We Talk Over: State of Play (06/02/2022)

@janman How's XIV going? Gotta beat it before XVI. ;)

Extra lame state of play! Super disappointed in horizon VR, and the only big thing shown was SF, and I don't play fighting games :( at least Stray & Callisto Protocol still looks good even tho jess kept calling it dead space...

ROLLERDOME. Yes, please, thank you.

I'm actually surprised Capcom showed a decent SF6 trailer and not another 2 second teaser. RE4 Remake also looks impressive, it seems like the story is going to go in a different direction than the original game. Capcom was the star this State of Play for what it's worth.

Meowm's dead, parkour.

Jess, your brain is fine, Jeff is being obtuse on purpose :)

Final Fantasy XVI looks amazing!!!!

I really hope they don't dial back the goofiness of RE4. I'll be really disappointed if it's not the OG voice actor for Leon too.

Also, FF XVI looks really impressive, but god, that series has totally lost touch with everything I used to love about it.

@siamesegiant said:

It's already confirmed to be Nick Apostolidies from RE2make for Leon. As for the goofiness...based on Village, I'm sure some of it will be there, but not the same level of over-the-top campiness that we got in the original. RE4 is my favorite RE game and one of my favorites of all time, but we'll always have the original (and Capcom is actually very good about not delisting old versions of their games), so I'm excited to see what they decide to do with it.

The Street Fighter 6 logo is definitely an improvement. Having VI in the 6 is pretty slick.

Looking forward to These Arms Are Dildos

I'm disappointed with this State Of Play event, oh well I'm waiting for the proper Xbox and PlayStation's respective Game showcase events in 2022.

Hype as fuck for FF16. Yoshi P!

Yeah, based on everything in the REmake canon to this point, it'd be foolish to expect RE4 to play up its silliness when the original leaned so hard in the other direction. RE2 was a little silly but its silliness felt rooted in a very different sensibility, less doing the best with what they've got and unintentionally digging up some comedy, more knowingly not using all the best takes or even striving for perfection as long as they got something fun/entertaining.

Can't help but be curious how they handle a certain tiny lord on a second pass, though. At a base, instinctual level a remake of RE4 feels like a Dr. J slam dunk but there are some things very core to that game that if taken too seriously - or, maybe, not seriously enough - that could be really difficult to recover from. It feels kinda silly to write this next sentence, but from a certain perspective remaking a game like Resident Evil 4 in the same fashion as the other REmakes is a pretty bold choice. It'll be the first time they're taking on a game that's only obvious flaws are as much victims of time and evolving gameplay conventions as actual issues with its design.

Can't wait to see/hear more, if only because I've got this weird feeling that this project is gonna be harder to pull off that it seems!

Please put respect on Randy Savage's name

Nothing in this State of Play looked interesting. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded. The RE4 remake, I guess, but I'd much rather have a RE:CV remake... Also please stop with all the Marvel bullshit.

I like Jess so much and I don't think there's anyone I've ever disagreed with more on pretty much every single gaming opinion.

I also think Horizon is too colorful - like it's not just green, it's like, hyper-saturated, over-bright green that's just too much! And now they're asking you to strap that to your face???

I was hyped for all of this. The indy games look cool, but damn the big titles dropped here? BANGERS. RE4 looks more creepy and still overly melodramatic, Street Fighter 6 looks so freakin' heavy and sick, and FF16 looks NUTS. God, both SF6 and FF16 look nuts, which are two franchises I haven't felt love for in a long time.

The game kinda explains it...you really need it to look that bright since the machines are literally perfectly fixing the planet causing it to terraform with the lowered fossil fuel burning and other stuff that otherwise would make the planet less pretty. If you look at the earth and the idea of it with few humans remember how it would look vs now. I get that people don't like it but It's a point where ill take it to help push the narrative rather than the feelings of those playing. Kinda like how GOT had violent scenes and kept doing them knowing their popularity grew and the same said scenes were causing people to hate the show as it's not a real nice thing to look at...it pushed the narrative they're trying to tell so in that case if it's not harming anyone I'm ok with it. The same goes for the gaudy look of outfits or the I assume insensitive use or liberal influence of cultures some state online to be bad taste...I'm not sure I agree with that but again it's to each person to decide. The game is also diving deep into sci-fi, and people don't like that, thou'd say it always looked sci-fi with robot animals in all but I guess people hoped it was just a simple world with dino robots and anachronistic people, and that's it. Do missions call it a day? For a flagship title, they are taking a big risk IMO and straying away from simple after only 2 games. Very surprising. Soon I expect people to look at Horizon's series like they do Kingdom hearts in that horizon 6 will be so far gone, people will hate it without even playing it due to how removed the story is from the roots, whether that's fair or not who knows.

@av_gamer: why do or how do we live in a world that capcom of all places is turning around from failure after failure of not giving fans what they want to capcom going...ok i guess we can make good games...power stone 2 remaster coming soon...streetfighter that looks good and different...good resident evil games that somehow feed new and old fans while keeping harsh i dont enjoy most things critics at bay with inventive ideas...overall i hope other studios do the same.

Excited for stray and resident evil 4!

Glad to see all the big FF summons there. They look gorgeous. But that combat.. did Final Fantasy fully transform into Devil May Cry here?

The Callisto Protocol look like a dope Dead Space, with a better title this time around.

Rollerdrome, cool idea, but i don't think it looks very appealing personally. Very sterile environments without much going on. Random enemies standing around waiting to be shot down, the wall-ride doesn't look like it connects, your character just kinda gets glued to it and perpetually moved forwards instead of slowly dropping altitude.

Stray could be awesome given it's taking place in a Kowloon Walled City-like city, which is a fascinating environment.

As for 'street fighter going open world' I bet that it's mostly going to be one of those hub-worlds where you can walk up to opponents or certain other interactive objects that used to be menu-items. But it's nice to see them to go for an actual city as hub this time around, instead of those smaller hubs that never feel like they are worth exploring.

Finally, as a dutch guy i have to give props to Season for it's bike-usage. Clearly the open world vehicle that we need in games.

Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West have years of hard-work from numerous people, craftsmanship and scientific research contributing to their character models, animation, physics and even AI.

When a game like HZ is recognized, science and engineering behind them is funded and recognized.
When The Stanley Parable is recognized, a good writer is recognized.

I've made my decision about which is more important.
You make yours.

@nodima: Yeah, I agree, it'll be really interesting to see what exactly they decide to do with the content of RE4. I actually think its gameplay and encounter design holds up completely though. It's still a super tight and responsive shooter with lots of nuances to the combat, and they really need to nail that for this remake. Time will tell!

@s5n8k3: Huh? I would rather play Stanley Parable any day of the week over HZD, but it has nothing to do with who worked on it or who is being recognized. And scientific lol really? I just find the whole thing endlessly bland, and I'm a fan of Assassin Creeds and BOTW and you name it. That kind of game is my favorite. Those games are not. I don't care how many people worked on them. And, yeah, I think the characters are incredibly overdesigned and kinda ugly. VB and folks like me aren't the only ones. Alex Navarro was saying the exact same thing on Nextlander on Thursday. It's not knee jerk contrarianism, especially given the more tepid (but still very good!) response the second game got.

@beggary: Read about:

-Surface modeling

-Mesh processing

-NURBS

-Mesh deformation

See if you can figure out the math. It's cool

It's science. Decima engine is Guerrilla's in-house product. The technology is proprietary and confidential, most likely.

https://darik.news/usa/health/a-look-at-how-the-decima-engine-has-evolved-graphically.html

My favorite scholar on the topic:

https://dl.acm.org/profile/82258908657

My favorite professor's course:

http://www-labs.iro.umontreal.ca/~bmpix/teaching/6113/2019/

My favorite Sony announcements lately have been the ones assuring me that I won't need to buy a PlayStation.

And this is part of the curiosity, right? So much of the design is built around that - honestly - one of a kind sorta tank, sorta not control over Leon. Watching Abby play RE4 a couple years ago, the showdown early in the cathedral where Ashley is the most vulnerable and most first run players will have to take advantage of their entire arsenal is pretty damn reliant on how cumbersome the player movement is.

Even more abstract levels like the hill villages after first meeting the merchant, or of course the entirety of the mercenary island in the end, in many ways draw all of their tension from how rigidly Leon moves around the maps or clumsily he operates his weapons. Thinking of RE2, they found the original game's tension without replicating its clumsiness by emphasizing the tight spaces and asking the zombies' shambles to create the variables poor camera angles used to.

But that was, more than anything, a setting that by its very nature created a sense of being trapped in a terrible situation. RE4 rarely dealt with that specific feeling - though when it did, it did so pretty fantastically - with the transition to fairly bespoke areas that felt distinctly separate from each other.

Even thinking about all that might be thinking too hard, though - if you've ever watched someone who's played too much RE4, it's quickly obvious that it's signature set piece prior to the title card is more of a timed puzzle than an action problem. Thinking about it abstractly, you then realize how much the nature of Leon's movement lends itself to a first time player getting scatterbrained and panicked. So what does that scenario look like through a modern lens?

These are just a few of the things I'm really curious about!

@nodima: I really couldn't have said a lot of that better myself. It's something that a lotta people don't understand about RE4 - the game is built around the tank controls. If Leon were suddenly able to strafe, most of the enemies, especially in the early game, would be completely trivial because their attacks are mostly vertical swings, and circle strafing around them would be ridiculously easy. RE5 kinda solved this by making the enemy attacks much faster, but it wasn't a perfect fix. So I'm sure the enemies will be much more aggressive in this remake.

Also your point about RE2 remake using the zombie shambles to make the player miss and evoke the same fear as the fixed camera perspective as the original game was spot on!

Look, FFXVI looks really neat, but I really need to know what the hell that game is. What was even happening in the kaiju battles? I did not like the combat of either FFXV or SOPFFO, so maybe it just won’t be for me.

@topcyclist: Wait what!?!? They're re-releasing Powerstone?

"Leon's brown sheepskin leather bomber jacket appears with permission from Schott NYC."

Dang. Leon's got money to blow I guess. That's a $1500 coat he's about to get all bloody.

@big_denim: Yes, it is info from a leak that they plan to release a bunch of games. One of them was power stone 2 assumed with online play. Besides me no one cheered lol.