@Ralizah Oh yeah, I remember that little quest from early on in the game. The lady did look kind of spaced out, but it didn't provoke anything out of the norm for me; all games have their slightly odd moments!
I'm not sure how BioWare are reacting to all these awkward and silted conversation gifs - on one hand, it is a lot of 'free press' for the game. On the other, it could be somewhat off putting for some. We shall see.
@Ralizah It may be resource intensive, but I'm not sure it SHOULD be for what it offers.
The first one was definitely too short, to redundant, too empty....it was very clearly a work in progress that never had a chance to be fleshed out due to Microsoft's publishing timelines. You have to keep in mind, at the time, Bioware was a studio very much adrift. Their publisher (Interplay) had just gone down in flames, and were owed millions in missed royalties payments from Bader's Gate II & BGII: Shadows of Amn. They had very low operating funds, reduced staff, and no publisher, so they were kind of at Microsoft's mercy and compromised some of what they would normally be doing. But it WAS an RPG and allowed some gameplay decisions versus just being an action game series with some RPG elements. DA: Origins should have been excellent, and it was excellent, but it also felt like it had fallen a long way from grace from the heights of Baldur's Gate. It did have serious control and performance issues, though....
@Peek-a-boo I don't see how it could possibly be anything other than bad publicity. I'd accept a presentation this amateurish from an indie title more easily, but this is a huge AAA game. The facial animations and dialogue are just BAD.
@Ryu_Niiyama What's with the inventory? Surely it can't be as bad as skyrim's? Where they decided grid-based inventory doesn't work on console, even though BotW is rocking a full PC-scale grid-based inventory?
ME3: The first half was fine. The second half was dreadful. The story was a wreck. The gameplay was STILL better than the tragedy that was 2. The Reapers became comic book versions of Zelda Guardians rather than menacing dreadnoughts that would wipe out solar systems before you even see them and the "welding races into a single creature" thing was a little too Lovecraftian for the already Lovecraftian story world. The ending.....I refuse to discuss the end. Ever.
Andromeda has been one of my most anticipated games for the last 3 years, and in the end it's getting a stealth release I didn't even know was happening at all during the middle of the dead-season along side a new Nintendo console launch. I didn't even preorder it and probably don't need even more games in my backlog (still have DA:I shrinkwrapped...) I can't believe I'm actually going to skip ME:A but it's looking that way. Usually when EA does a stealth release with little to no fanfare, it didn't even have proper E3 hype on its release year, like Mirror's Edge, it's because they know it's junk and are sending it out to die.
Bioware: That's an interesting topic (incoming text wall alert). I've long had some theories and ideas about them (ideas that are unpopular) that they were perhaps never terribly good. But I'm not sure where things changed for them. Do you remember old Bioware...I mean back in the day Bioware? MDK, MDK2? They were phenomenal action games. And great crazy characters. Shattered Steel was a better mech game (almost) than Activisions amazing MechWarrior / Battletech games. Baldur's Gate was amazing, and Baldur's Gate II was unworldly. Of course they didn't have to design gameplay mechanics, they simply had to adapt an existing rulebook. But their world building was basically open world before open world was a thing, and every single building could be explored. And they adapted PnP gameplay precisely.
Things started getting worse with their last Interplay published game, the expansion pack for BGII felt hollow and wrong. At this point Interplay owed them (a lot of) money they never payed for BGII. During the same time, Black Isle did Icewind Dale (an excellent BG-esque dungeon crawler. After they split ways with Interplay they did NwN. That game, though praised always felt like a serious let down. The end of the Infinity engine seemed like the end of "good" Bioware. Obsidian (the remnants of Black Isle, but minus their technical wizards and technical lead, Chris Taylor) did NwN II and that felt MUCH more like a proper "Bioware" game from the D&D series than NwN did. It suffered catastrophic technical issues though.
When they briefly teamed up with LucasArts they did KotR, and it seemed like Bioware was truly back. That was one of the best 3D WRPGS ever. Obsidian did the sequel which had better story, but felt less ambitious. But it was still a tighter told tale until the end they admitted fell out the bottom financially.
Then Bioware teamed up with Microsoft for ME. I think that's where ME went wrong, it was basically a Microsoft funded way to get a KotR sequel that was never going to be. And it was clear with the Citadel, etc, they were going out of their way to make a "this is totally not KotR except it kinda is" franchise they didn't have to pay royalties for. The partnership continued with Jade Empire which was, though waay too short, honestly one of the most memorable games I've ever played. It was a brief spark where Bioware was back at their prime. And then EA happened. And everything since then has been different shades of poo.
But when I really think about it, short of Jade Empire (a stroke of genius), and KotR (I wonder how much of that was really done by Lucas Arts?) everything for Bioware fell apart when they ended their partnership with Black Isle through Interplay. Black Isle officially worked on BG & BGII and was on the title credits. I'm wondering if Bioware's legendary status was actually an image built on the backs of mostly Black Isle, the (real) Fallout guys, considering the BI remnants at Obsidian seem to have made a lot more "Bioware-like" games since the end of Interplay than Bioware has. It's something I've considered for a number of years now. What if Bioware's contribution to BG was really mostly the engine, not the game? The fact that Bioware's founders resigned after the disgrace of ME3's ending and little in the company changed may be a hint as well. Hard to tell since, within EA, it's just a department label, anyway.
The RPG scene in the west is pretty bleak if so. We've got Bethesda, possibly Square-Enix Montreal (Deux Ex), and Obsidian that rarely cranks out anything without bad technical flaws (not that Bethesda doesn't.)
@Ralizah I'll never forgive Bethesda for what they did to Fallout, and I'll never forgive gamers for praising them for it. Fallout 1 & 2 were special (Speaking of Black Isle), and Bethesda turning it into an open world TES game all about the actual post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland as a survival sim rather than the weird burgeoning new civilizations that adapted in weird ways to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that grounded the originals. FO 1 & 2 was never about the radioactive military bases. It was about the odd canteen towns and weird perceptions of "our" world from their perspective. The whole thing was tongue in cheek. FO 3 & 4 just became a depressing apocalypse sim with tiny hints of civilization "enduring." Yuck.
@NEStalgia I'll admit I loved FO3 when it came out, if only because it felt like such a refinement on what they had already done with Oblivion. I think it was good for its time. In retrospect, though, the game doesn't hold up as well as the weirder isometric games. My big problem with FO4 is that it doesn't even feel like an improvement on FO3. The game has WORSE dialogue options, fewer interesting side-quests, it gives you the power armor way too early, AND it still feels archaic and dated, like they haven't substantially updated the engine from Skyrim. As fun as Skyrim was at the time, it too felt slightly dated when it released, because the engine just wasn't that different from older Bethesda games. FO4 feels like a last-gen game with slightly improved visuals. Oh, and you want to talk about a game not being worth how resource-intensive it is? I had to update my home computer to even play Fallout 4. It wouldn't run on my previous 2011 computer. This is a computer that would run Wolfenstein: The New Order at 60fps. How terribly optimized must FO4 have been?
My go-to 3D Fallout game remains Fallout: New Vegas, which brought back some of the quirkiness and actual role-playing of previous titles. Tellingly, it wasn't even developed by Bethesda.
Currently Playing: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (NS2); Corpse Factory (PC)
@Ralizah I was super hyped for FO3 as a huge fan of the originals. Even the weird Brotherhood of Steel turn-based TRPG. I got the big kit with the bobblehead, first hardback strategy guide I'd ever bought, all in prep. Then started playing it and within an hour or two realized "OMG this is awful! It's depressing! Fallout shouldn't be depressing, I should be laughing the whole way through! It's a zombie apocalypse game now! I hate zombie apocalypse games!" I played and navigated around into central DC with the giant mutants outside the radio station and figured "forget it, I'm so done with this." That was the PC version. I don't even want to think about the console versions. I love Oblivion, more than Skyrim from what little I made it through Skyrim last time I tried, but FO is not Elder Scrolls. Bethesda didn't get that memo, and that's what went wrong Instead of being fun they made it "ok kids, this is what it's like to live in a post-nuclear war, have fun!"
As far as their engine, they started with using Gamebryo back in the day. Gamebryo was infamously a very unoptimized, badly performing engine filled with tons of room for bugs, some catastrophic. It's very easy to break. On top of all that it never even looked very good. The trouble is, TES built up a MASSIVE codebase over the decades as we can imagine so switching from Gamebryo wasn't really an option for them. But they couldn't produce better looking games with it either. Starting with Skyrim and FO4 after, they started using Creation, their in-house engine....but really it's just a fork of Gamebryo that they're now modifying in-house to try to make it look better. That was the main point of them buying id: To get Carmack and the engine gurus in to fix up the engine. Getting Doom was just a perk (get it? Fallout? Perks?.....) The problem is Carmacks magic got used up decades ago, his engines have been optimized messes for some time too (I still can't believe Epic won in the end...they started as the ones that were totally optimized.) So where Bethesda is now is they're trapped on a very obsolete engine that was never actually very good, but they have so much needed resources stuck on it they can't leave it. So their only hope is to try to fix it up to make it modern themselves. As a result it still looks mostly like the old bad engine, runs like it too, and is still as easily broken which they're masters of doing. But Skyrim HD is running on a new build that supposedly very heavily optimized the engine, not to Unreal levels, but versus where it had been. That's why it's silly all the coy misdirection they're doing with "we can't say if Switch is getting the remastered version" - of course Switch is getting the remastered version, the original version wouldn't run on Switch, it barely ran on SLI'd power rigs, the engine was total garbage and they knew it. The HD remaster requires LESS powerful hardware than the original.
New Vegas: Not sure you read the text wall with all the history in it to Ryu above, but if not, you probably won't be surprised to find out that the reason you like New Vegas comparatively is it was made by Obsidian which consists of a lot of the former Black Isle staff. It was made by most of the folks that made FO 1 & 2
@Ralizah The more I see the more I feel bad. That game looks awful. That it's on a PS4 Pro is even sadder. PS4 Pro makes the cutscenes look shiny, but the gameplay looks like it's running on a PS3. Which would be forgivable if it were properly an RPG. But it's just an action game still.
Though I'm still annoyed at the existence of PS4 Pro in general 3 years into my launch day PS4 that makes me feel like I shouldn't bother with it anymore. This game kind of shakes those doubts
@NEStalgia Yeah. Obsidian is clearly more gifted in terms of character writing. Did you ever play South Park: The Stick of Truth? It's fantastic. The switch from Obsidian to Ubisoft for the sequel worries me.
The PS4 Pro is decent hardware, but it's really not necessary if you don't care about slightly enhanced visuals or performance in AAA Western games. It's sort of like the New 3DS: nice if you play the system a lot, but certainly not a requirement for anything.
@Ralizah Wow. In the previous pictures and videos you posted I really didn't see any problem... until you posted that awkward walking animation gif and that "my face is too tired" scene. Jesus, what's up with that walking lady?
And I thought Horizon's awkward jump animation and facial features were a little off... I think I've been spoiled by Naughty Dog's games.
@Operative2-0 The animations were always pretty bad, but nobody cared because it was an RPG. It was pretty standard for a big world RPG to cut corners on animations and models. What's so jarring here is they spent so much on plastic sheen for the rendering, and then have these bad animations and frantically darting eyes like all the characters are performing at gunpoint..... Dead, lifeless face features is one thing. But it's as thought they've animated them as a cross between Chucky the doll and the zombie children from Polar Express....
@NEStalgia yeah maybe the new, shiny sheen they all seem to have makes it more noticeable. I noticed a similar shininess in the brief glimpses I got of inquisition
Apparently getting those cheap digital animation class interns might night have been the best choice the management made....
@Ralizah I don't even mind the idea of a $400 "upgrade" console that's backward compatible with the former, that's a cool idea for a long term ecosystem and I enjoyed it with N3DS. What chafes me is the "hey, we know you bought the new console that never lived up to it's promises of 1080p gameplay just 36 months ago, but we'd like to do a do-over where you buy the corrected one for the same price you bought the iffy one and pretend we did it right from the start. Yes, we know we only delivered the suspend feature a year ago even though we promised it in 2013..." At least MS waited 4 years... I mean who knew the WiiU would set the bar for longevity in the 8th gen?!
I imagine they'll make some money on it, but it reduces the "pride of brand ownership" for me, personally. Especially now with a Switch, I look at the PS4 as "oh, that old thing" when, just in the Fall when I finally opened Uncharted 4 I was getting the "hey I should play this more often, I forgot how nice it is" feel about it. If they're going for the "in with the new, out with the old" motif...well...Switch is newer. Kinda says a lot that I'm desperately trying to like Blaster Master Zero while Horizon and a dozen other PS4 games sit in shrinkwrap bought and paid for. Not that the modest bump in graphics is much to write home about (or visible at all in the case of Andromeda, apparently...) but it just takes a bit of shine off using the PS4 know it's quasi-obsolete. It sits next to my WiiU now, physically AND mentally
The only reason I don't retreat back to Microsoft with Scorpio for my "AAA western PC substitute" console next time around is the games. Sony has games I want to play (including the other half of Atlus games which is the most important of all) and Microsoft, well...doesn't.
It's that cruddy Frostbyte engine they're so fond of over at EA. They don't have to pay to license other engines which is a big deal for EA since they have their own. But it was designed around older hardware where plastic shine was how you make the game look advanced. And that works so well for NFS and sports games. It doesn't hold up so well now. It looks kind of silly in games like this, but the "megabloom" is almost a design effect Bioware's intentionally using...
@NEStalgia Despite its limited system resources, the Switch, with its snappy UI and effortless transition from console play to handheld play, feels positively futuristic to me. Not that Sony hasn't been killing it lately. Gravity Rush 2, Resident Evil 7, Yakuza 0, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Nioh all in the space of a couple of months? That's nuts!
I pretty much own a PS4 for exclusives. If I want to play Western multiplats, I'll do so on my PC, which is significantly more powerful than anything Sony or Microsoft have released (unsure about Scorpio, though). I don't play them very often, though, and I mostly keep powerful computers for emulation purposes.
The last Western multiplat I got any real enjoyment out of was Far Cry 4. Typical Ubisoft open world game, but, like Zelda, the paraglider feels very freeing (although it's not a constantly available resouce like in BotW).
Currently Playing: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (NS2); Corpse Factory (PC)
@Ralizah Haha, don't remind me of my backlog I've already given up playing the older portion of my backlog! Gravity Rush, Horizon, Persona 5, and I THOUGHT Andromeda would be my big Sony back log at the moment.....the first 3 are all a go...not sure about the last one from one I'm seeing
But yeah, how weird and twisted is it to have to say "I have the Sony system for the exclusives, but I just can't love the hardware as much as Nintendo's slick hardware?" It's like living in an alternate reality For me, the "other" console is for the AAA multiplats that interest me and the exclusives. I bailed out of PC many years ago, got sick of dealing with hardware, refuse to go digital, and won't touch Steam with a 10 foot pole ever, so PC kind of became an impossibility! That and combining gaming and work into one super machine seemed like a bad plan every time a game locked the system, and I don't want to game confined to a desk...I can be trapped at a desk all day every day...don't need more of that! So consoles for me these days, but you're right....Andromeda, Deus Ex, FF, Bethesda games....I do like Assassin's Creed when they don't flub it. But not a whole heck of a lot of multiplats have been interesting me these days outside those. But Sony's got those exclusives.... I hope the future of Uncharted isn't as boring as it sounds without Nate....I love that series but after 4 ended, I'm going to miss Drake....he was so much of the mood. GoW doesn't interest me even slightly, but they've still got a boat load of exclusives that interest me (plus, again...Persona....I need to always own a Playstation just for my Persona fixes (pleasecometoSwitchpleasecometoSwitch)) I firmly believe Scorpio will be superior to Pro, but certainly not up to current high-end PCs (by a long shot), and I'm not sure at this point the differences really matter much since all the new high end systems require the games to run on the base models anyway. But Sony has games. I mean good ones.
Hardware though...I seriously have, what 10 or 12 top shelf games (including DA:I) in my PS4 backlog, all paid for...all "free" to me at this point, games I waited years for....and I'm seriously thinking of buying Lego City AGAIN to play it on Switch just because I can't get myself to peel myself away from that hardware...it's just so fantastic!
As someone that just got a decent gaming pc, I still find myself in love with the PS4 pro hardware. I find myself more comfortable with the controller than the keyboard and mouse / Xbox one controller on pc.
That said, switching ff14 from ps4 to pc was such an amazing decision.
I think I'll get all multiplayer focuses AAA games on ps4 for a while longer. At least until I have more pc friends
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