Bioshock meets Cuphead looks a lot better than the last trailer did. Keeping an eye on this one for sure.

I’m sure the remake will release with the same level of QA and polish that the original Oblivion shipped with. That renowned Bethesda standard of quality.

I never said it was a great game. In fact I literally said:

Genshin has a lot of other problems even gacha aside

I just said it wasn’t garbage. There is plenty of other actual garbage out there. It looks and plays like a mobile game because it is a mobile game. It’s a mobile game you can play on your PC if you want. But it’s still a 5-year-old mobile game. Expecting it to look like AC Shadows or something is silly. Besides, the BOTW-ripoff-meets-anime art direction really seems to appeal to a lot of people, and art direction is much more important than graphical fidelity anyway.

The soundtrack and score is genuinely very good and varied, with each area having its own feel and sound to the music. The game is huge and has lots of different areas to explore, each with its own characteristics. The world has lots of little details and puzzles, some that are extremely simple dopamine hits and some puzzles that are somewhat challenging. There is like a hundred hours or whatever of story content to go through that at least quite a lot of people seem invested and engaged in. There are new events every month or so with various things to do.

Let be clear: I don’t like Genshin personally. I don’t play Genshin. I think there are a lot of problematic elements in it not just with monetisation but with grind, RNG, retention/addiction mechanics, unskippable cutscenes and probably more I’m forgetting off hand.

It’s still blatantly unfair to call it “garbage”.

The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.

The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.

To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.

(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.

Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.

That would have been quite something. I’ve seen P.T. being played and that was fucking scary.

I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.

I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.

The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.

The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.

The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.

The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.

The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.

The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.

Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.

Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.

I played Arcanum for the first time this year. There are a lot of cool things in it, but it really doesn’t hold up all that well.

There are faction quest lines and such, but there are also other STALKER mods that focus more on story content. Have you looked into Goldsphere?

I will throw in another vouch for this series. It is exactly what you’re looking for. I haven’t played any of the more recent entries but I’ve heard they’ve been received very well. Total War: Rome 2 is a classic, but for something more modern I’ve heard only good things about Three Kingdoms, though I haven’t played that one personally.

There are gacha games out there that are garbage games. They aren’t the ones that are popular though. Stuff like Gensin has a lot of quality content that pulls you in and hooks you. It looks like that has proven to be much more effective than just a waifu simulator. Now, I do think Genshin has a lot of other problems even gacha aside, but calling it garbage is blatantly unfair.

Even though the best way theoretically of playing Anomaly is putting together your own modpack, there are a ton of custom pre-assembled alternatives out there if you don’t have the time and/or energy to fiddle yourself. Not just G.A.M.M.A. or EFP, although I know those are the most popular ones.

Vanilla Anomaly is great and all but there is so much more to it than that.

Didn’t you know sex is bad? It’s absolutely reprehensible and the only allowable exception is for the purposes of procreation, where you are allowed only to use the missionary position and your lawfully wedded wife is to be completely obscured by a blanket covering her entire body apart from a small hole in her crotch area. You can not look down or touch her body with your hands at any point, you should be reciting prayer the entire time and preferably keep one hand on the Bible during the whole process.

All other ways to engage with sexual acts and sexuality are unnatural, ungodly and frankly disgusting.

My meagre contributions pale in comparison to your efforts, but I do what I can.

And there are those who have it even harder than YOU. Everyone’s station in life is different. They are allowed to experience that.

I’ve never understand the logic of the people who espouse that line of thinking. Is only the one single person alive who has it the literal worst out of all the billions of living human beings allowed to feel bad, and everyone else is obliged to look at them and say “well it could technically be worse so I guess I’m not allowed to feel bad”?

Wholly agreed. In general the concept that “you can’t patent an idea” or “you can’t patent a general concept” is supposed to be at the heart of patent law. I think some of these game mechanics parents, like this and the Nemesis System, go against that too much.

Spongy isn’t related to hitboxes, just means taking many bullets to kill. I think there are only two in 2033

and they are meant to be avoided anyway I think.

I played 2033 and Last Light on Ranger Hardcore and didn’t really feel the bullet sponge issue, at least in 2033 (haven’t played Exodus yet). There are some tanky enemies but I think they’re mostly meant to be avoided rather than fought.

Also I’m pretty sure on higher difficulties both you and the enemies deal more damage so while you die easier there are also fewer bullet sponges. If anything I think the bullet sponge phenomenon occurs on Easy, bizarrely enough. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

Statistically it’s vanishingly rare for games with this level of hype to match the expectations, but it does happen.