Just the main campaign in Witcher 3 and ended up with the Empress ending, also the ending I was striving for this time around. It’s such a beautiful and well told story, incredible moving. The first time I played Witcher 3, I new next to nothing. It was my first dive into the Universe Andrzej Sapkowski created, this time around I had six books of knowledge to enhance the experience. Characters I loved, became better and so did the rest of the world.
I had forgotten how well crafted the climax was, the boss battle again Eredin. Incredible cinematic, powerful and exciting. Without taking control away from the player. Now I’ll continue my journey with my favourite expansion, Hearts of Stone.
I’m also playing another game and sadly it’s as a great of a experience. I’m highly enjoying the gunplay in Battlefield 2042, I’m at no doubt having a lot of fun. Sadly the player base on PC is almost non existing, It almost impossible to find players for the 128 player modes, only TDM 2042 through Portal have been a reliable game mode.
Steam chards are low, BF V is currently out preforming the latest BF game in terms of active players. The game needs a major overhaul, just like Star Wars - Battlefront 2 got. Another Dice game with a similar rocky launch, but now is thriving. It’s a shame, I highly enjoy the gameplay, expect the class system. That I hate. I hope they are able to salvage 2042.
Got the Mass Effect: Legendary Collection, just finished my play through of Mass Effect 1 (for the first time no less) and am about to start playing through the second one.
I’m so tempted to buy it in the Xbox sales at the moment. It’s down from £59.99 to £29.99. But I’ve heard rumours that it might be coming to EA Play (and consequently Game Pass Ultimate) shortly.
I am so keen to play it as I had so many good memories of playing through the campaign. However, it was also the last game that I ever made a conscious decision to play on the hardest setting (Insanity). I remember almost not being able to beat the third game at the final approach to the place where you have to make the decision. Those who played it on insanity will know exactly what I mean when I say “Marauder boss”. Under normal circumstances this would not be hard, but if you play on the hardest setting (and in your weakened state) you had to rapidly land about eight consecutive head shots as the camera and your character swayed around. Too slow or a single miss and you were dead. There was about a three minute approach as you staggered from the previous checkpoint to fail again and again!
If I did play it again, I’d be missing out on those three achievements for completing it on Insanity. I enjoyed the story too much to allow the unbalanced level of difficulty to ruin it.
I mean I wouldn’t hold out hoping for rumours to be true unless it is absolutely concrete evidence that it is going to EA Play/Game Pass. And thirty quid is a good deal when you factor in owning the game instead of “renting” it. (That is how Game Pass works right?)
Due to the almost dead servers on BF2042, I chosen revisit BF V. To be honest, I find it a major improvement over BF2042. The level design is a lot more dynamic, it caters towards more playstyles. BF2042 is more or less a lot of open areas with a few buildings, with little destructibility. BF V on the other hand got a variety of levels, all from open fields, small European towns, lush pacific, snowy Norway and bombed major cities. Plus no specialists, just good old school classes with their own role.
Every modern AAA game from the biggest game companies out there
The 90s - late 2000s were all about innovations. You could clearly see the differences with each sequel such as BF1942 and BF2 as an example or FC1 and FC2. Nowadays everything is stagnating and focusing more on photo realistic graphics, in-game fps and if the game supports 4k or not. Executives don’t want their developers to take huge risks like they would back in the day so all we see in cookie cutters AAA games.
I think Far Cry 1’s mediocrity at a gameplay level was why they changed to the just as half-baked gameplay of Far Cry 2.
And that was almost certainly because of the technological leap that happened then with a jump to 3D based consoles (as well as HD). There has been no real technological leap that necessitates any sort of developmental race or any tech that warrants forking out that much cash when you can innovate at the graphical level. Maybe VR will but that day obviously isn’t here yet especially since Gamers sleep on that tech.
Not that is a bad thing mind you, the early days of those 3D consoles were a fucking nightmare. I think you have forgotten how much crap there was back then and just how many games relied on formulas that worked. Like Activision’s O2 games which were Tony Hawk games but for different extreme sports or even FPS most of them were the same even back then and you can’t forget TPS cover shooters as well. I even heard Hitman was supposed to be one of those generic shooters before complications turned it into a stealth game. Our mastery over the medium means we don’t get those challenges anymore. We are to good for our own medium now, the perils of man-machine interaction.
The biggest innovation in today’s gaming space is the liberalisation of game development so a sociological shift over a technological one. Sites like Kickstarter or even Indiegogo enable passionate people to make games and explore beyond conventional limits. It is the ability for even small teams of people to make games due to easy to use programming language and engine licensing. Plus democratising disenfranchised people and even enfranchised people enables better and more unique stories or means of telling conventional ones.
Most gamers don’t like products that are too different either, gamers don’t like chancing on innovation, most gamers don’t checkout independent games, many gamers don’t look at that scene at all, many gamers have very narrow definitions of what they consider a game and a (tragically) not-so-insignificant selection of gamers will burst a blood vessel if the PC is a minority. I notice the exact same patterns in anti-superhero movie people, old guard comic readers and avid gamers.
I call it “The Cinephile Principle”, the people who want new things are never the same people who actually do seek the underground and independent stuff that is innovative. These people are risk averse usually out of fear and habit or because they have high expectations or low standards which turns them off certain works. If they do want innovation it is usually at a surface level
Executives aren’t stagnating just because they are assholes who love not spending money on something that will fail (although that is a problem), they are doing it because there is absolutely no real financial incentive to do so. Each publisher has found something that works and it is profitable.
Each publisher knows that Gamers would get angry if they even tried something radically different hence why AAA Innovation is just “Well we saw this other game people like so we are going to copy it. You will be angry yeah but you morons are still going to buy it.” then disaffected gamers buy the old thing in droves so publishers will realise they must like the old stuff that works. So even surface level innovation in AAA sector is quashed by Gamer short sightedness.
So you want to innovate and you want to be cutting edge but you have an audience that hates real change and you don’t want to actually take risks or spend a lot of dosh to innovate. What do you do? Simple, you focus on the one thing that you can improve on substantially without sacrificing the “sanctity” of your game’s core gameplay and that would be the graphics. They do it because graphics are the best way to give the illusion of innovation but without actually innovating. Hence why we measure game periods by their graphical capacity (8-bit, 32-bit, 3D, HD) and not the engines, hardware or software.
The long and short of it is at the end of the day Gamers will always value the logos on the box and the playability of the game over the actual innovative qualities of a games. Executives and Gamers have facilitated a teleological end point for innovation in the AAA sector. Some say human achievement will reach a similar stultifying end under liberalism, my god I hope they are wrong.
But I would hate to end this exhaustingly long diatribe on a downer note. I figured I would do my part to help gaming and share a video that highlights some games this year that went way under many people’s radar.
I would have wrote something shorter but I spent all of this time writing it that it feels like a waste of words and time to just delete them all.
I think Far Cry 2 has to be the worst case of trying to integrate a disease into its gameplay. It used to be Dead Rising 2 until I played it as a thinking adult and realised that it was a part of the commentary on the pharmaceuticals industry.
All subjective of course but it might be time to replay Far Cry 2. But let’s be honest the best Far Cry is Blood Dragon.
that was but one thread in the tapestry of hate fc2 directed at the player, and it was ace. i can’t think of many games brave enough to fuck with the player ‘body’ in that way.
Since we’re in conversation about it already, I figured I’d share this video I actually found just last night. A nice little argument on why having a distinct art direction/style is better than just focusing on what looks 8K HD real-life.
Well, yeah. It’s just a funny coincidence I found this like 12 hours ago, and here we are, discussing the same thing here. (Plus he’s got nice visual reference for what he’s talking about.)
I do think there’s a small case to be made about why some games don’t innovate in the gameplay department, and that’s cause many people buy the games they know because they know the systems and control schemes that bring them joy.
I don’t know if we’re only talking about shooters here, but I do think the larger gaming landscape has lots of innovations going on with various blends and tweaks to existing formulas and systems, it’s just a lot smaller and gradual than the major shifts of the old 2D–3D and graphical eras.
On the AAA end of the spectrum we’ve got Control with its New Weird inspirations, third-person shooter combat, and Dark Souls-style gameplay. Some characters get massive revivals and praise like with the Spider-Man games on PS4 (even if it’s essentially 80% similar to the Batman games) or even Kratos with the third-person, narrative driven God of War (5?). Popular indie games like Cuphead and Hollow Knight are platformers with great difficulty and Metroid-vania inspirations, respectively. There’s also the unique Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn, a 1-bit 3D mystery game where you fill out a cause-of-death ledger. Or even his previous game Papers, Please with you becoming a border customs agent.
I think plenty of games, even if they borrow interchangeably from each other, still “innovates” in great and small ways, since they can each offer unique blends of genres and gameplay mechanics. Every now and then, too, we get some pretty unique things. Hopefully they achieve the best amount of success so that other games can adapt it too.
There’s even the recent Guardians of the Galaxy game from Crystal Dynamics that I’ve heard has got a lot of praise for being a straight-up linear adventure that doesn’t have any extra monetization, needless RPG leveling mechanics. Weird that this game seems to go “backwards” in terms of mechanics, but it’s just what some people want.
[Ahh, I hope my point is coming across clearly. I’ve deleted and re-wrote this 3 times looking for the right words. I think it’s ok now. ]
I think that gets certain mentions in what I wrote but yes people will gravitate to what is familiar to them especially control schemes and out of brand loyalty. It doesn’t help that three companies are responsible for almost all of our non-PC hardware development so that innovation realm is stunted.
I used shooters as a point of reference because they are generalised as the least innovative genre and they are also the biggest attractor of uncritical gamers with what I consider bad media habits. That and it is hard to be truly innovative in a medium after any given point of time. Seven basic story structures and all of that, eventually you reach a stopping point or we out pace our own tech.
What we consider innovation can be subjective especially when it is an artistic medium. Just like any other part of an artwork.
Technically the game is going forwards it is all the crap they didn’t add that was the regression since monetisation of videogames dates back to arcade games, their sole function was to take change from people.
Doesn’t matter, it took me an hour and a half to write that initial essay to make sure I communicated my points correctly.
Kratos getting the “sony game treatment” isnt really innovative imo. kind of a shame tbh, as the older games had much more unique ideas but now get seen as the old stuff that was just unnecessary gore and sex quick time events.
I think it is innovative from a storytelling perspective in how they managed to bring some much needed maturity to the series and indicative of how certain people in the industry have matured over the years.
Innovative for a video game? No.
Innovative for the God of War series? I’d say yes.
I’m no expert on it (as in I’ve never played one, but I’m familiar with it). It used to be focused on a hack-and-slash, wide angle combat, with the occasional super-cinematic boss battle and QTE cutscene (with some weird sex minigame on the side)
But the latest entry flips the script on it. The combat is more focused, intimate between smaller groups of enemies. The camera is pulled in very close, meaning you have to get more tactical when overwhelmed. And I think they’ve gone away with QTEs, but I’m not so sure.
It also boasts a more mature story, as Acci said, pulling on relatable topics of fatherhood and grief. Not sure what the story and themes of the old games were, but I think they were a lot more broad that this one.
This is not to say that the old version of the game is bad, it’s just adapting to modern mechanics and it did so in a really successful way, which is a cool innovation for the series. Probably helps that it had a good hiatus between entries.
the combat in the original two god of wars wasn’t the best i’ll concur, but god of war 3 made massive strides in turning god of war from a spectacle fighter to a true hack & slash. Long difficult combat chains or combos that catered to the players creativity, air-juggling, strategic use of specials by managing your magic, using quick time special kills to regain health (basically a more complicated glory kill system before glory kills were a thing). In comparison god of war 2018 has refilling magic, small non-complicated enemies and minimal creativity on the players part (atleast imo). I think the combat is a definitive downgrade to gow 3 and a minimal upgrade to 1 and 2
The mature story argument is the argument i see the most with modern god of war and i disagree heavily. Just because its a last of us clone with a kid character doesn’t make the story more mature. the original god of war trilogy had the exact same themes about fatherhood and dealing with grief and incorporated that into cool gameplay sequences (hugging your wife and daughter to give them health, meaning you lose health during a long endurance based fight.) The older god of wars definitely had more spectacle but they are by no means less mature than this modern lou clone
Thinking of making a return to Borderlands 3. I own the base game on EGS but plan to just buy the game and all DLC bundle on Steam for ease of access. I adored Borderlands 1, 2, TPS, Tales, back in the day. I used to be very unironically invested in the lore. So much so that even 3 years later, I am still very pissed at a specific plot point of Borderlands 3’s plot. I’ve sortof dropped off of it, I actually know very little about the upcoming Wonderlands games, but I do want to make a come back, especially with all the DLC and fourth skill trees. Just wish I had a co-op buddy to play it with really.
I don’t know, keep bouncing around with video games really. I feel so unsatisfied and irritated lately, mainly from work. Really want to get some proper game time when I go on holiday on the 10th.
That’s odd. I’m able to get find games almost instantly after searching for a server (usually searching for Breakthrough 64 lobbies). I wonder why you’re not able to find them so easily.
As much as I enjoy 2042, I’m glad it’s failure is meaning alot of battlefield fans are realizing how good V is. It has the best infantry gameplay by far with awesome gunplay and great maps like Marita and Provence. I definitely need to revisit it.
It’s just a funny coincidence I found this like 12 hours ago, and here we are, discussing the same thing here. (Plus he’s got nice visual reference for what he’s talking about.)
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