He wants a colorful amusement park RPG on rails that plays itself for him. He doesn't want to be bogged down by silly things like gameplay mechanics, he wants to paint by numbers.
My favorite is that the later Far Cry games mocked the trope that they invented. But then just added something slightly different. Ubisoft just can't help making checklists
I've tried New Vegas three or four times. By the time I actually get to New Vegas and meet Mr. House, I'm overwhelmed by the number of things I'm supposed to be doing and dead dog tired of those fucking OP Legion assassins that show up to ruin my day every fifteen minutes.
Part of that is probably on me, because I'm the guy who wants to experience the whole game in a single play-through, and I try not to take on too many new quests until I've finished the ones I've already got. I've also been recently informed that if I rush to New Vegas and do Mr. House's quest, the Legion assassins will back off for a bit, which is a big deal because my god I'm sick of them. I never would have tried that on my own, as there's nothing in the game to give me a clue that they're connected, but maybe I'll give it another shot and do that.
This aligns with my experience of a very particular kind of game designer. I worked with one who, in a casual conversation about games where someone said "there's no wrong way to have fun," they responded with "yes there is, and it's my job to tell people what the right way is".
This is not a systemic issue, at Ubisoft or anywhere else. It's a particularity of a kind of person who is deeply drawn to games, but who also doesn't see other people as, well, people. It's a person who has made friends with games and game systems because they're incapable of being friends with, well, sapient beings.
Video game studio projects tend to have multiple designers working on them, with the creative director (or just "director") and lead designer working on large scale design things - genre, core loop, etc - and progressively less senior designers working on progressively smaller, progressively more soul crushing design work. Think things like item design and balance. Weirdly enough, the ones who think they're the arbiter of fun don't generally progress very high up this chain.
The OP isn't wrong. Turn-based combat is falling out of favour with the majority of the new generation. Final Fantasy has dropped turn-based combat for the same reasons.
For several console generations now, all character expressions can be done in real-time. Actions such as ‘press the trigger and your character will shoot a gun’ and ‘press the button and your character will swing their sword’ can now be easily expressed without going through a command system.
It’s now common for gamers younger than me to love such games. As a result, it seems that it does not make sense to go through a command prompt, such as ‘Battle’, to make a decision during a battle.
It was always a design choice born from limitations. It's not going to disappear, but it was destined to decline in use once those limitations disappeared.
CRPGs based on TT rulesets and classic JRPGs aren't the same kinds of turn-based games. CRPGs have more in common with SRPGs and games like X-COM, the latter of which has been increasing in popularity when you look at all the games with turn-based tactical combat now compared to a decade ago.
There's no way all turn-based games are dying out. Some types are more popular than ever, including Western CRPGs. If anything, it's Realtime with Pause that's getting less popular in that space.
They were never about hardware limitations. Limitations of imagination of the designers, maybe, but we've had action games for 35 years now.
Actions such as ‘press the trigger and your character will shoot a gun’ and ‘press the button and your character will swing their sword’ can now be easily expressed without going through a command system.
And yet we can't purge ourselves of the awfulness that is quick-time events. I don't buy the argument. It's an attempt to handwave away trends without discussing real causes and effect. If the suggestion here were true, other similar mechanics, such as QTEs, would have been dead a long time ago, not be a core element of a huge number of triple-A titles.
Being confident in your answer doesn't make you right.
More than one type of game exists. It is always a creative choice. Always has been. I could go into examples, but plenty of people have already provided those.
Personally, I just can't stand playing Larian Studio games. It's like playing with a vindictive DM. It was especially noticable in Divinity: OS2. I played as the skeleton guy who was permanently disguised. I'll encounter a random group of enemies.....and somehow, they just know to use heal on my undead guy to hurt him? He's disguised, what the fuck? Every enemy whether man, animal, or demon knew every weakness, knew which players had the lowest weaknesses, and would exploit the absolute fuck out of them. Exactly like a vindictive DM would.
Yeah I agree that's rough, and probably an unexpected interaction. That being said, other than that, I've played pretty much all Larian Games (even Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga) and I've never felt like the game is working against me, but I have felt like the game is of punishing difficulty in some unexpected ways. When you make a game with so many permutations, there are bound to be issues with some of the edge cases. Not defending them, I'm happy you shared a legitimate complaint, unlike the OP review which isn't a legitimate complaint, but is clearly just salt.
Your particular scenario does seem frustrating, I agree.
For the vindictive DM? Oddly enough, I like that! Lots of subversion to keep it interesting. At least for me who suffers from "pick one strategy in the beginning and run it to the end game".
"You mean this game doesnt have constant pop ups, a giant arrow, repetitive companion dialogue OR flashing UI elements constantly reminding me what to do? How will I even know where I'm going?"
I love turn based games. Not all of them, but a well made one is pretty sweet. I kinda stopped liking final fantasy at a certain point because it lost that
It's not sarcasm. Just because someone says something "based" doesn't mean they're right. It is "based" in the sense that it is an extremely unpopular opinion and this reviewer is extremely unapologetic.
Honestly though, what makes this funny/sad is that this isn't the first time an Ubisoft dev has gotten mad at a new fantasy RPG - these people (same guy?) had a similar reaction to elden ring which also broke records and went against industry norms. These "norms" have been terrible for gamers because they've allowed publishers to claim that they're making "better games" just because they managed to squeeze out a little more graphical fidelity since the last iteration. Then an independent dev comes around and shows the world how utterly incompetent these mega-publishers are, and their response is to cry and spew nonsense about how "real games" are supposed to be.
Turn-based as oppose to realtime-based combat. You take turns with your opponents picking a next move. Realtime there is no waiting for your opponent to finish their turn.
Is this a corporate flunky? That's not how you do 1337speak. 7 is a T, not an I. Memento Morti guess works? But the phrase is memento Mori.
In actual critique, Ubisoft has no ground to complain about others games after shitting out the same trash unto death.
There have also been a number of big publishers complaining about bg3. That this shouldn't be used as a metric for RPGs because its such an outlier and offers too much to be at profitable. Which is telling.
Fucking wut. I've never historically liked turn based or isometric games and BG3 is engrossing as fuck. This person needs to step out of their comfort zone and take it for what it is, or just accept it's not for them instead of shitting on it.
@oscarlavi Cripes, good thing we’re all out here loving it, eh. It’s the most gripped I’ve been by a game in years (tired adhd and not being very good at games didn’t help, I used to get stuck a lot)
There was a controversy a couple of weeks ago where some AAA developers were saying things like "don't expect our standards to rise now that this game is out" and generally being salty about how good BG3 is