Airship Ballet

Sure, but it wasn't only the lack of little things that got to me. I picked up on the little scenarios just because it is, first and foremost, a vidya game. It did try to connect to the whole Deus Ex debate in cutscenes, but only ever by acknowledging its existence, acknowledging the varying arguments put into it, and using it as a backdrop for a wonderfully realised near-future world. I excuse it based on the fact that the world design is visually astounding (though Detroit is tiny and Hengsha confuses the map) and that it's generally a fun game, though an easy one. I think your point is that their acknowledgement of the concept of man-made gods made you think on it a bit. That's cool, it probably will do, but conversely it's what irritated me, because it should be the game that does that: it needed to play with the idea more than just introduce a concept to you and let you do your own thing with it. I was sat there my first time, having this internal debate about the pros, cons, rights and wrongs of turning everybody into super humans. It hit me that Jensen is intended to be the proof that it's possible, and that they have the technology to replace a body with machines, rather than just limbs and organs with prosthetics. It started that little what-if thing in me that most cyberpunk titles do. Then I got more frustrated as the game went on, because I had all these neat ideas that could have easily been put into the game one way or the other, and ultimately it struck me that they just didn't care for the concept that much. They paid their dues to it every now and then, but I was sat there thinking of this and that of my own accord. They wanted to make an actiony stealthy RPG hybrid thing with crafting and player progression, and set it in a cool universe with cool robots and the illuminati. They put Deus Ex in the name and barely bothered with the notion itself. They just said "some people like augmentation, some think it's unnatural", then cut to riots and Hugh Darrow just starting to touch on it before the game shuffles you on to the ending. You're made aware of Sarif, who's for it, Darrow who is overwhelmed by the power he unlocked, and Taggart, who is supposedly against it but who knows with that type of person. It takes this really interesting, complex idea and then whittles it down to binary opposition for and against it, and never really lets the player make their opinion known in the game world until you're there pushing a button for or against it at the very end. I thought that too, when I was wrapped up in the atmosphere of it. It's a constant stream of dialogue, conversation options and atmosphere, but when I was done I realised it actually said very little about its core concept and was, in and of itself, a hostage rescue story with robots. It needed less "No John I am the illuminati" and more "this is Eliza Cassan and I just blew your mind, Son." The Cassan thing got me really thinking, it was awesome, but it's the only thing in the game that more subtly addressed it. You were sat there like "but people would know, I mean I suppose an infallible robot is better than a person, but what if..." and it was great. It needed far more of that, far more "I never asked for this" and way fewer mad sick cyborg fights. We got to see a whole lot of rockets and swords and stuff integrated into people's bodies, but it needed to question things that would have an impact on society. Things like the news being automated, people using social enhancement augmentations to seduce people and to get a pay rise at work. Interesting stuff that opened up all new avenues for social reform and opportunities for exploring them, not just "they said it was for good and then they put rockets on them, and rockets are bad, yo."

Not at all! I'm not even being picky, just suggesting that the storyline for RAGE was as much as the setting needed and that the one for DE:HR was far, far less than the context demanded. tl;dr They take this wonderful concept full of what-ifs and potential moral dilemmas and instead just create a futuristic setting with rad robots. Gameplay consists of fetch quests and the narrative never tackles the actual elements of the debate, but rather makes the player aware of them and then ends the game. The storyline that they did go with is uninspired and really choppy. They try to fit three storylines into a can made for one, one being a crappy save-the-girl plot, another being two wealthy, successful people spontaneously going crazy with power (one being talked down from it moments later despite apparent years of internal turmoil about it) and a third one being that they were all part of the illuminati all along because the previous games were about the illuminati so they felt they had to cram it in here too. It's lazy, it's confused, it's rushed and, worst of all, it delves into exciting, almost-virgin video game narrative territory and says "oh, hi, sorry, don't mind me, just passing through."

There are actually ENB presets out there to make it more yellow. 'cus, y'know... reasons.

But I thought you were against poor story delivery.

Spy Boy has no soul, confirmed.

Yeah, I played it a little while go. Nothing struck me as different, really. You'd have to show me a side-by-side for me to notice, so there's obviously nothing major.

Looks good! The site itself is pretty well-designed and, following the guide to Quinn Co at least, is comprehensive. I think that grammar and formatting of the information is lacking, but the information itself is great.

That's true for a whole load of games that come to mind. I really don't believe in the claim that game developers in general are getting lazier or less inspired. The stuff coming out is amazing, it's just that for some reason people think AAA dross is representative of any sort of trend in the industry. It isn't, it's just a noisy and well-funded group of publishers making noise at their own conventions while the majority of people worth talking to ignore them or attend their stuff to poke fun at the uninspired stuff they put out. Saying that AAA productions are any indication of the state of the industry is like saying that pop music's prevalence means all other music is irrelevant. The "le wrong generation xDDDDD" argument is unfounded, seriously.

Lots of far worse ones, too! Besides, if we judged everything based on the competition it has, we'd have too much in common with most countries' education systems. It's far healthier to judge something based on its competition in hindsight, not when you're going into it. You can judge things based on their own merits far better when you're not remembering how great your favorite game ever is.

If you can bring yourself to call Crysis 2 "middling" I think it's clear that you expect too much in general. My point is that it's not pushed as a deep, compelling tale of love and loss, but rather a silly excuse to blast banditos away with ridiculous guns. Bulletstorm had an awful story, so did Painkiller, so did Unreal Tournament, so does Gears of War: these aren't the games that you can fairly say "had a less-than-compelling story, not worth my £4.50." Rage definitely isn't sub-par on the whole, and as you can tell I'm far from complacent when something isn't done justice. The average quality of video games has been consistent for a good decade, with some below average and even more above. It's nowhere near time to start the vox populi "rise up against consumer abuse through mediocre titles" spiel yet, especially in this context.

Could it perhaps be your expectations that are leaving you disappointed? It's a game by id and you're complaining about linear gameplay and a sacrificing of story and freedom of movement in favor of top-notch gunplay? Picking up an id game and expecting anything other than satisfying gunplay and non-existent story/freedom is like picking up a Thief game and expecting to be given a shotgun. If you looked at screenshots and watched trailers/gameplay footage and came away expecting better textures than what you saw and a compelling story somewhere amidst the Mad Max buggy fights, I'm afraid that the fault lies with you. need to stop reading this thread, it's getting me down

I mean it does get pretty dark at times. It dares to go where the medium has never really step foot before, and for that reason I rated an eleven out of a possible five.

Okay, well since you've played the majority of big releases, don't want to play any smaller (and often better) releases, can't buy anything recently released because you want them to cost as much as they will in a couple of years' time and think that 2010 has fallen into antiquity, I've got a little list that I think should match your criteria. Dwarf Fortress - a game full of stunning vistas about Frodo taking the ring to Isengard from the perspective of the dwarves. Looks stunning in 4k. XCOM UFO Defense - Another stunning game, optimised well enough to show the entire globe on-screen at once. You play as Will Smith and his sassy sidekick Jeff Goldblum in an action-packed adventure that takes you all around the world in an effort to fight back the alien menace. TES Daggersmall - Fan project working to completely remake Bethesda's Skyblivionwind and bring it up to date to run on modern tech. Even Titans are struggling to run it, it's nuts. Weird thing is, it's about the size of a student's bedroom: it's just that graphically advanced. Meinkraft - A noirish re-telling of Adolf Hitler's life from his teen years to the fall of the Third Reich in '45. Hard-hitting and gritty, boasting extreme fidelity and definitely not for the faint of heart or hardware.

Sorry, what?

There's this pretty niche, old game I've been playing lately. Might not be too popular on this forum in particular, but I'd recommend you check it out all the same.

Metro 2033 or Last Light, Son.

Nope, haven't heard from him but I do intend to post a link whenever he gets around to it!

I honestly just like checking everything. I've always maintained that stealth is, ironically enough, a secondary gameplay direction in the Thief series, and TDM by extension. I think the primary direction is exploration, in that you walk into a place blind and have to go around checking everything while remaining undetected. The largest part of the game for me is making a mental map in my head and figuring out where I haven't been, what I haven't checked, and so on. The stealth is obviously still pivotal, but the exploration is just a constant thing, and all the trepidation I ever feel when trying to remain undetected is that it'd make it a pain to move further into the mission if I set off an alert. If I can look into a room and see everything immediately, that's spoiled for me. I wanna go rubbing my face along all the paintings and ham-fisting the contents of cabinets to see what's in them, all the while nervously glancing at the door. The exploration itself is the core of the game for me, and it's the stealth that backs it up, so as far as I'm concerned, the easier it is to tell loot apart from junk, the less fun I have.

I just outright refuse to buy a PS4 for it. I did it for Monster Hunter on the 3DS, and after I got like 700 hours of commute gameplay out of it I haven't touched it.

You can't really take what a person selling a product says and assume it's what they actually believe. They'll say anything to appeal to their audience, even as you see the sparkle in their eyes die mid-sentence. Conference shows and the consequent interviews are only useful for finding out what the game is through gameplay footage. Disregard everything that isn't raw gameplay footage (and even then try to figure out how much of it is representative of the rest of the game) at those shows, because they talk a load of shit during interviews. If it's a stage demo, ignore the dude talking and go off what you see because, again, everything they say is paper-thin buzzword spam. The more buzzwords you hear in an interview or stage demo, the more they're being paid to spout nonsense. The more effort they have to go to in addition to gameplay screenings, the worse the game probably is. I mean it's common sense. Little Jimmy wanted to be a level designer, so he learned and it became his passion, then he grew up and men in suits wrote a script for him to present it on-stage. Little Jimmy doesn't agree with the script and thinks it sounds stilted and out of touch, but it's in his contract. That's if they even hire Little Jimmy. They might take his work and have Paul Marketing completely misrepresent it before his very eyes. Nobody wakes up in the morning and genuinely thinks "I know, I'll go put hours and hours of my time into a shitty game that'll garner me a bad reputation, then go lie at a few conventions so that my bosses can take a bigger cut of the shadily earned sales than me." The people who build the thing are generally talented, passionate people in my experience, and I've made a good few friends out of them. It's like Robert Patterson hating his role in Twilight with a passion. Dude loves acting but hates what he was made to do on that one job. The people behind AAA productions typically loathe the end result when they see it from a distance but talk about the great time they had making it. They're skilled people who enjoy their jobs, but the direction they're made to throw their work is decided by out of touch people who know more about economics than they do about the entertainment industry. From what I've seen, it's not the devs' intention to create a crappy, buggy, lukewarm game, and it's not their decisions that screw it up, but the people driving them.

I think that when everyone you know who worked on it bows their head like a berated puppy when you bring the game up, they know what they did. The actual developers aren't even remotely blinded by the money: that's the attitude that caused the talented people to push out a crappy game, but it isn't theirs to begin with. If the suits were feckless enough to try for another, it's going to be with new people for sure.

You can just host your .pk4 on any free filesharing site and share a link via PM, should be hassle-free.