all-knight-party

That’s sad news about the studio. I suppose some people forgot that the original Mass Effect had quite a few issues and it wasn’t until 2 that it got real good, and having that bar set at a payoff that was only possible through three games of narrative choices and carryover was impossible to hit for Andromeda.

It seems like it was cursed with “how the heck do you follow that up?” Syndrome. And sadly the facial animations seemed at the time to be the critical anchor that all the general issues surrounded and were exemplified by.

I hope in the future Bioware steps back from adding those “MMO side quest” style side content they began including for Inquisition, it did really change the feel of the whole game having those there.

Interesting to hear about the first act dragging, I actually think this is a problem echoed by Starfield, whose first 12 hours are confusing as you don’t understand where and how to access the different types of gameplay at will, and it’s too early on in your character’s development to be able to really fully engage and figure out the ship and outpost construction. By then the people who don’t have patience or weren’t interested in the game to begin with have likely already had their opinions begin to solidify.

I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.

How do you feel about/have you played Andromeda? I love the ME trilogy, and I was a quarter through ME2 doing a trilogy replay as well, but then Starfield released. I’ll get back to it eventually though. I haven’t played Andromeda myself, but I feel like it couldn’t possibly be as terrible as the kickback it got on release.

Removed by mod

Absolutely. There are a few studios I love so much that I know what they produce I’ll enjoy well enough to find it worth it, and so I’ll watch a gameplay trailer or two to get a baseline understanding of the type of game I should expect, and as soon as I’m satisfied by the premise, that’s it.

I wait for release and explore around the possibilities myself and wonder things, and test things, and get mad that I didn’t realize I could do a thing the whole time, but it’s really just an awesome way to experience a game.

Of course, this only works if I trust that the studio will put out a baseline of quality and expected type of gameplay. If a game is of questionable quality money becomes a larger issue than ideal experience.

Absolutely. A huge reason why soulslikes are so beloved. Through a huge combination of deliberate decisions touching nearly every facet of the game, an ethos is crafted all for the sake of intriguing the player, challenging the player’s mind and physical execution, and then triumphing, with discovery of several forms peppered throughout the way.

The lack of a map, enabled by a well designed and memorable world is one of the best examples for me. Nothing else I’ve played quite matches navigating Dark Souls without a map. You’re in one spot of this large, interconnected, seamless world. You just finished grinding an item in Darkroot Garden, and you want to return to Firelink.

Mentally, a collage of images appears in my mind, laying a pathway, a map of the world, the different paths and elevators I must take to get to where I need to go, and I begin walking, and I follow my own directions. That experience is all over the place in that game, and for all the obtuseness that’s in there, it was still so worth it to commit to that design so hard.

I’d love to live in a world where I could just install everything and never struggle for storage space.

Ohh yeah, this article. I’ve only personally witnessed about a half second stutter on occasion in the cities, I could probably count the occurrences on two hands with about 30 hours in, but that sounds about right because even Oblivion whose own optimization bottlenecks itself gets “traversal stutter” for me on PC.

Memory leaks are possible for sure, especially since Digital Foundry confirmed there’s still save game load time bloat after a long playthrough.

Is that a hardware thing? I haven’t had any real stuttering or freezing, just low FPS in the cities

Katana ZERO. The fact that your character can fail and “die” and yet be able to control the flow of time to return and try again is not only contextualized through the game’s lore and your character’s usage of a drug, but becomes basically the entire story by the end of it. Brilliant game.

That’s how you get your kid to never go to the beach with you

I feel you. I just hit 20 hours and I probably didn’t start to fully realize how to find different kinds of content deliberately until about hour 15 after I’d got some of the faction stuff started and explored enough planets to understand how to find certain side quests.

For the first while my natural instinct just had me exploring all of the cities and stations, just talking with people and picking up masses of side quests, then I hit a point where I started actually doing them, because I was burning myself out on walking and talking.

The non-scaling level of systems is interesting, figuring that out helped me to be able to do quests that I was leveled for and weren’t super spongey, I figured out the structure of the random quest board quests so I could partake in FPS shooting, ship shooting, cargo running, or more narrative driven side quests depending on my mood.

Figuring out that the trade authority (only the manned shops, not the kiosks) is your stolen goods fence meant I could really start stealing in earnest, and the decrease in environmental items that are lootable, along with the decrease in lootable homes and apartments means stealing opportunities are harder to come by.

Even still, after being pretty cheap at level 20 I’m at about 120,000 credits, which seems close to enough to fully build my own ship, which I’m about to eagerly do in my next session. Once I’ve got a ship built I’ll want to start and get into landing on less colonized planets and figure out the outposts and such, where I can pivot to hiring people from the taverns and getting into that whole side of the game.

I think because of the amount of things you could do, the amount of them that are basically impossible to do from the outset due to money (ship and outpost building), and the way the game doesn’t guide or explain things well, it was really easy for me to create my own boring rut where I just walked and talked and ran away from tough enemies because I didn’t realize I picked up a quest that was in or lead to a high level system.

For instance, I knew you could board ships, I had no idea that I needed the systems targeting skill to target engines to even do that at all, the skill description didn’t mention it, and the early game mission that forces you to board doesn’t require you to have the skill, you just board when the ship is supposed to “die”. I was also initially upset random items couldn’t be broken down into materials, but then I realized some materials can just be found as lootables, same for some craftable components.

All told, as I play more I’m coming around to it all more, but it’ll probably take another ten or 20 hours before I fully understand all the systems and can make a judgment on if I like it more, less, or the same as Fallout 4, which I also loved.

Earth Defense Force is the shit. It’s not way more fun than it has any right to be, it’s exactly as fun as shooting giant alien insects as an overly patriotic earth sci Fi military SHOULD be.

I think if you show the gameplay to somebody and then the addicting loot system that they’d be down, unless they just don’t like the chaotic shooter-ness. But yeah, those games are fucking great

That was the same for me, but reverse. I tried to play No Man’s Sky to get hyped for Starfield, but they’re just such different games doing different things and one doesn’t appeal to me as much as the other.

They have a whole rube Goldberg machine set up that fires a BB gun into their gut every time they get shot

Oh, yes. Any Arrowhead co op game will work, besides Magicka they also have Helldivers or their Gauntlet reboot.

Working my way through completely exploring the entire world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I really love this game, but goddamn is it enormous. I’m about 75% in.

And just picked up the switch port of Red Dead Redemption. Really glad to be able to play this one without dragging out the 360. Still an awesome game, and a damn good port.

Yes, it really knows how to make inventory management an integral and engaging part of the gameplay. Too many times is inventory management done wrong or relegated to a mechanic thought of as “busywork”. .

I’d love to see more games shine a spotlight on it, because I find it very interesting.

I wouldn’t necessarily say unfun, but “not for me”. Stardew Valley. I went in ready to relax and farm, but oh God, time moves quickly! And I only have limited energy per day. That wombo combo when I was starting out just stressed me out and I didn’t get into it immediately.

I know there are mods for it or that it’s a good game even with the time, but out of all possible farming type games there were plenty more my speed than Stardew.

I think it does make sense to expect that up until you realize how much of a technical undertaking it’d be to do so and whether that payoff seems worth it to them. Seamless transitions seem to me to still be in a category to show off if you have it, so that they didn’t should be a red flag, but if you didn’t watch all the footage then you wouldn’t realize that, which I get, and I dont expect everybody to watch both the showcases like I did, thats probably over an hour of footage.

I can see why you’d expect a similar seamless experience due to their previous maps, but implementing that is completely different due to the style of game and requires new engine features to do so unlike their previous games which were already capable of it since Morrowind. You could expect them to consider doing it, but it wouldn’t be a given