Xbob42

Yeaaaah but these days usually if that happens a game is gonna suck ass or be a big bucket of nothing. It's not the 90s anymore where you could pump out an incredible and feature-rich RPG in a year.

I don't really see this problem going away so long as executives have more power over the direction of a game than anyone else. The "direction" will always be heavily influenced by market research and ROI, yada yada we all know how game development works. As long as everyone keeps only trying to land mega hits studios are going to continue to be absolutely shredded like this over and over. And that's not even taking into account developers part of what are considered legendary studios hoping the "[studio name] magic" kicks in at some point and they literally magically make a great game somehow, so it's obvious even without executives a lot of these studios just lose their way, often when big names leave.

I'm surprised they didn't just have them wrap up whatever they have and sell it. Not like they have a stellar reputation of highly polished and finished games or something.

Not at all. I have two different shifts, 10pm - 6am on Sun/Mon/Tue and 9pm-5am on Wed/Thur. So I go to bed basically as soon as I get home, very short commute, so I wake up between noon and 2:30 PM depending on how much I sleep in, and then I just hang out with my family all day until night time. Since I'm with them before work instead of after, I'm never "too tired" to do anything with them, and since I have free time in the afternoon, everything is still open. Frankly, it makes family time way better than I ever got from most other jobs. Especially since I hate mornings and like to stay up late. So I'd be tired when going to work, then be even more tired when I got home.

I work graveyard, so I never have to set an alarm, I go to bed when I get home and start my day with free time and go into work every night feeling full of energy and wide awake. I can't stand mornings.

As for how far along in development is, I recall reading that development started as early as 2015, though how much of that was actual development vs. planning/concept I don't know, but things like this make it sound like they were doing some real work: I can't imagine they were in pre-production for too terribly long based on that. Although they did say it was "very early in development" in 2019, so who fucking knows. All I know is they haven't exactly been knocking it out of the park lately and live services get buried deep into a game's DNA to ruin them as thoroughly as possible.

So that added another 4 years to its development, right? I seem to recall them talking about live service in this shit from the start of development, so it has to be core to what the game currently is. Considering how hard it seems to be for devs to update just about anything that goes deeper than surface level, I can't imagine digging deep into the core of the game and ripping out some dumb bullshit they shouldn't have put in to begin with is going to be an easy fix.

Wait, people actually couldn't figure out the light switch in Control? What kind of fucking lunatic could ever figure out you need to pull the switch 3 times? WHAT COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS REALITY MATRIX ARE THEY PULLING THIS INFORMATION FROM

Yeah I'll be skipping whatever they put out next. No reason to expect anything decent or for them to follow up and fix mistakes, setting the precedent that multiple layers of disappointment are acceptable to them. It is not to me.

This game is fucking dope. These are the kinds of games that I find myself more and more attracted to, far more than any big name exclusives. Not survival games, good lord I'm tired of survival games, but this kind of game in particular, something that seems so similar and like a known quantity on the surface, but just gets cooler and cooler and cooler the more you play. Baddass fucking game.

This is not the Batman horror-themed tactical RPG I was expecting.

Shame the PS4 one was a real shitshow. Half the framerate and 1/10th the charm of the original game. But the nice animations were enough for a lot of people with low expectations. Hopefully Rift Apart is a return to what actually made the series good, rather than utterly shitting all over the best reasons to play these games.

Yeah, hearing that some people are still getting crashes stinks. It's been very stable for me each time I play. Hope they can address whatever is causing issues. Crashes can really ruin an experience if the timing is bad enough. And yeah, Valhalla is very colorful. The first area is pretty samey but then it opens up into some great vistas, many of which I think I posted in this very thread.

On second thought, maybe I won't be giving this game a try... Was kind of bored to tears watching that video. I guess it'll never quite click why people like this genre so much to me. A shame, since people put in so many hours, and I like games where I can sink lots of hours when I've got nothing else to play. But it just looks so duuuuull.

This last patch seemed to have finally pushed performance over the edge for me. Before this I was still experiencing fairly regular microstutters. They weren't horrible or anything but could be distracting. There'd be a loooong drop on that graph every 30 seconds or so, only for a single frame, but I could definitely feel it. Now the longest drop was to 59 FPS jumping off a big cliff, which I didn't even notice. So much smoother now. And FPS seems a little higher in general. Still really enjoying this game. I really like Eivor, and I like that you explore the world on foot or horseback, as the naval stuff was starting to get old. I really enjoyed Odyssey, but did a lot of fast traveling from island to island, and I only like to use fast travel sparingly in most games as I feel it starts to really shrink the world and make what I'm doing feel less important and impactful. Also love that they're adding new abilities and skills and activities even this late after release. Without the fairly narrow skill tree that Origins/Odyssey had, they can just add stuff whenever they want. I know they added a few pretty cool skills to Odyssey post-launch, which was a nice surprise, and I'm glad to see that still going on. Feels like each time I decide to return to the game there's some cool changes or additions waiting for me. And maybe this is just me, but playing this and Ghost of Tsushima back to back, there's something I really don't like about Tsushima's world design. It feels like someone tried to bring a series of Japanese painting tropes to life or something, and while that can be kind of cool, it makes every area feel really... off? This one's down to personal preference, I'm sure, but it kind of feels like in Valhalla I'm exploring a natural landscape, while in Ghost I'm exploring some weeb artist's wet dream. Ghost has really well-done and finely crafted landscapes, but they feel fake and weird to me I guess. Like I could hear the artists having a long conversation about old samurai flicks and how the beautiful landscape belies the ugly reality or some bullshit. Also I kind of miss all my cool Valhalla abilities when in Ghost. Ghost has a slightly more responsive character and a dedicated jump button, both good things, but I feel my arsenal and skillset are really limited and set in stone, and as someone who thrives on novel new gameplay mechanics, it's rough for me.

A "political stunt" where you actually get things done sounds more like... good politics?

If this game took you longer to beat than original FF7 you were either playing a guide or you blew chunky ass at Remake.

Part of a full game for me is telling a full and complete story. This isn't that. Just because they want to handwave retcon a bunch of shit and basically write a new story doesn't mean that the story is complete, and as I only had to buy original FF7 once and got both the entire story and entire world (and it was much longer than FF7R) this is not a good sell for me. Wowee zowie it completed some character arcs! That means it's like the Halo trilogy! I don't even have an incredibly high bar or anything for a "complete" story, I play the Legend of Heroes series, each 2 games in that series is basically a full game split into two separate titles, but that's because they're very long and tell a far grander story than what we saw here, and also they don't launch at full price. Every single one of those games, for the most part, is longer than ORIGINAL Final Fantasy 7. I don't need this to be that, those games are also very slow and not action-packed, but I feel like FF7 was already action packed without action packing it full of filler nonsense to pad out the playtime so they wouldn't have to make environments outside of Midgar.

I'm absolutely not a germaphobe, so you have your answer.

Well of course, people are dying to get out and do something social and "normal." I wasn't a big fan of going to the movies to begin with because there's always some jackass who's very clearly sick hacking up a lung every time I go, on top of theater hygiene just being gross in general, but even I wouldn't mind going out and seeing a movie... a few weeks after I get both shots.

Biggie playing Smash Bros

They left it out of 3. Fuck. Guess I'm playing a Diablo game then.

Will they allow controllers on PC Diablo? I never really got into Diablo 3 because Diablo seems like a sort of mindless podcast game, which is fine by me, but I either had to play it on my console to use a controller or on my PC for the "real" experience, not that it ran badly on consoles, but it's usually more of a pain in the butt to switch over to a console for what I consider a relaxing experience. Getting back out of the weeds, I would be dramatically more likely to actually play a Diablo title if I could play the PC version with a gamepad.

I was gonna say, seems like it'd otherwise be a huge waste of time and money to try and cure stage 4 lung cancer on someone almost a century old. Palliative care makes a lot more sense.

It's terrible design for stupid people.