Posts: 4640
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 1:19 pm |
Yeah, I also think the Kokorowa spinoff will probably be more of a strategy game. Those little animal guys seem like team captains and then she will crank out the automotons to build up the force. I am curious what will happen with Shenmue. Maybe it will amount to just getting ports of Shenmue 3, but it wouldn't be the first time that a new publisher did a port/remaster and used that to gauge whether to do a sequel. I do wonder what a Shenmue 4 would be like though. I get why 3 is the way it is. The idea of making the game as if it came out when it was supposed to makes a certain kind of sense, but most potential customers are going to expect more modern gameplay. And having so long between games probably would have been a good reason to revise the plot to not have it end like it did. I've heard that it was originally supposed to be 6 parts, but considering what it took to make part 3, maybe it wasn't a great idea to stick to it. For mihoyho leaving twitter, I hope it is something that sticks. This isn't the first time where people seemed to leave twitter, only to come back because of various reasons. Companies will move much slower than the regular user, and are going to be more prone to wait to see if people actually stay with whatever replacement they picked. Twitter coming out and saying that its going to be scraping stuff for AI may be more of a push though. As much as companies seem to be ok with the idea when they do it, they hate the idea of it happening to them. And the sad reality is that Blue Sky will probably need big companies to join to have long-term viability.
Posts: 548
Location: PA / USA
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 3:55 pm |
I'll have to give that new Trigran box set a watch after I play Gungrage GORE, as I recall both series originating from the same creator. I got exactly what I paid for with Shenmue III. I find it a bit baffling that people complained it wasn't more modern, as Yakuza still exists, and for someone like myself that finds the Dreamcast to be a religious experience, there would have almost-certainly been complaints from my end of the audience if Shemue III came out and it didn't look and feel like a janky Dreamcast experience. Now that said, with as much prompting as you get during Shenmue III to go into random houses and pull drawers open, I cant help but wonder if the experience would have been more coherent as a title with VR support. There's a lot of exploration and poking of random things in Shenmue games, and as a fan from the Dreamcast days, I cant help but wonder if the VR medium would have been a better diverging path for Shenmue's development to take rather than carbon-copying what Yakuza has become. I'm perfectly open to the idea of a Shenmue IV experimenting and trying new things, but I wanted Shemue III specifically to feel just like I finished playing Shenmue II and for the most part, I feel like it delivered on that. I've said it before, but the new Shiren (at a glance) looks like a downgrade from the Wii's more realistically-proportioned experience, and nothing is likely to ever top how beautiful/colorful Tower of Fortune's sprite work is. I may circle back to it eventually, but Serpentcoil is very much not at the top of my list at the moment. Anyways, I'll likely either wait and just look at the announcement list for the Game Awards & cherry-pick some trailers, or do a drunk watch-party with friends and play "meme bingo" with the ad-block on. Golden Joystick I think pretty much already one-upped anything his lord almighty the Doritos Pope is going to have going for us outside of like one or two legitimately-surprising game reveals I can hear about secondhand later.
Posts: 2348
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 4:13 pm |
Keighley really has trapped himself in a Faustian bargain where he has an awards show...but has to keep changing rules and giving ad space to companies, insuring everyone hates him and never takes the show seriously. Hell, it's not even a good place for announcements as everyone fights for space and it all turns into a blur. It's become a painful microcosm of the industry: spectacle over substance, product over people, hype above all else. Just an embarrassment. In other news, Virtua Fighter 5 is finally on Steam so that's amusing if nothing else. Now back to Dragon Quest III (which is the biggest release in 2024 for Japan so HA to the grifters). Time to take on Zoma with a Gadabout and women dressed in swimsuits
Posts: 2669
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 4:24 pm |
As long as you can beat/contain your FOMO there is no real reason to watch the Game Awards. Most of the time is filled with ads, the acceptance speeches are kept painfully short (please wrap it up) and the announcements you can easily watch the next day. I used to watch every year and complain what a waste of time it was and at some point I simply stopped realising what a waste of time it was.
Posts: 238
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 4:30 pm |
Since you brought up Okami and Sakuna at the same time, I must again mention that it is interesting that they both spoiler[integrate aliens with existing legends in a less technological setting. I have just never seen this up until now and then I saw it in two series. I have seen people say perhaps gods were actually aliens before, but never seen it done to visually until these games.] It's just such a specific shared detail between the two, I wonder if there are other games that do this and I am just unaware? Great article as always also!
Posts: 4640
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 5:12 pm |
As long as you can beat/contain your FOMO there is no real reason to watch the Game Awards. Most of the time is filled with ads, the acceptance speeches are kept painfully short (please wrap it up) and the announcements you can easily watch the next day. I used to watch every year and complain what a waste of time it was and at some point I simply stopped realising what a waste of time it was. Last year made me decide I was done watching it. It could have been half as long without all the ads and promos. I know they need funding to keep afloat, but I've always thought it was weird to turn it into such a spectacle around future games. It's supposed to be about celebrating what came out during the year. There is also the whole pre-show thing. I kind of get putting some of the less prestigious awards together like that, but maybe it isn't all that important to have awards for things like e-sports. The speed where the host for that part would read the categories, nominees, and then winner was fast enough that it felt like even the people working at the show didn't care. smurky turkey wrote:
Posts: 6311
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 5:12 pm |
I got exactly what I paid for with Shenmue III. I find it a bit baffling that people complained it wasn't more modern, as Yakuza still exists, and for someone like myself that finds the Dreamcast to be a religious experience, there would have almost-certainly been complaints from my end of the audience if Shemue III came out and it didn't look and feel like a janky Dreamcast experience. Well two things Yakuza & Shenmue are different games eventhough it’s been oft mentioned Shenmue inspired Yakuza. Two Shenmue’s clunkiness was one of the things that impacted the game’s marketability. In addition the Yakuza games have had some clunky gameplay elements that as time has passed have seemingly been mostly ironed out. There’s not reason a new Shenmue can’t do the same. Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Fri Nov 22, 2024 6:01 pm; edited 1 time in total LinkTSwordmaster wrote:
Posts: 3827
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 5:59 pm |
Sakuna should have been right up my alley, but I couldn't get into the rice farming aspect. Kokorowa will hopefully be more my type of game Elden Ring's DLC can't be played standalone so I don't think it should be considered as a game of the year contender. Not surprising mihoyo wants to push their app, but I don't use it for anything other than the bonuses it gives for their games and I don't expect that to change. I'm sure plenty of people outside of hoyolab will repost it anyway, so not much will change.
Even XB3's expansion could be played on it's own from the main menu and I'd probably have to give some thought if it would count.
They have an ongoing game category that Phantom Liberty won last year, so that seems like the right place for it. Either that or they just make a new category for expansions and keep it separate from ongoing games since that seems like it's be more suited to live service type of games anyway.
The link in that section btw didn't seem to go to a related article, just to a siliconera page about genshin figures?
Posts: 4543
Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer.
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 6:33 pm |
For those of us who generally wait a few years to buy games, at least those of the triple A variety, The Game Awards are an utter non-entity whose existence I am only reminded of for a couple of weeks a year in November. I glanced at the list of nominees and there's very little I'm interested in ever actually playing even in four years when they'll be $5 on Steam but, aside from a couple of indie games, 2024 was a total wash-out for the sort of games I'm interested in anyway. The one 2024 game that I was most looking forward to, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown turned out to have no offline single-player career mode, which is how I played the first two Test Drive Unlimited games and which is the only way I was interested in playing the new game since I've never been into multiplayer, and apparently it doesn't even do "online" that well by locking players out from playing against players from other regions or players on other platforms meaning most lobbies are empty, which is kind of a problem if you're selling a game as being a MMO experience. It's been less than three months after launch and Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown's peak daily player count on Steam has been under 300 for the past couple of weeks, which is dire for a game which was in development for about five years and which shelled out big money for expensive car licenses like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche. If Playstation's even-more-expensive and heavily-promoted Concord hadn't been utterly DOA, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown would be a likely contender for flop of the year.
Posts: 135
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 6:51 pm |
For mihoyho leaving twitter, I hope it is something that sticks. This isn't the first time where people seemed to leave twitter, only to come back because of various reasons. Companies will move much slower than the regular user, and are going to be more prone to wait to see if people actually stay with whatever replacement they picked. Twitter coming out and saying that its going to be scraping stuff for AI may be more of a push though. As much as companies seem to be ok with the idea when they do it, they hate the idea of it happening to them. And the sad reality is that Blue Sky will probably need big companies to join to have long-term viability. Despite this article using it as a segway to complain about X, Mihoyo shifting their announcements has nothing to do with the people upset over Elon Musk, the American election results, or any of those other reasons people are leaving in protest. They're also moving these announcements off of Facebook as well and additionally they're not going to any of those alternative social media sites but their own proprietary site to draw more attention to it. It's been something they've been planning for awhile now. Also they're still posting other stuff on Facebook and X and are not leaving entirely just trying to draw more eyes to their own stuff. [REMOVED BY MODERATOR: please stay on-topic and avoid deliberately antagonizing other users. --F] For those of us who generally wait a few years to buy games, at least those of the triple A variety, The Game Awards are an utter non-entity whose existence I am only reminded of for a couple of weeks a year in November. My AAA purchases are few and far between and are usually years after they come out so by then all the DLC is available and it's all heavily discounted. Even games I do want I tend to wait on. I plan on getting Dragon Quest III but I'm not paying 60 dollars for it when I've played the original Famicom and Super Famicom versions so much and they're readily available. I even played those mobile port collections they put on Switch like 5 years ago too. I already grabbed the uncensored mod for it incase the usual modding websites decide to go scorched earth on it like they've been doing for other un-censor patches lately. But I have plenty of other stuff to play in the meantime like the latest HoloCure update. I find The Game Awards funny mainly because I see people who trash them and Geoff all the time also have no problem using them as leverage for their own opinion Either by gloating about a game they hate being snubbed or a game they like winning and using it as proof it was a good game. People are funny like that. As it stands I only care about them for the potential announcements I might be interested in. The best thing I've ever seen from them is the Smash Bros announcement for Joker from Persona 5. Greed1914 wrote: Tenchi wrote:
Posts: 6311
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 6:59 pm |
If Playstation's even-more-expensive and heavily-promoted Concord hadn't been utterly DOA, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown would be a likely contender for flop of the year. I know why everyone loves to bring up how much Concord cost to make when discussing it’s failure but it was a game that was far less hyped up than Skull & Bones, Suicide Sqaud KTJL, Star Wars Outlaws (Ubisoft had two underperforming releases this year), and while it’s still too early to call Dragon Age Veilguard. All those games like Concord had been in development for years, likely were not cheap to produce. And unlike Concord had much longer periods in between their public reveals and their initial release dates which was literal years in some cases like Skull & Bones as opposed to Concord which was publicly revealed 4 months before it’s release. Those games each are just as valid contenders for bomb of the year. Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Fri Nov 22, 2024 9:17 pm; edited 3 times in total Tenchi wrote:
Posts: 512
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 7:12 pm |
Concord was being sold as the start of a new age. Twitter being hell is why Miho dropped it because the comments were just hell and look at me crap. Riviera's sound modes are wonderswan first ost (the wonderswan music arranged) gba, psp, and source (the base for the wonderswan ost)
Posts: 6311
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 7:30 pm |
Concord was being sold as the start of a new age. Which given it was a hero shooter in a market crowded with them (on top of being sci-fi). That was obviously not true. Nate148 wrote:
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 644
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 10:02 pm |
I'll have to give that new Trigran box set a watch after I play Gungrage GORE, as I recall both series originating from the same creator. Eh... about the only thing Trigun has in common with Gungrave GORE is the over-the-top character designs and names from Yasuhiro Nightow. Gungrave is way more in-your-face about its silliness (evil mobs sharing drugs that turn people into zombies, and all). Trigun still has the silly characters and wild character designs ("Millions Knives", and other wild takes on English compound words), but for all its stylism it's also a very thoughtful treatise on a guy with an unteneble worldview and the suffering he undergoes trying to maintain it. The Gungrave anime did a good job of tapping into that energy (it's more of a slow-burn mob drama tragedy). Great show, though, Trigun was a gateway drug back in the day for a reason. Definitely worth a visit. For mihoyho leaving twitter, I hope it is something that sticks. This isn't the first time where people seemed to leave twitter, only to come back because of various reasons. Companies will move much slower than the regular user, and are going to be more prone to wait to see if people actually stay with whatever replacement they picked. Twitter coming out and saying that its going to be scraping stuff for AI may be more of a push though. As much as companies seem to be ok with the idea when they do it, they hate the idea of it happening to them. And the sad reality is that Blue Sky will probably need big companies to join to have long-term viability. Bluesky has been a revelation for a lot of people that we don't really need to tolerate hot-headed contrarians bursting into our spaces and trying to rankle hides. Life's hard, who wants to argue on the Internet? BlueSky will eventually need help with funding, that's just the nature of the beast. But for now? Heck yeah, I'd pay $5 a month for a fancy animated avatar if it meant I still had the kind of curation I have on Bluesky. It'll decline eventually, but for now I appreciate people being NICE on Bluesky and being able to see my favorite accounts (and an increasing number of Japanese artists). And I imagine studios will appreciate being able to interact with fans without having to worry about people trying to start flamewars in their comments. I am curious what will happen with Shenmue. [...] The idea of making the game as if it came out when it was supposed to makes a certain kind of sense, but most potential customers are going to expect more modern gameplay. And having so long between games probably would have been a good reason to revise the plot to not have it end like it did. I've heard that it was originally supposed to be 6 parts, but considering what it took to make part 3, maybe it wasn't a great idea to stick to it. Shenmue’s clunkiness was one of the things that impacted the game’s marketability. In addition the Yakuza games have had some clunky gameplay elements that as time has passed have seemingly been mostly ironed out. There’s not reason a new Shenmue can’t do the same. Part of the issue is that Yu Suzuki himself has gone the extra mile of ignoring and defying modern game design. This is the flipside of something like what Takahata pulled with Xenoblade, reiterating on his old concepts and themes until he found a take on them that stuck with folks; Suzuki is bull-headed about making Shenmue work... but Shenmue is still a game and most other games have taken the concepts or ideas from Shenmue and realized them much better in the years since. It's 100% Francis Ford Coppola releasing Godfather in 2024, exactly as he did it in 1972. Media just... isn't produced that way anymore. I say again, we're better for it existing, but it's valid to critique Shenmue 3's design as outdated. Sometimes, an auteur sticking to their guns isn't the best way to go? In other news, Virtua Fighter 5 is finally on Steam so that's amusing if nothing else. That news released late last night, long after this week's cutoff--way too late to include in this week's column. And I'm not sure there's much else I could add to it past what I wrote the other week about Virtua Fighter. VF5 REVO getting rollback netcode is some good egg in Harada's face, though. For those of us who generally wait a few years to buy games, at least those of the triple A variety, The Game Awards are an utter non-entity whose existence I am only reminded of for a couple of weeks a year in November. I glanced at the list of nominees and there's very little I'm interested in ever actually playing even in four years when they'll be $5 on Steam but, aside from a couple of indie games, 2024 was a total wash-out for the sort of games I'm interested in anyway. The one 2024 game that I was most looking forward to, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown turned out to have no offline single-player career mode, which is how I played the first two Test Drive Unlimited games and which is the only way I was interested in playing the new game since I've never been into multiplayer, and apparently it doesn't even do "online" that well by locking players out from playing against players from other regions or players on other platforms meaning most lobbies are empty, which is kind of a problem if you're selling a game as being a MMO experience. It's been less than three months after launch and Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown's peak daily player count on Steam has been under 300 for the past couple of weeks, which is dire for a game which was in development for about five years and which shelled out big money for expensive car licenses like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche. If Playstation's even-more-expensive and heavily-promoted Concord hadn't been utterly DOA, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown would be a likely contender for flop of the year. Yeah, this mirrors my experience with "AAA" games. Back when I was in high school and Halo was top dog of the industry, so much game news and discussion left me in the cold because I really didn't care about the bleeding-edge tech. Like, I was happy enough beeping and booping my way through Dragon Warrior 1&2 on the GameBoy Color, what do I care if there are realistic reflections on Master Chief's visor? The saddest thing is that today's bleeding-edge AAA game is, exactly as you put it, tomorrow's $5 blue-light special on Steam. It's funny to look back on stuff like Golden Eye: Rogue Agent or San Andreas; back in 2004, we couldn't imagine games looking better. Here we are in 2024, and those games run on phones. And it's not even that the games are obsolete; a lot of stuff from 2004 still holds up! They don't even need that much in the way of graphical improvement (see: Snake Eater, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes). But tech is ephemeral. I don't care what engine Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay ran on. I care that it's a game that lives up to the meme of open-palm slamming the Chronicles of Riddick VHS into your VCR and doing all the motions and wooshing noises. Drakengard was never going to get nominated for any kind of award upon original release (and to be fair, it likely wouldn't today either). But Drakengard opened the door to a ton of Yoko Taro's games. Far Cry 1 earned multiple awards back in 2004, but I can't pick out a Far Cry from an Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. [quote="Greed1914"] As long as you can beat/contain your FOMO there is no real reason to watch the Game Awards. Most of the time is filled with ads, the acceptance speeches are kept painfully short (please wrap it up) and the announcements you can easily watch the next day. [...] The speed where the host for that part would read the categories, nominees, and then winner was fast enough that it felt like even the people working at the show didn't care. That's the other part that rankles my hide. I get it, Best Sound Direction isn't as sexy as Best Tweet From Hideo Kojima, but jeez, let the sound designers get their time in the spotlight. Devs take enough crap from people as it is. There would be a lot less active antagonism towards devs if folks understood the processes and effort required on all levels of game design--not just tactile gameplay, but even how sound cues are engineered. Like, the Oscars are a joke too, but the Oscars at least focus on the nominated works. They're not hawking trailers for the next Indiana Jones between breathless takes for Best Costume Design and Best Editing. Since you brought up Okami and Sakuna at the same time, I must again mention that it is interesting that they both spoiler[integrate aliens with existing legends in a less technological setting. I have just never seen this up until now and then I saw it in two series. I have seen people say perhaps gods were actually aliens before, but never seen it done to visually until these games.] It's just such a specific shared detail between the two, I wonder if there are other games that do this and I am just unaware? It's kind of a plot twist in spoiler[Final Fantasy IV, where it's revealed that Zeromus is an exiled Lunarian and both Cecil and Golbez/Theodore are half-Lunarian (effectively making them aliens)]. Great article as always also! I thank you for that. I've been lucky enough to have a few creatives pop into my DMs and thank me for my coverage on their work. I appreciate being able to shed some light on people's efforts and it warms my heart to make people feel seen. And I do appreciate folks coming in here and getting excited about stuff. I look forward to covering someone's weird favorite and seeing their mind blown that it's actually happening. The industry behind games is cruel and abusive, but the folks turning the gears and clacking on the keyboards? They're doing good work. They deserve to know it.[/spoiler] LinkTSwordmaster wrote: Greed1914 wrote: Greed1914 wrote: BadNewsBlues wrote: AiddonValentine wrote: Tenchi wrote: smurky turkey wrote: FishLion wrote: FishLion wrote:
Posts: 2348
Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2024 11:41 pm |
Part of the issue is that Yu Suzuki himself has gone the extra mile of ignoring and defying modern game design. This is the flipside of something like what Takahata pulled with Xenoblade, reiterating on his old concepts and themes until he found a take on them that stuck with folks; Suzuki is bull-headed about making Shenmue work... but Shenmue is still a game and most other games have taken the concepts or ideas from Shenmue and realized them much better in the years since. It's 100% Francis Ford Coppola releasing Godfather in 2024, exactly as he did it in 1972. Media just... isn't produced that way anymore. I say again, we're better for it existing, but it's valid to critique Shenmue 3's design as outdated. Sometimes, an auteur sticking to their guns isn't the best way to go? Shenmue III is definitely an example of someone thinking they were doing a grand return, but instead we're all left wondering what the big deal was. Shenmue is fascinating to analyze due to how much of its verisimilitude-centered design has now become standard for sandboxes and immersive sims but instead of getting a purer design without the chaff and bloat of a lot of modern games, it just feels so empty. Unlike Virtua Fighter which never had anything to fix about it, Shenmue had a LOT of issues that could be improved with modern design. Which is funny to say as Shenmue was meant to be a Virtua Fighter prequel RPG starring Akira. FinalVentCard wrote: