paulmako

This is my first time playing an Assassin's Creed game. I wanted to check out the series and thought I should start with what I remember hearing was the weak entry. So far I'm actually enjoying it! I'm only about 5 hours in so we'll see how long it lasts but I'm having a blast running around Paris. The vertical world design is great and spidermanning your way around to evade guards is fun. This game is also very beautiful, still.

Over the last year I've also put about 8 hours into Horizon and about 18 into Witcher 3 and while the missions and writing in both seem very good, neither has grabbed me enough to stop me getting bored when going from Point A to Point B. For me the huge maps in both games actually end up damaging them. Horizon is better because the on foot movement is tighter and traversal is a bit more varied but my time with the Witcher 3 so far involved a lot of passive horse riding past swamps. It is great when you get to your destination and watch a nice cutscene but that's not enough for me. The basic traversal in Assassins Creed: Unity is making me keep going with it when I've dropped the others (for now).

Other recent games have fared better. The wonderful traversal is the main draw of Breath of the Wild and perhaps I did Witcher 3 and Horizon a disservice by playing them after Zelda. Another game that isn't really open world but still held my interest is Yakuza 0. I think it avoids boring traversal by making the playable space small but very dense. There are tons of great missions and you can very quickly go between them.

I'm going to keep going with Unity and eventually play Origins and see what I think of the apparent changes that game makes to the series. I do plan to go back to Horizon and Witcher because I'm hoping they will click, but I wanted to shoutout Unity because it did so from the start.

@mike was correct, this really is the best part of the GOTY stuff.

This is what I was thinking the whole time! It fits into both the 'interactive' and the 'world building' interpretations of the category. If world means 'sense of place' then PREY should absolutely have been at least mentioned, because the space station it takes place on is extremely well realised.

It was my GOTY but sadly didn't click with them enough to see more of it. I think they mostly did give it a go at least.

HA! I actually bought this game yesterday after seeing it recommended by a game developer on Twitter. I've barely seen it mentioned elsewhere but thought I would take a chance on it. I've been thinking about it all day!

It's not really like anything I have played before. The presentation is lovely and the puzzle solving is really satisfying. I've just gotten to chapter three. The little narrative element is a nice way to tie things together. The music is also way better than I would have expected for a puzzle game!

I didn't realise how much I needed a break from AAA games until I started playing this, so I'm glad to see someone else feels the same.

Sorry to necro (and double post) but I randomly remembered this project. Looks like the website they had for crowdfunding after cancelling the Kickstarter (apocalypsenow.com) is down. So I wondered what happened.

The most recent thing I found was this short reddit thread from a month ago of people wondering what happened. Someone seemingly writing on behalf of the team does respond to one post saying that they haven't collected any money and never planned to until funding goals were met, so at least backers won't be losing out.

The thread also mentioned something else. On the game's tumblr page in mid-November the game director had left a short note saying that they have withdrawn endorsement of everything relating to the original movie, the production and the game itself.

The only other posts on the tumblr are two from mid-October. One post is condemning convicted child molester and Jeepers Creepers 3 director and Victor Salva, who apparently has an industry connection to Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola. The other post is about deleting personal Twitter accounts and accounts associated with the game in solidarity with Rose McGowan, who received a temporary Twitter suspension while speaking out against Harvey Weinstein.

I was always somewhat doubtful as to whether this game would come out, but who knows what position they were in when this happened. Maybe they were making good progress behind the scenes. Either way, I respect them for sticking to their morals and disavowing themselves if they no longer wanted to be associated with the gross behaviour of Hollywood.

It's been a couple of years now so people have to think back, and it's almost a decade since 3, but 4 had a far more lively color palette. See these examples of scrapyard vs scrapyard and outskirts town vs outskirts town.

Fallout 3 is a lot of grey, green and brown. Playing Fallout 4 you can tell there was a conscious effort in the art direction to add more color to the world. The change to a less irradiated setting is part of that.

Going to join everyone else in saying that I have heard nothing at all about a new Switch in 2018.

If there is, it will be a small manufacturing revision that makes it 3% more energy efficient when docked or something minor like that. Not a 'Switch Pro' kind of upgrade.

The current Switch is in all likelihood going to be the same one they are selling this time next year.

PREY is my favourite game of the year and it might met a mention in things like best story or best moment but I don't think any of the staff took to it that much, and that's fine. That's not what this thread is for.

An actual game that won't be discussed at all is another Arkane release: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.

I'm not sure if anyone played it as I think it came out during the initial frenzy of Destiny 2, and I don't think any of the crew were too hot with the previous Dishonored games. Maybe Jason has mentioned them now and then.

I'm not even sure if it would win any category (unless they have one for level design) so maybe it wouldn't be mentioned even if it had been played. It's a really great slice of Dishonored though.

The game isn't out until December 1st.

If you've got an early copy, can you elaborate on what makes it the best game of the year?

The first thing that came to mind is Sins of a Solar Empire, although that's at a pretty abstracted level.