It's not really pointless, just because you can easily remap them to replace the abomination that is stick clicking.
Like I’ve seen games that are in “early access” for years.
Games take years to build, especially when you are changing your design from feedback and improving the game. Some games come to early access intending to change little and just finish the game, while others come to get ideas and reshape the project as it moves along. Many EA projects are also indies with small teams, or even just one dev plugging along on their own, not even full time.
Of course there are bad actors, and devs who made mistakes (like thinking early access would fund development--even Valve tells devs not to do that, but there are always optimists thinking EA is for sales, and then they run out of money), but there are many ways to do every early access, and you have to look at each project to see what it looks like it's doing, how much and how often it posts updates, etc.
I wish companies could do genuinely good things like release big games on more platforms, without everyone's response being hand-wringing about what bad things it might mean for their own hardware.
Especially when it's Microsoft, whose Xbox platform already extends into this tiny other thing people might have heard of, called Windows... I think they'll be ok, somehow.
I'm more interested in this being FH5, which is just switching into a kind of maintenance mode, where weekly activity playlists repeat instead of doing new things, and both of those before there's even talk about FH6. Adding significant new players to FH5 now seems an interesting choice.
However, the reality is that most gamers are now using gear that has some ray-tracing capability.
Sure, plenty, and I'm still going to hard-pass any idiot game that forces raytracing or upscaling. Find something actually useful to do with the power available, instead of something that worthless and computationally wasteful, or don't and run at lower power. That's more valuable than raytracing.
Seems like a strange problem. I'd suggest playing more different games, and focusing on getting your hands in tune with the specific game rather than the type of game or perspective, and being more aggressive about remapping controls to fit how you want to play.
I switch games a lot and don't generally have issues settling into a game just because its controls are off from another game, but if a dev puts something common somewhere weird, I'm absolutely going to move it to one of the places I expect it to be.
- Nioh 2
- Witchfire
- Devil Slayer Raksasi
- Curse of the Dead Gods
- Metal Mutation
- Cavity Busters
- Waves (free, but still)
- BlazBlue Entropy Effect
- 30XX
- Nova Drift
- Quantum Protocol
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Hellsinker
- Twin Ruin
- Devader
- Arboria
- Bloody Spell
- Aura of Worlds
Also, if he's a bit of a tinkerer, he might be interested in trying shooters using gyro+flick-stick, which he probably didn't have access to before. Witchfire, Deep Rock Galactic, and Deadlink can readily play that way once set up in Steam Input. Some games you only need to set up the gyro-to-mouse and flick-stick, whereas others (eg Vermintide 2) you have to map the entire controller manually.
Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:
- Enemies target you but hit each other, so you manage their attacks to help your fighting instead of just staying out of trouble.
- "Frenzy" orb pickups, which act a bit like combo meter fuel except instead of chaining hits you make frequent choices about whether an orb drop is worth chasing, keeping you close to danger.
- Instant gun switching with overheating instead of reloading, so you fight hard and switch constantly between your three guns to keep any one from overheating while getting the best out of their specific properties.
I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it's just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I'm genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it's early access). Plus, it's extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you're always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, to keep runs a little different.
Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:
- Enemies target you but hit each other, so you manage their attacks to help your fighting instead of just staying out of trouble.
- "Frenzy" orb pickups, which act a bit like combo meter fuel except instead of chaining hits you make frequent choices about whether an orb drop is worth chasing, keeping you close to danger.
- Instant gun switching with overheating instead of reloading, so you fight hard and switch constantly between your three guns to keep any one from overheating while getting the best out of their specific properties.
I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it's just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I'm genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it's early access). Plus, it's extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you're always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, so each run is a little different.
No, at least six months is the plan.
It does have a price in a sense, but that price also gets you that exact value in premium currency, so you don't actually pay anything extra for early access, you're just required to buy that much currency to open the doors.
Jeez, the laziness of reviewing it based just on the store page. It's been in early access for like five years, getting better every update, and not one person there can even bother to actually play the game they recommend to others?
Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it's a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there's certainly huge underexplored territory on "offensive" actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn't mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.
It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it's still better than not having it at all.
Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that's a level of player and dev effort/investment that's rarely on the table.