legend

9 hours ago, stepee said:

 

 

 

 

No Rest for the Wicked seems to be gunning for this title 

Yeah I've definitely got my eye on this one.

9 hours ago, stepee said:

Also The Ascent:

 

 

 

This one as been on my wishlist forever, but I never pulled the trigger because the reviews have been indefinitely saying it's buggy as hell with lot's of save corruption issues. Is this resolved yet?

8 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

It may be doable but Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (the excellent anime film) is based on Amano's character designs and that tried hard to emulate it (and it looks beautiful) but I imagine the cost was astronomical. That was back in 2000 and that was an anime film, not a game, but I imagine a game would be even harder to do. Are you saying to do so from an isometric perspective? That'd probably be more possible at least.

Yeah I was thinking isometric (other that cuscenes I guess) which might make it easier. But it also seems maybe harder to translate to isometric? Not sure. I'm not an artist, but I wouldn't mind an attempt from someone who is!

I'm not sure if it's possible to make it work, but it would be interesting to try and do a remake of VI that had the same style as the all the FF cover art/concepts from Yoshitaka Amano. I mean, I know he was also a character design for the games, but the games don't look like this.

Context: I saw some discussions about an FF6 remake, and naturally this brought up that Square doesn't think it's possible to do like FF7R because the cast is too huge (and maybe the world too big?). This led to people saying they'd like a 2D remake, which would be more doable.

But the things people were posting were "Like Octopath Traveler" and other pixel art games.

And that just sounds... boring? There are pixel art styles that I enjoy, but that seems way to safe and boring for a bigger scale remake.

That led me to the question in the title: what are currently the most beautiful isometric 2D games that are not pixel art and also not trying to look like a retro game?

For side scroller, there are some real winners like Hollow Knight and Ori. But isometric? Feels like there are fewer.

The best ones that come to my mind right now are:

1. The Pillars of Eternity games

2. Disco Elysium

3. Hades

The fist two happen to use the game engine. While Hades looks great, I'm not sure it would work for an RPG. I'd put something like Tunic on the list, but while that's not pixel art, it still feels like it's trying to be retro and I'd like something 2d that feels more like it's freeing itself from the aesthetics of the past. You can argue that PoE is also trying to be retro of a sort too, but the style they were inspired by leant itself to painted backgrounds that I feel like allows it to update itself more without obviously looking retro.

E.g., PoE 2:

What others come to mind for you?

I think an evolving dynamic narrative is by far worth the cost of "a few days without an enemy type"

If you're really gaming so much that this blip affects you, you probably already have the trophies.

Tonight I took another crack a the mindflayer combat simulator now that I knew I had to kill the flayer first.

That was indeed a fucker. I was doing okay managing my teammates to keep them from fighting the scrubs but I'm pretty sure the mind flayer's AoE attacks would kill them or something because their health would go from nearly full to "where the fuck did they go"  

Finally got him using the sleep strategy on the scrubs to keep them away and going all out to build synergy attacks as fast as possible and unloading tifa to kill him in the first stagger.

3 hours ago, SaysWho? said:

Cleaning up a few things in Gongaga/Corel that I missed and then I'm heading toward Nibelheim.

I hope you like breaking boxes!

21 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Helldivers 2 players just wiped out an entire enemy faction, so what on Super Earth happens now? | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

---

"With the bots eradicated and the bugs contained, the galaxy is free once more."

 

 

From the official Xwitter account:

 

 

Deus Ex MD is awesome. It's a fucking crime we're not going to get more.

This is tangential, but I'm honestly curious. How do you define good/bad taste @sblfilms? Is good taste the ability to recognize that something unconventional will resonate with a larger population despite it being new or is it something else?

I'd be down.

Great episode.  They're doing a good job selling the great power great responsibility idea in a very brutal and intense way!

I think the only thing I remember about Resurrections is that Laurence Fishburne was tragically not cast and it's now the two instead of the one.

7 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

There's no reason to assume an FF6 remake would adopt the same combat system as the FF7 remake. It could, but I don't think that's a given. Either way an FF6 remake probably isn't happening.

If they wanted to do a real-timish game, I think the core structure of FF7R's combat actually is a good fit. Both 7 and 6 were ATB games. If memory serves 6 has a bit more custom actions between different character than OG7, but that actually plays well into how have 7R has each character play differently with their own ability set.

That said, I wouldn't be opposed to something more turn based either if we ever got this.

2 hours ago, Bacon said:

more proof discord needs to be deleted

Naa.

I've been going back and doing some things I put off. I was hacking away at the mind flayer combat simulator, was feeling good because I got it, and then realized the requirement was to take the mindflayer down *before* the scrub enemies, not just win 

That seems pretty rough. Like you have to actively stop your party members from fighting them.

I suspect if they remake 6, they're going to split it into parts as well. Maybe after 7 part 3 and doing the full world map + air ship they'd be more comfortable doing this though.

I really can't stress enough how much I hate that generative ML is the face of "AI" at this moment.

4 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

When Go outside at night in the summer and I’ll notice that the number of fireflies is not nearly what I remember when I was a kid. Even in remote WVa it seems like there’s simply not that many at all when I distinctly remember catching so many growing up (and releasing them after)

This is my memory/perception as well.

2 hours ago, Dodger said:

 

I mean you can say Phil Spencer has failed at his job but you can't say the dude hasn't tried. While "infinite growth" isn't possible you're just not going to make it with negative growth, especially when you were already a distant third in the market. This is hardly a case of the game sold 4 million copies and didn't meet expectations fuck you level of capitalism.

I'm not blaming Phil per se. If my hot take assertion is right, the problem lies above him.

Hot take: the problem isn't "capitalism." The problem is some combination of investors being myopic idiots and bad mechanism design of the stock market that allows for day-trading nonsense.

21 minutes ago, DPCyric said:

 

Actually several wasp species aren't very aggressive and very good to have around. 

If they're going under my radar because they're not assholes, then naturally I wouldn't seek them out in the purge  

14 hours ago, SuperSpreader said:

Executives think Ai is gonna reduce costs to make games (without affecting their income of course) and also think Game Streaming is the future (which requires ai assistance because of inherit latency issues). So the executive vision of games is Games made by Ai played by Ai that you pay for. 

 

This industry will be dead within 2 gens if these dudes don't go. 

There's a lot of work in AI for games that isn't about asset or code generation and can lead to useful things that expand the game rather than replace developer work. So don't lump all AI for games into that bucket!

Bees can stay. Wasps can get fucked.

6 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Interesting impressions compared to YOVG, at least as far as the control as is concerned they said it had crazy input lag unless you played in performance mode.

It might have input lag. I'm not a good enough action gamer these days to immediately tell. But there is much more to control than just that. I don't really want to drag this into a discussion about Elden Ring, but as a point of comparison I found the controls in Elden Ring unbearable. As an example, Its lock on system was a joke and if you didn't use lock on the character was far too able to swing one inch past the enemy. In contrast, I'm able to get Eva to do what I intended and easily move between parries dodges, etc. while keeping the camera where I want it (where sometimes lock on is the right thing to do, and other times not)

6 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Also, this seems a lot closer to Lies of P or Sekiro than DMC or Bayonetta, a game a lot slower and deliberate with a lot of emphasis on parrying.

That comparison wasn't about the combat, it was about the environments and world being very over the top. This game is more deliberate than DMC or Bayonetta, but it's not slow or without fast combos either. (FWIW, Bayonetta was also heavily focused on dodging)

Played the demo and it's pretty cool! Combat is decently challenging, but wasn't crazy hard (so far) and the controls feel solid. The environments with lots of crazy shit happening remind me a lot of Bayonetta and DMC in a good way. I will probably purchase it when it comes out.