Load Our Last Save: Load Our Last Save: Deathloop

Is this live live?

@voiceinject: It was live live a few hours ago!

fun stream - thanks yall!

@twins: thanks!@

So, you actually CAN kill them however you want, you don't really need the End It All quest to finish the game. I never got it, killed all the Visionaries in my own way and completed the game no problem. Thank you for showing Deathloop, one of the most interesting games from a game-design standpoint :)

It's funny, I hear how good the game is or was at release, cause as you say the usually open nature of dishonored like games now reaching mass appeal, but with mass appeal comes dissenters, and I now hear how bad the game is causing people poked around and found out how everything works under the hood. Kinda like figuring out the nemesis system or whatever. I still think this game looks interesting and I love stealth. Is all the dissenting this game is not a masterpiece yadda yadda just a lot of talk, as in the crew of people who always say nothing's perfect, there are tons of nitpicky flaws that I won't care about, that make the game awful? Just for example I lately seem to really just enjoy my time with even the most hated games. Playing Avengers story mode only right now and it's fine, not seeing the boiling hate, sure it's repetitive and stuff, but I haven't grinded, barely level up outfits or all that stuff people hate, and just running through the story with decent animations and graphics. (I guess I'm saying I choose to overlook the bad if I'm enjoying myself.) So is this game still good? Or is it some steaming pile that reddit and what not states lol.

Maybe i play games too casual but dang most games on gamepass are pretty fun in short bites.

@topcyclist: This is a game made by Arkane, the studio that makes games that have multiple endings based on what you do. That is not really a thing as much with Deathloop. There is a "golden loop", so there is always one solution to complete the game, and if you want to End The Loop. I feel like people just expected more than one complete solution for the game, which would take WAY MORE more work from the developers, and make the game come out year later. It's a good game, just don't expect Prey level of gameplay complexity.

I totally agree with rorie that the repeating levels would suck if you couldn't also go in guns blazing. but holy shit, the first ingame week, I was all about hit and run. Which reflects my endgame gear - funnily enough, I also stuck to Shift (and Aether) - a third slot for powers could definitely have changed up my playstyle more.

the slide/melee combo probably doesn't come naturally when playing on keyboard, but damn rorie, you're missing out.

@topcyclist: it's important to remember that the internet thrives on discussion, debate and argument. These things necessitate taking a side and then defending your stance. If you are looking on the internet for neutral opinions or people saying "Yeah I played it, it was ok", you will eventually find it, but they will be the exception among a sea of love it/hate it opinions. Enjoying a game most people have disliked doesn't say a whole lot about you or the people who disliked it. It's ok to think a game is ok.

For example, I'm currently playing a random action game called Gujian 3, and there are things in it that I could use to fuel a negative opinion and others that could fuel a heavily positive, but ultimately it's just totally ok, and I don't feel the need to have strong feelings one way or the other.

@broshmosh: I see, kinda the whole reason some of the review site aggregates become useless as 1. people only review when extreme feelings so they can vent so mostly negative for say an experience at a restaurant. 2. people try to offset bad reviews with a perfect 10/10. 3. people try offset good reviews with 1/10 cause nothing's THAT dang good, I found a flaw. 4. games arent made perfectly to appease everyone, some games just won't work no matter how good. If I only play sports games then pick this new death loop game up and hate all forms of shooting in games and stealth or loops, my disgust that the game uses these elements comes off way worse than it seems. Could be the other way around. Overall it seems professional critics like it, and most at the release enjoyed it. So I'm excited. Honestly, the discourse on Reddit seems to always boil into extremes so I should have not been surprised.

@topcyclist

Personally, I tend to get most strident about games where you can see a lot potential that goes unrealized. Which is sort of where I land with Deathloop. The first 6-8 hours of that game were legitimately awesome and I had a great time. But then you get to the back half of the game and the whole thing falls to pieces because the game has absolutely no solution for keeping the repetition fresh. Which is why the last 6-8 hours of the game were among the most disappointing things I've ever played.

Which is precisely why it's so frustrating. If I'm honest, I'd probably score the game somewhere in the range of a 6/10. In other words, very middle of the pack. But the reason I frequently talk about it as though it's a way lower score than that is because I can see the ways the game could have been an all-timer, and it's absolutely maddening that the devs made some of the choices they did.

Load Our Last Save? Rorie? Yes please.

Rorie just pulling the trigger without thinking, getting the bad ending is very on-brand.

I had two problems with Deathloop. 1.: The quest where you needed a certain voice never told me where to find it, so I had to google. 2.: The game did not give you enough interesting rewards. It was fun to check out what happens in eaach place in each timelime - and how they sometimes connect to each other. But trinkets stops being interesting quite fast.

Oh cool, I love this series!

interesting. You have a dissenting opinion but didn't state it like reddit in that it wasn't vitriolic hate lol. Though Reddit can be good too, just using it as an unfair joking example. Can you explain the parts that worked and didn't more? for starters, I love stealth so I'm guessing even repetitive locations or mission structure won't matter to me. I found MGSV so fun even though you get the same locals, cause I chose millions of ways to fool guards and entry points etc. That said I took soo long to warm up on hitman due to the open nature for some reason and liking sneaking and less sandbox out in the open stuff, so I have my weird hiccups. If this game is just dishonored 3 like then ill love it. I'm not buying yet since I heard it will be on game pass on one of this site's forums (I assume that's a rumor)

@hellbrendy: I learned about the voice thing through listening to a recording of Charlie being interviewed by Julianna. From there I inferred that she interviewed them all and listened to the guards conversations until I figured out where it was going to be

@hellbrendy: Yes, this was a big part of it for me too. Once you get a few good weapons and some decent mods I basically stopped picking things up and doing sidequests. I also really wish there was a unique shotgun somewhere!

Feel like the main theme of this series was for old games someone hadn't touched for years. This seems way too recent.

@topcyclist: I know I'm not @therealturk but I would say I agree with what they've said. To me, DL was a massive waste of potential.

I should start at the top by saying that I think this game was designed with console in mind. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more on PS5 instead of PC.

In terms of specific issues, I think that a big issue is that it's just incongruent in its design. I'm also a big stealth fan and don't mind revisiting locales (I love Hitman and all the other modern Arkane games), but they load you up on arsenal so heavily (and incentivize gearing up through quests, dialogue, loot system, etc) that stealth really isn't required. Sometimes it will make things a bit quicker, but is honestly not as fun as melting through the legions of AI with massive shotguns.

On the note of AI - it's some of the dumbest I've ever played against. I think this is because it's designed with the slow turning of a thumbstick in mind. On PC, you can practically run circles around the enemies in combat - if you're handy with a mouse you can headshot most enemies from any range with even your starting weapon (and in the starting mission, they immediately tip you off on how to unlock the armory and weapons that are sufficient to carry for the rest of the game). Your extremely loud gunfire also only alerts enemies in the same "area", which doesn't really make sense given that the levels are really not so big. Feel free to indiscriminately machine gun down an area only for guards ~50 meters away have no idea you're there. I think the game would have been much improved if you could carry more powers and less guns, but then it wouldn't fit their vision for PVP as well.

The story was a big letdown - really cool ideas and really cool setting, but there is no time to ever get a feel for anything. I don't feel I really understood most of the visionaries or their motivations apart from being smart and rich. Everything is a hodgepodge. I feel like I somehow remember more about those Twins from the first level or two of Dishonored 1 than I do about any of the visionaries, and I haven't played that for like 10 years.

All in all I think their scope kinda fucked them - the multiplayer thing (while cool) was a huge waste of resources imo. It was always destined to die after week or so, and constrained a lot of the other design (different level layout, smarter AI, etc.).

Also, from a Giant Bomb perspective, I was irritated by how hard Danny went to bat for this, on Twitter as well. He has obviously formed friendly relationships with the folks at Arkane from doing NoClip, and was REALLY drinking the Kool-Aid on this one, imo. Taste is subjective and all that, but as a big fan of the studio and these type of games it was a big shortfall.

tl;dr

• AI is too easy
• Guns are too good
• Stealth not required
• Too many characters, not enough getting to know them
• Scrap the multiplayer
• It's linear as hell, even if it doesn't appear to be. It's like solving a Rubik's cube while reading a guide on how to solve a Rubik's cube

All this said if you can get it on sale, you might have fun! No need for pitchforks on Reddit, but a huge bummer for me personally.

@johnrabbit:

I think we talked about this in the video! I'm not sure, it might've been in the pre-recorded part of this. This is definitely one of the more recent games to show up in this series but since I had to put it on pause when my video card died I thought it was appropriate. I'll dig up some older stuff going forward.

@lase: I think I agree with most of your main points here. It definitely felt too easy on PC and once you have a few good weapons there's no real point in expanding your gun horizon, so to speak. I still really liked it a lot from a conceptual standpoint! It's one of the few games that really grabbed me this year.

@rorie: Oh, but there is! Supershifty is locked behind a two part game in Karl's Bay. Fathoms of Lament is open in the evening.

@lase: I agree with you on pretty much every point you made. I still had fun with this game, but for all the reasons you listed, I think this is weakest of Arkane's games so far. As for the part about Danny...I think the reasons you give behind it are unfair. Looking at the general critical reception to the game, it has garnered a LOT of praise all around and has gotten multiple perfect or near-perfect review scores, as well as being high in the running in GOTY talk.

While I am definitely baffled at how this game actually achieved that kind of response considering how underwhelming it really is, Danny is clearly not the only one who has strong positive feelings towards the game. It's possible he just genuinely really loves it.

@killem_dafoe: Yeah, you're right - I don't mean to paint Danny in a bad light or paint his enjoyment as fake. I just recall him mentioning design discussions with Arkane folks, and even got into a disagreement with him on Twitter where he was defending their "risky decisions".

He's obviously a really sharp guy and his time closer to development lets him provide great insight when talking about games, I just felt the defensiveness to some criticisms was coming from a place of "I'm defending my friends' work" rather than "I am defending this work".

Honestly I think it's just a case of bad timing, rolling from doing the Arkane NoClip as a fan/documentarian/entertainer straight into something journalism adjacent (or however you'd catalog GB).