Sven_
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To me it's the core flaw of the game, as it makes everything completely repetetive and mindless. "Just go exactly here and do exactly this." The only real choice / mental engagement (in an Arkane game) is experimenting with your weapon loadout and abilities, in a sense. But even in that regard, it feels oft like Dishonored leftovers.
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I'm also mixed on Deathloop. The moment to moment game and gunplay can be fun. As a package it is is really repetetive though as the real loop of the game is a tutorial that never ends. Deathloop = butchered by playtesting. :( It's one thing to take feedback on board. It's another to drop or nerf the entire core idea, as testers found it "tedious to figure a time loop puzzle out"... I mean, by the end the game even reiterates every single step so you wouldn't possibly miss it. To be fair, Arkane were under pressure to "deliver" at that point. And it WAS a rather unique idea that lay at Deathloop's core. The Redesign That Saved Deathloop Arkane : the studio that wanted to make games for smart gamers... and realized they weren't that many. 😁
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I'm at the point now where you can unlock the "Thief" difficulty (I think this is what it's called). Curious also. I think that even when they add stuff to it (more mission variety would also be nice from what I've seen so far), it's naturally never gonna be a classic Thief / Dishonored replacement. The game wasn't made with that in mind. I'm sometimes thinking of the "Dunwall City Trials" DLC, which was entirelly about challenges (though singleplayer, naturally). Still playing Sir Kicksalot first now. I was expecting some Dark Messiah combat madness...... but that the stealth is this fun also I hadn't on the radar (mostly based on noise/lines of sight). Playing on medium difficulty, but without saving mid-mission. That was a tense 40 minutes and I enjoyed every minute of it. Game also has a demo btw, but this level wasn't in it, ended with climbing up a lighthouse, coming down and then throwing bombs on pirates that had spawned/landed on the beach below. 😁It's such a chaotic mess at times, it's LMAO kind of fun. Tempted to try a ghost run, or do another playthrough as a mage just making people burn. :D
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Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith playing and talking about the making of Dishonored...... The creators of Dishonored react to their own game after 14 years | Devs Play Part 1 Each are working on new games with their new teams/studios. I'm so horny for more 0451 at this point, SHODAN could sell me her socks tbh! TL;DR: SCREW YOU BETHESDA 😒 "All I can tell you is that part of the reason why I left Bethesda was that they did not want to do the kind of games that we wanted to make," Colantonio says. He likens Arkane's approach to studios like Larian and FromSoftware: "Those are people that have been doing, over and over, the thing they know exactly how to do, until it hits super hard. So to me, that's what Arkane had to do." Colantonio wanted to keep building on what Arkane had achieved with Dishonored and Prey, but due to disappointing sales, Bethesda "decided that was not part of the strategy anymore".
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For a fiver it was a no-brainer (fan of the type). Still feels a little barebones (played 4 or 5 contracts so far). It's naturally also a more challenge-type game rather than a big narrative focus (still haven't tried CoOp, have you?). Funnily, I currently enjoy the (optional) simple stealth in Sir Kicksalot more (including the skill tree for a Thief type of character). But then that also sees me hopping from level to level, rather than the same 2 maps. And there's a lot more tools... I mean anything is a weapon, including fishes. Speaking of which, no idea why there's fishes jumping all over the place when I throw a baguette into the waters. And the postman upon hitting him just picked a chair to hit back. But then that's exactly the type of sandboxy madness I luv. 😁 (One of the first things I did in KCD2 was stealing guards and the tavern maid their clothes and armor, they were guarding and serving in their underwear for days hahahahah).
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Thick Asssss Thieves. Plus The Adventures Of Sir Kicksalot. LMAO! 🤣 POV: If developers hadn't spent the past 20 years on further exploring visual fidelity and cinematics, but physx and simulated sandbox chaos instead. The Adventures Of Sir Kicksalot - Trailer Can even be stealthed (there's three skill trees for warrior, thief, mage type of abilities, which you can also mix).
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Yeah the foundations to build upon are there, hope they do (only finished a couple contracts so far). Also made me want to replay Dishonored 2 (last time was six, seven years ago IIRC). On a slightly related note, last week also saw the release of Sir Kicksalot. Sir WHO you ask? The Adventures Of Sir Kicksalot - Trailer Puzzling how Dark Messiah's madness has never caught on. But then most devs seem again more obsessed with visual fidelity (everything must look cinema-perfect!) rather than physics and the madness that inevitably ensues. :D
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Warhorse the next RPG studio to go bananas big (unless they majorly mess the actual development up this time around). Warhorse Studios auf X: „You might have heard the rumours, it's time to reveal what we are working on. 🗺️ An open world Middle-earth RPG. ⚔️ A new Kingdom Come adventure. We’re excited to tell you more when the time is right. #WarhorseStudios #Annoucement #lotr #KingdomComeDeliverance https://t.co/Pcgf9SqW52“ / X Somebody at Obsidian HQ must be fuming now (in particular at former owner stage), what with first BG going elsewhere. And now it's Tolkien -- was it really Interplay's LOTR Book 1+2 that was the last "major" single-player RPG taking place there? Time flies by whilst you're having too many elves and dwarves and orcs anyway. :D (Tbh, I would have considered this a waste of unique selling point, what with Warhorse's "Dungeons without dragons" tagline. But as simultaneously they're also working on another KCD..) Kinda weird to think that Obisidian, who I'd considered the "last hope" personally during much of the 2000s and 2010s, are now a sort of "middle of the road" RPG-Like developer. At least in my eyes... Kinda wish they'd specialize more rather than making these "flatter" one size fits all games that seem to by trying to appeal to everyone. It wouldn't need to be Pentiments exclusively. But as once argued, a KCD (historical RPG) would have never been greenlit by Obsidian management, despite the neglected niche (niches and USPs are more important than ever in a market saturated). Josh Sawyer had been fighting for this HARD for decades -- and only could do Pentiment because it was a small-scale project. Else... not a chance. PS: This recently had me laughing -- the video and Warhorse's reaction in the comments. :D I Stalked Kingdom Come 2 NPCs for 9 Days (And Lost My Mind) PS: Anybody else gonna try Thick As Thieves today? In a better world full of Thief- and Dishonored-Likes, I'd be probably mixed. In this world and for but a fiver, however.... Dishonored 3 Hopefuls Should Try Thick As Thieves - GameSpot
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Couldn't find this in English, but: Neues RPG statt Kingdom Come 3: Bericht verrät, woran Warhorse Studios wirklich arbeitet Warhorse seem to be working on an all-new RPG -- self-funded (KCD2 must have made loads of cash given that it made its money back a day or two after launch....) One of the few new bigger budget projects to be genuinelly curious about whatever it may be. As this is so not what a decision maker / money giver at your typical studio / publisher would ever have to say:
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For the record: While I didn't love The Outer Worlds (1) either, I thought there were decent things in there as well. Overall, I think it's a rather mid title by Obsidian standards though. And one seemingly scared of its own design goals as well. There is "casualization" -- Pentiment, set up as a narrative experience surely isn't a hardcore gamer's game, and that's perfectly fine! It was never conceived as such. And then there is say the aforementioned looting in TOW1 that doesn't even matter as it's this abundant. In a way, it seems Obsidian came out of their crowdfunding stage under the impression that specialization would not be worth it (after Deadfire, see the quote prior about making real money off two PoEs...). Whereas for Warhorse, Larian, Owlcat et all it was the opposite. That said, whilst there were layoffs, Obsidian never cut down solely to the crew doing Pillars 1 back then. IIRC, they were still a studio in the ~100-150 people range at that point.
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That was my reaction to when Deadfire launched -- to nowhere near the buzz as PoE. To be fair, Eternity1, unlike Original Sin, was always big time sold on nostalgia, and eventually, that crave for the good ol' days may be fulfilled. Still, in the case of PoE, it's certainly not the "type of game" at fault -- or Owlcat wouldn't have rolled these things plus DLC plus Enhanced Editions en masse from an Eastern European CRPG factory line. :D In the case of TOW, it's not the type of game either, see Fallout New Vegas. What would have bummed me out (and kinda did) with TOW1 is that it was announced as a sort of Vegas-Like project (see the announcement trailers... "From thy builders of Vegas!"). And then was more like a baby's version of an Obsidian game, of one I've played better versions of before (not talking size, but depth). The entire industry is struggling a bit atm though. And if you ask me, the thing to notice recently has been about specilization -- of picking an experience and going all-in on it rather than watering it down so that everybody may be onboard. A game like Kingdom Come would have never seen the light of day at Bioware, Bethesda and Obsidian -- see how Josh had been hoping to make a historical game since forever, but bosses would go: "Nobody would buy that." And even FromSoft exploded by Elden Ring -- a title likewise that would have never seen the light of day at most of the old Western powerhouses of the industry, as deemed as too "inaccessible". These games were allowed to excel at what they were targeting -- and attracted added people simply by doing so, making them curious what's so "special" and "unique" about them. Warhorse have talked about how many history buffs they got onboard who aren't even hardcore gamers, for instance. As a side-effect, Warhorse are now pretty much the only top dogs on the "historical RPG" block too -- there simply is nobody around making a game like them on the scale of them, zero direct competition. Loot and combat and dwarves and elves and Pip-Boys? Dime a dozen. It's actually not just games. See also music, where there are few omnipresent superstars still left that everybody and their cat owns a record of. And rather, everyone tends to build their own streaming playlists, tailored towards them specifically. The market here too has exploded so much that everybody will eventually find something fit to their tastes. (Over 19,000 games released on Steam alone in 2025). One thing is clear though: Chasing trends with dev cycles of 4-7 years ain't gonna cut it. By that point that trend is long old hat. And everybody else chasing it as well may have already picked up what was left of all the buzz once you're finally ready to ship yourself. :D
