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.

Those people are subhuman and don’t belong with the rest of us. They get a tickbox that says “Select if you were born on the 22nd of the month.” All the tickbox does is send SWAT to the address you entered

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

I can understand the link between seamless exteriors and the equivalent of what that would mean in the context of a space game for Bethesda, but the technological implications of having a galactic system flight mode and seamless planet to space transitions are both completely new ideas to Bethesda and are also technically complex to implement in a game already knee deep in new tech and systems only from what we’d been shown.

There’s a reason things like seamless planet transitions are only something you might be able to expect in recent years. While Bethesda could totally make that happen, it’s not where I’d expect them to put their money, or they’d have probably dropped a line showing it off in the pre release footage.

At once, I understand why you might’ve expected that, but expecting anything not explicitly shown is never a good idea when it comes to tempering expectations.

Expecting anything that particularly in-depth without being shown explicit pre-release footage of it is an expectation trap. Bethesda was never going to make a space sim, any space sim features are a bonus and were far from guaranteed.

Yeah, Ive followed Jeff for a long time and he’s absolutely not afraid to say a game isn’t good, and his tastes can be fickle and particular, if I were a publisher cynically selecting who to send advance codes to to manufacture a good score he would not be one of them.

As a consumer, I love him because he has integrity, likes what he likes, and says what he means, and I even can tell sometimes when he dislikes a game that I’d still like.

I remember when GTA 5 hit PC in 2015 and was around 90 gigs. Seems like we’ve finally hit the point where most AAA games are around its size. How time flies…

Sometimes physics bugs can be funny, but I’d rather it not be buggy because I always hated things like getting hung up on geometry, having a physics enabled object kill me because I happened to touch it, or worst of all, realizing I haven’t seen my companion in the last ten minutes, somehow they got lost somewhere and only showed up after I manually teleported them to me with console commands.

The first two of those Bethesda seemed to nip in the bud by Fallout 4, but the bugs are not always charming.

Well, you confirmed some of my fears. I’m sure I’ll still enjoy it when I play it eventually, but the mech game genre has been in starvation mode for a long time and it doesn’t seem like AC6 will be able to really scratch that itch.

Getting back into Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker. I’m about at the end of the game and I’ve really enjoyed playing a portable full on stealth game. Its scope is quite limited, what with it being a PSP game, but it actually serves to breed a pretty easygoing stealth game with not too much of a cost for getting caught and pretty limited sound and sight ranges to match the small level sections.

While it’s totally limited it’s actually a bit refreshing compared to how tight being stealthy can be in even the home console MGS games.

And bring back touch screen inventory management. Beyond me why they didn’t take advantage of their own console’s features when they’d already done that in all past possible games.

Probably a case of TLOU having less impact for those who already played the game compared to Sonic Boom which is those characters in situations that are new compared to the games.

The same conversation Limbo started to kick off when they released that back in the day. Quite short, but when you enjoy each moment that much, how can you attempt to assign a dollar to hour value? You just can’t always diminish it to something that simple.

In terms of saying whether it’s “the best of all time”, well, it could certainly be one of the best of all time, but you really can’t put it in front of or beside games doing radically different things. Youd have to start making a few wide umbrellas of games to place together and then rank them from there. Perhaps something like Unravel would be more comparable with something like Inside or Limbo.

You should try Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. I think it’s up to 4 players, but essentially you both walk around a 2D side perspective ship and can control the different weapons and power systems.

You both have to run from station to station to navigate a large area and fight and defend from enemies and accomplish tasks. It starts easy and gets actually quite hard despite the art style. Cooperation is vital.

I’d also recommend Cook Serve Delicious, either the second or third, both are great games for one or two players. You essentially run a kitchen on a day by day basis. You have a menu of items you must cook for customers that come in throughout the day. Cooking requires pressing combinations of buttons to add ingredients depending on the customer’s special order for the item.

In between customer orders you have to handle cleaning tasks and there are rush hours throughout the day where tons of customers arrive. When it’s going full tilt you’re rapidly taking orders, putting food together, and sending out food, it’s extremely fun and as challenging as you want it to be since you can choose what you want to have on the menu if you’d like.

I like that you’re purely focused on making the food and accomplishing tasks unlike Overcooked where the challenge is more about getting the ingredients from place to place and having only two players makes it ultra difficult. CSD scales much better to the amount of players.

Christ, theft of property “$2,500-$10,000”. That’s a lot of copies.

I actually have not even played it, but I’ve heard it’s been much improved, correct me if I’m wrong though it’s still different from literally Fallout 4 with other players. For example, are there multiple long faction storylines, large populated cities with many side quests, a few radio stations, caravans, morality or faction reputation, bobbleheads, basically every major and minor feature in a standard Bethesda Fallout.

If it’s been updated enough times and in the right directions to include all that stuff, then awesome. I was by no means saying it was a bad game, I just want to know if it’s seamlessly a Bethesda title through and through with other players or if it’s still Fallout in a different direction.

Are you able to enjoy the world privately with only players you choose without any DLC or microtransactions based restrictions on construction or storage, mod support so long as each player maintain the same modlist, etc.?

That would indeed be pretty cool, I’d love to see if they go that route for TES 6. Clearly the FO76/ESO routes are not what that same customer base wants, for different reasons.

ESO is a fine MMO, but it’s absolutely an MMO and not a multiplayer TES game. FO76 is a skeleton of a Bethesda RPG but isn’t formatted at all how what the average Bethesda fan would want to play. It’s strange they went both of these routes before attempting what people have been asking for and even trying to make themselves for so long.

It’s a bit of a shame Starfield won’t include multiplayer either, but it’s hard for me to complain since I don’t have friends anyway.

Skyrim with actually good melee combat, much greater magic variety, companions who are smarter and not suicidal, horses who can move around with logical sense, more biome variety as much as I love what’s already there, factions that don’t end in you ruling all of them at once…

Turns out Skyrim gets a lot right but there are tons of things that could be much better.

It had flaws, but I found the three hero swapping mechanic pretty fun, especially due to each one having a class that made them better or worse against certain enemies, and I loved the whole triple jumping thing, combat felt unique and fun.

The rest of the game has a lot of not so awesome bits, but I found it absolutely good enough to warrant an improved sequel. Hopefully they do something with it one day.

I’m not sure what you mean. Saints Row 4’s large criticism was that it was too different from SR’s heritage what with being a super hero game instead of GTA on crack. Past that Gat out of Hell isn’t a mainline title and was even further out there, and then Agents of Mayhem wasn’t even a Saints game, and I enjoyed the hell out of that game’s unique merits.

The SR reboot was the first real Saints Row release since 3, so you could say that it didn’t do enough different (which I can’t speak for, I didn’t play it), but saying the series hasn’t done anything new since 3 is not correct. Whether those games were super great or not is a different discussion, but they were doing something different, unless you just didn’t specify between something different for the series or something different from all other video games.

I really dig that art style, it’s sort of the logical conclusion to things like Diablo 2 or Age of Empires 2. Something about the high fidelity 2D rendering of 3D objects from an isometric perspective is so aesthetically pleasing.

It feels more descriptive of the reality of the world and less stylized even though it’s, of course, its own style.

I’d agree with that, there should be a stricter standard on that stuff across the board with media.

Isn’t some of the issue there that just because they don’t have plans now doesn’t preclude them from deciding down the line to do something? If they release that all for free then later ports or things of that nature directly lose value.

Don’t worry, once youre given equipment to deal with them it’ll start to demystify them and you’ll feel more confident.

Don’t be afraid to save before you deal with them too. If you walk into their radius (your odradek will pop up in a dramatic fashion and start tracking them) then you cannot save, but if you just walk back until youre out of their range again you can make a save and then take however many attempts as you want to handle them.

Their behavior can be hard to figure out, so feel free to message me or something if you want more info on how to best handle them.

Oh yes, legendarily awful. And again, I don’t find it that impenetrable in the end, the delivery of the info is just so bad. If anybody wants to get into MH I’d love to help because I absolutely love the series now, but it took concentrated effort to teach myself without anyone to guide me.

It’s hard to talk about Elden Ring’s learning experience the same way since by that point the world had enjoyed around four or so similarly constructed From Soft souls like games that had entered the cult popular internet gaming vernacular.

It was no longer as uniquely obtuse as Dark Souls was at its time. But yes, it does teach better, and is more straightforward in a lot of ways, it aligns more with most gamers’ common understanding. It has a map.

And I’m not saying Dark Souls is entirely impervious to the argument that it’s obtuse, I mean look at the resistance stat. What I’m saying is that you can understand enough to become intrigued by the world and become hooked if it’s your sort of game. At the point that you really get hung up you’ve got incentive to discuss it with others and do that legwork.

It gets you into the game well enough while also establishing that you may totally have some mental hoops to jump through later. If there were to be some Dark Souls full remake with some arguable quality of life improvements, I’d bet there’d be a number of areas you could make less obtuse while still preserving a sense of genuine discovery, and that’d be a very fun “ethical” discussion as well with so much grey area to be had.