It's been genuinely distressing to see people condoning such horrific behaviour. Thank you for the small dose of sanity.
HolyDuckTurtle
I've actually been really enjoying it. It's a pleasant universe to just get absorbed in.
Sure, it's got a lot of very valid complaints (performance, UX etc.) but they matter less to me the more I get into it. Writing is not groundbreaking, but it gets pretty good. Since very good voice acting from otherwise random NPCs.
Also the first game I've played that lets me use non-binary pronouns as a third option, rather than just Gendered or not. Very cool and I hope to see more games do that.
I'd say the most disappointing thing is how straightforward almost every quest is. They don't do what Obsidian does in games like New Vegas and Outer Worlds where lots of quests have multiple resolutions, some hidden. In this game if it's not in the objective list it's usually not an option. It's the typical Bethesda experience of course, rather than Obsidian's, so it's still nice for what it is.
It's the closest I've personally felt to exploring and interacting with the worlds of Mass Effect 1 and Knights of the Old Republic in a long time. It's got that sense of wander about it for me.
One of the really fun details about this fiasco is a few years back, after they had made a big PR fuck up like this, Unity stated they would make their Terms of Service version-bound. If you had Unity 2019 and continued to use it forever, you would only have to abide by the ToS for that version. Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.
...Guess which segment got quietly removed last year!
I've played a bit and explored the first major city. I love sci-fi games and am definitely starting to get a feel for the world and kinda like it. Not sure at this stage I'd call it "good" though, the gameplay is a bit clunky and the UX could do with a lot of improvements. Gunplay is pretty floaty and the default pistol iron sights are awful. My initial impression is: if you want a Fallout-style space RPG with good writing and characters, and have not yet played Obsidian's Outer Worlds, then that would likely be a better choice.
I also love flight games, but space combat seems very bland. It seems you're mostly big and slow, so there's not much manuevering going on that makes these games fun. Even a simple variation of Star Wars Squadrons boost>drift mechananic would make it much more engaging. You get an opportunity to see what a larger ship feels like and it still only has forward-facing weapons so it feels like you just try to out-DPS whatever is in front of you. If you try to use the environment, like giant asteroids, for cover or to split up enemies, said asteroids get blown up in seconds, a weird design decsion IMO. I've not messed with ship customisation yet. I did really like getting to a traffic zone and just hailing other ships to trade and chat though!
There are things I'm liking about the writing. This is, so far, the only game I've played which lets you choose they/them pronouns as a third option for voiced dialogue, which is really neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time, as opposed to just male/female OR gender neutral everywhere. The first major city has some interesting places and a history walkthrough from the local faction's perspective, which heavily hints at there being a lot of bias to unravel by visiting the others. I quite like the religeous centre books which discuss the idea of faith being core to human experience in a broader sense than just belief in gods and spirituality. I'm generally enjoying getting immersed into the world so far.
The game's opening is crazy fast-paced though, a thing happens and a guy gives you his ship within like, 10 minutes excluding character creation. I can't help but wander if the writers are relying on you having read lore on their website or something, because at creation you get choices for which faction you were raised by, but ZERO context about any of them. Could also just be a thing for repeat RP playthroughs, but I don't play games this large that way.
Another thing I'll add is graphically the game is pretty weird. It has some of the worst luminance balancing I've ever seen in a game. You'll see what I mean if you fire a mining laser in the first cave, the laser is dark. They seem to heavily rely on screen colour filters that add a grey/brown tint to everything and crush the dynamic range, Their first big outdoors reveal with a musical flourish is a brown landscape with a grey-tinted sun from the filters lmao. It's slightly improved on PC by tricking the game into using Windows Auto-HDR (which, amusingly, involves renaming the executable to farcry5.exe), but not by much. For a game that largely sells itself on exploring and finding beautiful vistas (I think at least, I avoided marketing and got the game with my new GPU) this is an alarmingly bizarre art direction choice to me.
Otherwise, the game feels like it's from 2016. It's lacking a lot of basic options like FoV sliders (can be edited in a config file, but still). Space travel is a series of black screens presumably because they couldn't get any kind of seamless loading to work. Besides equipping weapons from the ground, they don't seem to use alt-actions for anything else like eating food in front of you or reading a book without taking it (the former requires going through menus). Shop inventories do not show how much of an item you already have, etc. After installing the lastest AMD drivers, it runs well on my Ryzen 3600x RX 7900XT, 32GB system on High (not Ultra) settings, but in a way that suggests performance is significantly worse on lower-end hardware (and I am aware consoles are locked to 30fps!). I have yet to see the game justify its intense performance requirements given that, again, it does not look next-gen to me nor does there seem to be much complexity behind the scenes that affects gameplay from the player's perspective.
Overall I like it, but I would NOT have gotten it if it wasn't free with the GPU I got from my last one failing. I'm generally happy with playing an immersive space RPG so far, but would not recommend it over The Outer Worlds based on a more objective view of it so far.
Meaningful connection. A lot of these people are in these places because that's what they lack and think they've found.
Similarly to cults, few people escape these mindsets without somebody reaching out to help them.
The truly terrifying thing is, as the article shows, a lot of them are already retreating from their loved ones. After that, who is left to be able to help them out?
Damn, even if it's coincidental like the article suggests; those two things happening at once is NOT a good look for Bioware. Especially with BG3 being such a huge success.
However, some slim silver lining for those being laid off is that EA/Bioware appear to be handling the situation more gracefully than others. From the article:
McKay said that EA chose to act now to provide impacted colleagues with as many internal opportunities as possible. These changes coincide with a significant number of roles that are currently open across EA’s other studios. Impacted employees will be provided with professional resources and assistance as they apply for these positions. Those departing will receive credit in the game.
I highlight the last part because removing people from credits is a shit thing to do and I'm glad to see them overtly state this will not be the case. Hopefully this is not just PR BS and the laid off employees get new roles quickly.
Even though it was developed by a different team, they did capture the general charm IMO. The story and characters aren't terrible, some of it I really loved. Like Inquisition and Anthem, it was primarily let down by a lot of management and studio culture issues which have been made very public.
In my view, Dreadwolf is their opportunity to show if they've managed to overcome those callenges or has sucumbed to them forever. I am made hopeful by what appears to have been a well-scoped and managed project in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
The 24 minute video demo talks a little about this. A big benefit of having the Star Citizen alpha be playable is they've refined the gameplay a lot due to feedback. I think the changes they made these last few years to UX, flight model, combat design etc in S42 are really nice compared to what's currently playable.
For better or worse, they appear to have restarted development on Squadron 42 more than once over the decade. It has absolutely suffered from scope creep, whether that gets us a better game than it would have been in 2016/17 remains to be seen. Though that doesn't necessarily mean the gameplay design is "modern" - the game trades feel and usability for "immersion". It plays clunkily like ARMA, you can see in the video how throwing a grenade requires equipping it first (the "throw grenade" button is more like a macro to equip then throw), for example. They've done a lot of improvements to animation transitions to make the game feel better, but they can't seem to shake the core rigidness of gameplay.
Visually they've obviously done a fantastic job upgrading to modern technical standards combined with stunning art direction, Though again; scope creep, the old visuals would have been great for the time. Gameplay I reckon is still going to be fairly niche, they're marrying a Space Combat game with ARMA style on-foot gameplay, I imagine the broader gaming audience may like one but not the other.
With the feedback they've gotten over the years, it should be a far less clunky experience than it would have been 6 or so years ago. But of course, the standards have changed and the game has only become more of a meme over time, so it's got a lot to prove.