RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS

[Blarghagh]

I hope they add everything they promise, yes. I don't feel like Blizzard "lied" about WoD though. "Lying" implies that Blizzard knew all these things they announced weren't going to be in the game, that they had zero intention of putting those things in. But there's an unfinished inside of Karabor, there's production art of the missing Fungal Whale World Boss, there's animated sequences from raids that were in the beta but were never finished and never made it live.

 

I always find it interesting when people infer a developers intention based on their own feelings of disappointment. I find it highly unlikely that Blizzard intentionally cut all of this stuff out to **** the players. It's much more likely that something went terribly wrong during production and this is the best they could deliver. If it was any other game, Blizz likely would have delayed it even longer or even canned the entire thing. But this is an MMO that lives or dies on how much content they put out, and we already had 14 months of Siege of Orgrimmar. If Warlords hadn't come out when it did, I assume the game would be in an even worse place.

[Malcador]

The missed stuff will make people believe them less regardless (even if it's not a suspicion of malice, it can just be a lack of faith in their developers general ability to deliver). Even if some content couldn't be done to meet the release, like the Ogre content or Farahlon (that latter one irks me a bit, always found Netherstorm cool) would be interesting to know why they didn't release it later. I guess deciding to cut losses on WoD ?

 

Also, just remembered ****ing Wil Wheaton is hosting BlizzCon, argh.

Edited November 3, 2015 by Malcador

[Blarghagh]

Cutting their losses is what I assume. They said something in an interview about how they hired a bunch of new people but they had to scrap stuff those people did because it wasn't up to snuff and they hadn't properly trained those people. That makes sense, especially considering some of the environments they showed at the BlizzCon when they announced WoD look very different. Focusing on the next expansion to prevent another disaster would be a smart move. I'm also hoping that's what they did, because it means Legion will have more content.

 

Also bleh, I suddenly stopped thinking about getting a virtual ticket for BlizzCon.

[Malcador]

Fallout 4 PC screens - http://imgur.com/a/Wj4dm

 

Edited November 3, 2015 by Malcador

[HoonDing]

 

Your lazy-eyed "wife" looks really creepy.

 

 

That's ... pretty horrible, graphics-wise.  I mean, it kind of looks like an old version of the Sims, a few years back.

 

Well, of course, it's from console version.

[GhostofAnakin]

 

 

Your lazy-eyed "wife" looks really creepy.

 

 

That's ... pretty horrible, graphics-wise.  I mean, it kind of looks like an old version of the Sims, a few years back.

 

Well, of course, it's from console version.

 

 

I don't think you can blame consoles for those graphics.  The Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid V, Dragon Age Inquisition, etc. are all "consolized" and have much, much better looking graphics than the above.

[HoonDing]

http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/articles//a/1/7/9/1/5/9/2/andcwu.jpg.jpg/EG11/resize/1920x-1

 

Looks like an upgraded Fallout 3/Skyrim to me.

 

Last Bethseda game that was "cutting edge" graphics wise was Oblivion and they had to butcher their preplanned AI system to make it look like that. After that they sacrificed graphics for their obsession with big dynamic world, i.e. every item being interactable, every NPC having a schedule, etc.

 

Though what's puzzling is that they make a seemingly important character like your husband/wife such a generic potatoface.

[GhostofAnakin]

It's not even just how the character looks that's bad, it's the actual animation.  She moves around like a clunky robot.  It's like what C-3PO would look like if you put human skin over his metal frame.

[HoonDing]

She also appears to have sharp knees.

[Raithe]

It could be interesting depending on how in-depth and integrated it all turns out...

 

GamesRadar - Deus Ex Mankind Divided: Reinventing the Side-Quest

 

 

Dayglo Susan, prime-champion of The Footprint City, has been climbing the steel-haired leg of a god for fourteen days. She carries nine Spheroids, each filled with a bright, steaming toxin milked from the scooped-out glands of the world’s manliest Reptile Gladiators. Now, she is on a vertical course to the Brain of the World, ready to fulfill her promise as The One Who Would Make Our World Go Sideways. Halfway up, she stops to do a tech-gnome’s taxes, because it asked nicely.

 

Side quests have long been the bugbear of anyone who tries to actually think about the realities of an RPG for a second. The Elder Scrolls games paint you as something like The Furious Samaritan, immolating anything and anyone as long as a half-impassioned case is made for it. Dragon Age: Inquisition introduces a world where a tear in space-time is farting out impossibly strong demons, but you invariably herd animals for 19 hours. Hell, even The Witcher 3 - which went a long way towards making wandering problem-solving an integral part of the game - had Geralt applying detective work to a burnt frying pan.

 

Eidos Montreal doesn’t want that to happen with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. “I hate ‘side-quests’ and ‘side-missions’ as a term,” says gameplay director, Patrick Fortier, “because I love them so much in gameplay, and I feel it belittles what they actually are. I think the philosophy here was not have a tremendous amount of them - we invested in deeper stuff, and twists in terms of the gameplay.”

 

“You can tell that there’s less of a system behind them,” adds Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, executive art director. “We don’t just have 53 variations of fetching an object.”

It’s a design style that should lend Mankind Divided a feeling of pace almost constantly, a background hum of action that doesn’t dip below ‘I could be onto something’ levels. 

“Adam Jensen is on a very important mission,” explains executive narrative director, Mary DeMarle, “so anything that’s going to pull him away from that has to have weight. It has to be something so important personally that it’ll pull him aside, or something that will reflect the themes of the game in a different way or maybe shed light on some of the factions in the game that you can’t get from the critical path.”

 

The idea is that any detour will feel like it could help you understand Jensen, the main story, or the world a little better at the end of it, a recursive design that keeps you looking and moving simultaneously. And even if you do get bored, DeMarle emphasises that the quests can be stopped and left alone - which in itself will impact your story:

“Let’s say a side mission is a hundred page script. When I play it I get ten minutes of it because I decided that’s all I want. You on the other hand are like ‘Wait a minute, that’s intriguing, I want to follow up on that’, and you end up meeting new characters and have other things happen as a result.”

 

Most intriguing is how side-quests don’t just support the main story, they can tie into it, becoming part of how it plays out, without you ever knowing - as DeMarle puts it, your actions in the wider game can “haunt” the critical path through the game.

 

My hands-on snapshot of the game gave a taste of how that could come about. During the tutorial mission, an optional objective appears at the climax, asking you to keep an undercover, under-fire agent alive in a gunfight. If, like me, you ignore that to snipe slowly at goons from a mile away, he dies without much ceremony - to which your buddies on the mission respond with outrage (specifically, a fake-Scottish soldier calls you a “great ****ing bellend”, which is unintentionally hilarious).

 

I’m assuming this will have consequences for the rest of the game, that this agent could have helped with Jensen’s dive into the underworld. But, as Fortier makes clear, there’s always the chance it might not:

 

“The key thing for me I think is the effect can be big or small. The fact that we offer both means that you’re never quite sure as a player, and I kind of like that. It keeps people on the edge, keeps them guessing, so you have to make sure that you’re comfortable with your line of action before you do it.”

 

That indecision is perhaps the more exciting way to make side quests relevant. If Eidos Montreal made every single one inadvertently world-changing, it would feel as false as if they were all meaningless. But that some of them could progress to have truly powerful effects on your version of the game makes it all the more enticing to explore this place. 

 

“Players might not even know they’re on a side-quest,” says Fortier. “It’s going to feel like they’re on a main quest. What I love about them is that we get to explore other sides of themes that we’re dealing with, and on a more human level. Those are the quests that often stay with you and make the world gel together, so to me they’re fundamental. They’re what wraps the whole thing and makes it a believable world and not just a series of objectives that you’re doing in order to complete the game.”

 

What if saving that agent gave me a new set of quests, taking me to whole new areas earlier than other players could get to them? What if my choices in conversations lead me to a main mission for entirely different reasons to another version of Jensen? What if those gnome taxes inadvertently paid to fortify the defences at the perilous Loin Bridge, making Dayglo Susan’s anointed trek all the more treacherous? These are the tiny interactions that can turn an aside into a plot point, something to remember - something all side-quests should aspire to be.

[Keyrock]

Morrowind Animations - Never Forget

 

 

Meanwhile, 13 years earlier...

 

Edited November 3, 2015 by Keyrock

[majestic]

I hope they add everything they promise, yes.

 

When was the last time a WoW addon delivered exactly as promised before?

 

Honestly when it comes to adding features to WoW Blizzard should really rethink their communication strategy. First they talk about all the nice ideas they're having and tell us about all about upcoming features and then... they get quietly whisked away to the same dark place where the Warcraft adventure and Titan lie. I still remember being stoked about the Path of the Titans or Archeology and look what we got in Cata. Another Glyhp-Tier and the most boring time-sink since fishing.

 

Actually fishing was more fun than that. I even won the silly Stranglethorn competition once.

[Spider]

Well, so far information about Legion has been really sparse.

 

They've promised Class Halls, Artifacts and Demon Hunters pretty much. So seems like they are taking a slightly more restrictive approach this time.

[Blarghagh]

Indeed, let's hope they don't overpromise this weekend and BlizzCon and then we should be okay.
 

 

I hope they add everything they promise, yes.

 
When was the last time a WoW addon delivered exactly as promised before?
 
Honestly when it comes to adding features to WoW Blizzard should really rethink their communication strategy. First they talk about all the nice ideas they're having and tell us about all about upcoming features and then... they get quietly whisked away to the same dark place where the Warcraft adventure and Titan lie. I still remember being stoked about the Path of the Titans or Archeology and look what we got in Cata. Another Glyhp-Tier and the most boring time-sink since fishing.

 

That's true, Warlords of Draenor was just worse about it. Most of the time it's been experimental features that get cut. Like Path of the Titans or how Wrath of the Lich King still has "aerial combat" on its features list on the box. There have been zones and raids cut before too, but not quite as often (although WoW history nerds might remember Blizzard saying Outland was going to be in the vanilla game launch).

Warlords just promised and removed a lot more. The new capital cities, the chronal spire, the Farahlon zone and the Ogre Island, the fungal whale world boss and the small Zangarmarsh mini-zone that it was in, more customizable Garrison that you could place in every zone, Gorgrond's Grimrail transportation system, the entire Shattrath raid tier, Gorehowl as a Legendary Weapon, they changed the final boss which they said was Grom Hellscream and is now Archimonde, Trial of the Gladiator for PvP endgame, Class Accessoires, a bunch of storylines were dropped, and hell, it was even supposed to have that bloody dance studio they've been promising since Wrath. And then the Warlords website also claimed "new battlegrounds and scenarios" and neither of those made it in.

 

Looking at the wall of text that became as I was summing it up, it just solidifies my belief that something went horribly wrong during development. The expansion they wanted to make sounds amazing.

[Blarghagh]

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