Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/forty-eight-minutes-of-gamepla.html
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I’ve watched it nine times! It’s amazing.
I also think it’s not getting nearly enough coverage, given the blank stares and lack of knowledge of it’s glorious existence within the various nerdy circles I sometimes frequent.
I am willing to be disappointed horribly, for the chance that it’s all true.
I don’t know. The characters suffer from some of the same personality defects that turned me off from a lot of narrative games: they’re nasty people trying really too hard to act cool.
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Blah. I’m not watching this.
Do you remember the big reveal for Watch_Dogs?
Do you remember Watch_Dogs at all?
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What I remember, fondly, is Witcher III.
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I’m with the haters though.
I want to see gender fluid squirted all over this thing.
I want to see it knee deep in gender fluid.
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So… any cyberpunk character ever?
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My thoughts exactly, it’s like games publishers (i think this is more a pub decision than a dev decision) have not been paying attention and are again setting themselves up for a fall - see also no man’s sky. Of course it looks great because it’s a carefully prepared demo but i will not be the remotest bit surprised if we’ll eventually be seeing those videos comparing the demo to the actual game. We don’t really believe the city will be that populated, do we? We don’t see that for a good reason: it’s bloody hard to achieve. Other than that i found the shooty bits and dialogue to be uninspired with the inevitable gratuitous female ass shot - it’s an rpg so they could have shown something less heteronormative to really show the possibilities.
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A game less than the sum of its parts, but I still managed to get some entertainment out of it. (And the sequel was quite charming)
Could be worse. At least if it takes that route, a year or so’s worth of patches and you’ll have something worth paying attention to.
Well that doesn’t look much more populated than the larger cities and towns in CD Project’s last game, Witcher 3. And across that series there have been heavily populated areas in each one. With more complexity, more varied character models, and more realistic crowds in each release. And that’s the thing here. Its not a going in blind situation. This is a studio (and publisher, they self publish basically), who’s last game ended up being one of the best reviewed games of the decade. They’ve also got a history of serious post release support. Fast, frequent patches, free DLCs and tweaks and improvements planned and released for months after the games come out.
No Man’s Sky was a crowd funded indy game (no publisher per se in either case). And the situation there was more one of a new dev with no history to base expectations on, over hyping and over promising on their very first release.
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I don’t know… I’m getting this strong Daikatana vibe off the reveal footage. Its tinder profile looks great, then it shows up a year late with a bottle of half-empty MD20/20 and a spray of daisies that a donkey sat on.
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For anyone who is having doubts about CDProjektRed’s ability to actual deliver on the promise made by this gameplay demo I really cannot encourage you more to go have a look at The Witcher III. Really, that’s all that should need to be said here. Anyone familiar with the studio’s previous game is already satisfied that this game will be up to at least that bar of quality.
Again though, Witcher 3 still suffered from the E3 demo curse where the retail game did not turn out looking as impressive. I’ve not played it but I respect certain game journalist’s opinion that it is an excellent game and that’s all that matters really but these studios are making a rod for their own back by releasing these highly polished slices of gameplay. Well I say highly polished… the bit where the goon says “My legs!” after they get shot off moments before his head gets turned into a red mist might need looking at. I still don’t think the city is going to be anywhere near that alive with people for the retail release but happy to be proven wrong.
Well the Witcher 3 downgrade “controversy” was a really weird thing.
The people complaining were looking at what was essentially a tech demo from the original E3 announcement, offered years before the game came out. And while the complaint was that the old video didnt resemble the final game. It wasnt in terms of features, gameplay or anything like that. And their comparison point wasn’t the final game, but late non-gameplay trailers. They were basically complaining that there’d been some sort of hard to pinpoint reduction in the graphic quality.
A lot of people (myself included) were scratching their heads because that early video looked pretty damn identical to what came out. Its lighting was darker and more contrasty, and the color pallet was more limited and desaturated. But in terms of quality most people seemed to think it was better. CDP even explained they’d scrapped the lighting system for a better one and gone with a brighter more varied pallet because the early version was making certain gameplay features hard to use.
All the rage seemed to fizzle when the game actually came out, and was stupid good looking. And there was never a plausible reason offered for the supposed downgrade in a game that turned out to be good enough at stressing hardware to spend the past 3 years as a standard benchmark.
While there have been a couple of prominent examples of games being over sold the last few years. Watch Dogs and No Man’s Sky being the big examples. Those were situations with missing features, or where the final game was much smaller scale than expected. The secret graphical downgrade end of it is this weird little conspiracy that lives in the more toxic areas of gaming. There were legal moves and death threats against the Witcher team. And nearly every game thats come out since has been accused of a similar “downgrade” seemingly going hand in hand with personal political attacks on devs.
I dont know that you can draw too many conclusions about game marketing from all that.
And while we should always expect commecials to be commercials. These guys are going to cherry pick the best stuff they can show. What I’m seeing in that video isnt too far off from what they’ve actually put out in the past.
As someone who’s currently replaying the Witcher 3 because of how freakin’ great it is, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually know how to make a good game. It could definitely still suck, but there’s ample evidence that they could make it excellent.
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