Raven10

I definitely wonder what went on in the background here. Was this a case of Sony unilaterally pulling the plug alongside offering refunds, or did CPR agree with the move beforehand? Like imagine if this was EA instead. There's no way they would agree to delist a game no matter how bad. Would Sony pull the rug out from under the maker of FIFA and Madden and risk losing EA's support? Or would they give in to a major partner? Makes you think that Sony really, really needs to update their refund policy, or stop issuing cert waivers. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Just to clarify, I'm not saying that CPR isn't the party mainly at fault here. Obviously Sony is only reacting because of the broken game before them, but the fact that Microsoft and Valve didn't have to react because they have policies already in place to resolve these types of issues speaks volumes to how important it is to offer these types of policies, not only for the consumer, but for the business as well.

So first off, the Game Awards on not the equivalent of the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, or Emmys. That would be the GDC Awards hosted in March. All are chosen by industry members to honor their colleagues. That is why it is such an honor. Because Daniel Day Lewis said you were the best actor of the year not named Daniel Day Lewis. Miyamoto said you were the best game designer not named Miyamoto. And that means a Hell of a lot more than what some critics say.

That said, The Game Awards are much better than the days when they aired on whatever that awful TV station was. Geoff now has full creative control and has made some really great choices over the years in presenters, structure, and performances. People like to roast the dude but he gets the scoops, he's a fantastic writer on the off chance he gets to do a written piece, and he overall really seems to love games.

CD Projekt Red has a great history of releasing fantastic GOTY versions of their games that fix a lot of the launch issues while adding in new content. I have always played their games a year late because of this and haven’t been burned yet. So next year’s Steam Year End Sale is my likely time to purchase. By then most of the bugs will have been fixed, and they might even have retranslated or rewritten parts of the script that are causing outcry. Plus they have a bunch of post release content planned. So I will play it but was never planning on playing at launch.

Well those are some specs for sure. Wonder if it really looks that good. Will be interesting. I’m all for games pushing technical boundaries but these are higher specs relatively than Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Crysis required back in the day and those games were each a major generational leap in gaming visuals.

Yes, Your Grace was released on Gamepass this month so I thought I would give it a try after watching Vinny’s quick look. Now I am just going to throw another spoiler warning here for anyone who didn’t read the topic. I am going to spoil all of this narrative, choice driven game for you starting next paragraph. If you have not yet played this game and intend to do so do not continue reading. The entire game will be ruined for you.

So here’s the secret. For a game all about choices and resource management, your choices mean jack shit for 2/3 of the game. I read a ton of reviews after playing this and they all praised the choice driven narrative, indicating to me that they only played the game once and even then didn’t think too hard about it.

The game is split into three sections. In the first you are to prepare a wedding for your daughter. You are marrying her off in order to gain an alliance with a powerful neighbor in order to defeat an incoming army. Now here is the thing. The wedding will end in disaster regardless of how much effort you put into it. The foreign king will be poisoned and die. It doesn’t matter if you spend no money on the wedding or all the money. You might as well save it.

Then in the second part you have to find other allies while trying to solve the murder to get your now son-in-law to forgive you and join your forces. But both of these are false choices. Your son in law was the killer the whole time, so you are never going to get his armies so it’s a waste of resources trying. And the big battle will be won after an avalanche crushes your enemy. It doesn’t matter if you have 500 troops or 1000. You will win and be left with 20.

Now if the final part of the game, where you take vengeance on your son-in-law for his treachery was also doomed to fail then this game might have had something to say about fate. It would have been a real downer but it would have used the medium in a clever and subversive way by presenting itself as a game about choice when all your choices would lead to failure regardless.

But I easily won the third chapter. Note that I did not fail or save scum a single time. It seems from reading reviews that my very early decision to get in on the drug trade instead of fighting a war on drugs meant I never really had to worry about resources like most reviewers. This may or may not be biting political commentary about the cost of the drug war, but I found myself with more than enough gold to complete every task and upgrade. I also supported a brothel, which provided me with plenty of benefits both financially and otherwise. And mind you I was roleplaying as a good, kind, King, who just happened to have a very forward thinking, progressive world view. And in embracing the drug trade and the sex trade I found myself with plenty of cash. So I easily defeated my son-in-law and birthed my own son to be my heir instead. My other two daughters lived happily, one as a bear tamer and the other as a traveling lesbian warrior maiden. My wife sadly died in childbirth because I forgot the incantation to save her. Like I had everything right, read the incantation and then forgot it thirty seconds later. I could have reloaded but I wanted to be able to say I didn’t save scum so there you have it.

This is a choice driven game where most your choices don’t matter. It’s a resource management game where half the things you need to spend resources on don’t matter. And it’s a game that seems to very heavily favor a progressive, feminist world view. That’s fine except for that it makes the choices too easy. And that makes the whole resource manage portion meaningless. And considering how meaningless the choices in the narrative are, it kind of felt like I was barely playing this game at all.

It’s too bad because it really could have been something special if it stuck to its guns and forced a bad ending on you. Or it could have been special if all your choices actually mattered. But by trying to do both the game succeeds at neither and was an incredibly disappointing experience because of it.

@development: @humanity: I will echo what development has said about this being about as bog standard traditional of a JRPG that you can get, but I will say that it has a bunch of solid QOL features that you wouldn't have gotten in those older games. Enemies appear in the world on land (not so much at sea and I haven't gotten flying powers yet) so no random battles, plus easier to grind when you know what you are about to fight, all your party gains experience from every battle even if they aren't actually present, the game autosaves at various points so you don't lose a ton of progress if you forget to manually save, a handy "zoom" spell lets you automatically teleport to almost any location you have previously visited, and plenty of other little QOL improvements across the board. I'm not going to say anything here is especially innovative or even newish. But for a Dragon Quest game, these are features years overdue. Plus to finally get a true HD Dragon Quest game after years of Wii and DS titles is a real treat. While not as visually impressive technically as the best western RPGs, or even Monster Hunter World, the amazing art direction, character, and monster design make it one of the more artistically impressive games I've played. The VO in both Japanese and English is incredibly solid, the characters are largely likeable in my opinion, and the music is great just horribly placed. It's almost like the music was written without any real input from Horii about where each track was going to be placed in the game, or even what the actual plot of the game was going to be. Some tracks don't seem to last long enough, or vary in tone and mood despite the scene they are playing over retaining the same tone throughout. It's incredibly odd. In many cutscenes the music just fades out entirely before starting up an entirely separate track that doesn't in any way connect thematically or aurally to the track that was playing beforehand. For a composer who has been doing this for 40 years it honestly feels amateurish in a way I would not have expected. But the music editing is really my only real complaint with the game. As long as you go in expecting a traditional, turn based, JRPG, this is among the best I've played.

An update after 20 hours played. I am currently on a quest to build a rainbow bridge to reach the floating tree in the center of the world. It also seems that the kindly king may be possessed by an ancient demon of darkness. So, yea this is about as much of a Dragon Quest story as it gets. I’m just waiting for the magic tree to tell me about a set of magic armor I need to collect to defeat the demon, who also turns out to only be the servant of the real demon who is controlling everything from behind the scenes.

@sombre: I noticed this as well. I was walking around an abandoned town, which I shall not name for spoiler reasons, but the one right before you go through the door to Hotto. And during this somber scene they started playing the fucking over world theme after the sad track they wrote ended. A couple other times I felt like the music and scene didn’t match.

@fanaticalmilk: You can play the whole game in 2d. You can swap between 2d and 3D at any save point.

So the Definitive Edition hit Gamepass this week(along with Doom Eternal and some others), and I decided to give it a go after Jeff had actual positive things to say about it. I’ve been following Jeff’s game coverage for nearly 25 years at this point, and outside of the Persona games I don’t know that I could name another JRPG that he actually liked. At least none made since the PlayStation era.

Played until around where the quick look was and was surprised to find that I am actually enjoying it as well. The combat is really snappy, with the creative monster designs and their clever names keeping me interested. The story is super standard JRPG and Dragon Quest fare. Great evil set to destroy all reality. An orphan chosen one raised in a remote village who becomes a warrior of light. But the characters are all fun and well written, and honestly I will take simple and cliched over whatever Final Fantasy has become since 13.

This definitive version seems to have some solid quality of life improvements over the original. Just based on the quick look and some reviews I skimmed I noted that you can now craft anywhere, items dropped from trees and such are auto-collected, and I have yet to encounter the shop issue Jeff had in the quick look. Not sure if that is because of a change made to the game or if I am just doing something different, but I have yet to encounter any sort of inventory issue.

I saw on the Steam forums that the character models and/or textures in this version are worse than in the original due to being based off the Switch version. I can’t say I noticed any real issue here. Looking at footage of the original release compared to what I am playing, I am not seeing a huge downgrade, but I am not playing on a 4K monitor so perhaps it is more noticeable in uhd.

I will say that for whatever reason Square Enix went with fxaa over Unreal’s built in taa solution. Easy enough to fix in the config file, but begs the question of why they couldn’t include a toggle in the menu. Also adding motion blur requires going to the config files, and the in game menu also won’t let you render the game above 100% resolution, but again, easily fixed in the config file. Basically, a lot of really simple, built in ue4 features not being used for no reason. Lastly you have to quit using alt-f4, which is not uncommon for SE PC ports, but is it really that hard to make a quit button? (Answer: No it isn’t. I have programmed a quit button into a game in under half an hour. Pretty sure the very first time I made a quit button it took me under 2 hours including research)

So lackluster port but it runs fine being a ue4 game, haven’t noticed any bugs or glitches. Enjoying it so far and am interested to see if on PS5/Series X they can reach the level of visual quality seen in their gorgeous intro cutscene for the next game.

@dano4: Was it a top down view, side view or isometric(angled top down) view? Could be on of Rare’s earlier games, but hard to know without knowing what perspective it was played from. Also did you fight the enemies by jumping on them, hitting them with your fists, or did you have a weapon? Also was your character human? Male or female? Any other details you can remember about the character would help.