Having fun with the invasions in this game, even though the matchmaking can take a little while. Probably the part of the game where being stealthy is the most useful. If the player you’re invading is causing a lot of mayhem they’re really easy to track down, and you can find out where they’ve been by the conspicuous absence of all the enemies they’ve taken out.
How did I miss that there were invasions in this game? I’m excited to dig in this weekend.
It is most assuredly not a game to watch someone else play. I thought it might be from the intro but I’d get the same impression from the first stretch of Prey.
It’s a shame they don’t nail the tone of slapstick violence. I get the sense they want to blend it like Wolfenstein 2 but they don’t have the direction (or music drops) to do it. The tone of the floating words is terrifyingly close to things I’ve written and cringed about but that’s an emotion that sure emphasizes the ‘game about games’ presentation.
I was concerned at first at how an action emphasis works with the lumpy movement from Dishonored, which is really optimized for slow tactile moves over and under small objects, and after a few hours I think it doesn’t, really, but what they gain from the action focus is a lot of scrambling and improvising and hiding and trapping. It’s closer to creating the Half-Life 2 I imagined after that demo about shoving a washing machine behind a door and it makes sense that it only happened once approached from the simulationist side. I love to stumble into a room, slam the door shut, hide behind a bar and trap those idiots. Really happy with the AI tuning weighting so heavily towards dumb.
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The more I play of this game, the more I like it. It’s great!
I want to take a moment and applaud the fact that somehow this game does NOT have a fucking crafting system. And the little random weapon upgrades/modifiers manage to avoid feeling overwhelming or tedious, and they don’t even feel like a cynical gambling hook to keep me playing. This has all the pleasures of an immersive sim without the interminable hours of busywork! It shouldn’t be a miracle, it should be common sense… but it is a miracle.
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I also love that this is low-key an adventure game that also happens to have gunplay/stealth for texture. This is the first game I’ve played that’s felt like a conscious response to Outer Wilds.
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Okay I beat this game. I think it was pretty good buuut Outer Wilds still holds the crown for a time loop game. I think the main thing with Deathloop that lets the game down is that you don’t really feel like you’re discovering new information as much as you’re just going from one map marker to the next. Like there’s a bit where you find some fireworks that you need to sabotage, so the game’s like “hmm, I bet I can find out how to sabotage these fireworks if I go over here” and a map marker pops up.
In Outer Wilds you would find out new stuff on each time loop on your own, and you’d intuit what you’d be able to to with this information. There’s no joyous “oh shit, now I know how to do X, I can try Y” moment in Deathloop on the level of figuring out how the quantum observation stuff worked in Outer Wilds.
I think the fact that you can’t erase all your progress then finish the game in 1 loop with all the knowledge you’ve acquired playing the game like you can in Outer Wilds says it all really.
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is this the first game to tell the original bioshock to fuck off?
killing enemies in stealth in this game feels more like being jason vorhees than it does having to sneak around
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I don’t think that’s how Arkane thinks of it. Prey was an extended exercise in trying to reconcile BioShock with the rest of the Looking Glass heritage.
But I, roguelike defender, am really happy they’re trying to break out of the beachcombing mindset these games put the player in with the routing and repeating structure. (and of course, I never bought that storytelling in roguelikes should be bound by the repeated-challenge conventions that game is in - and I’m glad they agree).
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deathloop has modding scene energy
You don’t cast a shadow in this game
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the amount ofntimes this game has said ixm going to be ambushed only for no one to show uo gets it an automatic 0
But do you have legs?
No
The gear in your hands is very brightly illuminated by lights directly behind you, now that I see it it feels really weird
Also the game renders pretty reflections and stuff but based on player position not camera position so it feels like you’re controlling a camera on a stick that can rotate in place
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I believe this is what scholars call the “looking glass self”
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Appreciative that he’s open about this & I understand that from a business & production standpoint it’s probably best to look at these sorts of games but imagine how much more interesting this list could be.
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Also interesting (re: Dead Rising & Mooncrash)
In my opinion, designers should not be talking like this on twitter
some curtains are best left down
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I know I’m an oversharer but I try to get it out of my system in a non-public context, it’s the least-shameful thing I can do
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