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Even if that were true: That would be the least of problems.
Plus: They must have tried hard to not be another Owlcat then.
I just love how CRPGs always get away with padding their playtime via hundreds of trash mob and copypaste combat, uninspired quests and walls of text, all rolling straight from the CRPG factory line. Actually, they're being recommended for it. As if that "100 hours of playtime" tag was a CRPG seal of official quality in itself. As if a game making you spend days of your lifetime with it was something inherently worthwile in itself.
Meanwhile, whenever a game is rumored to er on the shorter site, it's Sauron Incarnate at work: They must be trying to rip you off. Avoid until discount. This is doubly disheartening, as especially on a tight budget (e.g. NOT BG3), balancing campaign length and polish/quality/iteration is a zero-sum tradeoff. That's why in Obsidian's Pillars Of Eternity, there is exactly one stand-out quest early on: the Raedric questline, which you can start and resolve in numerous ways. And why so many CRPGs are filled to the brim with combat: It's the cheapest way to lengthen your campaign.
And most CRPG developers are on tight budgets... encouraged by their very fans to waste their time with filler, as opposed to spending the few bucks on quality. The original Fallout would have a real rough time were it to be released today. That's a game that you can finish in between two meals, with barely ever engaging in combat any. All depending on your character build and route you take through the game. You know, role-playing and stuff.
Nobody forces devs to make 100 hour games filled with repetitive trash.
Arcanum. You can finish it in 40-50 hours.
Bloodlines. 30-40 hour game.
Dragonfall. 30-40 hours.
Geneforge. 40 hours if i remember it right.
Arx Fatalis. Around 30.
Nobody forces devs to make 100 hour games filled with repetitive trash.
Arcanum. You can finish it in 40-50 hours.
Bloodlines. 30-40 hour game.
Dragonfall. 30-40 hours.
Geneforge. 40 hours if i remember it right.
Arx Fatalis. Around 30.
"finishing" game is not the goal. playing and enjoying is.
if all you care about is to reach ending then games you play are shit and you should just watch ending on youtube.
Cocksucking fucking retard. The review I linked is from an easter european with 30k subs and half of those hate his guts. Absolute moron.
Edit: Oh yeah, he's a codexer as well. That's where I found him. The man is great when analyzing the tactical underlay of games.
You're perhaps not watching what's happening on horizon. WOKE Left hates openly Israel and chants on streets to destroy it while alternative right like PBD podcast with 5.44m subs has open discussion with Candice Owens on X and elsewhere "What is even antisemitism" and calls Daily Wire "Daily Jewish Wire" with more and more normie right-wingers asking questions why America behaves like Israel's battle french maid. More and more normies everywhere are talking about Jews in way it was talked about them in 1920s
Believe me, veil on Jews is being lift and I have feeling that they are ready to shut down whole internet before letting veil being lifted completely
Current generation of Jews like Infinitron are smug retards. Instead of leaving at least one seni-based publisher of video games, they made them all WOKE. What are 100s of millions of White chuds with no gf, no money, no house, no good vidya and nothing but hatred from mainstream gonna do? Just closed eyes, a single tear drops and die? LMAO. We gonna fight. Perhaps the most smug and most retarded generation of Jews in last 1000 years
I won't derail this thread about shitty goyslop gayme nor post here more. I said enough. If Infinitron moves all the posts that he hates, he proves my words right. If he doesn't, it's still the truth
Stupid Yids have overplayed their hands. I BEGGED them for years for compromise. Now it's too late. We're living in begining of their end. Do you know that they hate being called "stupid" more then anything else? Stupid, stupid, stupid Yids
You're perhaps not watching what's happening on horizon. WOKE Left hates openly Israel and chants on streets to destroy it while alternative right like PBD podcast with 5.44m subs has open discussion with Candice Owens on X and elsewhere "What is even antisemitism" and calls Daily Wire "Daily Jewish Wire" with more and more normie right-wingers asking questions why America behaves like Israel's battle french maid. More and more normies everywhere are talking about Jews in way it was talked about them in 1920s
Believe me, veil on Jews is being lift and I have feeling that they are ready to shut down whole internet before letting veil being lifted completely
Current generation of Jews like Infinitron are smug retards. Instead of leaving at least one seni-based publisher of video games, they made them all WOKE. What are 100s of millions of White chuds with no gf, no money, no house, no good vidya and nothing but hatred from mainstream gonna do? Just closed eyes, a single tear drops and die? LMAO. We gonna fight. Perhaps the most smug and most retarded generation of Jews in last 1000 years
Woke leftists are just useful idiots they have no idea of the power Jews actually wield.
When that token black woman in Harvard started running her mouth off about Jews, she was swiftly taken out and a literally Jew is now in charge of the university.
Nobody forces devs to make 100 hour games filled with repetitive trash.
Arcanum. You can finish it in 40-50 hours.
Bloodlines. 30-40 hour game.
Dragonfall. 30-40 hours.
Geneforge. 40 hours if i remember it right.
Arx Fatalis. Around 30.
I blame Bioware for starting the trend of bloated games. More specifically, Baldur's Gate 2. They just kept tossing ideas around and barely tying them together. It's a very messy game and it's a miracle that it turned out as good as it did.
Nobody forces devs to make 100 hour games filled with repetitive trash.
Arcanum. You can finish it in 40-50 hours.
Bloodlines. 30-40 hour game.
Dragonfall. 30-40 hours.
Geneforge. 40 hours if i remember it right.
Arx Fatalis. Around 30.
I blame Bioware for starting the trend of bloated games. More specifically, Baldur's Gate 2. They just kept tossing ideas around and barely tying them together. It's a very messy game and it's a miracle that it turned out as good as it did.
BG1 feels far more bloated then the sequel, with it's large number of wilderness maps that feel empty and pointless. Not to mention the cities filled with equally empty and pointless houses.
The second game fixes this issue by making less but more complex locations and having large variety of enemy encounters.
I kinda felt bad for Craig Ritchie after looking through some of the fallout, the bad press reception due to a lack of bribes and Zoe Quinn styled services, as well as the allergic reactions from extremist and racial supremacist sites like ResetEra, or libertarian sites with Balkan characteristics like the Codex. The poor guy can't catch a break and it's been an uphill battle since day one to make his game a reality. So I decided to check his game out due to pity and I hope to bring some nuance to this thread with my first impressions.
I've always liked seeing video games from areas of the globe without much of an established video game industry because they always bring a very local character to the table. When you start playing a game made in Croatia, or Finland, or Slovenia, you know you are in for something different than what the American global games industry has on offer. It's the difference between the soul of The Witcher compared to the watered down more international and Americanised experience of The Witcher 3, from something that could only have been made in Poland to something more Hollywood.
Because of this I've tried to check out obscure titles most haven't heard about, even if I haven't gotten some of them to run on Windows 10 yet.
So is this Australia's equivalent of The Witcher? Not really. It's unfair to credit Australia with Grimoire since it was developed by a neanderthal, so I will not compare it to Cleve's magnum opus, but The Land Down Under is responsible for Fallout Tactics and I don't think it lives up to that legacy. Let's take it from the top, shall we?
I've played a couple of hours of the game and so far I've been more confused than anything else. Earlier in this thread Craig Ritchie has been insisting that he hasn't been jamming the eyesore of current year American politics into his game and I was curious how true that was, and it sort of is? Kinda? The first screen you are met with in the game is some virtue signalling about there being dead people in the game, and the main menu has a long string of text at the bottom acknowledging the tribal people Australia supposedly belongs to.
This must have been partly for fundraising and investment attraction, knowing what sort of background Mr. Ritchie has, here from an interview with the Escapist.
Long before Ritchie got into game development, he worked in the realms of journalism and PR. Along the way, he had opportunities to gain familiarity with the ins and outs of development, ranging from QA to production, including running pre-alphas for EVE: Valkyrie during a stint at CCP Games.
This bowerbird-like gathering of skills over the years was one of the things that pushed him into action when a developer friend asked him, “Why don’t you actually try to give it a go and start your own studio?” That was December 2018, and Ritchie knew exactly the kind of game that he wanted to make — a project that would take advantage of his experience, familiarity with CRPGs, and good old business sense.
But if you've engaged with Australian culture you might also know that this is something they've been doing for many decades now. I think I remember seeing it in films from almost the 70's I think? They're always been a bit weird like that. And as far as I've seen so far none of that has been seeping into the story or gameplay itself. Since the majority of the last couple of pages have been about how woke it is I've given it a fair assessment and I'd say that it's far less in your face than many recent games. There is no orc-elf polycules like in the Pathfinder game, there has been no transsexual in the post-apocalypse talking about the struggle to find estrogen pills, and I haven't noticed any anti-White commentary like in Alan Wake 2. There is no pronoun selection and the game acknowledges your gender, even if it doesn't say male and female in the character screen.
I decided to roll a talky character since this is supposedly inspired by Disco Elysium and it's a good test for this sort of game. My character concept was the descendant of a Chinese spy that had been trying to steal government secrets before the bombs fell, so I maxed Charisma, put the rest into intelligence, dropping the strength to a minimum. The character system is a bit odd, both your alignment and skills play into combat, but I've only been in one fight so far into the game, and I've been to three hubs now.
I did note that all the male models had more cleavage than the female ones, consistently.
Which kinda didn't suit the character I was going for, aiming to seduce, lie, cheat, trick, charm, persuade, intimidate and bullshit my way to victory as a female spy archetype.
The gameplay so far has mostly been Planescape Torment-esque but with less combat, a lot of dialogue, some skillchecks thrown in here and there. At character creation you get to choose an origin, and i think this actually changes your starting location, Dragon Age: Origins and Temple of Elemental Evil style. I picked merchant so maybe that's why I haven't seen much of any combat. However, the one combat encounter I did have happened before the combat tutorial and I was forced to face off against two raiders without any party members, while my build was centered around passing conversation skill checks and supporting party members with healing and buffs.
Why did I call the game confusing? Because the writing lacks direction and it's very unclear what this is supposed to be. It's not even limited to the writing, there are a bunch of items in stores that I can't tell if they have any use or not, some are labeled quest items without me having recieved any quest yet to get them.
I'm with the game as far as the intro, the bombs fell and Australia is now post-apocalyptic. Doesn't seem very different from how it normally is. Most of the time it feels like playing one of those late stage zombie stories that were popular for a while, with less of a focus on survival and more on rebuilding civilization. But it also wants to be Mad Max, with raiders that drive around. Characters are not properly introduced and when what I think is the leader of a settlement is supposed to have some mysterious backstory a prisoner tells me to ask about I'm never given the option to do so. During a raid I can either escape in a wagon or an ambulance, but I don't know what the purpose of this choice is. Characters come and go and I have no idea who they are or what any of it is supposed to mean. Currently I'm doing a quest for an Abbo elder to find a string, but it's not very woke, more like using the setting of Australia in a gimmicky way for the setting, like the cringe use of Australian slang in every dialogue.
I couldn't tell you what the plot of this game is supposed to be, what I'm doing, or where this is going.
Anyway, that's all I got for now, will post further impressions after playing the game more.
I'm not sure how I feel about game references five minutes into the game.
Emus and kangaroos, because this is Australia, they really want you to know it's Australia. Stop typing, the Kanagroo is out of frame.
The game is cute sometimes.
No trans or gay flags yet, only wholesome koalas.
I don't know what the point of this was. After getting the sheep out of the fence it stuck its head back in when I came back later. It's not a quest or anything, it's just there.
I only met these people like five minutes ago, last night in game time. This death scene means nothing to me.
Perhaps this is the plot of the game? A mysterious crash site like in Arcanum? I still don't know!
