SolRo  - 2017-03-26
Thanks Trump!
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Old_Zircon - 2017-03-26
David Lynch only dreams of achieving what happens at 15:59-16:10.
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Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2017-03-26
Imo
Big budget games have, generally speaking, sucked, since sometime in the 00's
Perhaps they've become like music. The barrier to entry has been lowered to a tiny fraction of what it was.
When you can crank out *your own* ideas in Unity or Unreal with a tiny team, only the creatively impaired are gonna want to go work as part of a giant messy team / corp.
This is a golden age for creative stuff, its all just indy tho.
Examples of amazing recent indie games to back up my point...
Naissancee
Infinifactory (+ zachtronic industries other amazing games, shenzen IO, spacechem)
Factorio
legend of grimrock (1 and 2)
frozen synapse (2 coming out soon, also)
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SolRo - 2017-03-26 Pretty sure it's just bad management of a big project.
Clearly this game was cranked out as quickly and as cheaply as possible to a set launch date on which it was going to ship no matter what.
Also adding randomly spawning encounters is a terrible idea for a AAA title. It pretty much guarantees issues will happen that QA team will miss.
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Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2017-03-26 BONUS RANT!
Has the general standard for coding and software architecture in games plummeted or something?
Perhaps thats a side-effect of lowering the bar to entry.
I guess the whole stack you have to use has made many things much quicker and easier but also added a lot more complexity and shit to go wrong that devs have no understanding of or control over.
Also you dont need to ship a working product nowadays, u can have 0 day patches and whatnot.
Are all the good programmers just making web-apps for the money?
My favourite example is star citizen, im strangely fascinated by how much of an unadulterated clusterfuck its development is. Trying to develop the game backwards. They have years worth of useless AAA assets and still hardly any basic game mechanics worked out.
Also a bunch of 'old masters' have done kickstarters and made comeback games in Unity, satellite reign, pillars of eternity, torment:tides of numenera.
They are such messes! I cant believe they were able to make Unity fuck up so badly. Especially the inexile guys, the games they wanted to make are sooooooo simple, Unity does all the heavy lifting for them, yet they still made a clunky buggy mess, they obviously have no idea wut they are doin.
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Old_Zircon - 2017-03-26 Honestly the newest console I own is an n64, I don't own a computer newer than 2011 and I really don't care one way or the other about modern gaming.
But I love me a good trainwreck.
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Oscar Wildcat - 2017-03-26 To quote a commentor on Slashdot.
"The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for "intelligence") worship at the altar of youth. I don't know the number of people I've encountered who tell me that by being older, my experience is worthless since all the stuff I've learned has become obsolete. "
If you need heart surgery, would you take a kid fresh out of college, or a twenty year veteran surgeon? If you were facing serious criminal charges, how about a lawyer remotely located in India? But for writing software, apparently you need to be 18 years old by industry standards.
Well, I've written software for a long time, and I can tell you, the stuff I wrote at 25? Best thing I can say about it is, it seemed like a good idea at the time... There is an old saying amongst our people, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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garcet71283 - 2017-03-26 What I find bizarre is how the Mass Effect series is doing everything backwards.
Most franchises want to build on the prior version, adding mechanics and complexity with the assumption that the fanbase played the previous one (a logical assumption for a series with a single story arc). Instead, ME1 was by far the most complex and subjectively the "best" of the series in that it embodied what it originally set out to do better than the sequels. We wanted a successor to KOTOR in an original universe freed from D&D mechanics, and we got one.
What's even stranger (or not, if it's intentional) is that this trend is consistent across the other Bioware licenses, Dragonage being the obvious offender.
While if these were new franchises, each game could be forgiven, but for franchises built on returning players it's hard to tell if it's an intentional artistic decision or just laziness (probably the latter).
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SolRo - 2017-03-26 Probably at some point after ME1 a sleazy guy who doesn't play games showed a PowerPoint slideshow to the board about how simplifying the game 40% would boost sales 10% and the rest is history
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Caminante Nocturno - 2017-03-26
20:20
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garcet71283 - 2017-03-26
It's been bugging me, but I think I figured out why this looks so familiar!
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/DreamworksFace3_8 392.jpg
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Chancho - 2017-03-26
In the case of BioWare, their strength was that the people working there were their audience. They hired designers and writers who really loved RPGs and actively played them. They were real nerds.
Technically, their games were mediocre. They were buggy and often crashed. That was forgiveable to their core audience.
After EA bought them, their core people started trickling away. At this point, it's really not BioWare. It's just an EA label.
Every studio that EA buys dies in five years but can survive in zombie mode. BioWare was sold in 2007. Five years later is 2012. It took five years to make this game, that makes 2017. Right on schedule.
A common critique of this game is that the story and design sucks but the combat is fun. This is where EA excels: physical combat and sports. EA can make great games with humans shooting guns or playing with balls.
That's about all I can say. It's really unfortunate for the early BioWare employees because BioWare was a special nerd space for them. It will be interesting to see if they shut down BioWare Edmonton and what kind of indie scene does or does not happen there.
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StanleyPain - 2017-03-27
I'm about 15 hours into this game and, I dunno...it seems to be people making fun of this game are wearing some mighty rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, because half the weird, awkward shit in this game is really not much different than the weird awkward shit found in the original trilogy.
While I do think the ME trilogy was generally better written than Andromeda, it still had some mighty problematic issues here and there.
I will say this however: the technical problems in this game are pretty mindblowing for a major studio release on this level and the disconnect between the characters in the environments is brutal. Clearly there was one team who designed the aesthetics of the game; the physical locations and alien settings with all of the art design (which is universally fantastic in this game just as it was in the original games), and then some kind of weird FullSail b-squad was brought in to handle the character graphics and animation which is so astoundingly awful that I assume there was little-to-no QA or testing.
As for the game itself, in total: To be honest, despite how far I am into the game, I am still unsure of how I would review it. It's not terrible by any means (despite what all the manbabies on the internet would have you think), but it also has enough weaknesses and weird lapses of design judgement that you kind of have to be in awe of how this much effort and work was treated so indifferently at some point in the production.
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Nominal - 2017-03-27 I've always had my "b-squad" theory when it came to the Deus Ex: HR. There was some smart shit tucked away in side conversations and emails, but they handed the main plot over to some Square-Enix plot-o-matic graduates.
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Bootymarch - 2017-03-27
15:25
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Gmork - 2017-03-27
4:15 had me rolling
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The Mothership - 2017-03-27
bugs are funny, and these bugs are very funny.
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casualcollapse - 2019-07-10
I'm glad I found this
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