What game are you most excited for?

I don't know if games are being dumbed down. I feel like they are becoming more and more immersive and slowly becoming more and more realistic.

The problem is for me that they no longer excite me. I have 8000 hours clocked in on Battlefield 3. Wasn't the best game, but it made me extremely satisfied and happy.
So: The games aren't the problem here, it's just that I've changed as a person.

 

I don't actually think casual and AAA always go hand in hand. There are indie games that can be casual and there are AAA games that can be challenging.

 

When you're an older gamer that back then had to read manuals that ranged from 50 to 200 pages just to play, I do consider AAA games casual. Sure, you can be hardcore but they are so easy to pick up and play and have very few features to really grab my attention. Playing the original X-com games then playing the newer ones, its hard not to see them as casual games.

 

Microtransactions took the fun out of most games for me. I literally avoid a videogame like the plague if I find out it's trying to milk more money out of me long after I bought the original game.

 

Death Stranding comes to PC in July. Other than that, I don't have much hope for modern games. I think greed has killed the gaming industry, and I have withdrawn my trust from hype. Hype is a marketing tool, not a predictor of quality. I'm gonna dig around for some older gems I may have missed, or replay some of my favorites.

BTW, Steam Summer Sale is happening now

 

Yeah, but see; sometimes this can also ocurr with F2P games. Destiny 2 is a great example, and it's what has soured my liking of videogames. It's not only microtransactions, but the scummy way the game tries to take advantage of you.

You see: Destiny 2 gave you so much and so little at the same time. It gave you worlds to explore and content to look forward to, but it gave you just a small amount of dopamine to keep you hooked and keep you playing it daily. Warframe is the same thing.
I got away from it, and the moment I did, I felt relieved. I realised nothing I did in that game, even all the hours I kept grinding was ever going to help me in any form. Video game addiction is a real thing for some people, and games like these take advantage of that.

 

I'm sorry, I really need to pick on you a little bit. Ciri is in my opinion, one of the worst characters in any game I've ever played. I just finished witcher 1 and 2, and the cast from those games was astounding, deep, full of peculiarities, friendships and rivalries, twists and turns everywhere. Geralt feels like a real moral agent with an astounding amount of fluidity and choices. Name any other character and there are many good things to say about them - even the minor NPCs like Leeuvarden.

Spoiler: Very minor spoilers, just read it anyway

But Ciri is just this unexplained badass that everyone loves for no reason at all. You're just supposed to care about her and the games do nothing to encourage that. She's doesn't really have a problem with anyone, doesn't have any hard choices, just kind of does her thing. And she just comes out of nowhere and is instantly the center of attention for no reason. She's more of a "freak" than Geralt (as the peasants would say), being half-sorceress, half-witcher. But Geralt (who is just a standard witcher, and they have been plying their trade for centuries - people are accustomed to them) is rejected and hated EVERYWHERE he goes, yet Ciri is embraced by everyone save the wild hunt, if I recall correctly. I don't think she is mentioned a single time in the first game (maybe once), and then only a couple times in Witcher 2. The first 2 games hype up the wild hunt, and finding Yennefer and regaining Geralt's memory, but in TW3, it's just nothing but Ciri.

Now, I'm currently playing TW3 on the second hardest difficulty, and when I play the Ciri cutscenes, I try to see if I can win every fight by only left-clicking. YUP. I believe you can beat every encounter with Ciri by only pressing LMB, whereas Geralt would die in about 3 seconds if you did that with him. She's 20 years old and hasn't undergone any mutations, and Geralt is roughly 100 (I think?) Massive yikes from me. I just don't see it. Why would you make a franchise about one character, and then for no reason, make the focus on a completely different character? If they want to make a spin-off about Cirilla Fiona Elen Rhiannon, that's fine, just don't call it "the witcher", call it "the Source" or "the Hen Ichaer/ Elder Blood" - 1. she didn't undergo the mutations and is not technically a witcher, 2. the title refers to Geralt, and Geralt alone.

I haven't read the books though, so my experience is just from the games alone.

TLDR - I'm very triggered for no reason - but Ciri is a flat character, change my mind. inb4 no one replies to my wall of text

 

Paralives is still in the very early stages of indie development, but it looks AWESOME! A bunch of Sims fans are losing their minds over the smallest stuff, because EA has been so scummy for so many years with how little effort they put into the Sims. Paralives is basically showing up The Sims on every level, and Sims fans are waking up to the fact that The Sims could have done all this stuff years ago, but they just don't because they don't need to and can make more money off you by selling you a million expansion packs instead of improving the base game.

Also, don't get your hopes up to high if you haven't played 4 yet. I would say it's pretty inferior to 3 in most ways. I like it better for building, but for actual gameplay, Sims 3 is way, way better.

 

I remember playing 4, and within an hour I was hit by the unbelievable feeling of disappointment and no matter how much I tried to come to terms with it, I just couldn't, the game just sucked and did almost everything wrong. I never played 5, but I heard it was just as bad. What really irritates me is how absolutely pants on head stupid the plots have become. In the first 5 games (1-3, ODST and Reach), the core plot was easy to understand by anyone and all the extra lore was there to seek out if you wanted it. Now it seems you NEED to read all the books and watch all the crappy webseries just to understand wtf is even happening. I mean apparently a major faction in Infinite is going to be a faction of Brutes you will only know about if you played Halo Wars 2. That seems idiotic to me, why not keep the context for events in a game IN THE ACTUAL GAME and not spinoffs not as many played?

 

I haven't read the books beyond the first one, which is a set of short stories, not the novels, but I believe Ciri being so important to the narrative is because of how important she is in the books. The short stories set up her conception and the novels deal with her as a child and young woman. Just playing the games removes a lot of the context for why certain events are happening, the relationships between certain characters, and so on. For all intents and purposes the games are sequels to the books.

 

Regarding the "are games being dumbed down" argument, I feel like they are without a shadow of a doubt. This isnt to say complex games dont exist anymore, because of course they do, but a lot of them are being made to pander to people who cant even play a remaster of a childrens game from 2003 without getting stuck.

 

That's exactly what I thought, but playing the games alone leaves you very disappointed when you get to TW3. They should have integrated the novel lore better into the first 2 games, because some of these characters seem to appear from thin air, and you are left asking yourself, "who are these people and why do I care?" Even with all that aside, I think many characters were poorly written in TW3, stripped of philosophical complexity. For example, the conversations that you have with the king of the Wild Hunt in TW1 are very philosophical, even though he only has about 20 lines of dialogue. He doesn't appear in TW2 even once, but there is an aura of mystery and complexity surrounding him. But in TW3 Eredin is just this generic bad guy, stripped of all interesting character traits. Yen and Ciri are the worst, though. And all of the character flaws with Ciri that I addressed above still stand, lore notwithstanding.

 

She takes center stage real quickly as the main plot motivator to the point where she even have books where she is way more prominent than Geralt himself, which, admittedly, is something I always admired on the Witcher universe, particularly books, it's willingness to cast the main protagonist aside and show that as power and a key character he is, he is nothing more than a mere cog into something bigger he can in no way understand or control. It fleshes the universe in a way that, if you'll forgive me, not even Song of Ice and Fire can approach as well. There is no fodder in the Witcher universe and everyone, no matter how small has a special role.

 

Its been so long since I have played any of the games that I cant really agree or disagree. The thing is though, the games are essentially fanfiction sequels to the books, even the author doesnt like CD Projekt because they bought the rights to make games of his work for a low price, only for them to go on and become way more popular than he expected they would be. Personally, I read the first short story collection and enjoyed them, but it was extremely odd experiencing the story backwards, going from the narrative of the games to the stories that explain all the stuff that I kinda stopped caring about as I played the games (How Geralt got his titles, how he met certain characters, etc.) The games also do take certain liberties I imagine, similar to how, in the Metro games, Artyom is a gun toting Rambo gunning down countless Nazis, Commies, and mutants, meanwhile in the books I'm pretty sure he barely even fires a gun.

 

The only one that I'm really looking forward to is the new guilty gear (fighting games are my favorite) and possibly the new Paper Mario. Other than that, it's hard to get excited for games since so many of them are either interactive movies disguised as games, or all-online games that lose their online activity within a few months before it's on to the next one. I'd say I'd be excited for the new Metroid Prime but I wonder if that will even be out in the next few years.

 

Yeah I'm aware that Andrzej Sapkowski got fucked pretty hard, and of course I agree that games based on books are still just games in the end. I don't think he considers them canon so I can't complain about the lore (or lack thereof) in the games per se. But I will give CD Projekt Red a ton of shit from a game design perspective.

 

I'm not sure if it's CD Project Red's fault, if you read very early reviews about the game, Andrzej didnt give a damn about the IP, he didnt care if the game would fail or not, provided almost zero consulting services and was actually just trying make a quick buck, so in that regard, screw him. I think the game developers in that instance did nothing wrong. I mean, see how different is the relationship between the dev company and Mike Pondsmith is, he is as hands on as he possibly can, because he absolutely love his setting.

 

Read. The. Freaking. Books. Read them. Then I will actually take your opinion for granted Ciri is an incredible character, fully fleshed out by Sapkowski's words. Of COURSE she's OP. Also this post made me really sad for some reason, this wasn't picking on, this was destroying haha. I'm not gonna add more to what others said and you definitely haven't changed my mind, she's still the best character of all time, read the books and tell me what you think

 

I'm literally so happy we're all discussing the Witcher. A huge part of my life revolved around it for this past year and a half.

 

Quoted bc of you mentioning Metro, I picked up Exodus last year and still haven't been able to get into the game it's just too hard for me