i was honestly really surprised anyone here liked the first horizon, though yeah i’m massively fatigued with these things outside of the witcher 3/mgs5/death stranding/botw canon
it is really pretty at least
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has anyone here heard of a little game called Red Dead Redemption 2? it’s pretty great
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Saints Row, arguably Yakuza
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I honestly think the first Horizon is much more narratively deft than most people give it credit for, probably because the reveal on “how humanity in the past was saved from evil machines” comes like… 40 hours into the game, and nobody who isn’t already sold would ever even get there. The second one is just… I mean there’s some stuff that’s straight up bad—like unceasing Aloy VO where she will immediately solve every puzzle for you and constantly remind you how basic game mechanics work—but mostly I think the bummer is that it just seems to be trying to carefully iterate inside the bounds of the first game. Sylens appears as a hologram a bunch to direct you around, you meet most of the same characters—it’s still in the upper tier of One Of Those but it feels more in line with like… AC: Odyssey than HZD. I’m only like 10 hours in, which is baby times for One Of Those games but so far, yeah I’m having a pretty good time; I’m just not wowed
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the first horizon confirmed the lesson learned from the witcher 3: change the voice acting to polish for a better time
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You know, one thing I picked up from working in AAA is just this “director smell” that you get on things like plot beats or incidental VO that’s really unmistakable from having an artistic product micromanaged by someone who is neither an artist nor a writer nor a designer but has to answer to a lot of corporate stakeholders. It’s in stuff like where a character just shows up to tell you where to go next, and in my mind palace I can visualize the story bible document where some CD wrote “[NPC] appears to tell player to go to the mines” and the team just had to figure out how to make that feel like it made any sense in context. It’s in stuff like when you stand in a room for two seconds to have a sip of water and the PC instantly says “I can climb to the second floor of the building by using the stairs, or I can press X on the map to fast travel to my destination” like the game thinks you’re a literal baby who was born just seconds ago.
It’s the unmistakable sign that the primary focus of development was getting you through it as smoothly as humanly possible and relatively little time was spent on what it actually is that they’re getting you through, because that probably just came down fully formed from a brand or biz dev team. And that’s what HFW has that HZD didn’t—it has director smell
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yeah, Yakuza is the one i could really think of. and there they generally had the approach of increasing density rather than scope.
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God, Saints Row 2 has one of the goofiest open worlds I’ve seen in a game (where else can you fall into an open grave into an underground sex dungeon that empties out into a sorta redneck water park), and when someone at Volition was asked why Steelport in SR3/4 was so pared back, they said it was because they had metrics that showed few (if any) people explored all the weird places they crammed in there 
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played some KOF98 with @ymer and @aislesgrises as well as GGXXAC+R with various others 
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Update: just starting the opening cutscenes of Horizon FW mostly to test my setup, and this writing is infinitely worse than the first game already. It’s just recap and a 1:1 dialog, whereas the first one started with a cool ritual of the newborn Aloy joining the tribe at sunrise. Also Aloy said “I alone can fix it” urrgh
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Oh no. She didn’t say it in the cadence, did she?
You’d hope people would find another way of phrasing things after the last few years, just as a courtesy.
Like, that Snack World game on Switch sounds OK, save the coffee shop being called “Covfefe,” which…ugh.
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No cadence, and given that it’s a European studio it’s most likely a total coincidence, but I nevertheless feel it’s a bad sign that their writers’ idea of what sounds appealingly cool and tough happens to be precisely the same as Steve Bannon’s
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Or, the specific playtest where someone had a glimmer of confusion pass across their face and, in lieu of playtest being unable to resolve feelings of a game sitting with a person over the span of days, it was deemed critical to salve
The use and abuse of playtest in AAA, as a way to avoid resolving difficult questions, is something I have strong feelings on. Unfortunately, with the rise and incorporation of UX as a discipline into games, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
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The fact you can walk out the broadcasting range of the pirate radio station in Saints Row 2 and pinpoint it to a specific very out of the way antenna is still my all time favorite detail in any open world game (followed closely by that weird garbage sculpture park in a trailer park in the same game).
3 and 4 were great but they were so much less exciting to explore. That Hell one honestly felt the most in the spirit of 2’s city.
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Watch Dogs 2 actually takes a nosedive when approaching the end, sadly, as it becomes obvious most designers and writers were unaware that up until that point being nonviolent or even completely stealthy had been a valid gameplay option, so some scripted mission triggers are actually on winning fights (technically you can merely incapacitate the targets on the straight up assassination mission but the dialogue still assumes you killed them) because you need your big explodey showdown for the trailers, plus the discourse of your up-until-now cool-kidz-hackers radicalizes itself and the game never acknowledges it (one dedsec member actually questions the possibility much earlier but they never follow up on it even when one of your objectives is “let’s kill those guys”).
Plus I was baffled that the one teammate to have a plot-mandated death is, of course, the black guy and actually has a less emotional death scene than the comic relief robot (which, I discovered afterwards, is displayed much more prominently on the promo art. Heck, gotta-die-person isn’t even on most of it).
Plus, of course, it’ll eternally crack me up that Marcus fights the system that unjustly profiled him as a potential criminal and terrorist by becoming a criminal and terrorist and demonstrating the system was right all along. The big mid-game plot twist is the evil silicon valley establishment actually accuses you of all the crimes you’ve necessarily been committing up to that point! The game never seems aware of the paradox, either.
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Ugh, I recently saw a Worms game on the switch shop with a big discount on it and was like ‘oh man I loved Worms 2, wait while I get my wallet’, then clicked through the screenshots and trailer and saw worms with Trump toupees prominently featured, and went Fuck That.
Even if it’s intended as mockery I don’t want to deal with that
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It sucks so fucking bad, because the mission you do with him a little earlier, that takes place at the fake Google/Facebook office, is hilarious. Even the way they immediately code switch when a group of white guys approach them. It’s really good!
And then he disappears, gets murdered for no good reason, you kill a whole bunch of gang members, drill a hole in his hard drive, and never speak of him again. It’s maybe the worst tonal whiplash I can think of in something I’ve played.
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fell in love with galactica phantom this day
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One could make an argument for some of the Ezio trilogy of games for Assassin’s Creed as the characters stay the same for a bit and they are fine for what they are.
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Been playing a lot of CK3 again. Started a new game where I’m the king of a specific tiny region of Tibet. I and my family are the only believers of a specific tibetian ancestor-worship religion associated with our ethnic group and I guess I am just trying to see how many people I can convert to my ancestor worship before we are absorbed by richer powers. My other goal would be to reform our religion to love gay people… which is definitely within my power, as I already control several holy sites in the Himalayas relevant to my very small religion. Having a very small religion means that all my holy sites are really close to one another!
I’m currently on my fourth ruler, a “possessed” gay expert diplomat, and everyone is my friend. Unfortunately, all my relatives who love me very much keep trying to kill one another, but they have incredible tolerance for me, the family head/big time hallucinator. I have convinced my head priest that my frequent hallucinations are religious messages sent from the ancestors, so it’s actually currently working to my benefit. My son, who will soon inherit the throne from me, is an extremely horny expert spymaster. I am sure that once I take over that character, my kingdom will fall apart, because I’m pretty sure he is boning everyone at once.
Love this game. It’s never boring!!!
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