WHAT PLAY YOU!? Version 3.0

[FLips]

1 hour ago, Accident Prone said:

I love Castlevania. I love every game that has built on and emulated those formulas. I love the GBA and DS 'Vanias, I love Symphony Of The Night, I love Bloodstained, Axiom Verge, Guacamelee, Timespinner, Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, and every other game under that umbrella.

So I'm always disappointed whenever I see a good looking game and its got "Souls-like" plastered all over it. You've got a 2D platforming "Metroid-Vania" and you're going to ruin it with fucking parrying? Whatever happened to hack'n'slash, dodge'n'roll'jump and more hack'n'slash? I won't say that Dark Souls ruined gaming, but I will say that their gameplay tropes benefit developers who are too lazy to build in a decent combat system.

The new Castlevania having those same systems in place is just shite, and I would've spent a good AAA-price tag on a new 2D Castlevania. 

It’s the exact reason I couldn’t click with Metroid Dread. Gone were the massively varied environments and focus on exploration and instead it was all grey spacestation and parrying and I just could not be arsed at all.

[RedTwoster]

14 minutes ago, FLips said:

It’s the exact reason I couldn’t click with Metroid Dread. Gone were the massively varied environments and focus on exploration and instead it was all grey spacestation and parrying and I just could not be arsed at all.

Same. I didn't hate Metroid Dread, but I didn't love it either. It wasn't the Metroid Game I wanted (although Axiom Verge did a very good job of delivering that). The Soulsification of all things Metroidvania has created a very repetitive genre. 

[Accident Prone]

I had Metroid: Dread on my to-do list but I'll be sending it down to the bottom now. I never looked at reviews for the game, I just checked out the blurbs and quick scores, I had no idea that it had those elements baked in. As @RedTwostermentioned though, we still have Axiom Verge, and weirdly enough I began another playthrough of that last week when I ported it over to my Anbernic SP.

Two games have been good enough to get past the Souls-like mechanics, and thats Blasphemous and Hollow Knight. I was never able to complete those games after multiple attempts but I saw enough of each game to love them, and I was able to do so because each game has a window where you can just brute force your way through. I haven't touched Silksong though as I've read that its much harder than Hollow Knight and I'm not throwing down that amount of money just to suffer cheap deaths at the hand of parrying.

Edited Tuesday at 08:52 AM by Accident Prone

[Onyx2]

14 minutes ago, Accident Prone said:

Blasphemous

I played both this and the sequel over the summer, and if you haven't played 2 I'd strongly recommend it. They have shaved off some of the rough edges and in general made it much more forgiving, eg falls aren't instant death but just hurt a bit and put you back on the ledge, fast travel available earlier etc. Really enjoyed this.

[Accident Prone]

3 minutes ago, Onyx2 said:

I played both this and the sequel over the summer, and if you haven't played 2 I'd strongly recommend it. They have shaved off some of the rough edges and in general made it much more forgiving, eg falls aren't instant death but just hurt a bit and put you back on the ledge, fast travel available earlier etc. Really enjoyed this.

Now that is excellent to hear! I'll stick that on the wishlist then! Cheers!

[Onyx2]

6 minutes ago, Accident Prone said:

Now that is excellent to hear! I'll stick that on the wishlist then! Cheers!

It's still a challenge, don't get me wrong, but it feels much more fair. It's also just as surreal and obtuse. Beautiful though.

[Merzbow]

BioWare is dead, just like that EA has sacked 400 members and is closing down the studio... Next to Bethesda they're the biggest, longest Western RPG developer ever.

[Jazzy G]

Terrible. I bet the head of EA will pocket a nice bonus though. 

[RedTwoster]

3 minutes ago, Jazzy G said:

Terrible. I bet the head of EA will pocket a nice bonus though. 

That’s the worst part about this. Very few of these closures have been because the companies in question are not making money, it’s so people up top, so shareholders can make more of it. And it’s utter short-termism that completely undervalues the people who actually make that profit possible. With no one to make games, where does the money come from?

I’ve no doubt the majority of these companies are eyeing up an AI-generated future. But fuck that. I hope the people who have been laid off are able to set up their own companies and enjoy enormous success, and that the people behind these lay-offs - all of them, not just Bioware - see their reputations destroyed as they tank their companies through their uncaring greed. Fuck them all.

[FLips]

I loved the original Neverwinter Nights, it was one of the very first PC games I played. Mass Effect 1-3 and the original Baldurs Gates are fun too. Sad fact is they arguably haven’t made a great game since Mass Effect 3 thirteen years ago. Any company not wanting to burn money would have closed them down ages ago, as easy as it is to point fingers at big nasty EA.

[The King Of Swing]

1 hour ago, Merzbow said:

BioWare is dead, just like that EA has sacked 400 members and is closing down the studio... Next to Bethesda they're the biggest, longest Western RPG developer ever.

Bet the usual "anti-woke' wankers are loving it, too. 

Hopefully some former devs, start a new studio. 

Edit. 

Wasn't a lot of BioWare's problems caused by executive interference? 

Edited 16 hours ago by The King Of Swing

[Merzbow]

39 minutes ago, The King Of Swing said:

Wasn't a lot of BioWare's problems caused by executive interference? 

Plus all the head writers from the good old days were leaving one by one, both founders were out the door by 2012 too.

Weirdly I'm pretty sure a few came back to help with Anthem of all games, one of the biggest failures in gaming history.

[Jazzy G]

4 hours ago, FLips said:

I loved the original Neverwinter Nights, it was one of the very first PC games I played. Mass Effect 1-3 and the original Baldurs Gates are fun too. Sad fact is they arguably haven’t made a great game since Mass Effect 3 thirteen years ago. Any company not wanting to burn money would have closed them down ages ago, as easy as it is to point fingers at big nasty EA.

Mass Effect Andromeda got written off for having the audacity to not be a Mass Effect sequel, but a spin-off. It didn't help that it was really buggy when it came out, but I thought it was a decent enough game. There was only so much Shepherd and Reapers they could do, especially after the whole debacle over the ending of the third one. Maybe they should have called it Andromeda: A Mass Effect Adjacent Adventure or something to try and establish that it was set in the same universe but didn't follow on from the original Trilogy.

I picked up a new pad so I could split screen Borderlands with Vicky, and it's decent. It's a Turtle Beach Rematch Advance. I managed to find one in great condition for £15 on eBay. Does what I need it to. The d-pad is a little spongy, but everything else works fine. There are locks for the triggers so they have less travel, which is useful for shooters, then you can unlock them for playing driving games etc. It also has some triggers underneath which are currently set to A & B, so I have easier access to jump and crouch without having to take my thumb off the right stick.

I may try and pick some caps up for the analogue sticks because they feel a bit weird. Had a look online for some and I can't believe how expensive they are nowadays, and am baffled by the ones you can get to extend the analogue sticks which apparently means you can aim and move with more precision. Anybody got any experience with them?

[LaGoosh]

I thought Andromeda was boring as sin. Just a very tedious and uninteresting game on every level. Following up the trilogy was always going to be an impossible task though.

[RedTwoster]

15 hours ago, FLips said:

I loved the original Neverwinter Nights, it was one of the very first PC games I played. Mass Effect 1-3 and the original Baldurs Gates are fun too. Sad fact is they arguably haven’t made a great game since Mass Effect 3 thirteen years ago. Any company not wanting to burn money would have closed them down ages ago, as easy as it is to point fingers at big nasty EA.

I think the finger pointing is fair in this case - as @The King Of Swing said, they seem to have been hampered enormously by executive interference; I'd use Dragon Age: The Veilguard as an example. It started off as a live-service game before it morphed into what it became. Anthem was another attempt to chase live-service cash - I'd categorise BioWare as being in a similar position to Arkane and Rocksteady - single player specialists with orders from above to develop games they simply weren't well suited to make - the kind of games I strongly suspect they weren't wanting to make in the first place.