A company can become more agile with layoffs if you have a bunch of useless middle managers who exist only to justify their existence and you lay them off.

I don’t remember who but someone made a good example with the “this is fine” meme in Clair Obscur. Someone on the development team came up with the idea and it probably took a day or two to set up. So they took a day or two and it’s in the game. Had the game been made by Ubisoft that meme would’ve never ended up in the game because the idea would’ve gone through 5 different managers who need to give their blessing (because none of them want to take the full responsibility in case it sucks), then it goes through legal to make sure there’s no infringement, then through pr to make sure it’s not somehow offensive. Eventually a week has passed and management is still deciding if it should be implemented. Finally it gets canned because the time spent on making the decision had already made it too costly to implement. Something that could’ve been done in a day took a week and nothing got done.

But I’d be surprised if that kind of downsizing is what Jagex had in mind.

I loved Lune. I enjoyed her skills and gimmick the most and I think she’s probably the one character that takes the least amount of investment to make a decent build for, so she can and will absolutely carry you to the final act. But then she pretty quickly drops off as other characters get their builds together and end up dishing out far more damage than Lune.

If you want some build tips

Maybe there’s some ultra late game build that works, but I found a build that I enjoyed and when it stopped working I felt I’d rather remember her as she was than try to make her into something I might not enjoy.

Okay dude. Come back when you’ve stopped being a cryptic little shit and can communicate like a normal person.

I’m not sure I follow. Are you acknowledging the very fallacy you stepped into?

I want to see you explain how Spec Ops: The Line is the same thing as this propaganda shit piece.

I get the gist, I agree that games like America’s Army shouldn’t be on Steam but you can’t just broad stroke all “grunt in the middle east” games as propaganda. They can end up being something totally different and not comparable at all.

After giving it some thought I kinda agree with the author. Not in the hyperbolic sense that it’s the worst thing ever, nor in the sense that I don’t like parrying because I suck at it, but I agree on the point where he’s talking about fencing.

There’s so much more creative freedom and depth in actual martial arts, HEMA, fencing etc. that is just completely missing from most games. You don’t get the contact feel of your opponent, you can’t physically feel what your opponent will do. You can’t really gauge how far your attack will reach or, more importantly, how much range your opponents have. You can’t choose your angle of attack and, again more importantly especially in the context of parrying, choose how you defend. Your attacks are generally just a button click at which point the character does whatever attack has been programmed. Your defense is just a button click that generally blocks all attacks in front of you. Your parry is also just a button click that if timed right just parries (and sometimes automatically ripostes as well). All the nuance of melee combat is simplified to “one button for blocking/parrying and one button for attacking”.

So yeah, parrying does suck until we can turn it into something more engaging than just timing a button press.

It’s pretty much just an expansion to the first world and expanded the lore of that world. I thought the first world was also the most interesting so I definitely enjoyed it. I didn’t try out the new archetype but it looked interesting. I think it’s definitely worth picking up on sale.

Are you sure it’s all negative? Because on my steam the base game is “Mostly positive”. The DLCs are “Mixed” and outside of the The awakened king I can’t say much about the DLCs.

As for my short review. I’m not sure what those people think Remnant 1 was about but for me it was unique worlds, unique builds and unique enemies. Those things together give you an unique gameplay experience and Remnant 2 expands on all of those things.

The aesthetic was excellent in Remnant and Remnant 2 continues that by making those worlds even more detailed. There were multiple times where I just looked in awe at what the artists had concocted together. The only time where I felt the artistic vision wearing thin was literally the end of the game. I have vivid memories of all the worlds that are available in adventure mode, the final area ended up being unremarkable compared to everything that had come before it.

The builds in Remnant were pretty unique but I personally felt like the game didn’t give you enough tools early game to mid game to really build something out. You had guns, armor, trinkets, traits and mods but it all felt kinda constrained. Remnant 2 expands that by additionally giving you class archetypes, weapon mutators and you can modify the relic (the heart thingy that heals you in Remnant 1) and add relic fragments. All all those things individually are also expanded. Compared to the first game you’re going to get more guns, more armors, more rings, more amulets, just more of everything necessary to make a build.

The enemies in Remnant were great, an excellent mix of small enemies, minibosses and big bosses. Remnant 2 expands all of them with an even greater mix of small enemies, minibosses and big bosses. I’m not going to spoil any bosses but I definitely found them fun and memorable. The final boss is the only exception that comes to mind as I remember that being a frustrating fight.

The only objectively negative thing I can say about Remnant 2 was the performance. I don’t know if they’ve released some patches for it, but when I played around the launch of the awakened king it was borderline unplayable without upscaling.

If you enjoyed Remnant then it’s definitely worth picking up Remnant 2. Remnant 2 improves on everything that was great about Remnant.

I’m pretty sure the game is enjoyable, but is it really $70 (Or in case of EU 80€ which to be crystal clear is a fucking joke of a price) enjoyable? I thought about buying Doom TDA but when I saw the price tag I decided to buy V Rising instead. I’m pretty sure for more than half the price I’m getting as much enjoyment out of V Rising as I would out of Doom TDA.

My issue with the increase of premium pricing is mainly pragmatic. There’s no reason to pay that price when you could get just as good or better games cheaper.

There’s no reason to look at Steam numbers because the biggest extraction shooter isn’t on Steam, yet.

I’m willing to eat my words but I doubt I need to. In a world where Clair Obscur costs $50 I don’t how see how BL could be $30 better than one of the best games released this year.

She’s not just the main character towards the end, she is the main character of the story. We play Geralt, who is a side character in Ciri’s story.

Exactly. They can charge $200 if they want to but it doesn’t mean people are going to buy at that price. The price point needs to be where people are okay paying for it and I don’t see it happening at $80. Okay, I lied a bit, I see it happening for some games but not for BL4.

We’re supposed to take racism and far-right conspiracies as legitimate backlash? Normal people don’t care about shit like that. I’m with the other person, the reception was lukewarm because it played it safe.

I was talking in the context of extraction shooters. I can’t think of a single extraction shooter where you could add attachments but not remove them. I’ve also yet to see anyone familiar with the extraction shooter genre think it’s a good idea. If you think it’s a good idea you’re free to defend it.

I think Bungie still has experience making successful live service games, Destiny 2 has been a massive success for Bungie. The issue with Bungie is that they’ve forgotten how to release good games. Destiny 1 released kinda meh, but a year after launch started crawled back to being generally well received. Destiny 2 release (followed by the Curse of Osiris expansion) almost killed the studio, a year after launch started crawling back into being great and only in the last years really dropped off (when resources were pulled away from Destiny to Marathon). It feels almost like there are some head up their ass lead designers at Bungie who just won’t listen to feedback and release a shitty game. Then the live team takes over the project, listen to actual feedback and fixes the stupid shit that should’ve been fixed the first time around.

Even with Marathon they had that event where streamers (and some other media people) got to play the game at Bungie and then Bungie asked for their feedback and when they got feedback on some really stupid things (like not being able to take off attachments from guns) they just went “We know, that’s intentional”. They’re deliberately making design decisions that anyone with experience within the genre would instantly say “that’s a bad idea”. I don’t know whose head needs to be pulled out of their ass but if Bungie doesn’t want to release Marathon as a flop they need to do it quickly.

On a slightly different topic. I love how some people got to experience Marathon and Arc raiders in close proximity. Prior to the playtest people were cautiously optimistic about Marathon but Arc raiders evoked no emotion in anyone. And now it’s more than reversed. People are praising Arc raiders and Marathon is seen as a lost cause.

Because the verification system doesn’t take performance into consideration at all. It’s more of a “how much effort does it take to get the game running” indicator.

Except the production costs have also gone down. The development itself is easier thanks to better tooling and developers no longer require putting out physical media (which used to be a pretty significant part of cost).

And there’s no excuse for $80 when Clair Obscur released at $50 and is one of the best games released this year. I seriously doubt BL4 will be $30 more impressive than Clair Obscur. How about studio heads do their job and streamline their production process to make better products for lower costs instead of offloading their bloat onto the customers.

I’ve been saying it for the last decade, there’s no real “games are too expensive to make” problem. There’s only studios choosing the “go big or go home” death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they’re going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it’s not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.

But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they’ve been at it since at least mid 2000s. It’s only in the recent years where it’s really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They’re feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.

Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let’s get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.

Young me got that lesson when trying to play ARMA 2 on a 5400RPM HDD. It would run 60FPS if I didn’t move but as soon as I started moving the game started stuttering. When I installed it on a 7200RPM HDD the game no longer had any performance issues.

It all comes down to what specs the game was designed for and I imagine most modern open world games are designed for SSD-s. Putting them on HDDs will absolutely have a negative effect.

In the realm of turn based combat it’s pretty good. It has pretty easy to understand skills and mechanics that make it easy to pick up, but then you also get tons of modifiers (pictos and lumina) where the combinations can significantly alter how your character plays. And the timed triggers removes probably the worst aspect of turn based combat, the passivity. You can’t just sit there and wait while your character does a thing and then the enemy does a thing. You have to time your attacks but more importantly you have to identify what attack your enemy will do so you’d know if you need to dodge, parry, jump or gradient counter and then also time them correctly. It’s far more engaging than your average turn based combat.

The mediocre part of the gameplay are the side activities usually related to gestrals. I’m gonna vent now because my experience popped into my mind and it pissed me off again. Nothing infuriated me more than that stupid beach volley ball. Thank you for putting a fixed camera at an angle where it’s really hard to see the middle gestral throw and also your position in relation to where the gestral is going to land. The amount of times I lost the hard volley ball because I couldn’t see the middle gestral until it was too late really made me question how this even passed QA. And the reason I couldn’t just focus on the middle gestrals was because I had to focus on making sure my attack would actually connect with the gestral. The marker on the ground is just purely decorative as I had multiple occasions where I would attack squarely on the marker only for the gestral to still land and take a point away. AND FOR THE LOVE OF SOPHIE DO NOT THROW OUT GESTRALS FASTER THAN I CAN ATTACK. I almost beat the hardest volley ball match, except I didn’t beat it because I literally could not attack fast enough to send back the last gestral. I would just sit there, in perfect position, punching the attack button like a maniac and then watching how the gestral lands on the ground because the attack simply would not happen. Fuck beach volley. End of rant. Actually no, fuck beach volley again stupid fucking minigame. Now it’s over.

TLDR: gameplay good.