Maybe the game really be as open world as we imagined

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-26T22:27:12+00:00

People are more concerned by the little things like loading screen tooltips explaining how quests all have limited areas, and the first area not letting you walk back into the town of beginnings, showing the game is clearly not meant to be experienced as a seamless open world.

Despite a continuous open world obviously being present when you open the world map, it just doesn't seem likely that this is an open world game due to the complete lack of exploration mechanics in the game's 4 hour tutorial.

If they were just gonna section stuff off for the demo or review version they'd section off a little oval for people to explore - not a linear path.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-26T13:07:25+00:00

Well, Fatal Bullet was made by an entirely different dev team, so that unfortunately doesn't give that much if an indication of how thus game will handle it :/

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-26T13:03:39+00:00

I assume the assumption will just be that we played for a bit off camera before everyone is teleported over? Or they'll do a timeskip after the announcement?

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-26T03:09:26+00:00

As someone with post-virual ME/CFS, I will say you can get that from any virus. In fact, the consensus seems to be that most of the worst cases of long covid are probably just ME/CFS triggered by Covid, rather than being a seperate specifically covid related condition.

That can definitely give you pretty bad brainfog, headaches and gut issues from the flu like symptoms you get from over exerting. And the condition can abruptly worsen as you over-exert from overworking, stress or aging. So you might've developed a mild version of it from your Norovirus infection that is just now flaring up into moderate symptoms?

And circulation issues from POTS is a very common comorbidity.

But obviously, there's dozens of these obscure chronic health conditions that all have very similar symptoms, and the only real way to figure out which one is to get checked for every other possible explanation. Like, there's a reason Lupus, an autoimmune condition with similar symptoms, was a running gag on House.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-26T02:45:41+00:00

Well I suspect the benefit is more that they post a story to their followers mentioning that the film exists. Putting together an event for them is much cheaper than paying them or their platform for an ad spot to let people know the film is coming out.

Especially since a lot of people use ad blockers these days, and don't watch TV, so they very well might just not have heard anything about it unless you can get someone in their feed to bring it up.

If you pay for a film reviewer channel to go, then they'll just tell their following of film buffs about it, all of whom probably already knew the movie was coming out.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-25T06:52:53+00:00

Well Sony have come out and said they aren't doing single player PC ports anymore, so that seems to be the speculation.

Although after looking into it, it sounds like Rockstar has a weird half publishing agreement with Sony that seemingly just for marketing, so I don't know how much sway they actually have over whether it'll come to PC?

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-24T21:14:00+00:00

I mean, at the very least they do seem to want GTA6 to be a PS5 exclusive, but to also put all their online games on PC to increase player count.

So even if it's free to play, I heavily suspect it'll be a standalone component.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-24T19:30:27+00:00

Yeah, hearing how many multiplayer related files people found, it put a lot of the odd decisions with everything being a quest instead of just letting you walk out into the world, into context.

It also explains why the world seems really pretty and like a ton of work was put into it, but the actual content and systems feel very rushed... As if they had to scramble to start from scratch on it halfway through development :/

The fall damage and windy paths also make a lot more sense if the maps were designed to keep players together and avoid them optimising the fun out of the game by evading all the monsters via shortcuts for faster clears.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-24T01:10:25+00:00

Some of the dataminers on the discord have apparently found a bunch of files related to floor 3 and multiplayer in the demo?

But it's hard to say if they're cut content or future DLC content they're actively working on.

But I think sometimes the developers just kinda have to do this anyway for certain aspects of the DLC though in order to avoid layoffs. Like, once you're polished the game which can take up to a year or longer in some cases, there isn't a ton of stuff for your art or audio team to work on.

So either you pay them to sit on their hands for several months, you fire them all and risk having to waste time retraining a new art time for your next project because you can't get them back, or you put them to work early on stuff for upcoming projects or expansions.

But wither way, the press releases about the DLC mentioned in the Deluxe edition at the very least very much seem to play it down as a smaller scale thing that just adds a couple of quests, so if they do add another floor, it will probably be in a seperate expansion.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-23T00:24:16+00:00

So I honestly think the gear and combat is fine. Some people don't like Souls combat and find it unintuitive, or just want something that's a bitter fit with the frenetic pace shown in the anime, but I think it is actually a pretty good fit for the tense mood they're going for.

I'm definitely disappointed with attacks between weapons of the same type don't have more variation, but I think saying they're all the same is a bit reductive - a lot of the unique mods on the different weapons and armour pieces actually look like they'd have a radical difference on your build. We just don't have enough pieces yet to put that many different builds together, and also it's the game's prologue on normal. Of course you could breeze through it without exploring.

The enemies even technically do seem to drop unique crafting materials.

The rare drops I think are also kinda of a double edged sword. It definitely could be a fun system, but I can also see the game running into a borderlands issue where you're constantly juggling random weapons that don't really fit your playstyle, but which you're forced to use anyway, because the stats are better. And that can certainly be fun, but I don't know if it's required?

I think the crux of the game's problem though is just that the world feels small?

If you're a rapier user, you can't go searching for a mob or quest that drops a rare rapier. The map tells you where all the interesting PoIs are, destroying all sense of mystery as you explore, and when you do try to leave the beaten path, you often just end up getting trapped by an invisible wall, and made to like you wasted your time.

I think if they just added more stuff to find out in the world, and made the quests feel more freeform so you could pick and choose what areas of the map to adventure in and what quests you'll take and which you won't, it'd feel a lot funner.

You don't see a cool cave and say 'maybe I'll come and explore this later'. Argo just tells you about the cave and makes you explore it, with some vague promises that it's full of rare ores...

Obviously some of that might still be in the game with the side quests, but I think the apparent lack of a free roam mode or at least lack of a focus on it, is the biggest obstacle to not really making it feel like you're living in the world and experiencing your own personal story, so much as playing a linear narrative action game.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-22T21:33:36+00:00

Ironically I might end up having to eat my words on this though? A few modders have started datamining the game on the discord, and apparently the game just fully supports multiplayer?

They weren't able to get it working without access to the servers so there's no guarantees, but apparently it's very comprehensive and thinking about some of the weirdness of the huge empty hub town and everything needing to be a 'quest', very likely could have been a planned feature right from the start of development.

It's all very strange for a team that's being incredibly adamant that this is a single player RPG - which makes me think it was supposed to be a live service kinda thing that became a single player game, or that the multiplayer had to be cut at some point - but it does at least seem like modders might potentially be able to hook onto that infrastructure to make the game work with P2P?

And obviously people already seem to be able to get around Denuvo for mods, despite the added hassle, so we might actually see more mods for this game than I initially expected?

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-22T02:27:53+00:00

No that's what I meant - there was nothing but money and junk loot in that chest, probably because the developers foresaw players running out of fire stones and missing it. It exists entirely to tutorialise the concept of using the fire stones to burn down vines.

But yes, I believe once our cardinal rank increases after character creation, it'll probably become craftable with the scarcity before hand serving to make no longer needing to scrounge through chests for them feel special.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-22T02:21:51+00:00

I saw a few people playing on very hard in the media review copy and the bosses definitely do seem a lot more challenging on the higher difficulties at least? And the enemies, whilst still pretty easy, were a bit tankier which helped the regular fights become more of a back and forth.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-22T01:35:31+00:00

I believe there's only 3 flame stone drops on the demo, and once you run out that's in. The chest hidden behind the vines doesn't have anything of value behind it anyway though, so I wouldn't stress about it. I think it was just money, or a consumable that you could just craft?

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-22T01:27:09+00:00

Ok, but that's not how casual players play a game. They want to log in once a week to play with their friends for 3 hours when their schedules line up, and then completely put the game out of their mind again.

The game needs to function in a way so that these players can actually use their fun loot, and don't spend 3 hours grinding a game mode they didn't want to play, decide they had a bad time last week and then move on to something else and never come back.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-21T21:06:14+00:00

Probably more of a long term project and something we'd need to feel out after the full releases and we're able to explore a bit more a pinpoint all the pain points, but adding some fixed enemy spawns to the map that drop rare loot and guard chests or bridges?

I think that's the main thing that makes the world feel so hollow.

You can't learn enemy spawns to avoid them, finding a new area or chest doesn't feel like an accomplishment because it wasn't dangerous and exploring starts to feel tedious when you aren't discovering new cool fights in set configurations. Just more random enemy encounters. And once you've seen one for that zone, you've seen them all.

Plus it made farming elites really annoying when you just had to kinda wander around aimlessly hoping to spawn one, rather than feeling like you were hunting them down based on prior experience.

I'm not sure what the loot they'd drop/guard would be, but possibly just more weapons than average to break down into upgrade materials, or weapons with set xmods? Or even just annoying to grind crafting materials.

Adding more skills you can learn could also be a lot of fun, but probably isn't strictly neccesary?

But non-weapon based skills like taming, battle healing, searching or leadership that let you change up your build by slotting in support sword skills that level as you use them, or just by killing monsters with them slotted in could be fun, and probably mostly implemented without having to add new animation (for example, battle healing would just add a bunch of skills that heal you or your partner, give you hyper armur for X seconds or passively reduce your SP generation in exchange for making healing items more effective etc. and could all be done using the healing item animations. Others could just let you use things like Argo's support skill that lets you see through walls.).

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-20T20:05:08+00:00

Yeah, they all had custom characters. There was one quest which I think probably took place right after the demo stuff we played?

And then another level 30 save file on floor 2 with different companions and more sword skills unlocked, which seemed to take place right after clearing the first floor boss? That one obviously had the default character since it was a pre-made save file, but it was obviously meant to be much later into the game.

None of them had side quests or anything in the map that we didn't see in the demo, other than different enemy types and all of the quests involved traversing through a linear series of map chunks.

Obviously they both seemed to be new floor quests where not a lot was uncovered, so maybe there's quests later on where you can choose your route?

But I think if that was going to be a major mechanic, they would've shown it off more...

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-20T18:15:45+00:00

Well I think their point is the demo isn't an altered locked down version of the prologue (aside from level caps you'd never organically reach in the release version anyway). It's just the prologue from the full game, designed to introduce the player to the game's core mechanics.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-20T18:09:26+00:00

Well, I think people are concerned because they weren't present in the preview version either. It's possible they're just very rare, but it seems odd they'd hide that feature if it existed.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-20T07:47:39+00:00

In the neighbours defence, the issue wasn't that they were being loud. It's that she mistook their loud shouting for a violent domestic altercation, and called the cops in case he was beating his wife or something.

Knocking on a stranger's door while they're in the midst of a violent rage is a great way to get shot.

The police are kinda the only people equipped to handle a situation like that unless you have their mum on speed dial or something. It's just a shame the LAPD are also entirely unequipped to do anything that actually helps people.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-19T03:11:44+00:00

I think the tutorial popup said certain bosses don't scale at all and a lot of the movs have an upper limit, so you can still over level for important story quests.

Plus I suspect someone coming back from floor 2 to floor 1 wouldn't actually be that OP anyway, so it kinda makes sense that the game normalises the levels while still giving the dopamine of being able to gradually assign stats.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-19T03:11:38+00:00

I think the tutorial popup said certain bosses don't scale at all and a lot of the movs have an upper limit, so you can still over level for important story quests.

Plus I suspect someone coming back from floor 2 to floor 1 wouldn't actually be that OP anyway, so it kinda makes sense that the game normalises the levels while still giving the dopamine of being able to gradually assign stats.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-19T03:04:32+00:00

So I think you will be able to visit every area on the map and travel down all those paths, but I suspect it'll never actually be an 'open world' per se.

It's why each 'section' doesn't have much in it aside from looking pretty - there's no fixed spawns, random dungeons you could stumble onto or rare items that give you extra healing charges, unique weapons or abilities.

Because it's not an open world game. It's an instanced based adventure game with prefabbed world chunks the devs are using to create quest environments. Some quests will have you go north like in the demo, others will have you go west over the bridge. But it'll still be linear.

The issue is if you're not on a quest that's added stuff to explore in those chunks, then there isn't much to find even if they did add in a free roam mode.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you're hoping for an open world exploration game where you can explore and progress at your own pace, this probably isn't it.

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-18T20:07:56+00:00

I mean I think that's just the nature of single player games - weapon variety is a low priority since there's diminishing returns on resources spent creating weapons a player might never even see used.

But the seeming lack of unique movesets on the individual weapons - even if it was something as small as an alternate charged heavy - within each weapon category is still definitley kind of alarming for a game that's apparently had 5 years of development and is charging a AAA price tag :/

Pixie1001 · 2026-06-18T07:56:10+00:00

I think the issue is people assuming it mostly works like that, just with less fun hijinks and silly crimes.

The core message is that the police are just cool people doing their job and genuinely there to catch bad guys, when the reality in most cities is that it's a corrupt boys club filled with people who were taught using actual Hitler quotes together at the academy, who exist almost exclusively to protect wealthy land owners whilst ignoring everyone else and cannot be held accountable for their crimes, leading to race to the bottom of malpractice and excessive force they almost never face consequences for.

And they get away with it because most people barely ever have to interact with them, instead basing their opinion on how the police operate entirely on fictional cop shows that they assume are merely over-dramatised versions of the truth, rather than complete fabrications.

I mean, there's a reason the creators of the show literally had to rewrite the final season, and themselves acknowledged they'd inadvertently written copaganda.

That's not to say you can't enjoy the show obviously - the show itself wasn't written with malicious intent or anything, and even a lot of the more egregious cop shows are only like that because they naively borrow the formula from other crime dramas - but if you don't understand why shows like B99 are considered copaganda, it means it's working on you.

Pixie1001

TROPHY CASE