Has it ever been something else? Nobody using “woke” seriously has ever been able to define it.
Has it ever been something else? Nobody using “woke” seriously has ever been able to define it.
There are several projects trying to do their own life sim. One that was supposed to be published by Paradox was cancelled recently, shortly before planned release, and to the surprise of the dev team apparently.
This is not an easy genre to develop for, lots of things can go wrong and it might be hard to find a good balance between boring and unmanageable feature creep.
Even Cities Skyline devs had a headstart, they already had a successful transport sim before they tried to fill the smoking crater left by EA SimCity’s explosion.
I don’t think “for the time” is that relevant here. My major problem with it is how shallow it is. All 5 phases are so repetitive, with so little variations and so little to do.
The only good things about it were the editors, those were impressive, especially the creature editor. But it’s just cosmetic, mechanics are so poor almost nothing emerges from it. It’s quite disappointing for designers that have been major actors of the simulation genre forever.
Will Wright was still there for Spore, so everything he touched was not gold. It’s supposed to be a whole universe and it’s barely a simulation of anything, somehow he forgot to design a game around it.
And now he’s hopped on the Blockchain/NFT train…
Yeah, pretty much. The best Sims game doesn’t exist, it’s a Frankenstein monster that would take bits of the 4 games.
I love the idea of 3 with the open city and NPC progression, but wow this game’s an unstable glitchy mess. It’s not even close to be playable without many unofficial fixes, and even then, it runs like shit.
The only things I’d take from 4 would be maybe moods (nice to have, I guess) and the more organic body models, with more seemless morphs. 4’s gameplay is boring as hell, nothing interesting ever happens. And they got rid of create-a-style which is a huge creativity downgrade.
8bitdo SN30 pro. Small, lightweight, perfect button placement. SNES controller designers knew their shit, just add two sticks and a pair of triggers and you can play almost anything with it.
Connectivity is just one of many problems with joycons.
The shitty sticks that may or may not drift after a dozen of hours and the faulty rail cable that disconnects the SL/ SR buttons are worse.
Tolkien estate usually doesn’t like their words used in random stuff. Sometimes I think they’re bordering on control freaks, but in that particular case, yeah, nuking that shit and forcing them to change their name wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me.
If they’re not aware of it, maybe someone should tip them.
I don’t know how it was when you were a kid, but there’s been a good number of pretty damning stories since then.
Especially the one about the fucking overt pedophile with the rabid “edgy” fanbase and Roblox having to be coerced into doing something.
Or the shady team-developed games, that are not being controlled in any way by Roblox, but where minor developers are being “recruited” and exploited by adults.
Or the way Roblox itself obfuscates how much you can profit from your games with absurd fees over fees over terrible fake money exchange rates. And how it encourages shitty monetization practices.
"See, on this diagram, that part of the global population represents the users we can legally identify, because they’re not minors.
_ So, who’s in the rest of the diagram?..
_ This is a mystery to everybody."
Yeah, I got it mostly for the campaign, hoping for more Baldur’s Gate. It was so disappointing.
The story was uninspired, but most of all solo gameplay was so boring. One character, one NPC companion and you couldn’t control them in any way, starting at low level, all of that made your strategic choices practically inexistent.
And then the engine breaking everywhere causing it to rewind your action after 5 seconds because it suddenly remembered “hey, you were not supposed to be able to go there, we’ve put a bunch of knee-high crates to block that 5 meter wide empty hallway!”
Like… The one with the werewolf? Really?
Well, that’s definitely one of the Sonic games of all times.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
…
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
shrugs
X used self-destruct.
Yes, so much yes. I’ve got that on mine too, and it’s a pain. it has very small, close “buttons” too, setting the temperature is an exercise in accuracy, when it reacts at all.
And yes, the tiniest drop of water fucks everything up completely.
Capacitive buttons on anything are annoying, they’re unreliable as fuck. They might trigger with the slightest accidental touch, but then they’ll act like your finger doesn’t exist for a dozen pushes.
Yah, I haven’t tried latest update yet. Problem with NMS is that it’s a bit daunting diving into it again and again, I don’t like returning to month-old saves and starting from the beginning takes ages. Especially that with all the content updates, you get a dozen simultaneous quests jumping at you at first occasion.
I’m still doing expeditions, and that in itself is already a ridiculous commitment IMO. I wish we could just do them at our own pace, the time limit is baffling. I noticed that last expedition literally 2 days before it ended, I got everything, but it was a freaking race to get there.
It had a few graphical upgrades through the huge content updates it got year after year.
Now there is more biome diversity, more decorative flora, better underground environments, more creature types…
If anything, they tried so much to populate it that sometimes I feel it’s lacking some truly desolate environments. “Empty” planets are uncommon, and even those are mostly cluttered with weird stuff and “anomalous” living things.
I’ve not played Forbidden West, but I’ve played all of Zero Dawn. I’ll just say, as much as I like the game (I do, quite a bit), it’s bad at being open-world.
Most narrow paths are only related to quests, and if you try exploring them before you need to go there the game punishes you by making it a chore to go and to leave for no gain. Also, the terrible message “you’re out of bound, turn back now or we reset to your last save” is one of the worst failure at world design ever. It pops up constantly if you’re just trying to explore.
And yes, I tried playing HUD-free for a bit (I had a great experience doing that on Breath of the Wild). As you said it’s almost impossible, the environment, while looking good, is way too messy to spot the small details you’re supposed to… Unless you turn on the magic compass and GPS.
In other games, paths and important items are highlighted with lighting and clear and functional visual cues. Beside the infamous yellow paint, HZD does almost none of that efficiently.
I mean, there were lots of multiplayer games when I grew up, before CoD or Halo, but still.
Doesn’t change that I dislike most of these.