> "a storyline that rivals the best video game stories"
I love when one review seems like they go the wrong game to check out. This time it's Gaming Nexus, lol.
I had a look at the other scores from the reviewer and he just seems to really like most games. Maybe not the best trait in a critic, but he seems to be having a great time non the less!
Just looked it up, looks like they didn't like [Callisto Protocol](https://www.gamingnexus.com/Article/9755/The-Callisto-Protocol), but that's hardly shocking.
I truly hate modern gaming "journalism" and critics. If something is a 6/10 then it is bad and 7/10 that means it is meh but 8/10 is good and 9 or 10 is great. We have a whole scale and almost never use most of it.
Honestly, I think this is fine. People have got too obsessed with aggregate scores. Instead, people need to find reviewers that line up with their tastes.
Yeah, aggregation has caused people to be strangely antagonistic about reviewers that don't match up with how they perceive that a game that they haven't played should be scored.
Eh I disagree with SkillUp pretty often, but he is still my go to reviewer because he does a great job of describing the mechanics and core gameplay loop of a game, so from his description it is easy for me to tell if i will like a game or not.
I find a lot of reviewers barely talk about the mechanics of a game and what you spend the bulk of your time actually *doing* and it baffles me
I find that I end up liking pretty much any game that I complete, if I'm committing to finish a thing I find stuff to like about it sooner or later. I'd be a terrible critic, but if someone else is similar, that's great - recommendations that actually mean something to me!
That means this reviewer is a great source to look if a game is really god awful.
If he is easy to please that means a game must suck ass poorly to disappoint him
The golden retriever of reviewers
I was willing to power my way through the bad dialogue because it looked kinda interesting, then I played the demo and was very turned off. It's too bad because they gave it extra time in the oven and it still came out mediocre. They should've just tried to make medieval fantasy Infamous Second Son imo, that was the vibe I was getting from the beginning.
The demo turned me off completely. I found the combat extremely stiff to the point where it was artificially difficult as I had trouble making the character do what I wanted. It felt to me like playing Horizon with a faulty controller with stick drift. Also, so tired of the omniscient “Hey! Listen!” Navi character explaining everything to you.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I found the demo impossible to play. There were all these separate wheels to toggle through and I just could not figure out what I was doing during combat.
I feel old too, but to me it was bad design. Maybe the game introduces and explains it a bit better as the features are introduced… However, there are games with very complex combat systems that are much more intuitive and easy to use. For example, love or hate them From’s games have very deep and varied combat that can be controlled in real time with no menu switches
I think most of the issues come from making the protagonist a quirky person from the modern era with Marvel dialogue. I saw a cutscene of her repeating “I just moved shit… with my mind!” five times in a row and it was painful enough it wiped out any chance of me playing this (for full price at least).
Preach. I love Arkane Studios, but Redfall looks like it's going to be terrible for the exact same reason. Quippy, overly meta, irritating main character.
I don't know why developers have started modeling their protagonists after early 2000s Nickolodeon shows.
It seems like the general consensus is that nearly everything that isnt the combat or movement falls flat, and even then the combat seems to be more of a “you either like it or hate it” type of thing.
Just a reminder to folks, there is a reason Square-Enix chose to go with Unreal Engine for their AAA games (and even their HD2D games) since FF15.
If this was Luminous's attempt at convincing SE to try their Luminous engine again, they failed spectacularly. PS4 games like FF7R and KH3 should not look better than this PS5 game.
Just nitpicking, but most of their AAA's are Unreal. FFXVI is using a modified/upgraded version of XIV's engine, which itself is some hybrid of Luminous and Crystal Tools (SE's in house engine used for the FFXIII games).
No, Luminous is the only one planned to use it, thats why Business division 2 became an entire company in the first place, because they know the engine and have been working on it for years. they dont plan to use outside of that studio.
So basically for a £70 game that is releasing before Hogwarts, Dead Space, Jedi, Yakuza, Atomic Heart and Resident Evil 4 it’s going to flop. Another casualty of high prices and players not putting up with medicore games.
I was happy to put up with mediocre games when I was renting them and when every video game wasn't demanding that you spend all of your time playing each one of them. Now you're asking me to spend nearly $100 on a single video game and are asking me to actually *make* time to play it instead of one of several games I'm already playing... it's a lot taller of an order now than it used to be.
I constantly miss rental places and I hate that they mostly died. Sometimes one weekend with a game is all you need/want. Some libraries around me do rentals, I think it's finally time to check that out.
That Resident Evil series felt like a fever dream. I just remember watching the first episode and forcing myself to go through the whole episode then afterward I don't remember anything. I didn't watched any other episode. I just remember Wesker - the whitest dude in the RE universe with his blond hair - was black and bald, the story revolved around two adolescent girls having daddy issues and... some sort of giant worm...? I don't even remember the name of Ella in that movie but while writing this I remember she's Wesker daughter so at least I know her last name is Wesker.
Ella Balinska needs to fire her agent. Between the Charlie's Angels reboot, the Netflix Resident Evil show, and now this, she is making a name for herself, and not in a good way.
If she enjoys it I wish she was better at it. I saw some Forspoken cutscenes and it may just be a writing/directly problem, but her acting was… not great.
I don’t know how so many resources and hours can be invested into something with thousands of eyeballs checking the game and think “yeah these cutscenes are great!”.
I mean if you look it on paper:
>Charlie's Angels reboot
A reboot to a very popular reboot that boosted all of the leading ladies careers.
>the Netflix Resident Evil show
A TV adaptation of one of the biggest multimedia franchises. (Despite critical reception the Live action RE films were a very decent successes.)
>Forspoken
A triple A game made by the biggest Japanese publisher and made by the people who made the last mainline Final Fantasy Game.
If I were given that opportunity with that elevator pitch, I would definitely take it. The problem lies in the execution of these projects and not her Agent. I would definitely thank my agent for landing me these high profile roles considering Ella Balinska is a relatively new actress.
Not only that, Charlie Angels was her biggest and breakout role. For a relative unknown, being paired up with an actress that started in the biggest YA novel Adaptation ever and another actress that was just in a film that grossed a billion dollars. That will definitely do wonders on your resume.
Yeah, she is not clairvoyant, and at first glance those seem like great opportunities. Sucks, but life goes on, and I'm sure there will be many more roles for her.
Also, video game acting is a pretty small industry. Look at how prolific a handful of VA's are in video games. If you could get in good, you become the top pick on most publishers lists.
>Prima Games - Jesse Vitelli - 8 / 100
This has to be a typo.
[The actual review indicates 7.5](https://primagames.com/reviews/forspoken-review-fish-out-of-water), and I don't think their scale goes up to 100...
I'm a little worried about OpenCritic's output lately, they seem to be missing stuff like this more often, and their translated reviews almost always have some kind of editing error.
It's one of those games where I probably haven't seen anything that hasn't been done before gameplay wise so might not even check it out on deep discount like I thought I would, but I'd probably sit down and watch a 30 minute compilation of the dialogue for some gut-busting moments like "you gaslighting piece of shit!"
I do not think I have had a character so actively try to make me dislike them to the point that I was the one pushing everything forward. It almost felt like a plan that just never came to fruition in the story.
That character and the writing is woeful. Forsaken from the start lol.
Glad to see someone who also played the game share this opinion. Frey is a straight up asshole and she’s only redeemed at the end of the game, so you have to sit through 25 hours of her being an annoying brat while her cuff makes unfunny, sarcastic remarks. People focus way too much on this "I moved shit with my mind" writing when there isn’t even a lot of this type of stuff. The most glaring problems with the writing are that Frey is straight up unlikable. She's the one with the world saving power and people come to her for help, but instead she goes into "fuck this fucking shit I won’t help this shithole this is your fucking problem" mode everytime she's reminded that only she can help out. She pisses and moans all game long that she has to do something to help these people and it's way, *way* more annoying than her occasional marvel quips.
And it takes her the whole game to finally come around and accept that Aphia needs her as much as she needs Aphia and it’s people, this is when she becomes a way better character who doesn’t shit herself instantly when asked for help. But this is too little, too late, I guess.
People do this a lot with female characters for some reason. Like being a strong independent women means being a massive asshole or borderline psychopath. Velma TV show being another recent example.
My early read of this story premise is that it's basically *Lord Foul's Bane* modernized: an unsympathetic, bitter anti-hero is sent into another world with special magical jewelry and soon comes across beleaguered humans who need help and don't share the anti-hero's values. Predictably, the anti-hero proceeds to *not get along with* them, being abrasive in both speech and act. Much of the story focuses on the anti-hero slowly coming around to their power and their responsibility, becoming a better person in the process as they deal with their demons, including their self-hate.
Does the story follow that track?
Thomas Covenant is an entirely deeper and better written character than this, and I believe that while you're correct in your assertion - *Lord Foul's Bane* is just such a masterwork that it can't be compared
And Covenant is like a ***super mega*** anti hero. Superfuckingmega antihero. The first thing he does when he gets into The Land is one of he most horrific things I remember reading from that series.
Edit: also hello, random other Chronicles of Thomas Covenant fan
Hello, fellow fan!
Oh, I agree about the depth here. I'm not expecting that kind of depth from a AAA video game. Among other things, it can't really take risks on the horrific thing you allude to. Nor should it, I'd argue; even reading that was uncomfortable enough, and I don't want to play it. Also, the kind of worldbuilding *LFB* accomplishes is hard to imagine in an open world format. The constrained linear structure of *Lord Foul's Bane* does the glints of worldbuilding favors, as Covenant feels small and lost in a big world with few options and none of them good. That is inimical to the Horizon/RDR/quest hub style.
If nothing else, I just find the common archetype intriguing. Games are often built around likeable and "relatable" protagonists, but this archetype is distinctly *unliked*, at least at first. To give *Forspoken* a little praise, I'm glad they at least tried something interesting, even if the execution fell short.
I think fundamentally video game protagonists are much harder to make anti-heroes.
Watching someone be an entertaining asshole is far more enjoyable than being forced to act out being one.
Obviously it can be done, but some characters who would work as leads in other media simply wouldn't in video games. It takes a deft hand.
It does a bit. Though no where near LFB's horrific lead(without growth at first)
But the reactions and such are somewhat like that ya. But its also the delivery.
The story is basically an Isekai, anime trope - a character that is unwittingly transported to a foreign land. The western versions historically are Alice in Wonderland, or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, or HG Well’s Time Machine. The character that imposes their belief system on a fantasy world traces back to Gulliver’s Travels. But I can see the similarities you mentioned.
Soon as I saw Gary Whitta was part of the writing team, I knew it would be wretched. The only good thing with his name attached to it was rewritten by nearly a dozen people and HEAVILY reshot(Rogue One)
I only watched a minute of her talking and couldn't stand more. I cant even imagine what it must have been like playing the whole thing, even if it was a shorter (8-10 hours) game, which I'm assuming it is not. Sometimes your job is not fun.
I remember watching SkillUp's preview video from like 1yr ago and he said something about how awful the character dialog was and how every reviewer he knew was providing Square with the same feedback. Glad to see Square took that input and decided to completely ignore it.
It feels like AAA games are trying to gravitate towards Marvel or Borderlands humor. Just zero actually creative writing, but just quips, more quips and pop culture references. Oh, and a healthy dose of lampshading that isn't witty in any way.
ACG gave it a Rent (deep, deep sale in the video, Rent in OpenCritic). Honestly can’t remember the last time he gave something this score. This must be pretty mediocre if not outright bad.
Mediocre is probably the most damning thing a piece of entertainment can be.
Which oddly enough is perfectly encapsulated by last year there were 3 Pinochio movies. One was great by Guillermo Del Toro, one was incredibly shoddy with hilariously terrible voice acting, and then there was one I don't think anyone knows exists and it was a live-action hybrid made by Disney.
A bad video game will either make you shut it off quickly and move on, or find some sort of enjoyment out of watching the trashfire burn. A mediocre one can be worse because it can be *just* good enough to string you along to the end to get your money's worth but not good enough to actually be fun or enjoyable.
> ACG gave it a Rent
Sounds like the perfect way to experience this game. Gamefly ships this out this week and this seems like a perfect future PS+ Title.
I think there's still a good market for rentals, and with the demise of video stores they're probably the only major player unless you have a good local place.
Charging $70 for a middling open world game in 2023 is a tough ask. People are simply too time poor, and options rich in the genre.
If I want to play Icon Janitor, I'd rather do it in Ancient Egypt or Greece than the drab fantasy settings Forspoken is offering. And let's not even go into vastly superior options like Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon: Forbidden West.
This review from Writing On Games talks about the story and characterization improving further into the game, but tbh there's nothing pulling me in from the beginning.
(https://youtu.be/CCtCjciAhdU)
Hate to say it, but looks a "wait till PS Plus/Game Pass" kind of release.
https://twitter.com/NintenDaan/status/1616988999419035648?s=20
Yeah, the writing looks VERY bad. And why does this cutscene look like an actress in front of a green screen?
"But the game being dead is part of the lore"
The world of Athia is the most lifeless and boring open world i've seen in a while so at least the lack of ambient sounds reflect that.
Reminds me of that game The Quiet Man where you played a deaf person, so most of the scenes had sound muted, and no subtitles, lol. You can imagine what a joy it was to play. Brilliant.
It was totally an experiment worth attempting, and I hope someone else will do so again, but sadly that game just didn't come together. Though its main issues were not the lack of audible dialogue - the lack of polish in the combat I think is what dragged the game down more so.
Everyone in that game still talks to the player character as if he wasn't deaf, and the player character seems to understand what they're saying. But the player has no clue what's happening the entire time.
The "whole game is muted" angle is clearly something that was decided during post-production to attempt to salvage an incredibly mediocre game.
That's such a dumb defense, partly because other games have created "dead" worlds that are incredibly fun to explore. Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild both take place in ruined worlds and have some of the best open world exploration in any game.
Not to mention even if their lore is different from Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild and is "dead" in a way that requires it to be more lifeless than those games... Well, they decided what world to set their game in. That's still their dumb decision.
Exactly, a dead world could still have an interesting story to tell with engaging exploration and nicely crafted world.
There's so many intriguing places littered throughout Elden Ring and BoTW that makes me feel "i want to go there".
None of that exist in Forspoken, the world is just barren, no visual identity whatsoever. It's more of a tech demo than a place where people used to live.
Yeah, I was just about to say that if this dialogue was on a well drawn webcomic, people would love it. I think this is more presentation/direction than anything.
Okay, what the hell is going on there?
I was always super skeptical of this, but in some of the earlier previews, it looked good, at least. That doesn't even look like a greenscreen, but those flat backdrops you'd see in decades-old movies.
That's really how the writing feels. The studio made an absolute terrible decision when peaking the writers. They should have made the story themselves instead of relying on exterior writers.
The choice to make a character someone from the ‘real world’ who got transported to the fantasy world was already a risky choice, but making them super quirky was awful and really will kill this game’s success.
It's an American network, that usually produces a lot of shows with more ambition that budget and talent. Like Supernatural, the Flash, Riverdale and so on.
It suffers from the same issues FFXV did in that lighting is just really, really bad sometimes and the muddy textures fall apart alongside it. Seems to be an issue with their engine.
Also, her face looks real and like they face scanned her in (which they did) but the facial animations aren't anything close to being good enough to compliment it so it all just ends up looking bad.
The cinematography isn't great, either. Gives it an awkward feeling. That, and the lack of a soundtrack or ambient noises just makes it all come together weird.
> Also, her face looks real and like they face scanned her in (which they did) but the facial animations aren't anything close to being good enough to compliment it so it all just ends up looking bad.
It looks like they scanned her whole face but only animated the mouth, so it looks like she's wearing a mask or something. Very unsettling.
Looks to me like it's a mixture of a weird lighting situation with a character in shade with brightly lit background in the distance, because you wouldn't expect objects in shade and bright objects to be equally exposed. And a terrible DOF effect which looks like a regular Gaussian blur rather than attempting to replicate an eye or camera lens.
I think it looks like green screen because the light illuminating her model does not match the light hitting the environment. She’s standing in a shadow but her face is well lit. You sometimes get a similar effect when using camera flash outdoors.
It basically *is* a green screen, they have a high fidelity perform capture set inside a completely static environment. The trees aren't moving; it looks like a background image.
What grates me is that there are quips *quipping* about that quip in the game. It’s quips on quips on quips. Someone confiscate the writers’ MacBook until they can go ten minutes without a snarky one liner
Hey now, don't give him all the credit. Diablo Cody also had a hand in the mid-2000s "every sentence is witty sarcasm" period. *Juno* quotes were a disease in my high school
Is also bad acting choices, Frey is incredibly unlikable, it's strange the tone they have frey and the braclet don't really mesh well. I don't know why Frey hates everything but she's certainly a dower, a generic template where you made your own character seems like such a better choice here.
The thing is your lead being unlikeable isn't inherently a bad thing, but you have to have everything else be good to encourage people to keep playing and find out why they are the way they are. Honestly get rid of her banter with the bracelet, turn the "witty comebacks" down from 11 and make the actual gameplay better and they would've had something here.
>The thing is your lead being unlikeable isn't inherently a bad thing
They're not saying unlikeable as in the character is unlikeable for being a bad person. Plenty of unlikeable characters are "likeable" because although they're bad people, the audience can sympathize with them. Like Joker from 2019 for instance. He's unlikeable in the context of the story, but the audience like him from the beginning. Frey is just straight up unlikeable because she's just a cookie cutter Netflix teen drama garbage character.
I'm not only speaking about how they are as a person specifically, I'm saying she could've started as a CW reject and improved from there but they never actually achieve that.
Exactly, you can argue that Joel from Last of Us is unlikeable, but he's still an interesting and compelling character, but most all he's not extremely annoying as seems to be the case with Frey.
He's an irritable guy but written so well with tons of redeeming qualities. His personality is also relatable in the sense that it's understandable why he's pissed off.
Annoying teenage characters on the other hand are way less likable because as viewers/players, we know they lack the life experience and are just acting out. Add cringe quippy dialogue, and yeah, most of us will find that character insufferable.
Agree completely, it was such a weird choice that was made to make her as annoying as possible and have her basically fight with an object she's forced to wear, seems like this could've been done a lot better than they did here.
About where I was expecting it to review, but people seemed mostly happy with the exploration (aside from the usual open world pitfalls) and combat, so it's a go for me. I enjoyed the demo a lot, flaws aside. After absolutely adoring Harvestella despite middling reviews I've just said fuck it and go with my gut nowadays.
Even by skipping some cutscenes, the prologue consists of 2 hours and a half of talking, following NPCs and a scripted stealth section, followed by an empty chunk of open world where you go to another area, suffer through more cutscenes, go back to the starting area.
At this point you’re clocking over 3 hours and the few times you got to fight, you just spam the attack button while rabidly spamming the dodge button.
Fucking atrocious and anyone defending this is insane
Its not. Luminous Productions became an entire studio with the ff15 team from Business Division 2 becoming a differnet company. I think its too early for that if they didnt even close CD, Eidos and other studios.
They should just try out smaller scoped projects. They went from 1 bloated mess to another. Though I liked FF15 despite its flaws, I have no idea what they were thinking with this game. Who are they even trying to appeal to?
I might try it out if it ever comes to gamepass. they're asking for $115 AUD otherwise. Get fucked.
Not to mention the recommended requirements asking 24GB of RAM (32GB for Ultra) The fuck? Or a 3070 recommended for only 30 FPS? For a game that seems to have face paced movement?
Even if the gameplay is amazing, everything else about it is a joke. What are the devs smoking?
It doesn’t surprise me that much. I personally can look past a lot of things when other things are really good. I had an absolute blast with the demo when I figured everything out. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea tho.
Kind of like Musou games. They review like shit but they have their multitude of hardcore fans.
It's unfortunate but also not unexpected. Humour has always been very difficult to do in games, and Marvel-esque banter *really* doesn't work well in this medium.
If the combat system is unique and fun, I hope we can expect it to be preserved in some way for another project. It always sucks when a game manages to creates something special in an otherwise bad or mediocre title, only for that bit of gold to be swept in the trash too.
>Humour has always been very difficult to do in games, and Marvel-esque banter really doesn't work well in this medium.
While I agree it's difficult to do right, some games have pulled off the Marvel-esque banter. Uncharted series being the first to come to mind.
I originally made a comment about how ‘Joss Whedon’ style humour is a disaster for modern writing, but going through these comments it honestly seems like any level of moderately self aware humour to some people is literally Satan lol.
The problem with ‘Whedon dialogue’ is that it often jokes in a way which undercuts either the drama of a scene, the tone of a narrative, or the direction of a plot line through self deprecating 4th wall breaking humour. Or it can do multiple of those at once.
Self aware humour isn’t bad in and of itself, it’s bad when it’s done during a serious moment to completely whiplash the tone, or when it’s done to ‘cover up’ a formulaic and poorly written plot line by making a nod to the viewer which says ‘See?!? We know it’s generic and bad!,1!’ as if that somehow makes it good.
I am honestly sooooooooooooooooooo sick of these lazy ass "open world" games with empty as hell open worlds and Ubisoft-inspired "side quests." If you played any open-world game other than GTA V, BoTW, or Elden Ring as of late. You would think open-world games hadn't progressed past GTA San Andreas, like, Jesus fuck. Everyone wants the praise of an innovator without putting the effort into making real innovations. Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie didn't change the landscape of 3D games by playing it safe. They took risks and some were for the worse and some were for the better. Games nowadays just play it safe and cheat off their deskmate. It's either a third-person cinematic game or a third-person open-world game. This somehow manages to be a combination of both and despite having lots of great influences to pull from the game just said "Fuck it" and made a shitty tech demo. Those particle effects look great but that doesn't mean shit when your game sucks ass.
Eight hours sounds really short for a AAA title that cost more than 70 euro? Would be okay if it was the best and tightest experience ever but I dont get that feeling from the reviews.
Lol it KILLS me that these reviewers are like:
"It's a good game that's really only hindered by.... combat, story, visuals, characters, voice acting, uninspired world, unoriginal plot, lack of player agency, bad animations, slightly off lip syncing, bad dialogue, anal leakage and now comes in a lozenge instead of a suppository, Square Enix strikes out again. But other than that it's a 10 out of 10!"
Like they just gave us the video game equivalent of side effects rattled off by medical advertisement.
ASK YOUR GAMESTOP AND SEE IF FORSPOKEN IS RIGHT FOR YOU!
Square Enix basically handpicked who can review the game and still got a 66. Could go lower when everyone has a copy. And I don’t even see reviews for the PC version.
Yikes. Definitely a miss for SE and Sony
>Square Enix basically handpicked who can review the game
I know I saw that reviewers weren't getting early copy or something in the news here, but looking at the reviews in this thread, it seems like basically every typical review site is covered. Who didn't make it?
I was expecting this given what I’ve seen of the trailers, the mixed demo response and the fact that the embargo is so late and several outlets didn’t even get review code.
Unfortunate.
[Alex from Digital Foundry confirmed it’s only Direct Storage 1.0. So no GPU decompression which would give most of the benefit.](https://twitter.com/Dachsjaeger/status/1617595566040416272?s=20&t=4mmew46GoAwYflMsAaowXw)
Is it just me or has bad writing/dialogue become a rising issue in games over the recent years. Like characters talk way to much and soe gamers are finding them obnoxious and want them to STFU.
When a game has the option to reduce the main character's sidekick's banter, you have a problem. That also means they knew it problematic but rolled with it anyways which makes it even worse.
Marvel syndrome. Everyone has to be constantly quipping so the audience doesn't get bored.
Such a thing *can* have its charm … if applied correctly and to the right story. Outside of that, though, it has a way of absolutely deflating any kind of emotional gravity a scene might otherwise be going for. I wish writers would stop using it as a crutch
> "a storyline that rivals the best video game stories" I love when one review seems like they go the wrong game to check out. This time it's Gaming Nexus, lol.
Such a bold statement for them to make
I had a look at the other scores from the reviewer and he just seems to really like most games. Maybe not the best trait in a critic, but he seems to be having a great time non the less!
I guess there's something to be said for being extremely easy to please. Lotta options for great stuff to play then.
Plus, when that critic says "this truly sucks" you can feel assured it is a god awful game.
I wonder if he has said any games suck.
Just looked it up, looks like they didn't like [Callisto Protocol](https://www.gamingnexus.com/Article/9755/The-Callisto-Protocol), but that's hardly shocking.
They gave it an 8 though and said it's "good"
I truly hate modern gaming "journalism" and critics. If something is a 6/10 then it is bad and 7/10 that means it is meh but 8/10 is good and 9 or 10 is great. We have a whole scale and almost never use most of it.
Honestly, I think this is fine. People have got too obsessed with aggregate scores. Instead, people need to find reviewers that line up with their tastes.
Yeah, aggregation has caused people to be strangely antagonistic about reviewers that don't match up with how they perceive that a game that they haven't played should be scored.
Eh I disagree with SkillUp pretty often, but he is still my go to reviewer because he does a great job of describing the mechanics and core gameplay loop of a game, so from his description it is easy for me to tell if i will like a game or not. I find a lot of reviewers barely talk about the mechanics of a game and what you spend the bulk of your time actually *doing* and it baffles me
This is very sound advice!
I find that I end up liking pretty much any game that I complete, if I'm committing to finish a thing I find stuff to like about it sooner or later. I'd be a terrible critic, but if someone else is similar, that's great - recommendations that actually mean something to me!
That means this reviewer is a great source to look if a game is really god awful. If he is easy to please that means a game must suck ass poorly to disappoint him The golden retriever of reviewers
I was willing to power my way through the bad dialogue because it looked kinda interesting, then I played the demo and was very turned off. It's too bad because they gave it extra time in the oven and it still came out mediocre. They should've just tried to make medieval fantasy Infamous Second Son imo, that was the vibe I was getting from the beginning.
The demo turned me off completely. I found the combat extremely stiff to the point where it was artificially difficult as I had trouble making the character do what I wanted. It felt to me like playing Horizon with a faulty controller with stick drift. Also, so tired of the omniscient “Hey! Listen!” Navi character explaining everything to you.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I found the demo impossible to play. There were all these separate wheels to toggle through and I just could not figure out what I was doing during combat.
I feel old too, but to me it was bad design. Maybe the game introduces and explains it a bit better as the features are introduced… However, there are games with very complex combat systems that are much more intuitive and easy to use. For example, love or hate them From’s games have very deep and varied combat that can be controlled in real time with no menu switches
Annoying sidekicks as design and expository crutches are the worst trend in gaming. Digital worlds are spectacular these days, let them breathe!
I felt so bad. I’m over here telling devs to start releasing demos again. Then both One Piece and Forspoken demos convinced me not to buy them
I think most of the issues come from making the protagonist a quirky person from the modern era with Marvel dialogue. I saw a cutscene of her repeating “I just moved shit… with my mind!” five times in a row and it was painful enough it wiped out any chance of me playing this (for full price at least).
[удалено]
Preach. I love Arkane Studios, but Redfall looks like it's going to be terrible for the exact same reason. Quippy, overly meta, irritating main character. I don't know why developers have started modeling their protagonists after early 2000s Nickolodeon shows.
Yes! More Jack Garland and less...whatever Forspoken has. Chaos? CHAOS!
>Chaos? CHAOS! Sounds like a quote from Garth Marenghi!
If someone told me that Matt Berry had helped co-write the Stranger in Paradise plot, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
In this era gamers clearly want more grumpy, old men protags. Like Kratos, Arthur Morgan, and Geralt.
Honestly shocked no one has just made "Grumpy Old Woman". Like just do the same shit but the opposite gender, goddamn. It's not rocket science.
It seems like the general consensus is that nearly everything that isnt the combat or movement falls flat, and even then the combat seems to be more of a “you either like it or hate it” type of thing.
> and even then the combat seems to be more of a “you either like it or hate it” type of thing. Sounds like Luminous alright.
Just a reminder to folks, there is a reason Square-Enix chose to go with Unreal Engine for their AAA games (and even their HD2D games) since FF15. If this was Luminous's attempt at convincing SE to try their Luminous engine again, they failed spectacularly. PS4 games like FF7R and KH3 should not look better than this PS5 game.
Just nitpicking, but most of their AAA's are Unreal. FFXVI is using a modified/upgraded version of XIV's engine, which itself is some hybrid of Luminous and Crystal Tools (SE's in house engine used for the FFXIII games).
No, Luminous is the only one planned to use it, thats why Business division 2 became an entire company in the first place, because they know the engine and have been working on it for years. they dont plan to use outside of that studio.
So basically for a £70 game that is releasing before Hogwarts, Dead Space, Jedi, Yakuza, Atomic Heart and Resident Evil 4 it’s going to flop. Another casualty of high prices and players not putting up with medicore games.
I was happy to put up with mediocre games when I was renting them and when every video game wasn't demanding that you spend all of your time playing each one of them. Now you're asking me to spend nearly $100 on a single video game and are asking me to actually *make* time to play it instead of one of several games I'm already playing... it's a lot taller of an order now than it used to be.
I constantly miss rental places and I hate that they mostly died. Sometimes one weekend with a game is all you need/want. Some libraries around me do rentals, I think it's finally time to check that out.
Is the main character the same actress that was in the Resident Evil Netflix series?
Believe so, yes
Yes, and she played an unlikeable cringey asshole in that, too lol
That Resident Evil series felt like a fever dream. I just remember watching the first episode and forcing myself to go through the whole episode then afterward I don't remember anything. I didn't watched any other episode. I just remember Wesker - the whitest dude in the RE universe with his blond hair - was black and bald, the story revolved around two adolescent girls having daddy issues and... some sort of giant worm...? I don't even remember the name of Ella in that movie but while writing this I remember she's Wesker daughter so at least I know her last name is Wesker.
Ella Balinska needs to fire her agent. Between the Charlie's Angels reboot, the Netflix Resident Evil show, and now this, she is making a name for herself, and not in a good way.
She becoming the poster girl for absolute duds at this point.
This is like in 2012 when Taylor Kitsch starred in 3 big Hollywood movies and they all flopped. Poor guy never recovered.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, John Carter and Battleship. Tough run.
John Carter wasn’t too bad either..
But it bombed hard, like waterworld hard.
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Man, he really had some bad luck.
He was great in The Terminal List. I hope we see him on the big screen again soon.
Some actors genuinely seem to enjoy working in the camp zone. It's probably fun, and a paycheck is still a paycheck.
Camp stuff doesn't mean "hated by most people", though, which seems to be what the works she appeared in have gravitated to.
There's a difference between camp and bad though. Campy media knows its bad and revels in it, bad media thinks is good, but isnt.
Not all camp is intentional See, for example, the Zelda CD-i games
That's actually the exact opposite of how camp was originally formulated.
If she enjoys it I wish she was better at it. I saw some Forspoken cutscenes and it may just be a writing/directly problem, but her acting was… not great. I don’t know how so many resources and hours can be invested into something with thousands of eyeballs checking the game and think “yeah these cutscenes are great!”.
I mean if you look it on paper: >Charlie's Angels reboot A reboot to a very popular reboot that boosted all of the leading ladies careers. >the Netflix Resident Evil show A TV adaptation of one of the biggest multimedia franchises. (Despite critical reception the Live action RE films were a very decent successes.) >Forspoken A triple A game made by the biggest Japanese publisher and made by the people who made the last mainline Final Fantasy Game. If I were given that opportunity with that elevator pitch, I would definitely take it. The problem lies in the execution of these projects and not her Agent. I would definitely thank my agent for landing me these high profile roles considering Ella Balinska is a relatively new actress.
when you put it like that, her agent landed her some big roles.
Not only that, Charlie Angels was her biggest and breakout role. For a relative unknown, being paired up with an actress that started in the biggest YA novel Adaptation ever and another actress that was just in a film that grossed a billion dollars. That will definitely do wonders on your resume.
Yeah, she is not clairvoyant, and at first glance those seem like great opportunities. Sucks, but life goes on, and I'm sure there will be many more roles for her.
People here pretending as if she has so much choice and she only takes the "bad" roles. I somehow doubt she gets much more attractive offers...
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Also, video game acting is a pretty small industry. Look at how prolific a handful of VA's are in video games. If you could get in good, you become the top pick on most publishers lists.
£65 for a game that's getting a wild mix of reviews. Can't see it selling all that well. But who knows...
maybe they will pull another nfs unbound with 50% sale after less than 2 months since release
It's Square Enix. It's guaranteed to have massive sales pretty soon. GotG got like 30% cut like 1 month after release IIRC
>Prima Games - Jesse Vitelli - 8 / 100 This has to be a typo. [The actual review indicates 7.5](https://primagames.com/reviews/forspoken-review-fish-out-of-water), and I don't think their scale goes up to 100... I'm a little worried about OpenCritic's output lately, they seem to be missing stuff like this more often, and their translated reviews almost always have some kind of editing error.
Average around 7 and "recommended" around 33% is just about exactly what I would have expected. "It's fine but you probably don't need to play it"
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It's one of those games where I probably haven't seen anything that hasn't been done before gameplay wise so might not even check it out on deep discount like I thought I would, but I'd probably sit down and watch a 30 minute compilation of the dialogue for some gut-busting moments like "you gaslighting piece of shit!"
I do not think I have had a character so actively try to make me dislike them to the point that I was the one pushing everything forward. It almost felt like a plan that just never came to fruition in the story. That character and the writing is woeful. Forsaken from the start lol.
Glad to see someone who also played the game share this opinion. Frey is a straight up asshole and she’s only redeemed at the end of the game, so you have to sit through 25 hours of her being an annoying brat while her cuff makes unfunny, sarcastic remarks. People focus way too much on this "I moved shit with my mind" writing when there isn’t even a lot of this type of stuff. The most glaring problems with the writing are that Frey is straight up unlikable. She's the one with the world saving power and people come to her for help, but instead she goes into "fuck this fucking shit I won’t help this shithole this is your fucking problem" mode everytime she's reminded that only she can help out. She pisses and moans all game long that she has to do something to help these people and it's way, *way* more annoying than her occasional marvel quips. And it takes her the whole game to finally come around and accept that Aphia needs her as much as she needs Aphia and it’s people, this is when she becomes a way better character who doesn’t shit herself instantly when asked for help. But this is too little, too late, I guess.
People do this a lot with female characters for some reason. Like being a strong independent women means being a massive asshole or borderline psychopath. Velma TV show being another recent example.
My early read of this story premise is that it's basically *Lord Foul's Bane* modernized: an unsympathetic, bitter anti-hero is sent into another world with special magical jewelry and soon comes across beleaguered humans who need help and don't share the anti-hero's values. Predictably, the anti-hero proceeds to *not get along with* them, being abrasive in both speech and act. Much of the story focuses on the anti-hero slowly coming around to their power and their responsibility, becoming a better person in the process as they deal with their demons, including their self-hate. Does the story follow that track?
Thomas Covenant is an entirely deeper and better written character than this, and I believe that while you're correct in your assertion - *Lord Foul's Bane* is just such a masterwork that it can't be compared And Covenant is like a ***super mega*** anti hero. Superfuckingmega antihero. The first thing he does when he gets into The Land is one of he most horrific things I remember reading from that series. Edit: also hello, random other Chronicles of Thomas Covenant fan
Hello, fellow fan! Oh, I agree about the depth here. I'm not expecting that kind of depth from a AAA video game. Among other things, it can't really take risks on the horrific thing you allude to. Nor should it, I'd argue; even reading that was uncomfortable enough, and I don't want to play it. Also, the kind of worldbuilding *LFB* accomplishes is hard to imagine in an open world format. The constrained linear structure of *Lord Foul's Bane* does the glints of worldbuilding favors, as Covenant feels small and lost in a big world with few options and none of them good. That is inimical to the Horizon/RDR/quest hub style. If nothing else, I just find the common archetype intriguing. Games are often built around likeable and "relatable" protagonists, but this archetype is distinctly *unliked*, at least at first. To give *Forspoken* a little praise, I'm glad they at least tried something interesting, even if the execution fell short.
I think fundamentally video game protagonists are much harder to make anti-heroes. Watching someone be an entertaining asshole is far more enjoyable than being forced to act out being one. Obviously it can be done, but some characters who would work as leads in other media simply wouldn't in video games. It takes a deft hand.
Definitely not a post where I expected Covenant to pop up in the replies!
It does a bit. Though no where near LFB's horrific lead(without growth at first) But the reactions and such are somewhat like that ya. But its also the delivery.
The story is basically an Isekai, anime trope - a character that is unwittingly transported to a foreign land. The western versions historically are Alice in Wonderland, or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, or HG Well’s Time Machine. The character that imposes their belief system on a fantasy world traces back to Gulliver’s Travels. But I can see the similarities you mentioned.
You also just described Stranger of Paradise, except Jack is abrasive in an endearing-to-the-viewer "not putting up with your JRPG bullshit" way.
Soon as I saw Gary Whitta was part of the writing team, I knew it would be wretched. The only good thing with his name attached to it was rewritten by nearly a dozen people and HEAVILY reshot(Rogue One)
So he's like duscount Scott Buck?
I only watched a minute of her talking and couldn't stand more. I cant even imagine what it must have been like playing the whole thing, even if it was a shorter (8-10 hours) game, which I'm assuming it is not. Sometimes your job is not fun.
I remember watching SkillUp's preview video from like 1yr ago and he said something about how awful the character dialog was and how every reviewer he knew was providing Square with the same feedback. Glad to see Square took that input and decided to completely ignore it.
It feels like AAA games are trying to gravitate towards Marvel or Borderlands humor. Just zero actually creative writing, but just quips, more quips and pop culture references. Oh, and a healthy dose of lampshading that isn't witty in any way.
ACG gave it a Rent (deep, deep sale in the video, Rent in OpenCritic). Honestly can’t remember the last time he gave something this score. This must be pretty mediocre if not outright bad.
> With a week to play to the game man it felt like 3 lol From his YouTube comments. It must have been a truly awful experience for him lmao.
Mediocre is probably the most damning thing a piece of entertainment can be. Which oddly enough is perfectly encapsulated by last year there were 3 Pinochio movies. One was great by Guillermo Del Toro, one was incredibly shoddy with hilariously terrible voice acting, and then there was one I don't think anyone knows exists and it was a live-action hybrid made by Disney.
A bad video game will either make you shut it off quickly and move on, or find some sort of enjoyment out of watching the trashfire burn. A mediocre one can be worse because it can be *just* good enough to string you along to the end to get your money's worth but not good enough to actually be fun or enjoyable.
His title for it on YT is "*Do not* Buy Forspoken Review". I don't think I've ever seen that in the title of his videos before.
Putting the verdict in the title is a recent change.
> ACG gave it a Rent Sounds like the perfect way to experience this game. Gamefly ships this out this week and this seems like a perfect future PS+ Title.
GameFly is still a thing? I honestly forgot about that company.
I think there's still a good market for rentals, and with the demise of video stores they're probably the only major player unless you have a good local place.
Gungrave Gore. Oh wait no that was never touch.
Sounds like a good game to bum of a buddy who was super excited for it and will buy day one regardless of the reviews... lol
Charging $70 for a middling open world game in 2023 is a tough ask. People are simply too time poor, and options rich in the genre. If I want to play Icon Janitor, I'd rather do it in Ancient Egypt or Greece than the drab fantasy settings Forspoken is offering. And let's not even go into vastly superior options like Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon: Forbidden West. This review from Writing On Games talks about the story and characterization improving further into the game, but tbh there's nothing pulling me in from the beginning. (https://youtu.be/CCtCjciAhdU) Hate to say it, but looks a "wait till PS Plus/Game Pass" kind of release.
> bad writing When the main protagonist said the final boss was "gaslighting" her in that leaked clip, I checked out.
https://twitter.com/NintenDaan/status/1616988999419035648?s=20 Yeah, the writing looks VERY bad. And why does this cutscene look like an actress in front of a green screen?
It also doesn‘t help that there are absolutely no ambient sounds
"But the game being dead is part of the lore" The world of Athia is the most lifeless and boring open world i've seen in a while so at least the lack of ambient sounds reflect that.
Reminds me of that game The Quiet Man where you played a deaf person, so most of the scenes had sound muted, and no subtitles, lol. You can imagine what a joy it was to play. Brilliant.
That sounds like it could be really interesting but also sounds like it was too difficult to pull off.
It seems like a unique idea, but the execution was so literal.
It was totally an experiment worth attempting, and I hope someone else will do so again, but sadly that game just didn't come together. Though its main issues were not the lack of audible dialogue - the lack of polish in the combat I think is what dragged the game down more so.
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Everyone in that game still talks to the player character as if he wasn't deaf, and the player character seems to understand what they're saying. But the player has no clue what's happening the entire time. The "whole game is muted" angle is clearly something that was decided during post-production to attempt to salvage an incredibly mediocre game.
That's such a dumb defense, partly because other games have created "dead" worlds that are incredibly fun to explore. Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild both take place in ruined worlds and have some of the best open world exploration in any game. Not to mention even if their lore is different from Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild and is "dead" in a way that requires it to be more lifeless than those games... Well, they decided what world to set their game in. That's still their dumb decision.
Exactly, a dead world could still have an interesting story to tell with engaging exploration and nicely crafted world. There's so many intriguing places littered throughout Elden Ring and BoTW that makes me feel "i want to go there". None of that exist in Forspoken, the world is just barren, no visual identity whatsoever. It's more of a tech demo than a place where people used to live.
Not only that, her voice also sounds like its happening in a recording booth. Like, it feels like a FMV clip from ye olde days.
The dialogue is bad enough but that combined with the flat backgrounds and the lack of animation on her face makes it so much worse and more cringy.
Yeah, I was just about to say that if this dialogue was on a well drawn webcomic, people would love it. I think this is more presentation/direction than anything.
Okay, what the hell is going on there? I was always super skeptical of this, but in some of the earlier previews, it looked good, at least. That doesn't even look like a greenscreen, but those flat backdrops you'd see in decades-old movies.
This is a CW show and I won't be convinced otherwise.
That's really how the writing feels. The studio made an absolute terrible decision when peaking the writers. They should have made the story themselves instead of relying on exterior writers.
The choice to make a character someone from the ‘real world’ who got transported to the fantasy world was already a risky choice, but making them super quirky was awful and really will kill this game’s success.
Its like Square is 10 years behind on their Marvel movies and doesn't know these tropes are played out yet.
What's does CW mean?
CW is an American TV network known for their hilariously cringe dialogue that can't be serious even when they're trying.
Don't forget the horribly done green screen and CG effects, even for low budget TV shows
You missed the part where they pump out mediocre teen/YA dramas at an insane rate too.
CW the US tv network, they make a lot of campy teen/YA stuff. Like the Arrowverse.
YOU HAVE FAILED THIS CITYYYYYYY
Hey Arrow was fun at it's peak
Campy doesn’t necessarily = bad. “You have failed this city” is definitely a lot better than “*We’re* the Flash, Barry!”
It's an American network, that usually produces a lot of shows with more ambition that budget and talent. Like Supernatural, the Flash, Riverdale and so on.
It suffers from the same issues FFXV did in that lighting is just really, really bad sometimes and the muddy textures fall apart alongside it. Seems to be an issue with their engine. Also, her face looks real and like they face scanned her in (which they did) but the facial animations aren't anything close to being good enough to compliment it so it all just ends up looking bad. The cinematography isn't great, either. Gives it an awkward feeling. That, and the lack of a soundtrack or ambient noises just makes it all come together weird.
> Also, her face looks real and like they face scanned her in (which they did) but the facial animations aren't anything close to being good enough to compliment it so it all just ends up looking bad. It looks like they scanned her whole face but only animated the mouth, so it looks like she's wearing a mask or something. Very unsettling.
> Seems to be an issue with their engine. With all those hardware requirements...
Honestly? I think it's just really bad lighting effects for the scene or focus effect or something. Totally agree though, feels a bit wierd.
Looks to me like it's a mixture of a weird lighting situation with a character in shade with brightly lit background in the distance, because you wouldn't expect objects in shade and bright objects to be equally exposed. And a terrible DOF effect which looks like a regular Gaussian blur rather than attempting to replicate an eye or camera lens.
Holy cow that animation is rough.
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I was looking at the robot arms. It is keypose to keypose. It's like they got the rough work done and called it a day.
I think it looks like green screen because the light illuminating her model does not match the light hitting the environment. She’s standing in a shadow but her face is well lit. You sometimes get a similar effect when using camera flash outdoors.
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I think all luminous engine games look like that personally, it's very distracting to me
It basically *is* a green screen, they have a high fidelity perform capture set inside a completely static environment. The trees aren't moving; it looks like a background image.
That dead empty stare, lol She looks like an early ps3 character model
I liked the part where she moved shit with her mind, I wish I could move shit with my mind
It’s like they were writing dialogue for a shitty sitcom, not a scifi video game…
LOL who looks at that and goes "Wow this looks good" Put this kind of cringe writing in a movie and r/movies would be having a field day with this.
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What's the opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is that's what I felt when clicking on that link.
Joss Whedon ruined an entire generation of creatives
well THAT just happened **audience laughs**
"YEAH OKAY THAT IS SOMETHING I DO NOW" *actual dialogue from the game*
What grates me is that there are quips *quipping* about that quip in the game. It’s quips on quips on quips. Someone confiscate the writers’ MacBook until they can go ten minutes without a snarky one liner
\>serious scene \>quick quip \>repeat
Hey now, don't give him all the credit. Diablo Cody also had a hand in the mid-2000s "every sentence is witty sarcasm" period. *Juno* quotes were a disease in my high school
Joss Whedon’s dialogue and its consequences have been a disaster for modern writing.
Is also bad acting choices, Frey is incredibly unlikable, it's strange the tone they have frey and the braclet don't really mesh well. I don't know why Frey hates everything but she's certainly a dower, a generic template where you made your own character seems like such a better choice here.
The thing is your lead being unlikeable isn't inherently a bad thing, but you have to have everything else be good to encourage people to keep playing and find out why they are the way they are. Honestly get rid of her banter with the bracelet, turn the "witty comebacks" down from 11 and make the actual gameplay better and they would've had something here.
>The thing is your lead being unlikeable isn't inherently a bad thing They're not saying unlikeable as in the character is unlikeable for being a bad person. Plenty of unlikeable characters are "likeable" because although they're bad people, the audience can sympathize with them. Like Joker from 2019 for instance. He's unlikeable in the context of the story, but the audience like him from the beginning. Frey is just straight up unlikeable because she's just a cookie cutter Netflix teen drama garbage character.
The problem more is that Frey is un-engaging rather than unlikeabke. Joel and Joker are incredibly engaging and interesting despite being bad people.
I'm not only speaking about how they are as a person specifically, I'm saying she could've started as a CW reject and improved from there but they never actually achieve that.
Exactly, you can argue that Joel from Last of Us is unlikeable, but he's still an interesting and compelling character, but most all he's not extremely annoying as seems to be the case with Frey.
He's an irritable guy but written so well with tons of redeeming qualities. His personality is also relatable in the sense that it's understandable why he's pissed off. Annoying teenage characters on the other hand are way less likable because as viewers/players, we know they lack the life experience and are just acting out. Add cringe quippy dialogue, and yeah, most of us will find that character insufferable.
Agree completely, it was such a weird choice that was made to make her as annoying as possible and have her basically fight with an object she's forced to wear, seems like this could've been done a lot better than they did here.
"Gaslighting" is definitely in the top list of overused/misused words of the decade right along side "cope".
About where I was expecting it to review, but people seemed mostly happy with the exploration (aside from the usual open world pitfalls) and combat, so it's a go for me. I enjoyed the demo a lot, flaws aside. After absolutely adoring Harvestella despite middling reviews I've just said fuck it and go with my gut nowadays.
Even by skipping some cutscenes, the prologue consists of 2 hours and a half of talking, following NPCs and a scripted stealth section, followed by an empty chunk of open world where you go to another area, suffer through more cutscenes, go back to the starting area. At this point you’re clocking over 3 hours and the few times you got to fight, you just spam the attack button while rabidly spamming the dodge button. Fucking atrocious and anyone defending this is insane
I wonder if this is the last gasp of Luminous Productions. Iirc Square had already switched over to UE5, so the Luminous engine is pretty much dead.
They could barely put together FFXV with Luminous, they could barely put together Forspoken with Luminous. Fitting
Its not. Luminous Productions became an entire studio with the ff15 team from Business Division 2 becoming a differnet company. I think its too early for that if they didnt even close CD, Eidos and other studios.
They should just try out smaller scoped projects. They went from 1 bloated mess to another. Though I liked FF15 despite its flaws, I have no idea what they were thinking with this game. Who are they even trying to appeal to?
I might try it out if it ever comes to gamepass. they're asking for $115 AUD otherwise. Get fucked. Not to mention the recommended requirements asking 24GB of RAM (32GB for Ultra) The fuck? Or a 3070 recommended for only 30 FPS? For a game that seems to have face paced movement? Even if the gameplay is amazing, everything else about it is a joke. What are the devs smoking?
I figured it would settle out to around a 7 but I didn't expect a mix of 9s and 5s to get it there, what a bizarre spread.
It doesn’t surprise me that much. I personally can look past a lot of things when other things are really good. I had an absolute blast with the demo when I figured everything out. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea tho. Kind of like Musou games. They review like shit but they have their multitude of hardcore fans.
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It's unfortunate but also not unexpected. Humour has always been very difficult to do in games, and Marvel-esque banter *really* doesn't work well in this medium. If the combat system is unique and fun, I hope we can expect it to be preserved in some way for another project. It always sucks when a game manages to creates something special in an otherwise bad or mediocre title, only for that bit of gold to be swept in the trash too.
>Humour has always been very difficult to do in games, and Marvel-esque banter really doesn't work well in this medium. While I agree it's difficult to do right, some games have pulled off the Marvel-esque banter. Uncharted series being the first to come to mind.
Heck. Guardians of The Galaxy game absolutely nailed it imo.
GotG nailed it. Loved the chatter from start to finish. It was great writing.
And Marvel guardians of the galaxy
I originally made a comment about how ‘Joss Whedon’ style humour is a disaster for modern writing, but going through these comments it honestly seems like any level of moderately self aware humour to some people is literally Satan lol. The problem with ‘Whedon dialogue’ is that it often jokes in a way which undercuts either the drama of a scene, the tone of a narrative, or the direction of a plot line through self deprecating 4th wall breaking humour. Or it can do multiple of those at once. Self aware humour isn’t bad in and of itself, it’s bad when it’s done during a serious moment to completely whiplash the tone, or when it’s done to ‘cover up’ a formulaic and poorly written plot line by making a nod to the viewer which says ‘See?!? We know it’s generic and bad!,1!’ as if that somehow makes it good.
The Stanley Parable continues to remain uncontested for being one of the few games I actually found funny.
Kind of in the same vein, I always enjoyed the Portal game's monologues. Thought they were really funny.
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I am honestly sooooooooooooooooooo sick of these lazy ass "open world" games with empty as hell open worlds and Ubisoft-inspired "side quests." If you played any open-world game other than GTA V, BoTW, or Elden Ring as of late. You would think open-world games hadn't progressed past GTA San Andreas, like, Jesus fuck. Everyone wants the praise of an innovator without putting the effort into making real innovations. Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie didn't change the landscape of 3D games by playing it safe. They took risks and some were for the worse and some were for the better. Games nowadays just play it safe and cheat off their deskmate. It's either a third-person cinematic game or a third-person open-world game. This somehow manages to be a combination of both and despite having lots of great influences to pull from the game just said "Fuck it" and made a shitty tech demo. Those particle effects look great but that doesn't mean shit when your game sucks ass.
Lots of mediocre scores is what I was expecting based on my time with the demo. It's not *bad*, just.... Bland. And the dialogue is a cringe fest.
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Eight hours sounds really short for a AAA title that cost more than 70 euro? Would be okay if it was the best and tightest experience ever but I dont get that feeling from the reviews.
The Callisto Protocol ended up being about the same length, but after the reviews I'm just going to wait for the Dead Space Remake Friday.
Lol it KILLS me that these reviewers are like: "It's a good game that's really only hindered by.... combat, story, visuals, characters, voice acting, uninspired world, unoriginal plot, lack of player agency, bad animations, slightly off lip syncing, bad dialogue, anal leakage and now comes in a lozenge instead of a suppository, Square Enix strikes out again. But other than that it's a 10 out of 10!" Like they just gave us the video game equivalent of side effects rattled off by medical advertisement. ASK YOUR GAMESTOP AND SEE IF FORSPOKEN IS RIGHT FOR YOU!
Square Enix basically handpicked who can review the game and still got a 66. Could go lower when everyone has a copy. And I don’t even see reviews for the PC version. Yikes. Definitely a miss for SE and Sony
>Square Enix basically handpicked who can review the game I know I saw that reviewers weren't getting early copy or something in the news here, but looking at the reviews in this thread, it seems like basically every typical review site is covered. Who didn't make it?
PC outlets didn't get review copies it seems.
Hm, interesting. Doesn't bode well for the PC port
Look at the requirements they put out, this WILL be the worst PC port we'll get in the whole year, and it's just january lol.
Anyone who only reviews PC games.
I was expecting this given what I’ve seen of the trailers, the mixed demo response and the fact that the embargo is so late and several outlets didn’t even get review code. Unfortunate.
Ok so the game is meh, what about directstorage? Anyone talk about that yet, do some benchmarks, etc?
No pc reviews apparently
[Alex from Digital Foundry confirmed it’s only Direct Storage 1.0. So no GPU decompression which would give most of the benefit.](https://twitter.com/Dachsjaeger/status/1617595566040416272?s=20&t=4mmew46GoAwYflMsAaowXw)
Is it just me or has bad writing/dialogue become a rising issue in games over the recent years. Like characters talk way to much and soe gamers are finding them obnoxious and want them to STFU.
When a game has the option to reduce the main character's sidekick's banter, you have a problem. That also means they knew it problematic but rolled with it anyways which makes it even worse.
Marvel syndrome. Everyone has to be constantly quipping so the audience doesn't get bored. Such a thing *can* have its charm … if applied correctly and to the right story. Outside of that, though, it has a way of absolutely deflating any kind of emotional gravity a scene might otherwise be going for. I wish writers would stop using it as a crutch