I'm a Star Wars fan. Have been since I was a child.
I look at this and just feel a massive "Meh" rush out of my body like a wave of diarrhea. They're going to overboard with it. Battlefront was a nice thing when it was in the fancy pants previews. People clamored for it for years, they delievered it, and it was fucking shit. That single game completely ruined a lot of good will that I personally have for EA and Star Wars games. Maybe the Visceral game will be good. Maybe. At this point I don't know. But watching this was just pure fatigue and I just couldn't care.
Don't care about the mobile pay2win bullshit. Don't care about the MMO. Don't care about Battlefront. Don't care about what the Infinity Ward Respawn Entertainment is doing even though that's the second most interesting thing, because nothing was shown other than lip service. Just... show me fucking games. Until then stop tugging yourselves off because you have the license.
Is it just me or do the faces kind of look derpy? I mean everything else looks great. It has exploration which ME2 and ME3 were severely lacking in which is great. But the faces and the facial animations of both the Asari, which granted was hammed up a bit, and the human look... off.
I expected the human character at the end that wakes up to go "DUUUUUUR" and imitate Cartman from the Up the Down Steroid episode of South Park.
I don't understand some of the really nitpick type of arguments that these guys come up with sometimes for some games, especially the highly touted popular ones. To Brad's point the grapple hook in Uncharted doesn't have a floating icon always on the screen because you're just constantly surrounded with it, and it most certainly doesn't pop up from a football field away. When it pops up is when you can use it, and in some instances for some of the treasures you actually have to perform a leap of faith that will lead to your death in order to even use it. I get it isn't perfect, nothing is, but to make factually incorrect statements in some attempt to be the smartest dude in the room just bothers me. These guys are smarter than that. They're better than that. But for some reason I consistently hear things like this on the Bombcast. I get criticizing something and that they're critics first and foremost, but making factually incorrect statements while grasping at straws seems insincere on the whole.
Yeah! How about that online only digital future?! Looks great, right guys?!
Hackers suck, but Jesus fucking Christ. Eventually Valve, Sony, Microsoft, EVERYBODY has to be held responsible for their own shit security protocols instead of hackers. When stories like this are commonplace it's a bigger issue than hackers DDoS'ing.
I just don't get who was asking for a game like this or who it was made for. People that have liked the Far Cry series want dumb shit and explosions. They want a mission to burn up a pot field with a flamethrower while getting high in the process.
Then you get to the dimishing returns of this series. Far Cry 4 was already far to similar to Far Cry 3, with people even calling it Far Cry 3.5, and this just seems worse. It's typical Ubisoft. Hit on a winning formula and then just milk it, beat the fuck out of it, and suck everything out of it that they can. The beast taming feature, while new, isn't exactly something that's super stupendous omg I must play this now. It just seems like a dumb gimmick in a game that nobody really asked for.
Shame. I loved 3, and 4 to a lesser extent. But this is just Ubisoft being Ubisoft. Every fucking time they do it. They're worse than EA and Activision in this regard, combined and multiplied by 10. It boggles my fucking mind how they continue to do the same shit time and time again. They made that great trailer with Vaas for Far Cry 3 about insanity. By that definition they are literally insane. And French. Very very French.
Dan's, "If it was the best story someone would have finished it," was a rather ignorant thing to say in that he assumed it was bad because nobody finished it instead of taking into account it's a 100+ hour run for a single time through and people have extenuating circumstances in their lives. Vinny has 2 kids and he's the biggest proponent of the series, always has been. Jason has a newborn. Austin said he was in the process of moving and by the time that was done other shit came out. Alex is just Alex and lives life by the rules according to Alex.
Not liking the gameplay is one thing, because in a few key places it is not good. Geralt controls like shit, Roach controls like shit, and the ability system is shit. But to transfer that onto the story, when the story is not only good but is absolutely fantastic and has some of the absolute best set-piece moments in the RPG genre as a whole, is incredibly disingenuous. They kept it in the top three which is where it should be based on everything that came out this year, but it felt like they begrudgingly did it.
Let me just say this, Brad criticized the game for "only having 5 spells." Something that is intrinsically established in the lore. So some of them clearly don't care about that lore and forget that it's a game based on a book, not the other way around. Which is fine, but criticism of stuff like that just feels like an oversight.
I like this end of the year stuff, but Dan's comment caught me off guard. I like the guy. He brings an enthusiasm to this website that is much needed to balance out Jeff's cynicism. But wow...
@fishwitheadphones: You do realize a phone, as it stands now, has a lot more use than a VR headset right? Yes, it's more expensive. But it also justifies that price point with what it can do. A VR headset is just that, a VR headset. I can't access the internet on it, or play games on it without needing outside hardware, or text message on it, or phone people on it.
You want to get technical, a computer that can run Oculus Rift will be about 1500 dollars or there abouts. I just priced one out that was incredibly reasonable on PCPartPicker, and that's without keyboard, mouse, or monitor if people need that. Minimum total investment will be about 2100 dollars not including tax.
Furthermore that comparison was foolish as well. Incredibly foolish.
Yeah... 850 dollars for me to even get my foot in the door on something that is completely unproven? Fuck that shit.
Look. It sounds cool and it might end up being amazing, but that is way to high of a price point even if it is justified. The barrier to entry is far to high, I personally believe, for this to end up being anything but a failure in the future. The enthusiast crowd might be willing to pick it up and have the hardware to do so, but the general mass market crowd won't. And I hate to say it, but they're the ones that kind of matter to a point. There are a hell of a lot more of the general market than enthusiasts, and as such a hell of a lot more money.
And the biggest problem they have, and will continue to have, is being able to market this to the general consumer base. You cannot show what VR does, you have to experience it. When this thing has a 600 dollar price tag, or your regional equivalent, it has to have a better showing than a few people going, "Hey, this is fucking rad." And not only that but a lot of people don't have a computer that can run this thing. Look at the hardware statistics that Steam puts out and you can see the details for yourself.
So... kinda meh across the board. I expected the price to be really quite high given the development time Oculus has had and everything surrounding it. But at the same time it doesn't change the fact that the barrier to entry is absurdly high. Playstations VR, if it comes in at a lower price, could end up being the one the general public will gravitate towards. Because you have a system out of the box that is cheap and you know what you're getting that works hand in hand with a VR system. Even then it's a tough sell for somebody that isn't an enthusiast and doesn't know what they're getting.
This is worrying. Incredibly worrying. I was absolutely not cynical about this game in the slightest. The trailer at E3 had me out of my chair, staring at the screen with my mouth agape. The trailer at PSX made me incredibly excited because it looked so fucking good even if the battle system and some shit was different, they felt like modern changes that worked. But this, this scares me.
Reason why is how Square handled Final Fantasy XIII. I worry that instead of the overworld, which while kinda lame but gave you a sense of freedom, is going to be replaced by linear maps just one after the other. Like this;
Furthermore I just don't know if Square has it in them to make a game like this. Multi-disc games have existed in the past and they've done them. But what I'm getting at is would they make fundamental changes in how the game plays from disc to disc. Like how Final Fantasy XIII was different, but the same, since this could be episodic? Or could they hold themselves back and do it properly. Then we get to the release dates. Would they have a roadmap for when they're releasing and would it be within a proper time frame? Or would it be plagued with problems from a team that had an amazing looking game that got turned into vaporware and magically revived years later.
I just don't know man. This entire thing just seems fucked. I get why they have to do it, but the method of how they're doing it is not good. A game like this should not be done episodically. It should be done at once. What I want is something like Lost Odyssey and what I feel I'm going to get is a disjointed Telltale game with a prettier face.
AiurFlux's comments