they’ve already hedged that it will be both a premium title and also not full price
mannnnn watching the cinematic short first and then the gameplay reveal second has got to be some of the most intense whiplash i’ve experienced in years. is this a result of modern games taking too fucking long to make? they’re so behind the trend it’s making me feel detached from reality. like for real what the fuck is wrong with a single-player 6-hour shooter? it’s literally the safest bet of all time! why does everything have to be slot machines! (i know why)
well. time to play marathon 2 and 3 to get even sadder about the new one.
I know they are the current All Shooters Must Be This subgenre, but is there even a market for another extraction shooter? it’s like when everyone made a battle royale after fortnite (and PUBG, though that was even earlier) and all of them failed except apex. I guess they could be apex. game even fuckin looks like apex. but apex is free, who is paying for an extraction shooter who doesn’t already just play tarkov or hunt 18 hours a day? do they want to just shuffle their own players back and forth between this and destiny? are destiny and marathon published by different companies, I don’t even know anymore.
You can’t even get what you paid for with Destiny any more (especially not anything story-driven) and that’s not the kind of business practice you can easily walk back from, there’s little reason to trust Bungie won’t do the same again, especially after their rounds of layoff so Peter Parsons can have his classic car auction money.
sound design on the guns et al is really execrable, it’s the same old chk-chk-chk ‘credits received’ tron noise like call of duty or halo 5 hitmarkers, some kind of pavlovian focus-tested thing to make gamers salivate, dark patterns, i don’t like it. the future is a million little noises at all times
game director Joe Ziegler
gameplay lead Andrew Witts
oh I see
is it just me or does everything look a little minecraft-y? so many boxes and cubes. are they literally inside a computer. i guess that would explain it. i don’t mind the visuals really just the audio. craig mullins inspiration is interesting despite the divergence in colors. cool robot suit guys, transhumanism = good, game does look pretty trans overall which is good. i do love the malevolent AI thing as always so that’s a big draw for me, they got the voice right. “escape will make me god” very cool tagline
“it’s a bungie game so we gotta really push things” don’t love that line, but hey it’s not 2001 anymore i guess they gotta have some puffed-up studio mythos nowadays
if they were gonna push the team-focus angle i kind of wish they would not include any matchmaking to fill teams and force you to find a lobby through some sort of person-to-person interaction. never gonna happen, in practice it’s just gonna be the same as everything else where you get matchmade onto a team with one guy screaming into mic and another shooting you in the back
live service = live me-not-playing-the-game, but yeah anyway
ending on the literal gambling hook? “you’re only ever one run away from your next big score” jeeeeeesus christ
announcing a closed “alpha” now with a confirmed release date of september 23rd is uh… a timeline
first closed-door playtests went to the incestuous content creator industrial complex (HiddenXperia et al), no shock there but imagine if they were able to do something different
almost a comical amount of shit on screen
“we’re really excited to build a story that is innovative in the extraction shooter space”
but okay the story trailer, thank god we get some T.S. Eliot quotes. this is maybe the most reassuring thing i’ve seen thus far, in terms of ‘connection to old Bungie sensibilities’. would hit better as a single player title still!
okay why do the guns sound way better in the “story trailer” than in the actual gameplay…
the short film sure makes up for a lot in my eyes, but very much determined whether the actual game will carry through any of this aura. i hate to bring up the whole l11e d8e buzzword but i don’t know that the gameplay and the story feel particularly aware of each other, despite literally containing the same events
yeah don’t mind my negativity, i guess there’s nothing technically evil about a recreational limbic-system activation device
ok now reading the thread, thank god everyone is mostly backing me up on this cuz phew i thought i was going nuts
that story trailer really is nice though huh
I watched the Creator Alpha Gamplay video which made me want to play it less. It feels like it’s going to be a very sweaty and high stress FPS, and the art feels less appealing in the context of the gameplay. A stalker-like with this loot system and art style could be really fun.
yeah exactly! i was complaining to dylan about this but like, i feel like older shooters were more comfortable leaning closer to horror sensibilities, which is why doom 3 makes so much sense to me and why its reception is so bizarre.
the fragility, impersonal hostility, and brevity of the action in the cinematic are so much more of what i want out of this setting.
yeah jesus this shit sucks so bad. there really are fields of research that i feel like should be outlawed.
i feel like this is such a clear insight into the production process behind works of this type/scale, because like, the thing that is gestured at by all the auxiliary material is so cool, but it’s employed exclusively as the set-dressing for a slot machine. there’s no technical or design reason why the experience shown in the story cinematic couldn’t be accomplished with sufficient time and effort – something these studios have – so the only logical conclusion is that they aren’t trying to accomplish that.
it’s pretty disheartening to see that a lot of the comments under the gameplay vids amount to “asset reuse = lazy devs” like come on please exercise one percent of your critical faculties istg.
Was watching some YouTubers who played it at the demo event thing and one of them said they were told that while Bungie had worked out what the story was it hadn’t actually been written into the game yet but to expect a lot of lore dump audio diary type storytelling.
Which is kind of okay in a sense, I mean the original games told the story through found terminals and was great so it would be appropriate if they just did that again with this. But dang they really didn’t have anything of that to show at this event where they’re showing their game for the first time and it’s coming out in six months? Because they just started writing it? This game that they announced was in development two years ago?
Jeeeez this is all real depressing.
Instead of spending a billion dollars making this game they should just form a studio out of the people who made that cinematic short and just have them make like 20 or 30 more of those.
the only thing I can say in this thing’s favor is that I never really liked apex or destiny and this seems like it could maybe be a melding of those two design sensibilities in a way I’d like a little bit more than either of them. but that is like, really hunting for a silver lining for me personally that would in no way predict adequate player counts.
the lowest level security bot should be burning out your motor neurons from 5 km if you break from cover/silently trigger any part of the surveillance net. not dropping in like a stunned fridge
the infinitely-recyclable runners in the story short made me think “what if they just controlled compromised security bots”. a Signal from Tölva-like. that would have slapped, a bit more environment design and action
animation/acting in the story short was phenomenal. made the identical canned animation in the knife kill medley at the end of the gameplay reveal feel worse
Watching the cinematic short with a critical eye it’s actually amusing how much of it all is like a music video for introducing gameplay mechanics. It’s like, ok, they’re scavenging materials (and disappearing them into their belts just like a vidcon animation), this is how respawns work, there’s this guy’s Shield Power. Like knowing how the gameplay works cheapens the short in retrospect.
The short is by Alberto Mielgo, who worked on Tron: Uprising and Love, Death & Robots.
Hearing some wild shit is going down in the Marathon discord, like mods posting mpreg and inflation fetish art???
Payday 2 is an “extraction shooter” that everyone loves
Finally watched it and it feels like a rare case of buying the artbook being more enjoyable than playing the game.