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Beautiful settings wasted on mediocre games

L

leng jai

Member
Remember Me:

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Screenshot credit: Drunken Master

Just finished this game and I was absolutely floored by Neo Paris. Remember Me has to be one of the best if not best looking settings I've ever played. It's painful how mediocre the actual game is, and the chances of getting a sequel seem minimal. AC Unity seems like another obvious one but I've never played it.
 
I wanna say the uncharted series mainly because all you do in this beautifully looking areas is shooty bang people
 
Ff xiii

Seems like every other thread concerning some poorly done part of a game can relate to this.

Walked miles to gamestop the day of release, only to return it back thinking "why is such a pretty game filled with all of this much awfulness?"

The post trauma and Gaf complaining hasn't left my veins since.
 
This is going by my limited experience with the game and the reviews it got (Metacritic 67), but Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon. I think there are a lot of beautiful aspects of the game, including the setting, but from the little I played and what I read, there are a fair number of sources of frustration.

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The beautiful trailer that made me obsessed with this game. The graphics are fairly limited by the Wii; I wonder what this game looks like in Dolphin.
 
Too Human

Brimming with potential. Cyberpunk meets norse mythology aesthetic. Virtual reality world of pristine nature. Frozen, post apocalyptic wasteland on the outside. Futuristic cities. Characters are all cyborgs to lesser or greater extents. There's robotic ravens and mechanical goblins and stuff. Pretty cool.

It is squandering so much potential based on its setting. It's not as beautiful as it could be based on its premise either - but it does look quite nice. The real tragedy is not the visuals it failed to capitalise on but that it's completely the wrong genre (should have been more like Deus Ex than Diablo) and the gameplay kinda sucks.
 
I don't know about specific mediocre games, but one of my biggest frustrations with AAA games is that a lot of them have beautiful and interesting settings held back by the constraints of shooters. There are games where the artists and programmers obviously spent a shitload of time and money making these absolutely incredible-looking environments, but all you do in them is shoot people. There's no gameplay in most of these games to actually encourage players to invest in and interact with those environments.

The last few Battlefield games might be examples. They're not objective mediocre games, but when playing them I often stopped and looked at the environments the artists spent all that time making look pretty, and all they ultimately are are just fancy hallways and occasionally arenas in which you shoot things. Just look at that hamburger in Battlefield Hardline. Imagine an actual detective adventure game with graphics that good. That experience is actually the main thing that had me excited to see what BioWare would do with the Frostbite engine -- at least an RPG on that engine would give me a beautiful-looking world to actually interact with in ways other than combat. Alas, Witcher 3 basically did what I wanted from Dragon Age Inquisition in that regard, but I'm still interested in seeing how Mass Effect will look.

J_Viper said:
AC: Unity
Though "mediocre" is far too complimentary for that game.
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A huge one for me. One day when that game is $15 and I have a better graphics card I might get it just to benchmark the thing and look at the environments.
 
Kingdoms of Amalur. I wanted to explore that world but the tedious gameplay was too off-putting. Perhaps I'll give it another go at some point.
 
This is how I feel about every Assassin's Creed besides 2 and 4. Ubi employs some of the best environment artists in the industry.
 
Mass_Pincup said:
Remember Me is not mediocre, it's a great game.

Flawed? Perhaps but great nonetheless.
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Everything about the gameplay is average at best to me. The Pressen system was interesting but completely gimped by the ultra basic combo system. It pretty much boiled down to you spamming the combo that recharged your special metre since it takes 10 years for your normal attacks to kill anything. The traversal was basic and completely linear. As beautiful as the game was the environment was way too static, you could barely interact with anything. The best part of the actual game was the memory rewind mechanic, but that only made up of 5% of the content.

I can't see what the game does outside of visuals that makes it anything better than mediocre unfortunately.
 
Toukiden

One of my least favourite hunting games. Excellent setting of ancient Japan with fantasy elements with a mix of demons and spirits. I did enjoy the game somewhat but it was just... Mediocre.
 
I should give Remember Me a shot.

El Shaddai and Bio Infinite are good shouts, both supremely mediocre but fun to look at.
 
Remember Me, the music wasn't bad either. It would get really good, but then you'd start the combat and it felt like you were just mashing at the helm for no reason but to mindlessly get past to the next cutscene.

The world is great. It was like its own utopia that could have been enjoyable for hours had it not been for the mediocre gameplay mechanics.

I got about 50%+ into it and the combat just shrugged it along. The beginning was pretty good. A very likable character with a semi-interesting story.
 
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