Hangout The Games Hangout Thread

[Jammin]

Borderlands 3 trailer dropped as expected.


Looks a lot like Borderlands 2 to me. Which I'm totally fine with. I'm just really releaved this doesn't look like it's going the games as a service direction. Not battle royal or anything strange. Just looks like straight up FPS Diablo with weird and fun looking guns. Which is all the I want.

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 28, 2019, Original Post Date: Mar 28, 2019 ---

Also I like that they are including the Tales from the Borderlands characters in this.

 

[xi0]

The press conference was classic Pitchford. Incredibly awkward, making the entire affair about himself and with awful magic tricks. A lot of technical difficulties too. And on top of that, no clarification on what stores the game would be on for PC. Nice.

Borderlands 2 had MTX, so I'm not expecting much different. I'm not really sure what a live version of Borderlands would even be. Maybe something like PoE perhaps. It would be tough to imagine it was a legit MMO though.

 

[Jammin]

The press conference was classic Pitchford. Incredibly awkward, making the entire affair about himself and with awful magic tricks. A lot of technical difficulties too. And on top of that, no clarification on what stores the game would be on for PC. Nice.

Borderlands 2 had MTX, so I'm not expecting much different. I'm not really sure what a live version of Borderlands would even be. Maybe something like PoE perhaps. It would be tough to imagine it was a legit MMO though.

Terrible. It would be terrible. Live service Borderlands would basically be Destiny.

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 29, 2019, Original Post Date: Mar 29, 2019 ---

The thing I probably want most is the reintroduction of a game mechanic from Borderlands 1 where the non-boss enemies use the weapons they drop. Like in Borderlands 2 the enemies had a set attack value. Which was more balanced but I loved in Borderlands 1 how you'd know a certain enemy would have a powerful gun because they would be shooting at you with it. It made the mobs a lot more threatening.

 

[xi0]

Terrible. It would be terrible. Live service Borderlands would basically be Destiny.

Well, that doesn't sound terrible to me, if done right. It's not too far off from what that game is with online co-op. At least, I wouldn't compare something like that to what Bethesda did with Fallout 76.

 

[Jammin]

Well, that doesn't sound terrible to me, if done right. It's not too far off from what that game is with online co-op. At least, I wouldn't compare something like that to what Bethesda did with Fallout 76.

Here's the thing. If it's a live service they would need to monetize it more. Be that microtransations or whatever. Keep people "engaged" via crap like daily and weekly missions and various other busy work. And that's all stuff I don't want or need.

Borderlands has a very simple game play formula. It's not endless but it is fun. You get a good storymode. You beat it. Then you beat it again. And again. And again. Until you reach level cap got all the weapons you want and then your done until an DLC story driven expansion comes out. Then if your still not bored you go start a different class and do it all over again. Whether you do that alone or with friends, it's a good time. And one with a clear finish line.

And I think it's better that way.

 

[xi0]

I wasn't making a judgment on which version would be better or what I'd prefer, I'm just saying I think there are many worse choices for the GAAS model than Borderlands. Not sure how it could have been monetized more either, since 2 had plenty of cosmetics and DLC. I would imagine that unlike EA, Activision, or Bethesda, Gearbox probably wouldn't venture away from what they already do well. You saw that yesterday with their jokes about a BR. They probably wouldn't have the servers for it either.

 

[Jammin]

I wasn't making a judgment on which version would be better or what I'd prefer, I'm just saying I think there are many worse choices for the GAAS model than Borderlands. Not sure how it could have been monetized more either, since 2 had plenty of cosmetics and DLC. I would imagine that unlike EA, Activision, or Bethesda, Gearbox probably wouldn't venture away from what they already do well. You saw that yesterday with their jokes about a BR. They probably wouldn't have the servers for it either.

I agree it would be a pretty easy fit for a game as a service but that's why I was a little uneasy about it. I mean, with shift keys they were doing lootboxes before anybody it's just that they didn't sell them. Instead they gave them away.

And I'm relieved because it seems like they are not doing any of that. Which is going to mean a better game for us.

 

[xi0]

Ubisoft is partnering with Epic Games Store for Anno 1800

www.anno-union.com

Remember when Epic and Tim Sweeney said after the Metro Exodus debacle that they never want to pull games from Steam that were already being offered for preorder? I member.

...

......

 

[riki]

There is a rumor that George RR Martin and From Software are collaborating on a game, but it hasn't been confirmed yet so take that news with a grain of salt for now.

 

[xi0]

I saw it. Something about it felt sort of bogus. It seems too similar to Shadow of War or something perhaps. It'd make good business sense if it was related to ASOIAF, but part of me wishes it won't be. Unless he'd go the prequel/spin-off route and do something way in the past that's not related to the show at all. And even if that's what it'll be, a part of he is also annoyed that he's working on something other than Winds of Winter.... again. And that's coming from someone who's more patient than others and is really into his side projects like The World of Ice and Fire and Fire & Blood.

But who knows, maybe it'll be awesome and worth it... Or maybe it doesn't even exist.

 

[scav]

Ubisoft is partnering with Epic Games Store for Anno 1800

www.anno-union.com

Remember when Epic and Tim Sweeney said after the Metro Exodus debacle that they never want to pull games from Steam that were already being offered for preorder? I member.

...

......

dude just make peace with epic store or it's gonna give you PTSD

 

[xi0]

dude just make peace with epic store or it's gonna give you PTSD

Make peace? With what exactly?

I wasn't personally looking forward to Anno 1800 particularly, but I know some are, like @GrySun I think. So, it's useful information for people if they prefer having it on Steam, because it won't be sold on it after the 16th.

 

[scav]

best April fool i've seen today

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 1, 2019, Original Post Date: Apr 1, 2019 ---

Make peace? With what exactly?

I wasn't personally looking forward to Anno 1800 particularly, but I know some are, like @GrySun I think. So, it's useful information for people if they prefer having it on Steam, because it won't be sold on it after the 16th.

with Epic store practices. I feel like it's gonna happen quite often now lol

 

[xi0]

with Epic store practices. I feel like it's gonna happen quite often now lol

It already has, that's why I post about it. The less pushback they get about it, the more it'll happen.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 2, 2019, Original Post Date: Apr 2, 2019 ---

 

[Jammin]

This was a fascinating read.

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

It's a pretty interesting insight into Bioware and why Anthem is the way it is. What a fiasco. It's kind of amazing it came out at all.

 

[TrienDarkform]

This was a fascinating read.

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

It's a pretty interesting insight into Bioware and why Anthem is the way it is. What a fiasco. It's kind of amazing it came out at all.

I saw that; read through that during my lunch, and it seems like it was quite the mess. Stuff like this isn't uncommon alas, in many other areas besides game development...

Though I had to giggle a bit at this part, since I live not too far away from Edmonton:

There was also the fact that BioWare’s main office was located in Edmonton, a place where winters can dip to minus 20 or even minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which staff there say has always made it difficult to recruit veterans from more habitable cities.

Pfft, we only had a week of close to -40 this year! And it happened during February, which is highly unusual.

 

[Jammin]

It explains a lot though. Like it almost seems like a comedy of errors. Like the temptation is just to blame EA and it sounds like they deserve a share for placing unreasonable time constraints and forcing everybody to use Frostbite for things it's not meant to do, and just being generally a negative influence on the creative process.

But it really sounds like Bioware's own mismanagement and ego of the people in charge was to blame. No wonder it's been bleeding talent for the last couple years. And I don't blame them. Would you rather be there working on the next Dragon Age right now or at some lesser known studio like Hardsuit Labs working on Bloodlines 2? I feel like the choice is obvious.

Like it sounds like even they didn't really know what Anthem was. And all the fragments of ideas they had couldn't work with Frostbite. Especially not with them shifting the best people that had with the engine to FIFA in order to make Frostbite work with that.

The two bits that stood out to me were.

On June 29, 2017, BioWare’s Mark Darrah published a tweet that may seem odd today. He noted that he was the executive producer of the Dragon Age franchise, then gave a list of games he was not currently working on: ”Anthem; Mass Effect; Jade Empire; A DA Tactics game; Star Wars…” The implication was that Darrah was producing Dragon Age 4. At the time, this was true. This iteration of Dragon Age 4 was code-named Joplin, and those who were working on it have told me they were excited by creative director Mike Laidlaw’s vision for the project.

But Anthem was on fire, and by October, BioWare had decided to make some massive changes. That summer, studio general manager Aaryn Flynn departed, to be replaced by a returning Casey Hudson. As part of this process, the studio canceled Joplin. Laidlaw quit shortly afterward, and BioWare restarted Dragon Age 4 with a tiny team under the code name Morrison. Meanwhile, the studio moved the bulk of Dragon Age 4’s developers to Anthem, which needed all of the company’s resources if it was going to hit the ship date that EA was demanding.

It's no wonder they keep screwing up. Seems like the right decision there was to cancel or delay Anthem. Instead they threw a more promising project under the bus and lost a valuable creative mind in the process.

Like if Dragon Age 4 was restarted halfway through 2017 with a tiny team just to try and keep Anthem from falling on it's face. Now Dragon Age 4 is probably behind the 8 ball too. It's a chain reaction of stupidity that doesn't end until they learn to manage things better.

One mandate from Anthem’s directors had been to make the game “unmemeable,” a reaction to Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s jittery facial animations, which became an internet joke in the days leading up to that game’s release. For Anthem, the team used high-end performance capture in order to ensure that the characters couldn’t be turned into embarrassing GIFs and plastered all over Reddit. Since the bulk of the game’s story-telling would be told from a first-person perspective in the hub city Fort Tarsis, players would spend a lot of time staring at characters’ faces. The characters had to look good.

Performance capture, or “pcap,” did indeed make for beautiful animations, but it came at a cost. Because booking performance capture was so expensive, the team often had just one shot to get things right, which was a difficult proposition when Anthem’s design was changing so rapidly. Sometimes, the team would record and implement scenes that stopped making sense as a result of design changes. “There are little bits of dialogue, little moments in some of these performance-captured scenes, that if you stop and think, don’t make any sense,” said one developer. “The reason this doesn’t make any sense is because they changed some of the gameplay down the line, but it was impossible to change the performance capture.”

One mission involving the rebellious Sentinel Dax, for example, has a few lines of dialogue that reference the destruction of her javelin exosuit, which never happens in the game. The explanation is simple, the developer said. The mission was altered after they’d recorded the dialogue, and there was no time or money to go re-record it. “They were just like, ‘Well it’s not gonna be destroyed,’” said the developer. “Wait, that makes that line of dialogue make no sense.”

That explains so much of what I've heard about the stray story stuff that doesn't make any sense.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 3, 2019, Original Post Date: Apr 3, 2019 ---

It especially made me feel for Bioware Austin. Sounds like they really got dragged into this and basically got this game dumped in their laps and then got ignored by the leads at the main studio when they are the ones with more experience in the online space.

 

[xi0]

The Dax thing really stood out while I was playing. All of a sudden this quirky, reckless character came out of nowhere talking about things that happened like we SHOULD remember. Yet they never happened in the game.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 3, 2019, Original Post Date: Apr 3, 2019 ---

https://www.pcgamer.com/borderlands-3-pc-is-releasing-exclusively-on-the-epic-store-in-september/

Thanks for helping me to save money Epic and 2K Games!

 

[Jammin]

The Dax thing really stood out while I was playing. All of a sudden this quirky, reckless character came out of nowhere talking about things that happened like we SHOULD remember. Yet they never happened in the game.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 3, 2019, Original Post Date: Apr 3, 2019 ---

https://www.pcgamer.com/borderlands-3-pc-is-releasing-exclusively-on-the-epic-store-in-september/

Thanks for helping me to save money Epic and 2K Games!

It may actually cause me to buy it on PS4. Not sure though.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 3, 2019 ---

Well that and the couch coop potential. The latest trailer showed split screen. Which is a nice feature I honestly didn't expect to see return.

 

[xi0]

It may actually cause me to buy it on PS4. Not sure though.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 3, 2019 ---

Well that and the couch coop potential. The latest trailer showed split screen. Which is a nice feature I honestly didn't expect to see return.

Yeah, no word on PC split screen either. Will probably be needed to be modded in like in the past games. Not sure why they wouldn't have included it on console honestly. Is console splitscreen really that rare these days?