Yeah the DLCs made it feel like a full game. The base was a fun proof of concept, the the DLC fleshes that out. Both made me excited to see what version 2 with more time and funding could accomplish.
I hope they build on the more unique systems like the Holographic Shroud and give those systems more opportunities to shine.
In my experience, even the consumer facing portion suffers from lack of innovation. Look at the big rounds of lay offs this year, fairly uniformly one of the hardest hit teams has been UX Research. If you’ve worked with a good researcher, you really know their value. But translating value that into hard metrics is tough. A lot of the time CEOs in the private sector will accept Good Enough & fast Vs moving at a reasonable pace.
I don’t think there would even be an appetite for hard research at most companies. Takes too long, too much of a risk, the boss’ cousin had a really cool idea instead…
Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology. Outside of the FAANGs(/MAMAAs) being good enough is too easy, or investing in research is considered to be too high an expense with no guarantee on return.
Not even to mention the Star Wars games, any Marvel games, the new indie game, the Avatar game from Ubi. They might not have any active in-house studios but they are quite active in giving the rights to studios for their franchises.
Controller support is pretty good. I’m playing with a PS5 controller and pretty much the whole interface has been redesigned to fit it. It feels like it was an experience designed to fit the systems of the game opposed to fit a controller onto the PC release of the game.
Most annoying for me was End Turn was mapped to Y/Triangle and I kept pressing it. I swapped it to R2 and haven’t had any more slipups.
There’s refinements and QoL changes to be made for sure, but I’ve been surprised at how well it plays so far.
I’m playing docked on the Deck. Animations and cut scenes play really well. If you can, I’d recommend using a Bluetooth controller as I’ve found the deck specific controls to not be the best. The controller UI takes a little getting used to but it is pretty good now I’ve been playing a few hours.
The biggest negative is, naturally, the graphics. It’s smooth enough, but there is just a lot of blurriness and weird edging I can’t get rid of on any setting. In the close up cut scenes that pretty much goes away. That said, I’m still having a lot of fun and none of that was a deal breaker for me. It runs significantly better than it did in EA for me.
The one ‘annoying’ thing that has happened is I’m the video cut scenes there is quite a significant audio delay. It is not there for the in-engine ones or during combat. I’ve only seen two of these though and they’re right at the start of the game. I just watched on YouTube to see them properly.
If one of their goals is to sell premium access to train LLMs this type of gibberish would hurt that. When you can’t guarantee that the data source is coherent, then that would have an impact on the final model that is created.
I think a better approach is to transfer comments to a new platform or create new higher quality content. Could the solution to this problem become a guide that goes into more detail?
Interesting fact: The same parent company owns both Reddit and Turnitin.
I bought it after the demo, and while it definitely hit those highs again, the demo didn’t show just how low some of those lows would be. I made it about 60% though the game before abandoning it out boredom. While a demo is great, it is important to remember you’re likely getting a vertical slice of some of the best bits.
I’m in the camp of ‘I’ll wait for reviews’ on this one. Indiana Jones is a character with a controversial past and many of his character traits are not exactly modern. The puzzle stuff looked kinda fun and I’d be interested to see just how many there are in the game. Solving what looks like a blood sacrifice bowl with a bottle of wine is neat. Or it will be if that isn’t a telegraphed narrative. If there are point and click vibes where you pick up a clown nose in the first ten minutes of the game and then use It in the 9th hour, that kinda puzzle-bypass would be great.
I will say, ‘The Great Circle’ is such a boring name when they have ‘Circuli Magni’ right there. They give a clear translation in the trailer but ‘Indiana Jones and the Circuli Magni’ is significantly more interesting. SEO considerations I guess.