Quick Look: We Happy Few

yay!

I hate the look of this. The cartoony art style is so off-putting.

Edit: Also I love QLs where Dan really hates a game because he's so vocal about it lol. Like this, the Metro QL and Drawn to Death.

Well, it was fun to see Dan go Stone Cold on that sleeping guard, but then he woke up despite Dan throwing bottles at him. Yeah that's bad game design.

This game looks BAD. Can you believe they were charging $80 for the base game at one point‽

I Unhappy One

I think there's definitely an audience for this, but Dan isn't part of that audience.

That being said, it's clearly still a bit of a technical mess with a lot of systems that just aren't working the way they're intended. Bit of a shame, really.

This seems like the anti-Cuphead. It had a good e3 showing that got a lot of interest because of the aesthetic but it turns out it kinda sucks. Bummer because I was looking forward to playing it, but I'm not touching this thing with a ten foot pole now.

I think Dan is spot on in that this game feels like a Bioshock-like; and a lot of this final product seems to be a direct result of the devs saying "Oh crap, we never really understood what our audience wanted and we had to scramble to do it all over from scratch, and now we have a rushed, unfocused, unpolished result."

The art style and thematic vibe (the government keeps the populace sedated with mind-altering drugs) was one of this this game's greatest promises, and sadly, it seems to have all disappeared in a puff of smoke. Also, Dan's criticisms of this game are FAR more eloquent than his criticsm of Metro Last Light (which boiled down to him yelling "I don't like it! I don't like it! I don't know why but I don't like it!") and the Drawn to Death QL which, while not off-the-mark, was him basically yelling "Nerds! Highschool! Highschool nerds!"

EDIT: Waaiiiiit there's an in-game location called "Ravensholm"? Is this Half-life 3?!

I don't understand much about video compression and stuff like that, but the video quality gets really rough every time something on screen moves. It's almost like watching a video that was recorded in 480p. Or maybe it's just the game that is really muddy?

Understandable that they wouldn't trash the survival game elements, when those are such a big part of the game, but that still kills just about any interest that I have for this game. Especially so, when it's priced so high.

I like the aesthetic and setting, story could go either way. Dan's criticisms feel so nitpicky and we don't really get a good look at how he doesn't like the gameplay in this quicklook. There's probably more to it to make him complain so loudly at such seemingly small things. I got it about the faces, no need it to harp on it so much. Those drunk guards were obviously non responsive narrative reasons, if they were meant to be alert they'd act like the enemies we see later. I could see the crafting getting tedious, but I still don't know how to feel about this game.

Angry, frustrated Dan is my favorite Dan.

Ugh, this hurts.

I know literally everyone says this, but goddamn that trailer was so good. I love the 1960's mod fashion look. I loved the cartoony modeling. It felt like someone turned a Anthony Burgess novel into a game -- and that's the kind of story/vibe/aesthetic that games have not been good at conveying at all.

And then it was a survival game.

Which, you know, those are fun. I actually like those kinds of games a lot. But c'moooon. Don't waste that really cool aesthetic you have working for you on a survival game.

And now it seems like their make-good on that is still burdened with the inner workings of a survival game, and just, man.

"Dump at your own risk"

So Dan likes this game? Bit confused

Well, that is disappointing. Maybe the developers/publishers should stop marketing their games as something they aren't? This game absolutely looked like a story-driven singleplayer experience, in the vein of Bioshock, with an awesome logo. And the disappointment people had when it first was revealed that is was a survival game was justified. The developers tried to turn the ship around but it was clearly too little, too late.

Wasted potential.

The most shocking thing about this bad looking game is the price tag, holy shit

@pontoon_yacht: No, totally. I remember how awesome the first E3 showing was. The direction they ultimately took with the game, right from when it first hit Early Access or whatever, wasn't what I wanted out of it.

This game has been a real rollercoaster of emotions for me. From excitement at that first trailer, to disappointment to learn that it was a not-very-good crafting game*, to optimism upon hearing the developers were retooling the game into the narrative game implied from that trailer, back to disappointment to hear that the final product is a not good mash-up of genres with many technical limitations, and with a last twist of shock to hear that its a $60 game.

*I'm fine with a good one, but all indications were that it was pretty half-baked in early access.

@pontoon_yacht: Took the words out of my mouth. This would have been served so well as a bespoke 10 hour story and setpiece driven experience.

Is the name of the main character on purpose, or just a coincidence? Because if that’s a deliberate reference to Cpt. Arthur J.M Hastings OBE, I could maybe look past some of the jank and give this a shot...

So a mixed review from Dan.

I'm another one of the camp who was looking forward to this solely based on the original trailer. Shame.

I knew when they said they were delaying it to "do it right" that they wouldn't, they couldn't, scrapping the previous design and making an entirely new game, based on the promise of the initial trailer and the intro of the Early Access version, was never an option.

It's that Dead Island trailer but for a new generation. I kinda figured it would end up like this after they pulled it out of early access before release after the criticism of the difference in what the trailer showed and what it actually is. A kinda janky survival game(though I suppose janky is kinda inherent to the genre at this point) with a good style with some story stuff bolted on, pleasing neither crowd particularly well. The only shocking thing personally is the price tag, thought this would be like 30 dollars max.

What a surprise gearbox involved in another terrible game. Why does anyone still let these guys be involved in game design.

Jesus christ, this game is just a travesty. I know it's a fairly small team, but I got Contrast when the PS4 first released and although it was a fairly janky game it was at least interesting enough to make me complete it. This game looks so ill considered just on a fundamental level.

You could say it is due to the gameplay switch, but this game has had 5 years of development and they are still using the assets they had from back then so they clearly had to rework systems primarily. You could also say that it was overambitious, but again 5 years of dev time with a fair sized team and strong backing from Sony they should be able to create some sort of cohesion, or at least fill in the glaring holes that were being shown, rapid fire, during this quick look.

Seems like the studio is just incredibly troubled.

Oh, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

This game. Also Monty Python and the Holy Grail

It's a small thing, but that part with the ladder is a brutal indictment of this game. To have a game fade to black during a transit between locations that would require animating the character, but not fade out when making the same transit in a way that wouldn't require extra animation? Either the developers were straight-up lazy, or they just sighed and shoved the game out the door in a state that they could reasonably pass off as "finished" so they could just get the obviously doomed project off the books and start on something else.

This sincerely seems like the worst AAA game of the year and the fact that Joy is, according to the devs, supposed to be a stand-in for modern anti-depressants is gross and infuriating

Yet another game that we were shown at E3 looking extremely good and promising, then a total failure at launch. And $60? Let me spend that on a completely fantastic game such as Monster Hunter: World, thank you very much.

@johnymyko: It's common in Youtube as well. I also don't know much. But videos I have in H.265 tend to look like garbage with lots of movement as well as game recordings. Twitch handles it well in a lot of cases I've noticed.

I love how Dan is trying not to call the devs lazy (I mean I get it, games are a hard business) right when he gets to a dingy, rickety bridge to a place called "Ravensholm". But come on. That's a little on the nose and maybe just a tad lazy.

@ripelivejam: Or even a really focused 2-hour "walking sim" driven by a strong narrative. The world they set up in that trailer seemed really rad, and it doesn't seem to shine through at all in the final product.

It was kind of hard to tell WHY dan hated the game so much at first (sameface characters isn't really a problem if the rest of the game is good), but god damn, it seems like such a waste of a good aesthetic and setting. Calling the developers 'lazy' is pretty misinformed and assumes the worst of people that give up a lot to make things they love. But man, the game has a no mans sky level of disconnect between its apparent goals and the output.

While I definitely agree that this seems terrible and the early access version also sucked I think Dan repeatedly saying "a survival thing is not what people wanted" from this game like the early access version was is at least somewhat inaccurate. They were pretty clear about that being the kind of game they were making when they started their kickstarter and thousands of people backed it. So some people wanted that.

Fans of the genre, 6.8

@steveurkel: I don't hate them like everyone else does, but they've made some less than stellar decisions as of late. Though it sounds harsh, maybe they should stick to Borderlands. (Or maybe this was all a carefully crafted lead-up to Blands 3 and we're ready to love Gearbox again, hmmm...)

I have no intention of playing this game; I haven't since it was revealed to be a survival game. I think that the vast majority of Dan's criticism seems to be dead-on.

That being said, I think that Dan going on about how this "wasn't what people wanted" feels like some weird grudge. When it was first revealed that the original trailer was misleading, and that the game was something else entirely, that complaint was totally valid. They made the game out to be one thing, while it was actually something dramatically different.

But, it came out in Early Access two years ago. We've all known that it's a survival game for two years. I think that continuing to criticize the game for not being what we thought it was back in 2015 is unreasonable, and a little petty.

dan's passive aggro sacrastic 'environmental storrytelling' delivery made my day

When I heard Dan describing it on the Beastcast I thought he was being overly harsh on it. Seeing it though, it seems like he was bang on. A great idea squandered by a mismatch of game design and then retrofitting the game to be something different to what was initially advertised.

I'm so torn on this game. I hear it may have a good story delivered by some great performances but a survival stealth game is a hard enough sell for me, nonetheless one that seems pretty janky. I'm no stranger to playing games with frustrating gameplay for a good story but this might be too much even for me.

Also I love Vinny to death but him playing devil's advocate to everything Dan was saying when Dan was the only one who played it was a bit grating. That "for you" response was frustrating.

So do you guys think Dan likes this game?

This was the first time I ever played a first-person game because they're normally not my cup of tea. The first couple hours or so, I thought the combat and everything felt really bad simply because I was bad at the controls.

However, 5+ hours in and listening to Dan on the Beastcast, I realized that a lot of issues here are just inherent to the game. So many random character/environmental assets will be floating in the sky, combat feels really redundant and unoriginal, random and incredibly long load screens all of the place (you can walk forward a few steps, get a load screen, then walk forward another few steps and get a load screen), and the storytelling elements are sometimes just still-images with VO, which was all really disappointing.

The game wasn't enjoyable enough for me to continue, which is a bummer because when I looked up story spoilers online I really thought the narrative was cool. Everything just feels like such a chore: quests, combat, back-tracking. Had too much hope for this.

Quick Looks where Dan is exasperated the entire time because of how much he doesn't like a game are very, very not fun to watch.

@please_love_me: Vinny was just poking fun at Dan at that point.

There's a lot of talk about a disconnect between the game that was advertised and the one the developers strove to make, but putting aside the stylishness of the trailer, how does it make sense for there to be thirst meters in a game set in modern fucking civilization?