PunchingWood
@PunchingWood@lemmy.world
- Comment on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl | Review Thread 3 days ago:
- Comment on For me, Cyberpunk 2077 was uninteractive and has low replayablility value. 5 days ago:
Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?
I was thinking that too. I think during development it might’ve shifted, since I think Keanu originally wasn’t in the game, and they wanted to make him part of the game quite early on.
I would’ve liked if they had extended the Jackie chapter and moved the Silverhand arc to a later act. It would’ve meant that people would just be dropped in the game and let them explore the world carelessly before the story kicks up to next gear. But they probably realised that the game wasn’t good enough to pull off the open-world part, so they decided to get on with the sory right off the start.
- Comment on For me, Cyberpunk 2077 was uninteractive and has low replayablility value. 5 days ago:
I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase. And many things in the game actually reinforce that idea.
I played the game at launch and the game was absolutely infested with stupid and annoying bugs, so eventually I just skipped all side stuff and just wrapped up the main story, I think that was about half-way through. Back then the open-world most definitely felt like an afterthought.
No events were happening in the world, there were entire parts of the city that were dead and empty. There were even areas blocked off by doors that were “locked” and implied there was something behind it, but some of those places I could just clip through and fall through the world because there was literally nothing behind the door.
There were few things that made it seem like an actual living world, NPCs were just wandering aimlessly, doing nothing. Just making a cool looking area and then dropping a load of copy/paste NPC clones in there doesn’t make a good open-world. If you comitted a crime the police would just spawn behind you, wherever you were. While in contrast some of the story areas seemed more detailed and have more “scripted” things happening, which is part of why I think the game wasn’t originally open-world.
Gameplay wise it was not that special either, gunplay was okay, melee felt quite unsatisfying, and outside of combat there was practically nothing to do other than just driving around. Also the skill tree barely mattered, there were even skills like being able to breathe underwater longer, even though there wasn’t any underwater content, aside from one Judy mission I believe (which I didn’t get because she wasn’t accessible as a romance option to my character).
The only saving grace of this game was that parts of the story and characters were somewhat interesting, I liked the concept and style of the game. But it felt like a bad game when it came to actual gameplay.
I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.
- Comment on PS5 Pro is struggling to improve some games, despite its power advantage 5 days ago:
Games don’t need to be PS5 exclusive to be PS5 Pro enhanced.
- Comment on PS5 Pro is struggling to improve some games, despite its power advantage 5 days ago:
Or they gonna introduce GPU attachments instead of the disc drive lmao
But seriously, it’s beyond sad how awful this “upgrade” is. First it’s an insane price for minimal upgrade, there are no new games to even make use of this, and now even older games can’t properly make use of the better hardware. The whole reason to even upgrade dimishes really quick, and it wasn’t even worth it in the first place.
- Comment on US Senator Warner Presses Valve to Crack Down on Hateful Accounts and Rhetoric Proliferating on Steam 5 days ago:
Feels like the Steam community groups and discussions are so massive that it’s going to be an impossible job to start managing it now, unless they just nuke the entire thing and start over.
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 5 days ago:
I’ve also mostly enjoyed online multiplayer games, but I play a bit of everything. I think these are the games I’ve played most in order it must be:
World of WarCraft - Been at it since a year or so after it originally launched. Played a lot of Guild Wars 1 before that, and also lots of other MMO games before and in between, but WoW is the one I always keep coming back to. Longest break must’ve been like 6-7 years around the Cataclysm expansion, and then back at it at the end of Legion. It’s on the back burner now again because of another mediocre expansion, but I still check it out occasionally. I think I must’ve sank at least 5000+ hours (probably way more) into this game over the past 20 years.
Elite Dangerous - Been backing it since Kickstarter, had high hoped for the game and it was fun while it lasted. But I lost all hope in Frontier in managing this game. They’re only focusing heavily on microtransactions, currencies and paid early access content now. Must’ve been about 1500-2500 hours or something, but I’ve been out of this one for a couple of years now. I had high hopes for the future of this game, but Frontier is a master of promising glory and delivering disappointment.
Squad - Last, but certainly not least for me, around 1400 hours playtime (including the testing branch client). Got into this game right when it launched into early access on Steam. Was very tired of the themepark rides that Battlefield and CoD were turning into, but didn’t want to commit to Arma’s milsim style either. Squad fits in between perfectly. Also one of the greatest game communities I’ve got the pleasure to be playing with, never had so much fun with completely random strangers. The mandatory voice-chat really ties it together to create amazing and fun moments. This game really taught me that voice chat in games can actually be good, and not just kids spitting insults.
- Comment on Warcraft Rumble, Blizzard's first new RTS in years, will finally shed its mobile shackles and come to PC in December 1 week ago:
Oh finally!
Said nobody.
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 1 week ago:
Got into it yesterday, there’s a toggle to switch between old and new graphics during gameplay. And there’s also an option for original or updated music, it was an instant nostalgia kick lol
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 1 week ago:
I love the old games but I wish that unit pathing and attacking would’ve been updated a little. Or at least for the remastered version, or have it an option in the settings.
Another thing that always bothered me a bit was the max amount of selected units in many older RTS games. Sometimes it’s limited by the UI too, but they could update that as well.
- Comment on Nintendo Music – Announcement Trailer 3 weeks ago:
Even if they had put it on Spotify they would’ve gotten royalties from there. Which would be a nice bonus for them, because I can’t imagine anyone paying Nintendo Online just for the music.
- Comment on Nintendo Music – Announcement Trailer 3 weeks ago:
Of course they’re not doing it on Spotify, and instead choose to lock it behind their own subscription service.
Nintendo is such a greedy shitty corporation.
This would’ve actually been a perfect to be included with the alarm clock they recently released.
- Comment on Nightingale Developer Inflexion Games Is Laying Off Staff 3 weeks ago:
Would be interesting to know what positions they’re firing.
I bet it’s yet again none of the project and management level staff. Since they’re talking about “saying goodbye to a number of incredibly talented and dedicated team members”, after they said “we made the difficult decision to restructure our studio to ensure our long-term sustainability”.
So you have to fire people, but you fire the “incredibly talented and dedicated” employees. All this tells me is that projects they’re working on aren’t going to improve, if they ever get wrapped up ever.
- Comment on Read-onlys are cancer. Post stuff you want to see. 3 weeks ago:
Yeah I don’t think it’s entirely useless, it’s mostly useful for filtering out spam posts and unrelated stuff from communities.
Just on a comment/discussion level it feels like it’s not that great.
- Comment on Read-onlys are cancer. Post stuff you want to see. 3 weeks ago:
What annoys me about Reddit-like communities (yes including Lemmy) is that there’s this downvote feature.
The whole idea of these discussion boards is to have… discussions. So it’s annoying when you make a post or reply to someone with a constructive reply or argument, and then people can’t be arsed to actually reply, they just downvote to disagree and move on. It’s like the equivalent of people just going like “lol no” and then walk away.
Frankly it’s a feature that feels like it completely contradicts the point of online forums.
- Comment on After Era of Bloat, Veteran Video-Game Developers Are Going Smaller 3 weeks ago:
There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.
Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.
Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.
- Comment on Path of Exile 2 is getting delayed again, but only for 3 weeks | Digital Trends 3 weeks ago:
As long as the delayed time is actually enough to fix fundamental issues, usually a short time of a few weeks, or even months, is hardly enough to fix core issues with a game.
The article says it’s about the network infrastructure. Which frankly seems like something pretty significant for this kind of game. The 3 weeks delay makes it sound like it’s not an easy “just upscale the server capacity” fix, so hopefully it’s nothing too complicated that cannot be fixed within that time.
That said, I would rather that studios would just stop publishing release dates if they don’t even know if they can uphold the deadlines. I know it’s become part of the hype culture and pre-sales and everything else pre-release, but I had much preferred that games would only get announced when they’ve practically gone gold, and worst they’d need to do is to iron out some imperfections.
It’s like moving release dates has become part of the project development in the past decade, just to hit players with that “We wish to deliver the best experience possible, so we decided…” yadda yadda. Some might be genuine, but a lot of games still release in an absolutely garbage state after being delayed (multiple times even). It just gives the impression they do it to drive up pre-orders and hype. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if Rockstar would hit us with that crap sometime next year, and move GTA6 to late 2025 or somewhere 2026 or something.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
Just watched the first part of his video. It seems to line up perfectly with what I was expecting based on the gameplay we were shown so far, it’s just outright boring. Looks llike it’s gonna be a skip. Shame, because visually it looks nice to me and I kinda dig the art style, but if story and gameplay are boring it’s gonna be a no from me.
- Comment on Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Review Thread 3 weeks ago:
I’m still gonna wait and see, I think user reviews might turn out very mixed.
What really put me off from this game was the insanely boring dragon fight they recently showed in the PlayStation presentation. It just did not look that fun honestly, but perhaps other parts of the game are more so.
- Comment on 7 days to die is no longer Early Access, but still looks like this 3 weeks ago:
I never expected graphics to improve honestly. Plenty of good games out there that have been in development for a long time and look like old games, like Project Zomboid.
- Comment on Guess who’s suing the FTC to stop ‘click to cancel’ | Companies fight back to make subscription services easy to cancel 4 weeks ago:
Wonder when they’re gonna do that for Adobe products in Europe. Has to be one of the most scummiest subscription services present day. If you cancel too early you have to pay up a “cancellation” fee for remaining time of the month, or sometimes even more I believe. If you do it too late you’ll have to pay for a whole new subscription, and pay for the cancellation fee. I don’t even know why they’re allowed to pull that shit on consumers.
- Comment on Guess who’s suing the FTC to stop ‘click to cancel’ | Companies fight back to make subscription services easy to cancel 4 weeks ago:
Guess who’s not bothering with subscriptions.
- Comment on World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store 4 weeks ago:
That’s no comparison. McDonalds doesn’t sell the infected products intentionally.
- Comment on World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store 4 weeks ago:
Transactions are from two parties, if the product didn’t sell they wouldn’t keep doing it. The product wouldn’t exist if it failed to sell in the first place.
Plenty of shitty products in the world that never get sold, and then stop being produced.
- Comment on World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store 4 weeks ago:
Not even a new trend in WoW either.
Can’t even blame Blizzard, it’s the people who keep buying this shit that are actually the problem.
If these wouldn’t sell in the store they could’ve been items to obtain through in-game activities (which don’t require eternal grind).
- Comment on OpenCritic now has user-reviews including pros&cons and shows user score 4 weeks ago:
Steam had to change their review platform with a ‘Helpfulness’ system, because that’s how bad user reviews on Steam got. And it still doesn’t really work that well.
Like 90% is just people joking, meme-ing, trolling and review bombing.
- Comment on Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly offer ‘a lot of player freedom’ | VGC 4 weeks ago:
Alright, can’t really get hyped without anything else to go on.
I was pretty fine with the way Last of Us 1 and 2 were handled, did a pretty good job at telling a story, without making it feeling like a linear corridor game. More freedom in a similar type of game would be nice, but generally it just seems to mean more downtime traveling between objectives occasionally interrupted by random encounters. If that is what they mean with more freedom, and not something else like character creation or whatever.
- Comment on 'It Has Plateaued': Should We Be Worried About Console Gaming's Future? 4 weeks ago:
Depends on which games though. Like a CoD or FIFA will continue as usual, small visual upgrades but still yearly releases with minimal changes. Going from a PS4 to a PS5 with those games will hardly be a difference. I think current generation consoles focused more on higher resolution and higher framerates anyway, which was a welcome change to me, since a lot of games on PS4 ran like sub-par 30 FPS.
But if you take games like Horizon Forbidden West, it’s a pretty significant visual upgrade from Zero Dawn. Same goes for Spider-Man on PS4 and then Miles Morales on PS5, visually looks like a pretty significant visual upgrade.
Perhaps not everyone notices the visual fidelity moving up in consoles, but honestly that’s never been all that different with previous console generations. Unless you compare games from early in the life-cycle of a console, and then another game from the end of a new generation console. It still mostly gradually happens over the lifetime of a console generation.
I do think graphical progress has been slower than before, mostly because they seem to have shifted focus on higher framerates and resolutions. But in 5 or 10 years we’ll look back at these visuals as laughable. I remember feeling like this every few years, like thinking something looks like the most realistic game ever, and 5 years later you look back at it is being pretty mediocre compared to new standards.
- Comment on OpenCritic now has user-reviews including pros&cons and shows user score 4 weeks ago:
Yeah I don’t doubt that it will most definitely trigger people to visit the site more, especially if they get to engage with the content like that.
Had kinda wished it was something else than user scores though. Or some other way of reviewing games instead of the same as other platforms.
- Comment on OpenCritic now has user-reviews including pros&cons and shows user score 4 weeks ago:
Ehh… lack of user reviews are exactly what made OpenCritic better than MetaCritic.
It will probably just end up the same as MetaCritic. Where anyone, including people who never played the game, can leave reviews. And it’ll sooner or later just degrade into yet another review-bombing platform where you’ll find absolutely nothing constructive in the user reviews.
