I can't talk complete trash to Andromeda since the combat mechanics were so goddamn fun, but yes. It was a let down

 

Anthem dead.

Oh no. Who could have possibly predicted this? Too bad, so sad.

 

Playstation State of Play in 2 hours.

 

Wasn't Anthem basically dead on arrival?

Are they supposed to be announcing anything of note or is just game trailers?

 

Essentially yeah. They spent 6 years waffling, building some stuff out, scrapping it entirely and starting over, up until an EA exec sat down for a demo and went "Yeah, this is all trash, but this one part is great. So y'all go focus on that and get something worthwhile done, kthx.", and they spent the next 8 months cobbling together something for release.

The game launched and while the core gameplay loop, flying around and shooting bad guys, was legitimately great, literally everything else in the game ranged from pretty bad to atrocious. About a month later, the playerbase was effectively dead.

 

Biggest announcement from the State of Play is FF7R Intergrade. Basically FF7R with ps5 polish (graphics, load times, qol stuff) which is a free upgrade, they're also releasing a Yuffie... interlude episode? You play as her teamed up with some other Wutai staff dude.

Moogle Yuffie is adorable.

Kena got a release date! (Yaaaaay) It's in August (waaaaaa).

Sifu is a game i hadn't seen before. Looks like Japanese John Wick? Pretty cool.

 

Interesting.

Article attributes success of Jedi: Fallen Order and failure of Anthem to the reason for the pivot to a more single player focus for Dragon Age 4

https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/0...-into-a-more-single-player-focused-experience

 

Wait, people are still dumb enough to think DA4 is gonna be worth enough to worry about it?

 

Yes. I can't fucking wait to play it and party in the Tevinter Imperium. Here's hoping it's half as good as Inquisition was.

 

I dunno what the consensus was on DA:I, but I mostly really liked it on a gameplay level. Dorian was also probably my fav all time DA character. I also loved the dragon warrior class (whatever it was called).

Kinda just thought they didn't go far enough with the RPG elements, but otherwise pretty great (i wanted more control over building the keep and have it matter).

Totally get how everything past DA:I inspires apathy though.

 

Having recently played DAI, I gotta ask: really?

Maps were beautiful, you'd have to be an idiot to deny this. The whole setup for the presumed next game, goddamn but that's cool too. And the dragons, yes--really the first time the series lived up to "Dragon Age" in the title. Pretty much everything else sucked ass.

There was one single interesting quest in the game (Halamshiral Palace) and even that was burdened with bullshit MMO collectibles. Most main story quests were painfully straightforward. I dunno man, I just didn't feel any synergy between the presentation, the way dialogue was played out (at times with ridiculously immersion-breaking delays) and the information delivered in cutscenes/dialogue.

The lootgame was laughably weak, but that's par for the course for DA. The crafting system entirely replaces any effort required into making interesting items that drop at appropriate points (looting a lvl 16 shield when you're level 8 or a lvl 8 staff when you're level 16). Armor/weapon model variety was technically present but in reality matters little because you don't have options: you'll craft the most powerful piece you can, always.

Combat was like they thought "hey, if we take DA2 combat, add a gazillion fucking visual and particle effects so that you can't see wtf is going on, completely gut companion tactics, limit hotkeys to 8--including on PC--and slow it all down a bit then it'll be more tactical". What about abilities tho? Well, we'll move some stuff around (Haste, classic Necromancy spell), give 'em a few new rad moves... but then we disallow players to allocate attribute points (for some reason) and instead shove that part of class building into the MMO crafting system.

I am not even going to comment on the MMO/Ubisoft collectibles vomited all over the maps other than to say they were dogshit.

Ultimately though, the element I despise the most is the War Table. You really have to experience it for yourself to see just how much it is at odds with what DAI claimed to be. There are no words to express this--whose inspired idea was it to put a literal mobile gatcha game mechanic with increasing forced wait times into a triple-A singleplayer RPG? Gating main story missions behind this unbelievable bullshit, only to flip the whole thing in the end so hard that the player can end up with so many power points so as to make the currency meaningless.

It's not like there's no merit to something in the vein of this mechanic: make it a mini-game, DO NOT PUT IN 24 HOUR FORCED WAIT TIMES, calculate the currency to be limited and force the player to allocate limited resources like in a miniaturized, stripped-down version of tile turn-based strategies like Civilization. Keep main story quests separate. The player has to take one of X paths, and in the end can maybe unlock powerful, class-specific endgame gear, maybe gain access to a secret boss encounter, a cool-ass hidden upgrade to Skyhold, some sort of easter-gg that would require a ridiculously specific sequence of choices on the War Table throughout a playthrough... I can totally see the possibilities. What actually ended up in the game is congealed genlock cum. I don't give a shit if there's a mod for it (couldn't get it to work anyway), BioWare put this into the game in that state and that's indefensible, period.

Overall, a game half as good as DAI would be some utterly aggravating abomination filled with collectibles and fetchquests that would force the player to wait 24hrs after every 12hrs of play time.

 

Half of shit is still shit.

 

I loved Inquisition almost as much as the first game, and it's far better than the second one. In fact, I'd say the Descent is probably my favorite piece of Dragon Age lore and I loved that dungeon crawl. Probably have 1,000 hours in that game and I'm gonna start up another playthrough soon. But yes, the mod that fixed the war table wait time is a huge QOL fix.

 

Inquisition was a great game. Fuck off.

But yeah big lol @ wartable. I've said it before and I'll say it again to anyone playing DAI, reset the PS4 clock to fast forward and rewind time (thus completing the entire thing in 15 minutes).

 

I wouldn't call DAI a great game, but it was definitely pretty solid. Visual design was great, core gameplay loop was very solid, builds and build customization was well done, the characters were generally pretty good, and the main story beats ranged from decent to actually quite good.

It just also suffered from shoe-horned in facebook game bullshit nobody asked for or wanted, single-player MMO aspirations with a number of huge sprawling zones with hours of meaningless "content" (see: collect 10 bear asses) that exist solely to pad out the runtime, and some Bethesda-tier bug issues. None of that is entirely deal-breakers, but it drags down the finished product by quite a lot.

That said, every indicator is that Dragon Age 4 is going to be total trash. The development has been rocky, to say the least, and Bioware's been on a pretty consistent downward trend for the last decade, ever since the release of ME2. It's certainly possible they'll buck the trend and magically deliver something decent, but it's all but guaranteed DA4 is gonna be a complete mess in the same vein as Anthem or Cyberpunk.

 

Can't wait to have fun with that giant mess

 

I mean, the place Bioware always used to shine was in single player games. As soon as they started worrying about multiplayer stuff went sideways. As is, I'm tentatively hopeful for these new games and may even get them on release if they look promising enough.

Because god, I want to hope if EA has realised that single player titles can still sell maybe we'll go back to getting some solid titles that don't have production split between modes.

 

I think you can see the passing of the torch to the 'next generation' in the quality of their games, unfortunately.

 

AC: Valhalla is the first AC since Black Flag I didn't platinum.

The game can go honenstly suck on my nutsack.

As much as I wasn't enjoying the pacing of the storytelling and the utter ridiculous amount of bloat (this coming from someone who couldn't give a fuck if this plat took me 150 hours) splooged pointlessly all over the map, I was still gonna get the platinum in my own time, taking it slow...

Then the bugs started happening. All the time.

This game is probably buggier than C77. At the point where a 'Mystery' bugged where I couldn't talk to a lady to progress the quest, ergo stopping me from clearing that region, I wanted to hurl something at my TV.

Grrr... sooooo fucking mad I got dicked out of a trophy.

 

Fucking Hell Control is a good game. I'm not even mad i bought the ultimate edition for $20 on sale a month before it went free on ps+, I'm happy they get my pittance for this.

Gotta say I'm glad i didn't play it on ps4 though. The framerate issues friends told me about would have killed it for me. On ps5 you can play it at 4k60fps, or 4kRTX30fps. I'm sure the latter looks really pretty, but 60fps makes my dick hard SHRUG