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11

Gaming Community / Re: How are you feeling about ...

Last post by the-pi-guy - Yesterday at 03:18 PM

I don't know if I would consider Banishers a AAA game, but it felt like it got trapped in the need to have more open worlds and a lot of unnecessary content. It made it a real slog to get through. Even though you could just run through the story a lot of the side stuff felt necessary to get the full experience.

People on Era were giving Banishers as an example of AA.

I feel like this is a big part of my issue. I feel like a lot of AA games are just less polished AAA games. A lot of them aren't pushing an Uncharted 2 in 2024.

There's so many older experiences like Batman AA, Skyrim, Uncharted that were made by smaller teams by today's standards that are still well regarded. Some of them are being played by more people than the newer games. Starfield is being outplayed by Skyrim.

Why does it feel like there aren't many AA studios trying to make games like those?

12

Gaming Community / Re: Starfield OT Gone Gold

Last post by nnodley - Yesterday at 02:14 PM

i do kinda want to try and get back into this, but i also still feel like I should just give it 6 months and a ps5 version might be announced.

13

Gaming Community / Re: How are you feeling about ...

Last post by nnodley - Yesterday at 02:09 PM

Yeah i'm getting very sick of the AAA space thinking that games need to be these monstrosities with 100 hours of content.  And that in itself is lowering  the quality bar because everyone is trying to do the same old open world crud. Give me $50 - $60 singleplayer games that are fairly linear with minimal to no side content and that would be awesome.

I think ND struck a good balance with TLOU part 2 with giving a bit more freedom, but the entire story still bing a very strict linear story.

I don't know if I would consider Banishers a AAA game, but it felt like it got trapped in the need to have more open worlds and a lot of unnecessary content. It made it a real slog to get through. Even though you could just run through the story a lot of the side stuff felt necessary to get the full experience.

14

Gaming Community / Re: How are you feeling about ...

Last post by kitler53 - Yesterday at 04:41 AM

I recently finished tinykin and thought,.. I miss this.  

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Gaming Community / Re: How are you feeling about ...

Last post by the-pi-guy - Yesterday at 01:37 AM

I've written some pretty big posts about it at this point.

I'm excited for whatever the next Naughty Dog, Guerilla Games, Santa Monica, Team Asobi, Bluepoint, From Software, Bethesda, World's Edge games.
I'm interested to see what the next 343, Coalition, Sucker Punch, etc games will be like.
I might not love the next Horizon, but I'm sure it'll be good. I might not have a lot of faith in it being great, but I'm sure it'll be good at least.

But I'm very concerned about the direction that things are heading in.
There's so many practices in the industry that just can't be sustainable long term.

And I think very frustratingly, is that these processes frequently make worse games. Some games frequently feel bloated, and feel like they would have been more enjoyable if they were a little shorter.

16

Gaming Community / Re: Starfield OT Gone Gold

Last post by Legend - Yesterday at 12:59 AM

A recent patch seems to have made the game fully work with seamless travel around entire planets. A mod is still needed to disable the boarders, but this video shows a player land elsewhere and travel to a fully functional city.

I was pretty disappointed that the game didn't have any surface vehicles but it sure seems like those will be coming. I'd love to fly my ship around right above the land.

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Gaming Community / How are you feeling about AAA ...

Last post by Legend - Yesterday at 12:54 AM

Games keep getting bigger and bigger and I'm enjoying them less and less. Even ones I really like like Starfield are so mediocre compared to what I hoped for.

Can't say I'm excited for any AAA game. Horizon 3 could be great if they take it in the right direction but I'm somewhat pessimistic about that right now. Will Guerilla make it deeper and make it really dynamic both in its story and gameplay, or will they just double the "content" and steer the story off a cliff?

18

Off-Topic Community / Re: TV Show Thread

Last post by Legend - Apr 14, 2024, 04:55 AM

Monk is on Netflix. Not that I need it, but it's a much higher quality version than the peacock version.

Peacock was definitely SD, Netflix is HD. Although I don't know that it's the same remaster as the Kino Lorber ones that are being put on Blu-ray.

Very curiously, I just found out that the Netflix one accidentally includes a deleted scene in the second episode. The scene breaks the episode. But I'm assuming that means that someone else did the remaster. Because the scene does not appear to be included in the Kino Lorber season 1, either in the episode or as a special feature.

I wish Hulu was hd streaming. Shogun has such a poor bitrate at times.

Anyway I'm halfway through the Fallout tv show. It's good but not great.

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Off-Topic Community / Re: TV Show Thread

Last post by the-pi-guy - Apr 14, 2024, 02:11 AM

Monk is on Netflix. Not that I need it, but it's a much higher quality version than the peacock version.

Peacock was definitely SD, Netflix is HD. Although I don't know that it's the same remaster as the Kino Lorber ones that are being put on Blu-ray.

Very curiously, I just found out that the Netflix one accidentally includes a deleted scene in the second episode. The scene breaks the episode. But I'm assuming that means that someone else did the remaster. Because the scene does not appear to be included in the Kino Lorber season 1, either in the episode or as a special feature.

20

Gaming Community / Re: 4D video game OT: tesserac...

Last post by Legend - Apr 13, 2024, 11:14 PM

4D golf released recently which made me think of my old game concept.

Haven't played it myself but I think it really suffers from using the slice method that almost every 4d game uses. Looks so complicated and confusing yet none of that is intrinsic to 4D geometry. I posted about it in the old thread but just imagine how needlessly complex a 3D world would feel if you could only see it like this:

(a sphere on a brown table)

I'm focused on Hapax, and the game after Hapax, and I don't even know if there is a market for this type of thing, but it would be so cool to see a 4D game that attempted to actually show a 4D image like I was doing. The fourth dimension is intuitive when you can actually see it.

I struggled with representing the 3D volume on a 2D screen, as you can see in previous posts, so I still fiddle with it from time to time. Today I think the best method is a combination of a "hologram" and reconstruction. Slice the 3D volume into a whole bunch of horizontal squares and then position the 3D camera with slightly fake parallax so when viewed from the side at a small angle, the squares fill up the view without overlapping. It's odd and artificial but very approachable with the right context.

Like this but no gaps or overlaps.

Give environmental context, like you're playing as a person who themselves is controlling a 4D avatar and is viewing it on their slice-o-matic hologram display, and I think most players' brains would embrace it in seconds. All their brainpower can be focused on the 4D content that is being displayed. Stuff to the left/right on the display is to the left/right of your avatar. Stuff that is toward/away on the display is to the ana/kata of your avatar. Stuff that is up/down on the display is above/below your avatar. Smaller appearing objects are farther away and bigger appearing objects are closer. Moving sideways would shift closer objects faster than it'd shift farther away objects. Rotations shift everything regardless of distance.

Left stick to move left/right/ana/kata. Shoulder button moves you forward. Right stick to rotate the camera left/right/ana/kata. Maybe another shoulder button to look up/down. 4D objects can rotate in 3 additional ways but 2 of those don't make sense in a game on the ground and the third could be optional.