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STEAM | June 2016 - Dear Valve, E3 is here, please release Ricochet 2

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D

Dragon1893

Member
LurkerPrime said:
For myself at least, it's due to the unique content around every corner; new sights, characters, and situations are everywhere--there's never a feeling of "been there, done that." Toussaint in particular is hella compelling because of its more whimsical nature, vs. the rest of the Witcher's settings.

Like, if you stripped out all of the story, cinematics, and dialog, TW3 would be about the same as Dragon Age: Inquisition's primary gameplay loop of "go here, kill this, gather this; repeat" but it manages to avoid such repetition by expertly inserting lore, stories, and dialog around every corner. It doesn't tell you to explore, it makes you want to explore.

TW3's rich and varied gameplay is nothing short of breathtaking, setting the open world standard from that point forwards. In this vein, I really hope folks judge future open worlds keeping in mind what TW3 has accomplished, to avoid the barren checklistathon that most open world games devolve into.
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Well said.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
do we know what format the sale will be? just 1 single discount throughout like last time, or back to dailies and what not?
 
M

Monooboe

Member
LurkerPrime said:
For myself at least, it's due to the unique content around every corner; new sights, characters, and situations are everywhere--there's never a feeling of "been there, done that." Toussaint in particular is hella compelling because of its more whimsical nature, vs. the rest of the Witcher's settings.

Like, if you stripped out all of the story, cinematics, and dialog, TW3 would be about the same as Dragon Age: Inquisition's primary gameplay loop of "go here, kill this, gather this; repeat" but it manages to avoid such repetition by expertly inserting lore, stories, and dialog around every corner. It doesn't tell you to explore, it makes you want to explore.

TW3's rich and varied gameplay is nothing short of breathtaking, setting the open world standard from that point forwards. In this vein, I really hope folks judge future open worlds keeping in mind what TW3 has accomplished, to avoid the barren checklistathon that most open world games devolve into.
Click to expand...

You are absolutely right! The thing about TW3 that's the most repetive is the combat and it's also my least favorite thing about the game. All in all and still think TW3 really is the best game I've played. It might sound hyperbole but it's the closest to my dream game that any game has come.
 
Dice

Dice

Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
Mivey said:
Spelling everything out is not a sign of greatness.
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Neither is keeping everything so vague you lack relational depth or worldview that has more shape than merely being a certain race and in weak/strong position, which I feel Witcher does. It's always like "Nobody knows where [insert race] really came from, but I'm a [different race] so I don't believe or trust them. We [insert race] are the real deal and everyone else is full of shit. P.S. We like [insert deity] which people like because it exists."

Vague poetry doesn't make up for the lacking depth of worldview, cultural ways, methods of approaching thought and circumstances, attitudes born of centuries of complex relations and socioeconomic turns, etc. All of that is far more convincing to me in Dragon Age. It is definitely far lesser than Witcher in realism of present circumstances, dealing with those circumstances, complexity of trusts amid differing motivations, new layers of concerns introduced to factor, limitations of capacity to act on the basis of being just one person in a larger world with higher powers, general presentation quality, etc. However the lore/worldbuilding and how it manifests in the people is so strong to me.
 
L

LurkerPrime

Member
The cool thing about the Witcher is that all three games have the same underlying "3 C's" gameplay loop: chatting, combat, and consequences. The first game was a humble Eurojank RPG with a bold vision: a dark fantasy world where there is no right answer, one where good and evil are the myths, rather than monsters and fairytales. The Witcher 2 amped up the production values and polished the visuals and gameplay to a sheen, retaining its hardcore roots but giving it much more modern presentation. And then the Witcher 3 scaled this up by an unfathomable factor while still retaining everything that made the previous games great, all while presenting it as a AAA blockbuster franchise.

So CD Projekt have essentially made Eurojank RPGs mainstream. It's been quite a journey for Witcher video games, from cancelled game to Bioware-inspired RPG, to the most critically-acclaimed game of all time, with a lot of stories inbetween.

Dice said:
People give DA:I a lot of shit about this but it just doesn't shove you into conversations automatically by doing the missions. If you go out of your way to try to initiate conversations with everyone as you go it has really good characterization and woldbuilding. TW3 has the best, but DA:I is really solid.
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Completely disagree. DAI has dialog in the strongholds and cities, and in main or companion quests, but out in the world there is next to nothing. The side "quests" are two steps away from placeholders with dialog bordering "halp me pls" with responses that might as well be "ok / [leave]" with bits of exposition thrown in. If even that.

I really wouldn't be surprised if one region in the Witcher 3 (like Velen, Skellige, or Novigrad) has more main story content than all of Dragon Age: Inquisition's non-sidequest content (as in, main story and companion stuff). At the very least, it has a solid lead in choice and consequences in one region, vs. the whole of DAI. 'Cause when you cut DAI into its actual content--main, companion, and side content, you end up with, what, eight to ten main quests, about an hour long each, locked away depending on side content completion (power accumulation), a handful or two of companion quests of varying length, and hundreds of hours worth of repetitive side content, ranging from "pick up the thing" all the way to "kill the thing."

I will give DAI this, though: it does well when it focuses on its characters. I really liked Iron Bull and his people, Cassandra, and my dear Vivienne, but very few of the game's characters get this sort of treatment. It also has several good ideas, but they're never anything beyond that (war table "metagame," some of the cinematic moments that don't really pay off, the whole dilomatic/rallying aspect, etc.)
Dice said:
Neither is keeping everything so vague you lack relational depth or worldview that has more shape than merely being a certain race and in weak/strong position, which I feel Witcher does. It's always like "Nobody knows where [insert race] really came from, but I'm a [different race] so I don't believe or trust them. We [insert race] are the real deal and everyone else is full of shit. P.S. We like [insert deity] which people like because it exists."

Vague poetry doesn't make up for the lacking depth of worldview, cultural ways, methods of approaching thought and circumstances, attitudes born of centuries of complex relations and socioeconomic turns, etc. All of that is far more convincing to me in Dragon Age. It is definitely far lesser than Witcher in realism of present circumstances, dealing with those circumstances, complexity of trusts amid differing motivations, new layers of concerns introduced to factor, limitations of capacity to act on the basis of being just one person in a larger world with higher powers, general presentation quality, etc. However the lore/worldbuilding and how it manifests in the people is so strong to me.
Click to expand...
The big difference between the two is... Bioware made Dragon Age's lore from the ground up and they fully intend to use it, while the Witcher is based on a book that it has no direct interaction with (the books and games have separate canon).

Dragon Age's issue is, every single Dragon Age game has had a love-hate relationship with its core principals. Like, at its core, Dragon Age wants to be this mature, serious game, almost Witcher-like, where there is no good or evil, only shades of gray... but at the same time, it wants to be a heroic fantasy, where the Chosen Good triumphs over the Eternal Evil, and everything is Awesome. So politics and racism whilst battling against world-ending evils, covered in the blood of your enemies. And to compound this problem, every single game has had a dramatically different approach to what "Dragon Age" really is; first there is DAO, a game that's basically Mass Effect in a nutshell, then DA2, a political thriller with a twist so stupid it ruined the franchise, and (currently) there's DAI, which is... a bit of both, really.

I guess what I'm saying is, while Dragon Age has a lot of lore behind it it lacks a central, I dunno, thesis to bring it together. For this reason I find it difficult to praise its world building, when it has essentially had an identity crisis from day zero. Especially compared to the Witcher (as mentioned above) which has been consistent throughout, albeit on the "bigger than you" side.


Words, man. How did I write so many. Dragon Age and the Witcher do things to me.
 
B

bobnowhere

Member
Latest Indie Gala Hump Day Bundle contains Rapid Squirrel which was one of the games caught up in the fake review-bot shenanigans. According to the publisher, these are the last keys in exsistance.

Publisher said:
We here in Rai Studio want to say couple words about this situation and bring a little more explanation on what actually happened.

Firstly, we are not developers of our games, but the publisher.
As a responsible publisher, we have managed to bring some amount (yes, large amount) of keys for giveaways in different steam groups.

We haven't expected that one of this groups would be headed by an administrator of a steam-bot network. Nor we didn't expect him to use this keys and his bots to actually exploit the review system of our games.

Again, we haven't payed them any penny for this.

We got known of this situation too late, and yes, this is completely our fault.

We feel really sorry for the developers of our games, because they are totally innocent, and of course for the players, as this situation was cheating them. We will do our best to support players who bought the game, do refunds, try to get to consensus on this question.

Again, this is just a circumstance, but we agree with Valve's decision to disable a purchase button.

Speaking about this decision,

The games are NOT banned, only purchase button is disabled.
Everyone who bough our game can continue playing or do a refund. Every key will still work. However, we cant generate keys anymore.

We have only keys that has been generated before an incident, and they will still work.

So bundle buyers can still buy the game. People who want to buy it can still do it on Indie Gala. The only keys left are there, so if you want to try a forbidden game for purchace, go on ;)

And the last thing we'd like to share to you:

We have contacted Valve support. We have managed to delete all the bots reviews from all the games. We do agree that we are guilty and feel terribly sorry for developers and players.

This is a hard, but indeed important lesson. We will not let things like these happen again.

Thanks to everyone who have supported during this situation.

Regards,

Rai Studio Games Publisher.
Click to expand...

So might be the last chance. Game is probably terrible bundlejunk but you know!
 
L

LurkerPrime

Member
Deques said:
Looks like the release day outside USA is on 24th June...
What is this bs?! Why even bother different release days for a downloadable versions?
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Digital oceans? Like so:

Ja2ZGNe.gif
 
Dice

Dice

Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
I feel like you're saying what I mean but getting hung up on a different definition of worldbuilding. When you say it, you seem to mean present happenings of the world around you, like does it feel like a real living world where shit is happening all the time in the space around you. When I say it I mean a world that stretches past your capacity to observe it directly. Different lands, a wealth of history, whole cultures with entirely different ways of life and thought, etc. You say DA:I does well when it focuses on characters and that is part of what I mean. Like you say, Iron Bull is great, Vivienne is great. I'd say Solas and Dorian as well, though they take some serious work to open up conversationally. With all of these characters, as they open up they cast a huge light on whole sides of history; a new culture, a new worldview, a new region of the world.

In the Witcher, with all the sidequests you'll get a hell of a lot more about recent happenings. People will fill you in on the last 2-6 months of their life so you understand what is going on and this builds a sense of a living world, however only for the present place and time. In DA:I all the random people don't really tell you shit, but you're a stranger to them so I don't expect it. However they still do act in different ways, and those different ways of acting and thinking don't make sense until the main characters (plus books) reveal truckloads, and when that happens, in my mind it carries over into all the shallow interactions I have the rest of the time, as well as the larger interactions these parties have with each other that I observe as an outsider. Yes, the present happenings aren't anywhere close to the same level of development, but world/lore doesn't need to be in what directly interacts with you to be there.
 
derExperte

derExperte

Member
Tizoc said:
Eh i gotta wait til the 24tg for the new dino dini kick off game to be on psn
I just deal with it.
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Oh, that's releasing? As someone who would still be playing Kick Off 2 if his Amiga hadn't died I should get on that. But I also played some of his later games and they were all rubbish. And what if some fine day it comes to PC?
 
Tizoc

Tizoc

Member
derExperte said:
Oh, that's releasing? As someone who would still be playing Kick Off 2 if his Amiga hadn't died I should get on that. But I also played some of his later games and they were all rubbish. And what if some fine day it comes to PC?
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Itll release on steam eventually
 
S

someguyinahat

Member
Stumpokapow said:
Speaking of the Zero Escape series--why don't people pump out Unity room escape games? Imagine a game studio that sells Room Escape games for, say, $1.99-2.99 per game and limits themselves to 1-2 months per production run.
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Interesting but a lot of people are used to playing room escape games for free on flash sites (I know I sure was - I just got the links from jay is games,) and might not see the value in it.

But...wait a bit...

isn't The Room basically a room escape game?
 
L

LurkerPrime

Member
Dice said:
I feel like you're saying what I mean but getting hung up on a different definition of worldbuilding. When you say it, you seem to mean present happenings of the world around you, like does it feel like a real living world where shit is happening all the time in the space around you. When I say it I mean a world that stretches past your capacity to observe it directly. Different lands, a wealth of history, whole cultures with entirely different ways of life and thought, etc. You say DA:I does well when it focuses on characters and that is part of what I mean. Like you say, Iron Bull is great, Vivienne is great. I'd say Solas and Dorian as well, though they take some serious work to open up conversationally. With all of these characters, as they open up they cast a huge light on whole sides of history; a new culture, a new worldview, a new region of the world.

In the Witcher, with all the sidequests you'll get a hell of a lot more about recent happenings. People will fill you in on the last 2-6 months of their life so you understand what is going on and this builds a sense of a living world, however only for the present place and time. In DA:I all the random people don't really tell you shit, but you're a stranger to them so I don't expect it. However they still do act in different ways, and those different ways of acting and thinking don't make sense until the main characters (plus books) reveal truckloads, and when that happens, in my mind it carries over into all the shallow interactions I have the rest of the time, as well as the larger interactions these parties have with each other that I observe as an outsider. Yes, the present happenings aren't anywhere close to the same level of development, but world/lore doesn't need to be in what directly interacts with you to be there.
Click to expand...

Hm, never really considered the merits of what I'll call "background lore" (in books, codices, etc) vs. the more traditional method. I generally burn out on those loredumps partway through the game (any game) in my growing desire to finish it, so I miss a lot of that stuff overall. It actually goes a long way to explaining what people see in DAI's storytelling. Thinking back, I did like DAO's very rich backstory, but really don't remember much of DAI's.

So I'll just back up and say while I don't agree with the notion that DAI has a good story or anything, the whole stance makes a whole lot more sense to me now. Thanks for the illumination!


I think this difference in storytelling goes back to the roots of each franchise. I've heard the Witcher described as a "folktale RPG" and that rings true to me: it's about ephemeral things like myths, rumours, and people--constantly-changing things that are never what they seem. Meanwhile Dragon Age is heroic fantasy, all about legends, prophecies, and history--things set in stone, which may or may not reflect what actually happened or will happen. It's kind of two polar-opposite approaches to the same thought of "fantasy as reality."
 
L

Lain

Member
bobnowhere said:
Latest Indie Gala Hump Day Bundle contains Rapid Squirrel which was one of the games caught up in the fake review-bot shenanigans. According to the publisher, these are the last keys in exsistance.



So might be the last chance. Game is probably terrible bundlejunk but you know!
Click to expand...

I only grabbed the bundle for Ara Fell and Sudoku Quest personally, but thanks for highlighting this bundle. Probably would have missed it otherwise as I don't like to buy IG bundles after the price increases, nor am I too cool with buying bundles together with other people during happy hour.

Tizoc said:
They did release the sequel.
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Not on Steam, obviously.
 
T

TheLetdown

Member
Monooboe said:
Just came to Toussaint in Witcher 3 and whoa, the game still managed to impress me even after all the hours spent in it.

Also was thinking the other day, what is it with Witcher 3 that makes it stand out so much, for example Skyrim, which I also spent many many hours with, but with it I got so tired of it, in the end just hearing sounds from the game made me feel fatigue, but I've spent way more hours in Witcher 3 and I still feel such joy just running around in it.
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For me, it's how the world feels lived in, as opposed to Skyrim, where it felt like the cities were designed and then populated.

People's backs sagged a little lower around the Baron's little corner of the world; they had more pep in their step in the city and were cleaner.

The narrative informs the form, not vice versa.
 
L

Ludens

Banned
Did anyone here play Knee Deep? The game itself is very good, but the performance is horrible, fps fluctuate costantly with the result of costant stuttering.
 
P

Pachimari

Member
Zeknurn said:
Every Arma game and dlc for €17.16

https://store.bistudio.com/products/arma15-bundle

Hell of a deal.
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Damn, I just bought ARMA 3 alone on Steam for the same price. I have never done a refund before, so now I gotta figure that out.

[edit]
I need help!
I had ARMA 3 in my library. I requested a refund from Steam. So it's still in my library as I am waiting for their confirmation.
But now I bought it from Bohemia.com, and it's there in my library with all of the DLC now.

Will Valve take away what I redeemed from Bohemia? Because I don't have two copies of ARMA 3 in my inventory or library...
 
P

Pachimari

Member
Sarcasm said:
Why did you redeem it before the refund was processed? Sorry can't help you there though -.-
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I didn't think it through. I thought maybe there would be two copies but of course not. Now I'm gonna run the game for two hours just to be sure nobody takes away the game I bought from Bohemia.
 
D

Deques

Member
Madridista said:
I didn't think it through. I thought maybe there would be two copies but of course not. Now I'm gonna run the game for two hours just to be sure nobody takes away the game I bought from Bohemia.
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Was it one key activation? I believe that ARMA 3 from the bundle wont go away since it's part of that package. Just don't do anything more stupid. Running the game for two hours might be stupid since it will invalid your refund request
 
P

Pachimari

Member
Deques said:
Was it one key activation? I believe that ARMA 3 from the bundle wont go away since it's part of that package. Just don't do anything more stupid. Running the game for two hours might be stupid since it will invalid your refund request
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Nah, I just cancelled my refund request. Fuck it, have ended up paying €35 for it, as I paid for it twice. Fuck me to no end.

The ARMA 3 bundle from Bohemia is a 1-key activation yes.
 
T

TheLetdown

Member
Madridista said:
Nah, I just cancelled my refund request. Fuck it, have ended up paying €35 for it, as I paid for it twice. Fuck me to no end.

The ARMA 3 bundle from Bohemia is a 1-key activation yes.
Click to expand...

It's a learning experience.

You've become more wise in the ways of Steam, key shuffling, third parties.

Next stop, Wall Street.
 
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