General Video Game Thread

[Wretched]

@Selira Samsies. I'm watching people i knew from back when i really played gear up and getting old itches back. Thankfully for my sake, work keeps me too busy to invest, but I am having LOADS of fun casually.

I went Maldraxxas and never looked back.

[Rucket]

https://blog.bioware.com/2020/12/03/a-message-from-laura-miele-chief-studios-officer-electronic-arts/

Looks like rough times ahead for Bioware.

[Ganymede]

@Rucket said in General Video Game Thread:

Looks like rough times ahead for Bioware.

Gee, I dunno. Casey Hudson left in 2014, purportedly from the fallout of Mass Effect 3's ending, and he was the GM when the developmental abortion known as Anthem near sank BioWare entirely. About the only thing Mark Darrah did was announce Dragon Age 4's development. Say what you will about Mass Effect: Andromeda, but EA didn't give up on SW:TOR and managed to recover it from the ashes.

BioWare hasn't really done much to any acclaim for over 6 years. They missed the boat when they failed to re-master the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series for the PS4 / XBox One consoles, and are only now re-releasing the former for high-end consoles. Meanwhile, EA has shifted its focus to developing the Star Wars games.

[Rucket]

@Ganymede Eh, I can't blame them for not 'remastering' Dragon Age when Inquisition was a PS4 game. And yeah, their last few titles have been kind of garbo. Andromeda had a shit ton of issues, I pretty much loathed Inquisition and it's Mobile Game Wartable design, and Anthem, well...

But Darrah was a guy they put on Anthem to make the game playable like 9 months before launch. The studio has gone through all sorts of leadership issues and it just doesn't look like things are going to be getting better. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if EA renames the studio in a year or two.

[Ganymede]

@Rucket said in General Video Game Thread:

Eh, I can't blame them for not 'remastering' Dragon Age when Inquisition was a PS4 game.

I guess not, but not re-releasing the Mass Effect series was just stupid.

I suppose my point, if I had one, is that Hudson and Darrah coming on board didn't seem to help, so I don't know their departure is going to signal that the studio is going to start releasing good games. They could have attempted to fix up Andromeda, but instead just dropped the game. And Anthem was objectively terrible.

[tek]

Greg Ellis apparently released a 40-minute rant about SJWs and cancel culture... in character as Cullen from Dragon Age. https://youtu.be/m0uLait2Hfw

[GreenFlashlight]

I'm not even three minutes in and I'm cringing. It feels so weird that he'd respond to accusations made against him by slipping into character, never mind slipping into character to exhort his followers to buy his game to strike back at non-specific enemies for their non-specific crimes.

[Ganymede]

@GreenFlashlight

Yeah, what the fuck did I just watch a bit of? And why is it 40 minutes long?

Given where we are right now, I’d rather listen to PSAs by Joel Miller about pandemics.

[Packrat]

One thing which always struck me as wrong in Dragon Age was in the first game where you visit... That town, I forget the name, the one where the lord's son was a mage who had lost control and this lead to the entire place being taken over by the undead and the entire population of the (gigantic) castle turned into skeletons and ghosts.

So apparently one child with mage powers losing control could literally slaughter thousands of people and wipe out a major settlement. If mages are this dangerous? Well the arguments for the circle system become a lot more reasonable especially given the state of the circle when you actually get there. If anything it is amazing that humanity has not been literally wiped out due to one untrained mage losing control apparently being able to overwhelm essentially anything.

But the world is also literally full of myriad independent mages who are 1) Not turning everything into a hellscape and 2) Not even particularly more dangerous than a guy with a sword? Not much consistency. It is not as if they remarked upon the lord's son being exceptionally powerful or something which would have been easy enough to write in.

It was very much 'This is why they do this horrible oppression!' then never backed it up in the setting ever again.

[Dreampipe]

@Packrat tbf, the lord's son wasn't actually the mage behind all of that. He was possessed by a demon that was just piggybacking off his connection to the Fade to meddle in reality. It was more a combination of bad luck to stumble on a really powerful demon from hell.

Not every mage gets possessed by bad spirits, though. See Anders in Awakening before Justice went full Punisher-mode in DA2. Wynne also has a healing spirit that's keeping her alive and helping the party through the first game.

[Ganymede]

@dreampipe said in General Video Game Thread:

Not every mage gets possessed by bad spirits, though. See Anders in Awakening before Justice went full Punisher-mode in DA2. Wynne also has a healing spirit that's keeping her alive and helping the party through the first game.

This is kind of the point with the Circle.

Some Mages don't have much power; some have a lot of power. Some can control themselves; others cannot. Those who get possessed sometimes get possessed by bad spirits and do bad things; others get possessed by good spirits and do good things. Some people who practice blood magic do bad things with it; others do good things. Letting the Circle mages snatch up children sounds horrible, but that's how they can indoctrinate and minimize the possibility of child mages getting possessed.

And it is horrible, but that's part of the entire moral quandary behind the Circle.

[Auspice]

CPunk 2077 is everything I could have hoped for.

Like, from the get-go, I was super pleased. This is non-spoiler-y as heck, but:

Makeup options in video games have always sucked. Like they always look SO BAD. Like a 5-year-old trying on her mom's makeup bad.

But the makeup options in CP2077? Look good. There's good variety. They're designed well. Hell there's awesome nail art.

I should sleep. I need to sleep. But the game, she calls to me.

[Ominous]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU8heT2gTdc

I'm normally not one for most city builder games that aren't Cities Skylines or Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic because they're usually way too simple to hold my interest, but the setting of a floating sky-city that goes adventuring and resource gathering has me intrigued.

[Testament]

After beating Cyberpunk, I have many opinions but I can't and won't share them until more people have played through and beaten the game. I am a little let down that it wasn't nearly as long as Witcher 3's main story, but that's really nitpicking.

It's a great game. Really well written side characters. Immersive city, when it's not buggy. And in the end it's everything that I had hoped for.

But.

***Spoiler***

click to show

But after I beat the game, I had shades of Mass Effect 3 all over again. If you've played that game, you'll understand what I mean. All endings, of which there are 6(and one secret ending)all more or less lead to the same nihilistic result. The tagline of the game was, "You can't save the world, but you can save yourself." No. No, you can't even do that, it turns out. It's just another version of Red/Green/Blue and that's a real let down for me.

[Ominous]

@Testament
***Spoiler***

click to show

I think it's very, very hard to have all these branching stories that most open world games have these days and tie up all the loose threads effectively in an array of endings that are all equally satisfying on the time and budget that games have.

To this day it surprises me how upset people were that ME3's endings were so bland. How did people not see it coming? At the end of ME1 you could have a galaxy where the three big races were entirely crippled and humanity had to take the lead or a galaxy where the three big races' fleets survived and humanity just joined them. Vastly different outcomes, yet at the beginning of ME2 other than being told the galaxy is different based on what people say, there is no actual difference in the beginnings of the game or how things work in the galaxy.

[Runescryer]

@ganymede Remastered Mass Effect Trilogy for newer generation consoles is coming this Spring.

[Derp]

@runescryer said in General Video Game Thread:

@ganymede Remastered Mass Effect Trilogy for newer generation consoles is coming this Spring.

Wooooooooooooooooooooooo!

[Wizz]

Just finished Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS4, Streetkid turned Nomad.

What a buggy, frustrating, incredibly endearing mess.

The quality of the writing was for sure the saving grace. I genuinely felt for the characters and their stories and was really surprised by how sad I was to say goodbye to them.

Now I am left with a terrible gnawing hunger for more

[Derp]

@wizz said in General Video Game Thread:

Now I am left with a terrible gnawing hunger for more

From what I understand of the various endings, I'm betting that

***Game Ending Spoilers duh***

click to show

we'll be getting a DLC that just pulls a Fallout 3.

[Ganymede]

@derp

I'd prefer something else.