raNdOM vidEo game newSS

[Keyrock]

4 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

Maybe they won't totally screw it up and it'll please both old and new fans. Maybe.

 

[LadyCrimson]

^

[Mamoulian War]

6 hours ago, Vaeliorin said:

Apparently KOTOR isn't a remake, it's a "reimagining."

 

And the lead writer of the project is a lady, which was very vocal on the Twitter in the past, that she does not like this game... Fastest drop on my hypemeter from 100 below 0 ever...

[LadyCrimson]

7 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

And the lead writer of the project is a lady, which was very vocal on the Twitter in the past, that she does not like this game.

I've heard that was a joke quote from a whole back and forth, with the single line/reply taken out of context.  But I haven't read Twitter.
That said, she seems like the type to be backlashed-disliked by a lot of folks these days.

[Oner]

All I've seen on that from her was simply saying that KotOR wasn't her favourite SW game and... that's fair?
The rest of the stuff she posted was typical Twitter-quality nonsense, which isn't great but also not the worst I've seen.

[Mamoulian War]

2 hours ago, Oner said:

All I've seen on that from her was simply saying that KotOR wasn't her favourite SW game and... that's fair?
The rest of the stuff she posted was typical Twitter-quality nonsense, which isn't great but also not the worst I've seen.

Well, you might be right, that this one particular statement might not be a sign of trouble, but anyone on any project, who is engaging periodically in Twitter nonsense is a for me always a big red flag

[melkathi]

Ech, all them U-tubers farm views by crying about how wimin, and wokeness and whatever are ruining gaming. It's the thing to do as a tuber these days. Even if they have no clue what they are talking about or what online culture they in turn are contributing to.

Trailers and preview videos can be awesome and the game can still end up an Evil Genius 2. Trailers and stuff can be utter garbage and you can still get a Saints Row 3. And right now we aren't even that far with the kotor remake.

Some twit making a video out of reading twitter in the end is just that, a twit reading twitter.

[Humanoid]

As long as her favourite one isn't Rebel Assault it's fine.

[melkathi]

I somehow missed these. They are VR, so it doesn't matter

 

[Oner]

46 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

Well, you might be right, that this one particular statement might not be a sign of trouble, but anyone on any project, who is engaging periodically in Twitter nonsense is a for me always a big red flag

Same. I'm not that fond of KotOR 1 in the first place and I'm not giving EA money either, so it's a pass for me either way.

[bugarup]

7 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

And the lead writer of the project is a lady, which was very vocal on the Twitter in the past, that she does not like this game... Fastest drop on my hypemeter from 100 below 0 ever...

Well, the lead writer for KOTOR2 was very vocal about his hatred for "Star Wars" themselves, and look how that game turned out. So I'm cheering for this lady.

[213374U]

3 hours ago, Oner said:

Same. I'm not that fond of KotOR 1 in the first place and I'm not giving EA money either, so it's a pass for me either way.

I don't think this is an EA project. Sony Interactive and Lucasfilm Games, rather. Though if you don't want to give Disney money, that works too.

[Wormerine]

Considering that Raven is front a trailer in the trailer is an odd choice - sure it's iconic to KOTOR, but also Raven's presence should be downplayed. And yeah, it's an old game and it's somewhat pointless to pretend that people don't know that 

Spoiler

Vader is Luke's father

but if Raven is the focus of the trailer, I am somewhat worried what they find worth focusing on. A big question to me, is what the reimagining will be like... making it a better RPG? Sure. Making it even less of an RPG? ehm. We will see. I am not thrilled, but recent Star Wars titles have been quite alright. 

[Mamoulian War]

5 hours ago, melkathi said:

Ech, all them U-tubers farm views by crying about how wimin, and wokeness and whatever are ruining gaming. It's the thing to do as a tuber these days. Even if they have no clue what they are talking about or what online culture they in turn are contributing to.

Trailers and preview videos can be awesome and the game can still end up an Evil Genius 2. Trailers and stuff can be utter garbage and you can still get a Saints Row 3. And right now we aren't even that far with the kotor remake.

Some twit making a video out of reading twitter in the end is just that, a twit reading twitter.

And a lot of other youtubers and twiterrists are whining that being a white male is the same offense as bearing the name of Adolf

That's why any of these people and the people you mentioned as well, should be as far from any project as possible. They always make the stuff worse... Where has the common sense gone, that everything must be either rightwing or leftwing propaganda these days???

Edited September 11, 2021 by Mamoulian War

[melkathi]

There always has been propaganda. Hell, Uncle Scrooge trains children to believe that rich people are rich because they deserve to be, not because they got lucky and were born into a rich family, and that a rich person will when it comes down to it do the right thing. In the end a child might even be predisposed to believe in trickle down economics

[Mamoulian War]

That might be true, but it was not thrown into your face at every corner, like nowadays... In today's world, going out to exercise is fatphobic, having wife with bigger cups means you are sexist, eating chinese dumplings as a white person makes you racist...

I've seen and read more nonsense in last two years than in my previous 40 years...

[Zoraptor]

6 hours ago, bugarup said:

Well, the lead writer for KOTOR2 was very vocal about his hatred for "Star Wars" themselves, and look how that game turned out. So I'm cheering for this lady.

Avellone certainly didn't hate SW, and ended up doing a lot of stuff in that universe apart from K2 to prove it. Planetscape: Tournament did much the same deconstruction of the general RPG staples as K2 did for SW, and he certainly didn't hate RPGs either. You're far more likely to get good big C Criticism of something someone likes than something they hate.

Probably fair to say that Avellone has some significant dislike of the moral system of the Jedi though, as would most people if they thought about them for a few seconds

[213374U]

I think the idea was that MCA disliked the Force rather than Star Wars in general, and in particular the seemingly inescapable destiny-shaping aspects of it. Kreia is his mouthpiece in that regard.

I can't remember exactly where that idea came from, though -- an interview he did, or maybe a forum post here. I think MCA will like any setting that allows him to write walls of text into it.

[Zoraptor]

Don't think an interview citation or whatever is needed, it's pretty obvious from just playing the game that a lot of 'problems' were being pointed out.

It isn't that big of a step from not liking The Force/ Jedi Moralism to not liking SW considering how big a facet it is in it; that's why a lot of people think disliking that aspect has to mean disliking the whole thing.

A large part of the Jedi criticism in K2 comes directly from how they were set up in K1 too, and that set up was decidedly ambivalent already as to the validity of their Moral Stance. That ambivalence was central to the plot since they needed a 'good' reason for good Revan to have behaved as she did and a 'bad' reason for bad Revan to behave as she did, so you had to be able to paint the Jedi as good or bad/ right or wrong. That was also, fortunately and accidentally, a good set up for the Avellone approach to deconstructing tropes.

(bit of an aside, but I don't think Avellone had too much problem with the Sith's take on the Force, just with them typically being Chaotic Stupid)

[Keyrock]

 

[Malcador]

17 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

And the lead writer of the project is a lady, which was very vocal on the Twitter in the past, that she does not like this game... Fastest drop on my hypemeter from 100 below 0 ever...

Sounds like a plus to me.

[Lexx]

I have played through the new Life is Strange yesterday. Before I go on with a huge rant, I want to say that the game is not terrible. It has its moment and I did not regret having bought and played it. With that said ....

... oh boy, where do I even start. This is really hard for me to put into words without having it look like disconnected ramblings, so let's begin with the obvious and see where it leads.

This whole game is like... a masturbatory hipster fantasy. Holy ****, it's so over the top, there was more than just one moment where the cringe wanted to make me puke in a bucket. The game is set in the year 2019, in a small mining town, they have a vinyl record shop (I have found 3 vinyl players in different houses), of course it has an indie movie theatre, the whole town looks like what a hipster thinks utopia is like. There's fancy flower pots and stuff all over the place, and nobody is littering. I've already noted it when the first trailer came out -- the whole town looks like a creepy cult site because it's just not real. If this location would be real, it would be the most fakest town ever, and I guarantee the people living there must all be neighbors from hell.

While yes, LiS1 (I haven't played LiS2) also has its fair share of hipster stuff, it was still 100 times more down to earth than what this game is doing. It's like they had a huge checklist of hipster stuff and worked through it from a to z.

The next point on my list is the dialogue. Everything feels so off. There are lots of awkward pauses up to a point where I wondered if they forgot to correctly master the cutscenes. These awkward pauses underlined with a creepy teeth-smile that every character has, makes it feel like you are interacting with aliens who pretend to be humans. Holy crap, maybe that's why the town is so creepy?

I cross-checked this with Before the Storm (played the first chapter yesterday), as that game was also made by Deck Nine, and the difference is huge. Here the dialogue is fast paced, smooth, and never awkwardly creepy unless it is supposed to be like that. So... what the hell went wrong in True Colors? Who the hell thought that this is good??? Surely someone at least in QA must have noticed it??

What also made me want to vomit is the whole "empath"-thing. This is not hyperbole, I hate it so much, it's just disgusting. Feels like the game is trying to cater to a very specific kind of people. How should I put that in words... you know, some people see themselves as "empaths" -- they pretend to be able to read "the aura" of people and their emotions. Now the thing is, I had experience with people like this, and they are almost always disgustingly self-absorbed narcissists. If you want a YouTube drama example of such a person, google "Shane Dawson empath" and you get the gist of it. The game just kept making me think about this and in turn I couldn't take it serious.
At one point Steph says how cool it is that Alex (the player character) is an empath and that she always wanted to have an empath friend... NO YOU DON'T. This is where the game shifted into crazy territory for me. Self-proclaimed empaths are nutters and you want to stay away from them unless you really need that added touch of drama in your life.

That said, the story itself holds up quite well and feels more down to earth and "real" because it doesn't really feature any unbelievable supernatural events, etc. In theory you could remove the whole empath thing and the story would still be playable. While it wasn't anyting epic etc. I thought it was done pretty nicely and I really don't have anything to complain about that. The characters are almost all well written and likable. This time I even almost sided with the male romance option, which is probably a first for me. Still ended up with Steph, though, because I'm horny, not gonna lie. (The romance is pretty toned down this time. No naked sexytime or similar. I almost wouldn't even call it a deep relationship .. more like, the very early beginnings, which probably helps making it feel more real and less forced (like Rachel Amber and Chloe, who went the "I love you"-route after knowing each other for a couple hours).)

I also like how much they got out of the few actual maps that the game has. There's just like... I dunno, 10 different maps or so, but they all look nice and feel like they serve a purpose. Nothing is there "just because". However, the outside map has issues with invisible walls and unnaturally blocked off roads. This kinda reminded me of the maps in The Last of Us 2, which also had really crappy map borders... would have been easy to fix it, dunno why someone decided the stuff has to look this bad.

Most of my complaints are from the first and second chapter. The first chapter was *way too slow* ... seriously... all these awkward pauses and badly edited cutscenes that make you cringe like there is no tomorrow. The second chapter finally had things going, but now the game is rushed and you are supposed to care about people that you don't even know. With the third chapter (~ half of the game) it finally picks up and I started to really enjoy it. The final "end battle" was well written and the emotional impact was immense. The actual ending, however, was way too long and ruined it all again, which sucked hard.

Not sure how much the story choices actually matter in this game, but I like that they always made me stop and consider what the possible outcome might be. It also made me think about the moral aspect of my actions. To give an example, there is a scene where you have the option to "remove" the anger emotion of a person. The game heavily implies that this will help the person and make everything better, but me personally, it made me stop and think ... should I really be doing that? After all, doing this would be disgustingly manipulative, which brought me back to the further above mentioned "empath" thing -- people manipulating other people for personal gain. It's just wrong. Now I have no clue what would happen if I had done it, but the game later rewarded me with a pretty nice scene and a honestly really good outcome (tl;dr -- you have to let people heal on their own and not manipulate them into it). Of course if I would be getting the same scene after sucking out all the anger, I'd trash the hell out of this game for being such garbage.

Anyways ... as I initially said, the game isn't completely terrible. The story is interesting and feels "real", the characters are well written, and the conflicts are well done too. It's just that they went so overboard with all this hipster stuff that the game world feel like a fever dream. I 100% guarantee you, if this location would be real, everyone living there would actually be a terrible person. The weird dialog editing and the lacklust performance of the voice actors at times (another issue with the editing?? No directed recording sessions?) also doesn't really help it.

There's more I could write about the game, but I have a hard time focusing and getting everything in order (sadly I'm just not a good writer). So I'll just keep it at that... Probably not going to replay the game anytime soon (or ever?) unless they add an option to skip dialog (oh yeah, you can't skip dialog, I tried). Yadda-yadda, the music was nice.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Lexx

[MrBrown]

9 hours ago, Lexx said:

I the whole town looks like a creepy cult site because it's just not real. If this location would be real, it would be the most fakest town ever, and I guarantee the people living there must all be neighbors from hell.

While yes, LiS1 (I haven't played LiS2) also has its fair share of hipster stuff, it was still 100 times more down to earth than what this game is doing. It's like they had a huge checklist of hipster stuff and worked through it from a to z.

The next point on my list is the dialogue. Everything feels so off. There are lots of awkward pauses up to a point where I wondered if they forgot to correctly master the cutscenes. These awkward pauses underlined with a creepy teeth-smile that every character has, makes it feel like you are interacting with aliens who pretend to be humans. 

You have to make the right choices to get the real ending, where they reveal just that.

[Lexx]

Link to that? I just did a google search and nobody says that.

[BruceVC]

12 hours ago, Lexx said:

I have played through the new Life is Strange yesterday. Before I go on with a huge rant, I want to say that the game is not terrible. It has its moment and I did not regret having bought and played it. With that said ....

... oh boy, where do I even start. This is really hard for me to put into words without having it look like disconnected ramblings, so let's begin with the obvious and see where it leads.

This whole game is like... a masturbatory hipster fantasy. Holy ****, it's so over the top, there was more than just one moment where the cringe wanted to make me puke in a bucket. The game is set in the year 2019, in a small mining town, they have a vinyl record shop (I have found 3 vinyl players in different houses), of course it has an indie movie theatre, the whole town looks like what a hipster thinks utopia is like. There's fancy flower pots and stuff all over the place, and nobody is littering. I've already noted it when the first trailer came out -- the whole town looks like a creepy cult site because it's just not real. If this location would be real, it would be the most fakest town ever, and I guarantee the people living there must all be neighbors from hell.

While yes, LiS1 (I haven't played LiS2) also has its fair share of hipster stuff, it was still 100 times more down to earth than what this game is doing. It's like they had a huge checklist of hipster stuff and worked through it from a to z.

The next point on my list is the dialogue. Everything feels so off. There are lots of awkward pauses up to a point where I wondered if they forgot to correctly master the cutscenes. These awkward pauses underlined with a creepy teeth-smile that every character has, makes it feel like you are interacting with aliens who pretend to be humans. Holy crap, maybe that's why the town is so creepy?

I cross-checked this with Before the Storm (played the first chapter yesterday), as that game was also made by Deck Nine, and the difference is huge. Here the dialogue is fast paced, smooth, and never awkwardly creepy unless it is supposed to be like that. So... what the hell went wrong in True Colors? Who the hell thought that this is good??? Surely someone at least in QA must have noticed it??

What also made me want to vomit is the whole "empath"-thing. This is not hyperbole, I hate it so much, it's just disgusting. Feels like the game is trying to cater to a very specific kind of people. How should I put that in words... you know, some people see themselves as "empaths" -- they pretend to be able to read "the aura" of people and their emotions. Now the thing is, I had experience with people like this, and they are almost always disgustingly self-absorbed narcissists. If you want a YouTube drama example of such a person, google "Shane Dawson empath" and you get the gist of it. The game just kept making me think about this and in turn I couldn't take it serious.
At one point Steph says how cool it is that Alex (the player character) is an empath and that she always wanted to have an empath friend... NO YOU DON'T. This is where the game shifted into crazy territory for me. Self-proclaimed empaths are nutters and you want to stay away from them unless you really need that added touch of drama in your life.

That said, the story itself holds up quite well and feels more down to earth and "real" because it doesn't really feature any unbelievable supernatural events, etc. In theory you could remove the whole empath thing and the story would still be playable. While it wasn't anyting epic etc. I thought it was done pretty nicely and I really don't have anything to complain about that. The characters are almost all well written and likable. This time I even almost sided with the male romance option, which is probably a first for me. Still ended up with Steph, though, because I'm horny, not gonna lie. (The romance is pretty toned down this time. No naked sexytime or similar. I almost wouldn't even call it a deep relationship .. more like, the very early beginnings, which probably helps making it feel more real and less forced (like Rachel Amber and Chloe, who went the "I love you"-route after knowing each other for a couple hours).)

I also like how much they got out of the few actual maps that the game has. There's just like... I dunno, 10 different maps or so, but they all look nice and feel like they serve a purpose. Nothing is there "just because". However, the outside map has issues with invisible walls and unnaturally blocked off roads. This kinda reminded me of the maps in The Last of Us 2, which also had really crappy map borders... would have been easy to fix it, dunno why someone decided the stuff has to look this bad.

Most of my complaints are from the first and second chapter. The first chapter was *way too slow* ... seriously... all these awkward pauses and badly edited cutscenes that make you cringe like there is no tomorrow. The second chapter finally had things going, but now the game is rushed and you are supposed to care about people that you don't even know. With the third chapter (~ half of the game) it finally picks up and I started to really enjoy it. The final "end battle" was well written and the emotional impact was immense. The actual ending, however, was way too long and ruined it all again, which sucked hard.

Not sure how much the story choices actually matter in this game, but I like that they always made me stop and consider what the possible outcome might be. It also made me think about the moral aspect of my actions. To give an example, there is a scene where you have the option to "remove" the anger emotion of a person. The game heavily implies that this will help the person and make everything better, but me personally, it made me stop and think ... should I really be doing that? After all, doing this would be disgustingly manipulative, which brought me back to the further above mentioned "empath" thing -- people manipulating other people for personal gain. It's just wrong. Now I have no clue what would happen if I had done it, but the game later rewarded me with a pretty nice scene and a honestly really good outcome (tl;dr -- you have to let people heal on their own and not manipulate them into it). Of course if I would be getting the same scene after sucking out all the anger, I'd trash the hell out of this game for being such garbage.

Anyways ... as I initially said, the game isn't completely terrible. The story is interesting and feels "real", the characters are well written, and the conflicts are well done too. It's just that they went so overboard with all this hipster stuff that the game world feel like a fever dream. I 100% guarantee you, if this location would be real, everyone living there would actually be a terrible person. The weird dialog editing and the lacklust performance of the voice actors at times (another issue with the editing?? No directed recording sessions?) also doesn't really help it.

There's more I could write about the game, but I have a hard time focusing and getting everything in order (sadly I'm just not a good writer). So I'll just keep it at that... Probably not going to replay the game anytime soon (or ever?) unless they add an option to skip dialog (oh yeah, you can't skip dialog, I tried). Yadda-yadda, the music was nice.

This must be one of the longest and detailed posts I have ever read from you about a game and its very interesting so thanks for the details

But what would you give the game out of 100 ?

I wish everyone scored their gaming reviews out of 100 because I am a  numbers person and I generally understand reviews based on a actual score .....weird but  true because that is how my brain is wired