did, because it was made by some of the original OW devs. The same ones who left because they were tired of all the fun metas being made boring to please the hardcore players who have no life outside of video games. That isn’t an issue with Rivals yet. Enjoy it while you still can.
I was on the same boat as you forever. I came back to ow2 late last year. I’ll say this. OW feels better than it ever has. Very balanced and very fair, while maintaining that very chaotic and energized feeling. They added tiered perks which really break up the monotony of the game, and also brought back loot boxes.
It feels like they realized the game became stagnant, and they’re doing as much as they can to bring it back to peak, and past that.
They also are bringing back 'classic overwatch", and I’ll say this… After you play classic and go back to regular you can feel the difference. The only thing I miss is 6v6 but it seems like that’s coming back soon too
6v6 is already back, in open queue format
deleted by creator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-UsM9qaZ5A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r8rDBVCN1A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kum80OStNZY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_betnUPq-uQ
Terra Battle 1, created by the OG final fantasy devs. Best Uematsu soundtrack of that decade and one of the best mobile gachas ever. RIP
The Black Isle version of Fallout 3 (Van Buren).
Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
Good pick! I was so bummed when I heard that was cancelled.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
That’s a fair point. We did have Arcanum in 2001 and while it’s arguably legendary in CRPG circles, I don’t think it did all that well commercially.
I played Arcanum for the first time this year. There are a lot of cool things in it, but it really doesn’t hold up all that well.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
Did you get the HD patch?
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
Thanks for the write up.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
I suppose you’re most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3?
They are on my “to play” list. :)
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
This is before my time but I remember reading about a canceled movie tie-in game for Star Trek: First Contact.