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Genuinely couldn’t stand how on-rails it is. Why advertise this wide open world and then constantly restrict and limit my options to interact with it?
There’s lots of positive things to say about it. The combat is, yes, perhaps more satisfying than ever. They really nailed the Monster/weapons/armor designs this time around. I feel like there’s value in gathering again, something that recent titles have lost.
But it’s all stained by the low-rank experience. Spending 10-12 hours behing hand-held through a series of walk and talks where I am constantly prompted to stare at the beautiful landscape piece, or the way small monsters interact, as though the game is afraid I’ll miss it if I am left to my own devices, was both boring and insulting. There was a lot of decisions made to put cinematography ahead of gameplay experience here, and these decisions have genuinely made Wilds my least favorite release Monster Hunter title to date.
I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.
I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.
To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.
If someone already owns Tunic and is considering this, I would say to just directly donate the money.
Or just like… Donate through the bundle and consider trying out some minor projects created by people who are trying to make something cool? Why turn down access to these games out of some form of perceived superiority? This notion that since you’ve never heard of these other titles they can’t possible offer anything of value to you is kind of a spit in the face of struggling artists of all types.
The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.
I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the upscaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up from 0.5 to 0.6, and then disabling other features I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.
I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on Legion Go, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.
I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 5800 and a 3070 ti, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and unapologetically think they look better than even World).I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.
This article notes specific stuttering and runs the frame health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.
I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.
Hi-Rez is the king of creating a new game, pretending it’s their “big thing” and then enshittifying it while their good devs are moved to the next “big thing.” They are fad chasers who are constantly in a race to monetize a market and then move on.
I’m glad it caught up with them. Couldn’t have happened to a better company. Apologies to the earnest designers and programmers that got caught in the crossfire.
Problem is, I own most of the games on the Steam front page, so finding new and interesting games is getting difficult.
This. I feel totally underwhelmed by the sale this year because everything on the front page I already either own or have no interest in. I know the discovery queue exists, but it primarily tries to feed me the same jank I already know exists.
On the other hand… this feels like I would be calling it out as manipulative FOMO bullshit were it any other company.
While I hesitate to type this as it might be perceived as viewing a corporation as a friend, the intent matters, and GOG has a different history than the majority of FOMO abusing game companies. Did they identify that this is probably an opportunity to push some sales? Sure, probably. But I am chill permitting them that right when they’re visibly working to remove FOMO as a commercial strategy.
Undertale is such a bolt of lightning. It both depends on its player having experience with traditional JRPG and having no fucking clue what it is. But when the conditions line up, as it did for many people at release, it was such a master fully crafted experience. But even the slightest amount of “it’s good because…” really siphons part of the experience away.
My experience with GOG is that it is a fringe option, at least in the combined North American (USA+Canada) culture. Plus, the unfortunate reality is that in many cases GOG’s principles preclude it from being a genuine competitor to Steam. Insisting on being DRM free means half of released games never go to the platform, so it will always be the secondary “better if” option.
I worry about Steam’s functional monopoly on PC game access. It hasn’t been an issue so far, because it has remembered that it is, first and foremost, a service, providing consumer protection through a generous refund policy and supporting devs with easy access to simple matchmaking and anti-cheat systems. But without a healthy competitor, it would be easy for Steam to start milking it’s users and developers alike.
No satire here; I genuinely think it’s a great example of a remake done well.
There are some major breaks from the original plot, which in itself would be neat, but they introduce an entire plot element that interacts with this derivation. The spirits I was talking about, “Whispers” (had to look up the official name, tbh), appear whenever the story attempts to break from the original story from the original release. In universe, this is explained as pre-determination, or destiny. Thanks to our meta knowledge, we know in reality that these spirits are attempting to maintain the timeline from the original release.
As an early example, after the events at the first Mako reactor, Cloud decides to collect his pay and go his own way, which is not the original intended path of the game. To correct this, a group of Whispers attack the party, and ultimately injure Jessie, preventing her from going on the mission. Needing another body, Barrett is forced to rehire Cloud for Avalanche’s mission to the next reactor. Without spoiling specific details, the whispers slowly become a form of antagonist as the characters try harder to get away from the original plot of FFVII.
This is interesting in a few ways. First, we’ve introduced a new major conflict in the form of the characters fighting against a physical embodiment of destiny. They do not want the outcome of their struggles to be predetermined, particularly as that predetermination involved the death and suffering of some specific characters. This is, in my opinion, an interesting new plot element beyond being “the same game again.”
Second, stepping back, and examining this with a wider lens, we can look at the Whispers for what they are to us, the players, rather than what they are to the characters. We know they are not maintaining “destiny,” but instead trying to reestablish the original story we loved. As a result, I see the Whispers as the collective voice of the “change nothing” remake ideology. When a community asks for new content of IPs they love, there will always be diehard essentialists who want their loved stories to remain untouched; the Whispers, then, are these people.
So if the Whispers are a physical representation of the “change nothing” remake ideology, then what is there to make of the fact that they’re largely an antagonist? This seems to me that the writers were critical of this culture, so much so that they ask you to fight it to earn the different take on the story. Of course, it’s far from the only derivation from the original game, but that’s exactly my point: FFVII remake was so far divorced from the conceptual, soulless “let’s pump out the same game again” remake that they literally wrote that culture into a new antagonist.
I feel like people are taking this commentary a little too literally. I don’t think it’s intended to suggest that all remakes are always bad and we should be ashamed of ourselves for enjoying them. Mankind has a habit of romanticising the past, and that’s led to something of a modern obsession with nostalgia. These are fair, and interesting, statements.
That said, the choice of pairing the statement with an allusion to FF7 is probably not a great choice. The remake is fantastic, and isn’t at all symptomatic of the problem of quick cash-in, nostalgia driven remakes. Hell, the first game specifically tackles themes of pre-determination, which functions as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for nostalgia. And fascinatingly the meta-analysis of this is critical of exactly the same thing: there are literally spirits of sorts which attack the player and manipulate events to ensure the original story remains untouched, and they become a prominent antagonist of the game as the player works to tell a story that is different from the one told in the original. Perhaps there’s something counterproductive about attaching this message to a remake that’s critical of soullessly telling the same stories we’ve already heard.
Pre-empt: Everything I say is in regards to the original release. I have not played the pristine cut.
It is definitely intended to be deeply uncomfortable. It has a very “cosmic horror” vibe to it, while playing on themes of relationships, love and romance. Both the player and the princess will die, repeatedly, in sometimes gruesome ways, and sometimes absurd ways. Body horror will happen. You will read descriptions of flesh and bone seperating. But despite all that, it ultimately is an emotionally endearing experience.
It’s good, but not great. The story is impactful and meaningful, and it does a great sort-of incidental meta commentary on literature.
An opinion which I find most players don’t share with me: the ending was incredibly weak, to the point that I felt it really detracted from the experience, which led me to my “not great” assessment. It has a bad case of “the only decision that matters is the last one,” which isn’t the way I like these seemingly heavily malluble visual novels to go, and none of the endings feel genuinely satisfying. Worse, my first ending set up for something of a second attempt towards a “golden ending” of sorts, only to pull the rug out from under me and just kind of… end, instead.
The storytelling is great, the writing is engaging, the voice acting is fantastic, the art is gorgeous… There’s a lot to like about the game, so I don’t want to make it sound “bad,” because it’s quite good. It just sold itself to me as a kind of “choices matter” game, where I’d find myself digging for information and answers, so I can learn more and make better decisions on multiple, short playthroughs. I hoped to eventually either discover everything I want to discover and feel good about my explorations, or use my growing knowledge to find the “right” ending, whether that’s a “golden” ending or an ending that I find satisfying and rewards me for my effort. But, for it’s variety choices, it’s not really that kind of game. It is, at its heart, a linear game, with some variation in the experiences you have between where you start and where you end up, with a couple choices in the last moment determining which page you flip to before the credits roll.
Maybe I expected too much, and the problem is with me. I can’t deny that my opinion could be based on a failure of expectation. But, I restate, it’s good, but it’s not great.
No one thinks Gaben is the second coming. His platform just, actually doesn’t suck, and genuinely functions as a service to its users. It’s a low bar, sure, but it’s a good one. Comparing it to Microsoft axeing any studio that produces something worth talking about while they force more datascraping malware and adware into Windows is just dishonest.
Your comment reads more like you get off on being controversial than having actual insightful thoughts and the comparisons in what these three companies you listed are actually doing.
A lot of Steam games are also DRM free. It’s up to the individual developers whether they enforce DRM checks or not.
I’ve copied files from Steam folders directly to a flash drive, plugged them into an offline, Steam-less computer that I don’t have rights to install anything on, and ran them perfectly. But it is a game-by-game thing.
While I understand and agree with your premise to a point, aren’t you advocating for the removal of all randomness in videogames? As long as random factors are tied to outcomes, games will always be playing off that desire that the Skinner Box highlights. I’d argue that the entire modern rogue-lite genre is predicated on the fact that sometimes you will get “better” powerups, upgrades, etc., which leads to better outcomes. Auto-chess games are similiar, where hitting good random rolls leads to high powered teams and easy wins.
Mastery of both these genres requires both a wide birth of knowledge, and flexibility as you make due with what you are offerred, rather than simply always having the best things at all times. These are skills that are fun to have tested and build master in, and I don’t really think we should eliminate that from games. I agree that the worst offenders are simply trying to feed off human addiction rather than build are emergant gameplay situations, but any rule that targets the addict chasers is likely to catch other games with randomization in the crossfire.
Every single time I have played an Annapurna published game, I had a fantastic time. I won’t say that everything they did was equal, but everything they did was entertaining, and thought-provoking.
I can’t quite follow the legalese required to parse EXACTLY what this means going forward, but I am sure it is not good, and that is disappointing.
If you’re looking for “maybe slightly higher specs than the Steam Deck”, a good APU solution will get you there on the cheap. In particular, the 5000 series APUs are pushing 50% off in most places, because they’re the last entry in a socket type which has already been replaced.
The challenge will be finding a pre-built that takes advantage of these facts, so you may do best either using a website that lets you define the parts you want and then builds the PC for you, or walking into a local PC shop and asking them the same question followed with “I’ve heard that Ryzen APUs are surprisingly good for gaming and affordable right now”.
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Oh I don’t have any performance issues. My 3070ti has no issue holding 120 fps (with frame Gen on, mind you). Game plays perfectly.
And I’d be more forgiving of the “15 hour long free game,” but it ate a part of the game I enjoy, made playing that part of the game with friends challenging to the point of feeling not worth it, and it’s required before I am allowed to enjoy the game I actually paid for. Those 15 hours - well, 12 for me - were more valuable to me than the price I paid for the game. 15 hours of work is well into the several hundreds of dollars space. But I already paid over $100 CAD once taxes were in. Why do I also have to give it my time?
Again, great game, but worst on-boot Monster Hunter to date. And that’s saying something, considering World doesn’t let you hold a weapon for the first hour.