Hey, funny timing, I actually picked this up for the first time on the Xbox launch day and beat it last weekend.
I hate this game, lol
The characters have no personality, Jacob is "smarmy and likes to stab", Evie is "smarmy and likes to stab but sneakier". The plot is nothing, I still have no idea why the antagonist is the antagonist other than "he is a Templar and Templars are bad" (he uses child labor and kills people, but so do you, soooooooo). There are exactly 3 enemy types in the entire game, which change only by having the number over their heads getting bigger, arbitrarily locking off zones unless you grind for levels or just have the patience to slowly whittle them down. Weirdly, even the free running is pretty annoying, because all of the rooftops have these big smokestacks every 10 feet that super kill your flow of movement).
I know everyone ragged on Unity at launch because of the bugs, but honestly, if you showed me footage of Unity and footage of Syndicate without me having seen either before, I would have assumed Syndicate came out first, the animation is such a downgrade.
The one thing I will say, though, is that this game reminded me how much I like Assassin's Creed, like, conceptually. Immediately after I beat it, I uninstalled it, went on a scathing tirade to nobody about how AAA game design is a sinkhole... and then immediately bought the Ezio Collection and Unity lol.
@slaughts:Part of me wants to try to get him to play a modern, rules-lite, improv heavy TTRPG like a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game but also I can't imagine anyone who is friends with Austin Walker hasn't already had this conversation 1000 times.
This is one of the many reasons why D&D being such a crushing, monolithic majority of the TTRPG market sucks, is that things that are very much custom to D&D become traits of the entire medium, both in terms of the perception of the audience and in other games following market trends.
Genshin Impact censors words that China doesn’t like.
I mean, yes, but also this isn't really, like, a surprise. The dev is based out of Shanghai. They don't even have the choice of whether or not to capitulate to the demands from the Chinese government to censor this stuff, or of releasing a "Chinese-only" version of the game. It's fine to be mad about that censorship as a government policy in general, but the only thing this dev can be pinned for is "being Chinese"
@haz_kaj: I will preface this thought by noting that I am a huge fuddy duddy who increasingly dislikes AAA video games. I am earnestly more excited for Deadly Premonition 2 than The Last of Us 2, without a single trace of irony. That's the kind of broken person I am, so keep that in mind as I say this.
Cyberpunk looks insanely boring to me. I feel like it's pulling from a school of open-world video game design that other games have long since explored and abandoned. The idea of "you can do this mission however you want, you can shoot people, or you can sneak through a vent!" was revolutionary in 2010, now every game does this. Unless the game allows for some genuinely meaningful gameplay creativity other than just a bunch of thinly veiled skill checks, I will pretty thoroughly be passing.
I'm curious to see if the GB crew enjoys it or not, because as someone who plays a moderate amount of video games, Cyberpunk looks extremely "tried and true, ol' reliable open world game" to me, and I'll be curious if it still manages to hook someone.
Also, boy they are really just ripping off a lot of Gibson verbatim, and I realize that's because R. Talrosian ripped off a lot of Gibson verbatim, but still, come on.
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