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IMO, any time a game repeatedly fails to meet deadlines, especially so early on in its development, that usually indicates the game isn’t likely to launch in a healthy state. Either the scope is way too big, or the narrative is receiving major changes and reworks, or the people working on the game just wish they weren’t working on that project and taking longer as a result. This kind of situation is rarely good, and even more rarely ends up with a good launched product.
Cyberpunk 2077, Anthem, Mass Effect Andromeda, Halo Infinite, Duke Nukem Forever, John Romero’s Daikatana (although I personally am a bit charmed by this one despite it being undoubtedly bad), and other games are examples of this. Repeated failure to meet production deadlines, lots of crunch forced on the developers, and all for what? The launch product for all of these games was horrendously bad. Some for technical reasons, some for narrative reasons, and some for both.
When I first saw the trailer for Intergalactic, I had mixed feelings. I liked the intended graphics/art style and retro styled tech, the Porsche was a little weird product placement but fine I guess, but the characters and dialogue I personally found both unappealing. The obvious Snake Plissken rip-off woman the main character talked to (blonde with an eyepatch, I can only assume she is some sort of merc job handler) seemed maybe interesting but then she spoke and the writing lost my interest. Upon learning the game is likely to follow some sort of religious theming, I lost all interest in the game. Its not what I want from a video game. So this was pretty disappointing to learn. But now seeing the game is in such a state doesn’t give me great confidence that the final product will be even decent when it launches.
What’s the matter? I thought they were super confident this was going to do really well. Are they getting cold feet and deciding to make changes for fear of bad reception when they don’t quite have enough time, leading to forced overtime?
EDIT: Wait. All of this was for a DEMO? How bad was the game that they needed to work 60 hours a week mandatory overtime just to finish a demo of the game??
I’m not saying E33 didn’t deserve to win anything, but I don’t believe it deserved to dominate like that. No single game should be allowed to do this, ever.
I mean, of the 6 nominees for Best Performance, 3 of them (50%) were from E33. That shouldn’t be allowed, IMO. Pick the single best performance from one game, then you can have more variety to pick from. Also, the winner of Best Indie Game should automatically be disqualified from also winning Best Indie Debut game.
In my opinion: KCD2 snubbed for Best RPG, Silksong snubbed for best Action Adventure, and Half-Life 3 snubbed for Most Anticipated Game (is it disqualified – no professionals allowed?).
I won’t say E33 didn’t deserve to win an award, it definitely did. But I will absolutely say with certainty it did not deserve to be nominated in so many categories and proceed to win basically every category.
Having an award show give awards to only one nominee feels bad for everyone except the show runners, that one nominee, and their fans. Lots of games deserved to be there that simply weren’t, and lots of nominees deserved to win but didn’t simply because E33 won this year’s popularity contest.
For example, Best Performance should not have been allowed to have 50% of the nominees be from the same game (E33, in this case).
It was good, but Episode 1 Racer was better, IMO. It still holds the world record for best selling sci-fi racing game, beating out even F-Zero and Wipeout.
Also, Episode 1 Racer appeals to people that may not really care too much about Star Wars by being a good racing game regardless. Jedi Power Battles though, relies more on the Star Wars IP, IMO. Especially the PS1 and GBA ports, which honestly weren’t that great in comparison to the Dreamcast version.
I don’t see why people are calling this Concord 2. The art and character designs were actually good, and the gameplay looked even better. Despite my disdain for Apex Legends, I have to admit that the game feels good to play when you are doing well, and Titanfall obviously felt even better. I don’t see this game doing horribly as long as they don’t try to monetize character abilities or weapons or anything Pay2Win.
I am disappointed seeing that the Need for Speed developers are from Criterion, and not former Black Box. Criterion’s NFS games have been trash compared to Black Box, particularly the handling. They fall feel like mobile games thanks to their B2D mechanic, rather than the more predictable handling model from older titles.
I am still interested, of course. Episode 1 Racer was the best thing to come out of Episode 1. Hopefully this one is good and has active multiplayer.
I’ll be real, it was good that they showed this trailer first. Because Legacy of Atlantis is going to be way more popular. Catalyst looks like a game the executives demanded, and the developers said “Okay, we will make that if you let us make Legacy of Atlantis.”
I have not interest in Catalyst, but Legacy of Atlantis had me. Especially at the dinosaurs.
I dont know, I felt like it was more fitting for Diablo. Watching this trailer I thought:
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Wow I can’t believe they were actually allowed to show that on YouTube.
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It seems like Larian is making a lot of changes with the tone of Divinity.
Its interesting, but was definitely not what I would personally expect from Divinity.
Well at least Sam Maggs isn’t on this one.
Hopefully it’s a step in the right direction for Star Wars?
EDIT: Before you riot, my distaste with her has nothing to do with her being a woman, and everything to do with her being needlessly antagonistic to people and her being a writer on such “banger” games as Anthem and Call of Duty Vanguard.
I do find it perplexing that other companies can also release a game like this, fix it, and then everyone basically forgets and treats the developers like buddies again (like CDPR did with Witcher and Cyberpunk, or Obsidian with KotOR2, or Hello Games with No Man’s Sky).
Bethesdas original release of Skyrim was exactly the same, and then they fixed it. Same.with Fallout 76, Elder Scrolls Online, etc. The difference is that it just seems like people really love to hate on Bethesda more than other studios when they don’t really do anything that different.
I mean, The Witcher 3 on Switch had a lot of bugs that “shouldn’t have been there” because the game was already in a good state on other platforms. But that isn’t how game development works because porting to a different console isn’t as simple as clicking one button, especially not for something like the Witcher that runs in a proprietary game engine. Shipping with bugs is bad, but Bethesda isn’t any better or worse than other beloved studios. They do seem to be publicly hated more than other studios, though.
Its a Nintendo game with a well known name. Of course some people are going to call it a 10/10 game of the year, even if it doesn’t deserve it.
People said that Zelda BotW was a 10/10, and then Tears came out and made all of those people look like idiots. BotW was really more like what I said it was, a 6/10.
Goddess of Victory NIKKE fits what you are asking.
It is a high quality Free-to-Play mobile game played in portrait mode and completely playable with one hand (depending on how wide your device is). As long as your don’t care about leaderboards, it also isn’t Pay-to-Win. It is playable on PC as well, which is how I play these days. As a Day 1 Player, you don’t need to spend any money to play, enjoy, or progress in the game.
In terms of negatives:
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Some people may not like the anime art style (game is playable in various language dubs, including Korean, Japanese, English, and depending on region, Chinese, which are optional downloads to reduce filesize) or the character designs, which have huge… personalities
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If you don’t care about time limited events or being at the top of leaderboards, its not hostile to your playtime and mental health. Go at your own pace.
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It is a gacha game for characters and skins, but the game gives players a lot of options, so unless you’re trying to be #1 on the leaderboards in your server, having every character max level isn’t that important.
They recently added a “Story Mode” for the campaign, which significantly reduces the difficulty of all the missions in the 40+ campaign chapters so that players can enjoy the story without needing to have as powerful characters. I think you get reduced rewards as well, but its a nice addition. You can also get photo film rolls to unlock past time limited events (not licensed or collab ones though) so you can enjoy the stories of those as well. You don’t get the rewards for them as they were running, but still can experience the stories and minigames. You get plenty of free currency for free character rolls, no money is needed. Unless you really want a skin or really like a licensed collab and want to buy an IP specific bundle or something.
Basically, for a free player, there is A LOT of story content available to keep your busy for a while. Play at your own pace, and don’t worry about leaderboards and you’ll be mostly fine. The biggest advice is to try to get 5 characters 4 times each. If you are playing the regular difficulty story, there is a point where it is required to progress, and is often referred to as the only “wall of progression” in the game.
Lets talk about QTEs as an example. Because for QTEs, a developer can easily add an option to entirely circumvent them, with just a single boolean and a single line of code in the QTE input method.
I think that, for accessibility reasons, it is perfectly reasonable to ask for an option to switch between tapping a button and holding a button to complete a QTE. I think it is unreasonable to ask developers for an option to completely remove QTEs from their game (such as auto-succeed/auto-complete). For many games, this would turn an interactive part of the game which is normally followed by an uninteractive cutscene into an uninteractive cutscene immediately followed by another uninteractive cutscene. Players that disable QTEs could easily be sitting through very long stretches of uninteractive parts of the game instead of interacting with the game, leading to those players complaining about long cutscenes since they usually completely forget they disabled QTEs.
Shenmue has Quick Time Events. A lot of them. If someone hates QTEs, it would be better for them not to play the game at all than to play without them. It is a core part of the intended experience that enhances the player’s time with the game. You get to interact with the cutscene instead of dropping the controller and turning off your brain. As a player, you pay more attention and keep your controller ready because at any moment you could be hit with a QTE and you want to be ready for that. You as a player have anticipation, excitement, nervousness, fear, etc that the developer makes you feel using mechanics like QTEs. You are more engaged with the game than someone that wants those deleted from the game, and in the end that means you will get more enjoyment out of the game. Someone that wants that turned off wants to play a different game.
Not every game is made for every person. And thats okay, thats good even.
I don’t give a fuck if some pretentious asses “artistic vision” requires the player to backtrack half way across a level on every death or thinks a shitty minigame should be played no less than 153 times every play through.
Then just don’t play that game or use cheats (if its a singleplayer game)?
I don’t see why a game developer needs to intentionally provide an option to remove mechanics they designed a game around just to please someone that doesn’t want to play the game as they designed it.
I hate this. Not because it exists, but because it reminds me how old I am, lol.
I used to know people that would all join up for Quake II, CounterStrike 1.5/1.6, and Diablo II LAN events, but it’s getting harder and more expensive to travel these days. Playing online just isn’t the same for me, so I won’t be joining, but I do hope that the community continues to thrive and remain as drama-free as it can.
Goddess of Victory NIKKE.
I try to be careful where I play it because the character designs are pretty uh… well the characters have huge personalities, usually. That’s not why I play the game, but I recognize some people have more of a problem with that than others so I try to be respectful about it. Also, NIKKE is a mobile gacha game, which a lot of people dislike. So I would say it counts as a guilty pleasure, although I don’t really feel guilty for playing the game.
For me, I don’t really spend money on it. Except for their two collabs with Neon Genesis Evangelion and one collab with NieR, because for me it is literally the law that I pay at least a little for IPs I really like. I am not a Whale (Richard Nixon impression lol), I am not even a Dolphin(?) I think I am called a Minnow. Whatever they call a basically F2P player that spends so rarely they might as well not spend at all. Besides, I have played for 3 years and only spent $60 total, I think that’s a pretty good deal so far.
Anyway, I like the gameplay. I realize to some people this might sound like I am saying “I read Playboy for the articles,” but hear me out.
When I was younger, I really enjoyed going to arcades. In the tail years of the arcades, newer games started to pop up, among them being lightgun games. I really enjoyed playing Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, and later on playing Silent Hill The Arcade, Alien, Terminator, and others. It was fun while it lasted, but now arcades are dead and game developers don’t really make those kind of games anymore. Beside my home arcade cabinet where I emulate the older games (and get a worse experience because I have neither the pizza grease and cigarette smell, nor the different shaped controllers), I don’t have new options for lightgun games these days. Then NIKKE came out and the gameplay was close enough for me that I felt that same fun of a lightgun game. I enjoy my time with the game mostly because it reminds me of the fun I had in actual arcades with lightgun games.
RAM on the Steam Deck is not expandable.
Well, it technically is if you remove the current RAM chips, solder on new double density RAM chips, and flash the BIOS. But compared to a regular PC of just plugging the RAM sticks into the Motherboard slots they belong in, trying to expand RAM on the Steam Deck might as well be considered not possible. Even if you do expand the RAM, there is no noticeable performance gain.
Of course there are always exceptions, but I don’t count on news like this to mean that this project will be the exception.
Metroid Prime and Halo 2 both had excessive crunch and both turned out great, obviously. In Metroid Prime’s case, a management change seemed to fix it in the long term. In Halo’s case, Bungie just embraced the suck I guess, since they still wanted to make Halo 3.
Regardless, these were exceptions to the rule, and I would never expect a project to be an exception, personally.