one-armed dwarf

The lack of content could be down to problems developing with the engine tho. But it's all conjecture really.

Yeah, they're heavily indebted now to their vision for earlier games and decisions made while developing them. Skyrim is built on Fallout 3 which has some Oblivion in it etc.

It's like one of them Russian dolls type things init. They can't really roll all that stuff back. It's a really tough situation but I think the reception to 76 will be the wake up call that will start a big change. Hopefully.

No they're not, that's my argument too.

There's a huge opportunity cost to taking the time to making a whole new engine. Just ask Square Enix who lost entire projects to Crystal Engine and never releases Versus XIII.

Open world are difficult I imagine cause you're probably not guaranteed to have your design vision accomodated by off the shelf stuff like Unreal. Which would explain why BGS has been battering the Morrowind engine into weird shapes for such a long time.

But they own ID software. Those guys are making an open world game right now and it looks great. A little simplistic compared to TES, but maybe an ID-tech TES could work out somehow

BSG's thing is having open world with way more variables than stuff like Witcher or BOTW. There's way more knobs and things  to fiddle with in  Bethesda games. Being able to pick up a cheese wheel and put it on the highest tip of the Imperial tower. Having a room in your house dedicated entirely to storing watermelons. Storing all your best weapons inside glass containers and leaving them there. Having the game retain that state throughout your entire playthrough.

But what value is any of this really?

A thing I heard somewhere about BGS's software is it allows way more inside meddling of different values in a way that's not strictly considered safe design practice. Variables that should be declared private and immutable have ways of being overridden and each iteration of TES and Fallout has added more and more ways of overriding what used to be protected data. This could all be horseshit but it would explain the gradual decline in the software quality and the unexpected consequences we've seen with stuff like 76. Maybe their games are "too open" and are starting to become too fragile to really innovate upon.

There's a term for this: technical debt. When you've gotten such a buildup of technical problems that they paralyze you from building out new features. Often cause by sticking closely to old tech for too long or having a messy QA and release cycle.

RDR is interesting cause it manages to be a complex open world but it doesn't have all these same things to twiddle with. It's very tightly curated. I dont like that game at all but I wonder if that's more the direction BGS should go in. Not all the way but a little bit at least and put all the complexity into something actually valuable other than building a bridge of paint-brushes from the Imperial city all the way to Cheydinal.

Like I'm pretty sure you couldn't do any of that stuff in Morrowind. So I say again, make Morrowind 2 dammit

Edit I just read that the engine they use now is an updated version of tech they've been using since the late 90s ?

For what it's worth I heard Alex Navarro  raise the same issues with Odyssey. He is a big fan of the series and isn't lacking in integrity.

As for Jim, sensationalist? Yes. Click-bait? Sure. Hyperbole? Probably

Lies? Nah.

Personally I miss when sidequests where optional. For me that's against what the definition of the term implies. Or at least what it used to imply before.

It kind of ruined Nier Automata for me in route C. Didn't do sidequests and had to drop to easy cause I was level-gated out of beating enemies.

The thing you linked isn't a lie. Some people find gating progress behing sidequests a form of grinding. You can't call a thing which can be relativized to our individual preferences a lie.

Well I dunno, you made the claim and I'm not seeing the evidence so ?

I'm no Jim fan or anything, just putting that out there. Saying something is full of lies without explaining why is a bit too "fake news" for me to take seriously.

For me personally I think Danny is a bit compromised. The access he gets to studios is great but I think that hinders his ability to be a truly independent and/or critical voice. The stuff he does now feels more like a type of PR than something vigorous.

What are these Jim Sterling lies?

I would read your TES nerd rant, Sly

I think BSG open world just feels dated. Witcher III characters and story outshone Fallout's. BOTW has its amazing world layout. RDR also has a lot of the hard edges that a game like Morrowind used to have and isn't half bad at putting bits of narrate into its world for you to find.

It's a come to Jesus moment for BGS I think. I really think they should go for a throwback style game and do something more dice-rolley personally. Something weird that takes a long time to get into and understand. Morrowind 2.

My finger is on the trigger for that digital deluxe edition. I hate how Capcom do that tho. Basic baiting people with the super expensive editions

Playing some REVII right now. I reckon they could put a FP camera into RE2 and do VR if they wanted. I bet the RE2 codebase is full of REVII stuff still.

You are at the end

With the whole black levels thing it seems it can do black just fine outside the station. But when you go into that hallway you can see how it's pitch black at first but then turns to a milky blueish grey hue which kills the atmosphere.

If you watch this old build its way darker. Maybe they thought they went too dark or something

Edit : I watched some more of that video and some screens are just a black screen with nothing on it ?

Darker than DOOM 3

I suddenly find myself reconsidering my all digital ways.

I just don't have space for physical media. Can't carry all that shite around when I'm moving house/jobs/country.

There's nothing to work on this, right? All these games are already available on PS4 and xone.

I wrote a bit in the RE2 thread but speaking as someone who's been cynical on this remake I think they've pretty much nailed it here. As a statement of intent for what they're doing it's really solid. I wasn't fully sure I was going to buy this or KHIII but the decision is made for me now.

It's got the opression and the feeling of powerlessness and claustrophobia. It's got multiple paths you can take and a general feeling that you aren't just been led along (there are some scripted moments but not like RE6). It's feeling like it's continuing the good work of REVII and correcting the course for this series which is making games like they used to make on PS1 but with a modern twist.

It's easy to see why they did the 30 main thing I think. Trying to create that trade show hype but around a downloadable demo. I reckon it paid off.

My main issues are that the dark scenes look like grey fog. Not very scary. Leon talks too much, reminds me of Deadly Premonition a little bit.

Also no music outside of some ambient stuff. No safe room music. Bummer. Apparently you can get the old soundtrack as part of the digital deluxe edition. Sneaky Capcom. They did the same with DMC ?

I also wonder if it's maybe too violent? Maybe I'm just too old or a bit Mary Whitehouse but that scene with the jaw and the sinew got into too real territory a little bit for me ?

You have fewer licenses due to selecting your role. I wouldn't say it ruins it, you just have to work within your limitations (which makes it much better imo as the characters aren't carbon copies)

What makes it annoying is it's hard to know what license board/job is good for what cause they have such weird names.

They should do an adaptive difficulty where the game just gets harder the more you die. Call it Itagaki mode.

If you stay awake for 2 hours then maybe you can catch it

Can anyone beat my record of 18:33 with 1 death? I reckon not

I played that demo. It starts off in the police station so might be a bit spoilery if you don't want to see that stuff yet.

It's kind of a wild demo content wise. I think you can explore almost all the police station or at least as much of it as I remember. The catch is you don't have much time to see it.

It seems fine. It assuages one of my main concerns which is would the zombos be easy to deal with but I got overwhelmed a lot here. The knife counterattack from REmake is back but here you use the combat knife to do it and it can break (so no buttering zombies to death over and over like in CVX or RE4)

Screenshots

One thing I want to add is I had a very tough time making the game look good on my TV. The dark scenes look grey. My TV is fairly mid to budget range so it's not going to have the highest quality picture. But looking online it sounds like complaints about overly high black levels in HDR are common.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/resident-evil-2-1-shot-demo-releasing-january-11th-to-31st-for-ps4-xbox-one-pc-up-on-psn-xbl-nz.92076/page-16#post-16738470

It can be very passive on a moment to moment basis but I thought XII's combat system was very cool. Setting up clever little macros and letting them go off on enemies. It's really expressive with what you can make it do even within the limits of what was possible with PS2 memory.

It's a really strong idea for a real time RPG combat system that solves all the problems with rubbish party AI that XV has but I've never really seen it used in abother game. Apparently Dragon Age Origins has a similarish system.

A lot of the story stuff in XII is very forgettable tho, like they forget to involve you in it.

I will see the end of Shenmue 1 eventually. After all I beat RDR2, it can't be more boring than that ?

That's just the "prove to us you really want a sequel" tax.

Like DMC4 special edition.

Grinding out enemies until they despawn isn't a good design solution.

Look up blue smelter demon run. Or the run to Sir Alonne. They are harder than the bosses they are guarding.

I guess what I really mean is boss corpse runs. When they put a gauntlet of BS in your way before a boss and make you do it 50 times.

DSII is really bad for this. I never beat Blue Smelter Demon cause of it. Not cause the boss was hard, but cause the run up to it was really difficult and annoying.

The penalty for death better be significant. I'm glad corpse runs are gone as they are rubbish and ruined parts of DSII. But I hope this isn't like Bioshock or something

Everything else sounds excellent.