I recall Immortals of Aveum is an example of this style where you have a setting that emphasizes magic but kinda just depicts magic as “emissive stuff” inside realistic Unreal Engine environments. That also kinda describes parts of Elden Ring. It’s not my favorite thing to see.
The AAA videogame industry is vomiting up personnel and being crushed by eight 10 year old games but somehow these people just get to keep making these? Is one of their dads a billionaire or something?
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sometimes you just get your buddies from Respawn or IW and that’s enough for investors to throw you a few million dollars
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okay but listen
all those other companies’ big bets were bad
ours is gonna be the breakout hit forever game
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I’m thinking a lot about the scenario play out where GTA6 turns out to be a mess on launch like Cyberpunk was and see if it just fucks everyone over? I don’t want people to be screwed but I am imagining it. Almost like how the economy is too big to fail so that when it does fail those in power just sort of brush it under the rug
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that immortals of aveum game no one’s heard of or played had michael kirkbride writing the thing
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the wikipedia plot summary is written like the kind of video game they make up to be a background detail in a csi show
Following Luna’s death in battle, the Grand Magnus of the Immortals, Kirkan, recruits Jak to defend Lucium in the ongoing Everwar because of his abilities as a Unforeseen Triarch Magnus capable of wielding all three colors of magic: red, blue, and green.
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Jak… you are the one… every color of laser, is yours to command…
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Jon Favreau seems like a genuine nerd and a pretty nice guy so it brings me no pleasure to report that he must be hung from the neck until dead for his laser based art crimes
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For not doing anything as visually interesting on film as the use of the color spectrum in the Living Laser fight in Iron Man #260?
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I was pretty surprised to play the first episode of season 2 of the telltale batman game (never played season 1) & see that Michael Kirkbride was credited as the lead designer/writer on all of it
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Michael Kirkbride was ascended as Nerevarine when he finished writing for Morrowind, the homunculus now known as Kirkbride is a tulpa formed from the bilious hippocampus of Todd Howard
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would that even matter, though? cyberpunk was a mess but it sold a squillion copies, and any ill will toward CDPR or large games in general was short lived. if anything, cyberpunk helped game producers, because it showed them that it is just as possible to have highly successful failures as it is to have disappointing successes. if GTA6 was a broken, undercooked mess, rockstar would have every resource and every incentive to fix it, just like CDPR did.
edit: as an aside, most of the problems with cyberpunk that got all the press were technical problems, which were simply the result of the hubris of sales targets: they felt like they had to launch that game on the PS4, which was absurd. I’m playing the game now, 4 years after it came out, and in most respects it still looks like the future when you crank everything up and play with path tracing on. and like, yeah, the path tracing mode didn’t even exist in 2020, but still, this game had no business being released on tech from 2012 or whatever.
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I don’t think it would matter in that industry sense. The machine keeps on chugging no matter what. I think it’s a more a sense of what are we all doing here exactly? A sense that we have ended up having to look to monoliths, not beyond them. Perhaps it’s nothing new but it’s made me feel a certain way coming into this year.
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Sorry but can I be basic and ask what the Good RPGs are?
good western rpgs in the past decade include disco elysium, colony ship, baldur’s gate 3, divinity original sin 2, outward, pillars of eternity 2, kenshi, and I have heard a few folks around here talking about the new warhammer 40k rpg being a good one, though I haven’t tried it yet
during the dark age of 05-14, alpha protocol used the mass effect jrpg-shooter structure in an actually interesting way (though the shooting was really bad), the first divinity original sin came out, shadowrun dragonfall was the best shadowrun game (and the other two new shadowrun games weren’t bad either), knights of the chalice had great tactical combat, and mount and blade: warband was a whole new style of rpg. The successes in this era were all either small scale indie games, or good-but-flawed AA games. Wasteland 2 and the first Pillars of Eternity were fine (if I have to be totally fair) but I can’t find much point in going back to them now.
I’m leaving out chinese and japanese rpgs because there would be simply too many to list. Same for pre-05 RPGs, though I’ll provide examples if you want to know more
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There was also that Undertale game that assembled a following of totally reasonable proportions.
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Yeah my lists are by no means exhaustive. I’ve also failed to mention any recent dungeon crawlers (das geisterschiff and its sequels, for example)
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Thanks I will entry all of those games in the rubyquartz Cool Games scrapbook
I am trying to lure my friends back into the PC RPG space…it was these twin bros who introduced me to Deus Ex when we were in mid adolescence.
So many other people in our group turned out to be toxic and I haven’t seen much of my friends until the recent years.
Like we need some sort of pensive space to debrief from the 2000s, like a RPG with tasks and activities as a proxy for the emotional labour of Being Male Friends
I am thinking of turning up to the pub that they now own with Planescape Torment on a Switch, or like the Witcher on a Steam Deck.
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