- 1 Post
- 546 Comments
Guardians of the Galaxy was surprisingly good. More so than the movies, the game gives all the characters their due time.
Just make sure to stop when people speak, otherwise you’ll go past the invisible point that makes them stop and then you’ll miss out on the dialogue.
Could have taken some notes from God of War there.
The Play Store works exactly as designed.
It takes a search term, turns it into a list of completely random apps sorted by whatever makes Google the most money in in app payments and adverts, and then shows it to you.
What more did you want from a store run by the world’s biggest advertising company?
They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.
The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.
And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.
The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.
Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.
Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.
Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.
I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.
I was enjoying right up to the point where I stopped making progress and started getting frustrated at the random aspects of it. Even some of the self contained puzzles were taking a bit of trial and error.
The last puzzles are likely going to take a lot more hours than I’m willing to give it, not because they’re hard but because they require the stars to align before it’ll let you even try them. I stopped playing a while ago now, and I haven’t felt the urge to go back.
I’d say it’ll backfire when people can’t play those odd Xbox games that for some reason never came to PC, but there’s so few people using Xboxes anyway, I doubt it’s going to matter. They’ve well and truly dropped the ball since the Xbox 360, and don’t really show any signs of being interested in picking it up again.
Everything just points to them making enough money from everything else to not really care. This is as token an effort as it’s possible to make in the handheld space.
If somebody put strychnine in the guacamole, I’d expect Walmart to remove it from the shelves and offer refunds to anyone that bought it.
If somebody distributed malware through Steam, I’d expect them to stop it also.
Not that there is currently malware in Borderlands 2, but their EULA says they could put it there if they wanted, and there’s nothing you could do about it.
As usual, money is the best message. So if they do put it into a game you’ve paid for, request a refund. If Valve starts losing money, they will change their rules.
I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.
I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.
There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.
I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.
I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.
Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.
I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.
I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.
Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.
Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.
Yeah, there’s probably a fair bit of overlap between GamePass and PSN Premium games.
I suspect to try and push their own products, we’ll be entering an age where games are $80, and almost never go on sale, purely to make their own subscription services seem better value. And then they’ll crank the price of those as well.
A 2TB Xbox Series X now costs more than a PS5 Pro (in the US at least).
That is mental. Xbox hardware division must be bleeding money hand over fist. I honestly doubt they’ll do another generation, and stick to trying to monetise GamePass through PC and streaming. Maybe you’ll even see GamePass for PS6 since they own so many studios now.
You can actually shoot them in this one, but I’d recommend throwing at least a little bit of piss and shit first. Manners cost nothing.