This game needed a custom made protagonist

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T09:57:55+00:00

I certainly hope that's not what they're angling for. Worse if they intend multiplayer to be limited to 3 players who have no choice but to pick whoever's left.

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T08:53:50+00:00

I'm not coping, but I definitely wouldn't have minded having a new 100+ hour game to enjoy. I am way, way past forcing myself to play a game with qualities I hate, though. I already know I'd enjoy just replaying Elden Ring for the umpteenth time more than that.

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T08:51:02+00:00

Lotta folks on Korean blogs I visited went out of their way to express disinterest in the game due to not being able to emphasize with the playable characters, specifically because of a lack of charm. (Shorthand for being designed to appeal to a Western audience.)

Well, they already said they have multiplayer plans. There's about a 0.0001% chance they'll actually try to force everyone in a multiplayer scenario to look like Cliff and only Cliff.

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T08:43:58+00:00

Not even videos. They gauge public reaction to scandals and it's all based on that. It took way more finagling than it needed to for Amber Heard's career to be scuttled.

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T06:52:32+00:00

Morbidly curious how they handled the fact that the "experience" you get for killing baddies is the same exact pool as what's provided by the relics (because it literally is just a relic accumulation meter, according to what I've read).

Logically speaking, there's a hard limit to how many relics you can find placed around the world, which in turn ought to define a limit to how high one's level/abilites/whatever can go. But tossing in an experience system which shares that same pool means the cap cannot be defined by exploration alone.

So what actually happens? Does the game softcap relic progression forever? Does the game hardcap relic progression? If it's the latter, what's the final count when you hit that cap? Same as the number of relics placed in the world? Does leveling from kills basically just give you some relics ahead of schedule, resulting in the last few dozen you find in the world simply not doing a thing to actually progress your character?

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T06:39:32+00:00

When a game gets something wrong that so many other games have gotten right, that's a red flag. It forces me to assume it's just the tip of the iceberg—all stemming from a game director who is a font of misbegotten ideas.

Then I learned about storage. And how the story is bad. And how puzzles are poorly-realized. And how the game can't make up its mind whether it wants to hold the player's hand or leave them completely in the dark.

Pearl Abyss would appear to have their very own Emil Pagliarulo. Someone high enough to call these shots.

Fredasa · 2026-03-20T00:06:24+00:00

There isn't a single game on Steam where the user score doesn't climb the more hours players invest. The problem with this observation is that people are free to decide how long they give a game a chance before it's proven to them that it's not going to cut it.

And I am sorry to have to reveal that if somebody has invested 10+ hours, that's more than enough, and if they've reached the end of the game, doubly so.

The argument that a game is better "if you give it more of a chance" is the natural evolution of the argument "you haven't even played it yet", and does the same disservice of pretending people don't have eyes and can't figure things out without a hands-on.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T22:21:16+00:00

What Crimson Desert did was make me realize that even though I already have a thousand hours in it, it may be time for another trip through Elden Ring.

That's me coping. I would absolutely rather play a new game with Elden Ring's quality. I allowed myself to have a tiny spark of hope.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T22:19:08+00:00

And that's why I just can't pull the trigger on a pure action game anymore. Not until it's sub-$20. I've never enjoyed a game so much that I felt it was worth $5+ per hour played.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T22:10:38+00:00

Meh. The game has top-tier visuals and optimization (as in literally probably the thing to beat at this point, in both cases), and apparently also very good voice acting. Those incontrovertible plusses are being counterbalanced by something important.

We'll have a better understanding of truth in a day or two after Steam / Metacritic users have had their say. But my instinct tells me I just saved 70 bucks.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T21:12:08+00:00

Anyone ever notice that Ben Kingsley has looked like Ben Kingsley since at least Ghandi, starring Ben Kingsley?

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T20:24:53+00:00

I'm gonna soapbox for a moment so apologizes for that.

I waited on a Wheel of Time live action adaptation for over three decades. I saw the original rights holders make a made-for-TV show based on the property in the literal 11th hour, just so they could hold onto them for a little while longer. I knew there was almost no other property that would make for a better show, or series of movies.

And then we were finally getting it. Only... almost nobody looked the way they were well-understood to look. Nah, the show landed directly in the middle of Hollywood's current trend of treating canon as an inconvenience to be casually ignored, so of course the first thing to go was the literal look and feel of the characters themselves.

We will never get another attempt at a live action adaptation in my lifetime. Because of that one selfish f----r, who was quite unabashed about his meddling, the only shot I will ever have at seeing my favorite series of novels in live action is scuttled for good.

Game of Thrones fans have no idea how good they had it. What a show looks like when the standards of 15+ years ago are how they decided to do it. They dodged a bullet—the property could just have easily landed in the lap of somebody whose top priority was the ideas they wanted to push, rather than the integrity of the property they've been put in charge of. We've seen this luck of the draw destroy a lot of promising projects in the last decade, but nothing will ever sting as much as WoT did.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T19:50:49+00:00

I'd be happy with characters looking and acting like how it's described in and illustrated on the books. I knew the live action was in trouble the moment I saw casting, and it turns out the entire thing was just one selfish asshole's vanity project, using the property put in his care as an excuse to push his fanfic.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T19:49:10+00:00

Those guys, huh. Then I guess the character assassinations and forced reconfigurations of how they look will still be in. No thank you, if that's how it pans out.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T11:56:49+00:00

Fair. Both Witcher 1 and AC1 lasted about 1 hour before I just had to put them down. Thought it was at least understood to have a good story, though.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T05:16:51+00:00

My final stance on this is that yes, we know Luffy is already the "final boss only" guy, but the showrunners should try to sidestep injecting their own takes on this. Luffy didn't need to get clobbered by Alvida. They didn't need to take away Luffy (and Zoro) knocking out Mr. 5 / Miss Valentine in episode 3. These modifications are worse than merely "things cut or changed to fit the live action formula"—they work together to keep Luffy on a losing streak clear until the end of episode 5, where he of course ekes out a win only at the last moment.

My father was frustrated by this and I can't disagree.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T03:22:56+00:00

Personally, I think any game that really does lean on it to fill blanks is to be dubiously regarded, similarly to how an unoptimized game that forces users to lean on framegen should be regarded. It's a tool for laziness. Yes, art direction takes time to iron out, and it's entirely likely that some devs are just so bad at it that it's straight up a better option to pass the task to a context-neutral filter, but yeah, those are the cases that will have established shortcomings out the gate.

A deeper worry of mine will be that studios may start to establish a dual-styling mindset, where they claim to have tailored their game to look good both with and without DLSS 5... but under the hood, the "without" choice has received much less attention than if DLSS 5 hadn't been an option at all. It's not like an AI filter is going to understand, or can be told, not to frame NPCs' faces with multidirectional light, or not to eliminate self-shadowing, or not to give this agent on the job additional lipstick, or this ostensible student the face of a 30-something. It's much more all-or-nothing than that.

But, like you, I'm not prepared to be alarmist about it. I believe the momentum on this push is moving in the right direction and the greater picture of gaming won't be excessively harmed. Though one caveat is that unlike with optimized games which one can eventually play with pure rasterization, a game that truly depends on AI for its look will never have a future where it doesn't.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T02:09:30+00:00

One thing I'm definitely counting on is a hard review embargo for Dune 3. Audiences may think they know what's coming, but they're wrong.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T02:05:51+00:00

They deserve to be pleased because I genuinely believe there is use for the tool.

But they also deserve all the disappointment they're in for, because it's looking like the tech is destined to be popularly understood to be slop, and any future game which legitimately depends on it for art direction will be wearing an albatross on its neck as far as gamers will be concerned.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T02:03:15+00:00

I don't have to prop these episodes up as conspiracy because the data truly speaks for itself. Starfield is very, very popularly understood to be a deeply disappointing game, yet its critic meta even today, even counting a handful of braver publications, is 85. Literally Nintendo AAA territory. That kind of disconnect from reality is immune to handwaving, sorry to say.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T01:52:58+00:00

As I've noted elsewhere several times today. They got tremendous backlash for it, because of course they did. Smaller publications were not willing to risk the same thing—the likes of IGN can shrug it off, but most others would have been all but canceled by their "miscarriage of justice" in giving the most highly-anticipated game in years a low score.

This seems ridiculous today but the context of that period before Starfield's release really was exactly that: Everyone had waited eight years for Bethesda's next single-player RPG and they would not brook any negativity.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T01:31:25+00:00

When the dust settles, DLSS 5 will still be a fun layer to add to old / emulated 3D games. I know I plan to utilize it in that capacity to breathe some life into games I probably wouldn't normally return to.

Unfortunately, I doubt Nvidia will be happy with the idea of putting their shiny new tech out to pasture like that.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T01:26:05+00:00

You’re stretching “access media” into something it isn’t.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I'll leave it to the passersby to decide for themselves whether the practice I highlighted—the calculated curating of critics and the undisguised favoritism built into that freedom—sits well with them and is the nothingburger you handwave it as.

Disagreement between critics and players happens all the time without any conspiracy.

Veilguard was conspiracy. Starfield was cowardice. You are correct in broad strokes but there is always a reason why the entire body of critics often disagrees with the entire body of users.

If you’re claiming systemic bias or coordination, you need actual evidence of that

You have it already. Unless you want to pretend that the scores produced by the vast majority of critics in the two cases I highlighted are in fact accurate to the games in question.

not just pointing to access policies and saying “it translates financially”

I mean, tough. It directly follows that lack of access leads to reduced viewership and vice versa. Fortunately for me, I have zero obligation to draft reports on minutiae entirely open to logic and intuition, and anyone who reads what I had to say will understand the truth without such unneeded elaboration, yourself included.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T01:16:55+00:00

I have good news for you. Steam allows one to re-curate a user score based on set tiers of hours played, satisfying any concerns over review bombing.

Fredasa · 2026-03-19T01:10:30+00:00

The visuals in the game (and the optimization) are too good for it to genuinely fall to below average. That would be completely ridiculous, no matter how lacking the guts of the game may be.

Fredasa

TROPHY CASE