It's interesting to see they're so positive on this, my experience was pretty negative. I'm glad they seem to like it but for me the enemies were pretty boring to fight, the weapons lacked a sense of weight and impact. It's less like they are swinging a heavy weapon and more like they are pretending with a foam weapon.
I'm not as put off by the art style as some people seem to be, I don't think it looks amazing, but it's at least decent. The issue for me is 100% the mechanics. I will give the game one credit in it's favor, as opposed to Monster Hunter World, which added a bunch of really annoying cutscene limitations on when players can join your quest; at least this game understands "Hey this is a co-op game. want to group with friends and play it."
Figure I'd post this for Brad's question: It is a walled garden for the Quest, at least officially. I mean, it's hardware, and people will find ways to do stuff with it eventually. But to start with, that thing is purely meant to be a convenient way to access a library of specific games that have been tested/designed to work on the Quest.
Can confirm, Everquest was originally intended to be played first person. You could go 3rd person but most people didn't, at least when I played it (which was back before DAoC came out, which I swapped to a little after it came out). I have to say, I'm pretty amazed at how incredulous they are that people would play it, considering the only other option for MMOs at the time was Ultima Online which was a very... different experience. (Also I didn't know it existed until years later)
I love that they said he didn't have a killer tattoo, the reason being that they didn't notice that the shirt he was wearing, which was obviously a shirt, was supposed to be the tattoo :D
Gunna agree, I was excited for a new VRodeo, instead it's one game. I actually flicked through the video (since I don't have PSVR) to see if they got into other stuff because of the title.
Yeeeeah I'm going to definitely say that this is some wack science. The only game that was real competition with Darkstalkers that I saw on the list was all the way up at TMNT:Tournament Fighters and that is mostly huge personal bias because I played the shit out of TMNT:TF. But oh well, Jason sometimes has some bad taste too, but in this case he was on the money, even though yeah, Vamp Saviour is the one most people think of when it comes to dark stalkers.
Obviously there are some really polished console Unity games out there (Inside is immaculate) so I felt slightly shitty saying it. Hard to deny a bit of a trend though when you look at a list of games that have shipped on consoles with rough performance over the last few years.
The main thing I've heard from a few indie devs is that Unity's multithreading support came online pretty late in the game, considering that's effectively all console development is these days, and still wasn't amazing last I heard a while ago. Sounded like the engine relies on the PC's horsepower to brute force decent performance there, but that doesn't translate to platforms with weak individual cores. This was all 2015-16ish though, what's your experience been with it more recently?
I'm not going to bullshit, I can only speak to the experience I have as an indie dev. I haven't spent the money on console development licensing (don't have the money if I wanted to), but I've done a fair deal of testing on a weak computer (just around as strong as a 360, maybe less-so) and was able to get a lot out of it, as long as I didn't, as you say, brute force it.
The issue with Unity isn't the engine, it's that the developers that use it don't respect that it's not going to just take whatever you throw at it and produce perfect results. I understand the mindset, since a lot of those games have a big "Unity" logo on them, so rather then individually looking at the devs it's way easier to try to find a single cause. Sadly the single cause is that it's easier to be lazy and not polish a game then it is to make it truly great.
And it isn't just with Unity, Unreal has been free to get into for a while now and we're starting to get a similar style of poorly optimized Unreal games as well. An engine that is used to AAA levels of polish, so has a set level of expectations is coming up sorely short because it's going through the same issue as Unity. Since everyone has access to it, that includes people who aren't necessarily trained in it's use and how to make a quality product. Though Unreal definitely handles intensive assets more comfortably without getting overloaded (better built in lighting system as well), but it has other issues which make Unity my preferred engine to work with.
Ilseroth's comments