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Post by Sarge on Nov 29, 2020 0:19:26 GMT -5
Yeah, I really dug it. Would be really interested in why you fell off of it. The key to my enjoyment of it was quickly recognizing what was filler and what wasn't - I started having way more fun after that.
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Post by Xeogred on Nov 29, 2020 5:22:09 GMT -5
Once the game opened up after the more guided first few hours, it immediately felt too much like another Assassin's Creed to me. Even if the towers were now some moving robo dinosaur things, it was still towers you have to climb to reveal the map.
The side quests and dialogue in towns quickly felt like pointless fluff. This often happens in games, but I remember the random town NPC's looked so downgraded compared to the main characters.
The setting, even with the tint of sci-fi here and there, seemed boring to me.
Early on I was already having to micromanage things in menus with the colored loot and crafting. My tolerance for this is very low thesedays. Makes me realize, it's great Spider-Man had none of this.
Last but not least, I did not like the combat at all. Maybe things change at some point, but for the hours I put into Horizon the game puts a heavy emphasis on stealth. Then when you fight these dinosaur things, they always had some kind of gimmick or a set of weak points to take down almost like a combat puzzle. There is probably only one very specific way to take down most enemies, the game forces you to play by its rules. What this means between the encouraged stealth and the big robot dinosaurs, is that combat was extremely slow and boring for me. In a huge open world game I don't want to be forced to slow down and hide when I'm out exploring or heading towards some waypoint. Then if you get locked into combat, it was like get ready to spend 10+ minutes on this random little encounter alone. I can't recall melee being much of a thing either. This is where something like Ghost of Tsushima completely beats this one out for me, the combat was way more to my liking and never a bother. And if I want some good bow & arrow combat, the modern Tomb Raider's delivered on that too.
Plus, it came out around the same time Breath of the Wild dropped, which was a mindblowing game to me that pulled the rug out from under a lot of the boring Western open world design tropes. BoTW even has towers, loot and crafting, etc, but the way it implemented everything was more unique and it did a hundred other things so well, making things I generally get sick of it other games a non issue here. My biggest criticism of BoTW is that it has the least interesting main story in a Zelda game by miles, especially coming off Skyward Sword which has one of the best to me. But BoTW made up for it in its world design and atmosphere to me. Even felt like a Souls experience at times. Long story short, the comparison was hard to avoid and BoTW felt like a new experience, while Horizon felt like a game I had already played.
I ended up watching some of the cutscenes and ending to Horizon on YT since I was curious enough about the story. It seemed cool later on, but not enough to carry me through the gameplay. I sold it anyways. It's rare for me to sell games since I think it's a loss financially, but I enforced a strict rule on the PS4 and if I don't like something or don't finish it, it's not staying on my shelf. So far I think it's just been Horizon and Battlefield 1 that suffered this fate.
I couldn't get into Arkham City either, despite loving Asylum (which was a Metroidvania). Traversing the 'City' and just getting around felt tedious. If I'm not having fun with the moment to moment gameplay in these huge, long open world games, I don't stick around anymore. I also am curious to see what they do with BoTW2 and would entertain another Death Stranding, but I don't get too interested in sequels in this genre much thesedays either. I only play 1-2 of these games a year now and I'd rather my intake of them be a new IP or something pretty fresh and new. That said, I'm still in this void wondering if I'd like some of the newer Assassin's Creed games... maybe they'd still do some things I like. 2 and Brotherhood were some of the best games I played in the 360/PS3 era. But when I took a break and avoided Revelations and 3 at the time, it is now comical that including the newest Valhalla, I am literally 9 games behind on AC now, already. Yeah, I'm sorry but I'm not giving up 1,000 hours of my life to this one series, lmao. The few I may consider checking out on the cheap someday would be Revelations (to simply wrap up the Ezio trilogy), Syndicate (for the setting), and Odyssey (sounds like they finally go more fantasy here which could be cool). But ultimately they're low priority.
Shadow of Mordor is another series that looked so much like typical open world stuff and boring incarnate. It annoys me that Monolith Productions did these, when I loved Condemned and FEAR... wish they could have kept pumping out more horror FPS's.
I wonder how much crossover there is between open world games and the From Software stuff, or the Souls mold (throwing in the two Nioh's here)... because ya'll know which of these two sides I truly love and give my time to. Outside of the Yakuza's, some action JRPG's like FF7R or Nier Automata, Arkane's Dishonored and Prey games, the modern Deus Ex's, etc all those and the From games are probably the "longest" titles that I loved this gen and were big time sinks.
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Post by Ex on Nov 29, 2020 11:58:37 GMT -5
Thanks for the breakdown on Horizon, Xeogred. Your complaints seem fair. I know you like to tear through games at a blistering pace, so if a game is forcing you to slow down for puzzle fights, I could see how that'd be very tedious to you. I enforced a strict rule on the PS4 and if I don't like something or don't finish it, it's not staying on my shelf. This is a good policy. I did something of the sort myself this year. I sold off loads of PS2, Xbox, Wii, and Xbox 360 games this year. Probably a hundred games sold on eBay this year in total. But my collection is slimmer and more pertinent for it, and I used the proceeds to buy other stuff I wanted (mostly analog games).
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Post by Xeogred on Nov 29, 2020 12:22:49 GMT -5
Yeah. I'm all for stealth games when they're purely that, or your hybrid's like Deus Ex, etc. But open world + stealth just seems like a terrible combination to me. Even though I do often try to be stealthy taking out outposts or infiltrating bases, but when things go haywire, I like to just unleash. This was the case with Ghost of Tsushima. That game even has story reasons for NOT being stealthy though and gives you a prompt to yell and challenge groups of enemies for a duel which was pretty cool. Being a ninja is not honorable for samurai! But you as Jin can break all the rules and become the real demon...
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Post by Xeogred on Nov 29, 2020 12:51:43 GMT -5
23) Blood: Death Wish (v 1.7)Detailed thoughts and impressions coming soon. Also anayo , did I miss the review somewhere else?
Have always heard great things about Death Wish.
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Post by anayo on Nov 29, 2020 12:52:01 GMT -5
I really liked this one! The graphics impressed the heck out of me when I played it in 2012, particularly the stereoscopic 3D (I was really into the 3D stuff back when it was still a fad.) My only complaint was that Mario 3D Land felt way too short. At least the whole thing was fun. There were no boring or dull parts where I wished it would end. No you didn't miss anything, I just haven't posted it yet. I think I'll do it sometime today.
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Post by anayo on Dec 1, 2020 7:03:26 GMT -5
1) Quake 2a) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (human campaign) 3) Blood 4a) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Jade Falcon Campaign 4b) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Wolf Clan Campain 5) Shadow Warrior 6) Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy 7) Doom 2 8) Lego Island 2b) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (orc campaign) 9) Road Rash 10) Toy Story Animated Storybook 11) Half Life: Opposing Force 12) Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries 13) Quake II 14) A.D.A.M. The Inside Story 15) Commander Keen Episode One: Marooned on Mars 16) Commander Keen Episode Two: The Earth Explodes! 17) Ion Fury 18) Star Wars Episode One: Racer 19) Lego Rock Raiders 20) Gunman Chronicles 21) The Oregon Trail II 22) Dusk 23) Blood: Death Wish (v 1.7)Detailed thoughts and impressions coming soon. Death Wish (released in 2011 and updated as recently as 2020) is a fan-made level pack created by Dustin “Bloatoid” Twilley for the PC first person shooter “Blood” (1997). Death Wish seems to recycle all the same enemies and weapons from Blood’s Cryptic Passage expansion. It also appears that many of the same textures and assets are just rearranged to make new stages. For example I noticed the departures and arrivals board from the train station shows up on a lot of walls, even walls where there weren’t actually any trains but the setting called for a chart of some kind to be up on display. Despite having so few original assets - just opening cinemas for each episode and some intro voice clips as far as I could tell - Death Wish is a transformative masterwork, like a banger of a song made up entirely of samples from other artists’ songs. This does not feel like a fan game. It feels like a commercial product that should have been sold in stores in the late 90’s. Death Wish’s creator showcases an adept understanding of what it is that gives the Build Engine formula its own special quality. I love the stages that pay homage to other horror titles, like Silent Hill and John Carpenter’s The Thing. The pacing and enemy placement are spot on. In original Blood, I felt the game got off to a roaring start then puttered out about three quarters through. That never crossed my mind in Death Wish. The pacing in this expansion is superior to the base game. It’s funny how the Build Engine’s sharp, angular features and inability to render true polygonal 3D lends an ineffable significance to certain scenery details. I delighted in random minutiae like the seaside fun fair with carnival games and a booth with little tiny dioramas displaying the protagonist fighting action-figure sized monsters. In episode 3 there was one part where I had to cross a huge battlefield replete with deathtraps, pitfalls, concealed machine guns, and legions of bloodthirsty enemies forming a gauntlet to a black tower, the entrance of which was a toothy maw with ominous red eyes. Something tells me it wouldn’t have felt the same to see all this in a more sophisticated 3D polygon engine. Death Wish has touches of originality with unique moments I’ve never seen in a Build Engine game before. The one that stood out most to me was when I had to cross a rickety drawbridge. Suddenly the angel of death appeared on the other end of the bridge and was launching a barrage of fireballs my way. The fireballs overlapped and weaved over each other, creating a 3D bullet hell which forced me to bob and duck with limited clearance on the tiny bridge. If I touched them, I’d take knockback damage and plummet to my death. Build Engine games aren’t for everyone - they did go out of style post-Half Life (1998) after all. But if you’re still into those, you owe it to yourself to download and play Death Wish. I haven’t thought about game development since I was a teenager, but seeing just one guy come up with Death Wish made me momentarily question that decision.
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 1, 2020 11:34:33 GMT -5
Sounds fantastic anayo. I love a good "megawad" from a single designer, truly a labor of love. Hellbound was a similar case for Doom II. When I'm ready for another Build Engine fix, I'll be hitting up Death Wish!
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Post by Ex on Dec 1, 2020 11:50:43 GMT -5
I've always thought the Build Engine was pretty slick, even today it still looks good to me. I'm glad folks are continuing to wring new games out of it.
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 1, 2020 12:10:18 GMT -5
Yep. idtech / Unreal certainly pushed the tech forward, but the Build Engine has so much personality in the right hands. Ion Fury was tremendous, I hope we get a straight up sequel or some other devs give us new FPS's like that.
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