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gimymblert
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« Reply #9423 on: November 12, 2018, 01:58:07 PM » |
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SO let's talk about starlink, it's what happen when you see the hate about no man's sky and get all the wrong idea about it. This game don't know what it want to be.
It's handcraft not pcg:
You have a flat landscape of handcraft perlin looking hills with randomly placed handcraft copy paste POI, and a single unique asset, which is in the same style of the copy paste but unique, you will look at it 2s and say okay ... also the visual style is rip straight from no man's sky with added copy pasted flourish.
There is gameplay:
You like being interrupted every 5s when flying in space, even when you are inspecting a wreckage, after a fight? well, there you go. So you need to collect resources for mission or spending? how about a annoying pulling mini game! Oh we have a variety of fetch quest so you are forced to engage with pulling hair mini game! The game encourage exploration by having big planet and lot of icon to light up, I mean copy paste combat at location. Oh and I hope you like enemy that blend with the background OR are so small they get covered by grass and bush easily. And they are mobile enough so that you will lose track of them due to FOV not design for fast moving enemy.
You like flying?
You see this game as space ship, that fly, that's why we are forcing you at any occasion to play on ground, like it's a mako in mass effect, with flight disabler cloud, or stuff to heavy you need to lift. So there is no in atmosphere fight and it's hard to fight ground enemy while flying anyway, I hope you like bunny hopping because you gonna need it. Also we mapped necessary button to the faceplate so you won't be able to aim while using them, like shield and jump, while keeping the occasional on the easy accessible shoulder button like the occasiona taking off action.
Oh since you are on the ground, we have some platformer challenge for you! Gameplay! Except you are playing on ground something design for flight, it's super slippy and have mad acceleration, good luck doing precision platform with this? Try to fly? how silly! the platform are too small and the camera isn't design for that anyway. For good measure we added small interior maze section that sure will play nice with ship control! There is strategy, like you can place turret in the world to protect strategical point, except you gonna place these turret one by one, and that's a lot of backtracking, yay gameplay!
You like exploration?
Well we put a time pressure, with a light strategy layer, that basically mean you will lose progress by smelling the roses, as enemy retake position, oh and trying to help attacked oupost basically mean constant backtracking, procedural backtracking yay! You will have to backtrack anyway because you must do collecting resources, with pulling mini game, to upgrade them so you raise the overall planet viability, which will decrease on a timer anyway. Oh and you might need to backtrack from planet to planet to so you have that progression back. You gonna explore for sure, you will forced too! It's meaningful, no passive aimless wandering, no time for sightgazing so will use god ray while you travel, to blind your retina, instead, it's gameplay!
There is a story:
They wanted to reproduce the feeling of old cartoon in space, ulysse 31, captain future/flame, cobra, Jayce and the wheeled warrior, but we forgot the colorful character, the charismatic villain, the impossible situation, the high energy writing. Yeah you gonna have a cast of slap-my-face stereotype, that are not introduced in any shape of form, with no character arc or mission or development, you know nothing about them aside from small card from a mission, with zero chemistry, spouting exposition while doing nothing, there is a villain, he is villainy, kick his ass. Oh plot twist a character dies for drama, and it make the hero have an unearned moment. The lore is a snooze fest.
It's a ultra niche game due to a blend of disparate genre that don't know what it want to be and where the emphasis should be.
There is good thing, the template is actually good, it solve many thing mass effect andromeda tried before pivoting. The star fox inclusion is actually good and their side story hint at what the game could have been. It's pretty and it's on switch, though the absence of pcg landscape and voxel help a lot. I don't regret having buying it I got to see the many scale and technical trick they used and see what work and what don't. The world is also a bit lively, as in the you can see the AI behave and travel in sensible way, the NPC are good enough to take boss level enemy on their own, even if in the end it doesn't produce anything remarkable as there is too few behavior and event type, but it's still fun to meet random fighting of the two factions while exploring, but the fauna itself is forgettable.
The truth is that it looks like the game had a budget cut in the middle of production, I swear many aspect were design for on foot character, from the size of some loot box, the interior to the toy character.
The game basically use no man's sky as a template, the legion are basically what people thought the sentinel to be (a force taking over the universe), they have bit of the original mass effect andromeda gameplay pitch too.
It's basically mass effect: mako only mission, the bactrackening
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