People should limit their expectations. First time in 3D action space for that studio. They make amazing RPGs and im excited to see what they cook up for a story. But im not expecting to be wowed by gameplay.
(And exodus looks the other way around to me. Ive seen a few videos where characters made me cringe)
In fairness, the most Bioware wowed us with gameplay the worst the writing got... I think I'd take a slightly jankier gameplay experience if it meant better writing.
Eh, ish. ME1 was rooooouuugh, ME2 tightened it up a bit but was still pretty clunky. ME3 is, IMO, where it was at it's best. MEA went too far and needed to reel things back in. 1-3 were great for their story and characters, not their gameplay.
I played Mass Effect 1 for the first time quite recently since people keep raving about how good it is. I happened to find the conversation glitch that fully levelled up those stats and it completely negated "bioware conversation" as a gameplay loop and exposed the generic / bland 3rd person shooter underneath
Really? The combat was extremely repetitive with very little enemy variety and almost no reason to change up your tactics. I played through the trilogy a couple years ago on veteran, and there was only one fight throughout the entire trilogy that required me to do anything outside of the norm.
I'd argue that ME:2 leveled up combat fluidity in action rpgs and brought near bungie level gun play to a different genre.
That being said I see where you are coming from, you pick your combat path and dont need to deviate from it, very much a smash your way through kind of game.
Owlcats made nothing but bangers so far so they know what makes a good game at least. If you’re worried about a studio being unable to transition to 3D well for the first time, may I introduce you to Helldivers 1 and Helldivers 2. Arrowhead knocked it out of the park with that transition and they’re a pretty flawed studio. Some real pros like Owlcat can nail it, I expect
My excitement got the better of me, and I made the mistake of preordering Osiris. So far, the writing and VA performance have been abysmal.
Still plenty of time till release, but the game should be treated with incredible skepticism, imo. Wait for this shit to released made the mistake of trusting Owlcat because of the previous releases.
Holy shit, Unicorn Overlord is similar to Ogre Battle 64? I had my eye on that game, but didn't watch too much on it.
Now that piques my interest, heavily. Ogre Battle 64 was one of my fav N64 games.
Legitimate question what “spiritual successor” do you think is on par with its originator? I can’t think of a single one that isn’t just an okay clone of the original.
Spiritual successor isn't well defined here i think but you have a lot fo games clearly deriving from a parent game independent of what happens to its parent.
Bioshock series is an obvious older one.
Bloostained Ritual of the night was a clear successor to 2d castlevanias that is widely considered to have delivered after they fixed it up.
Path of Exile was essentially inspired by Diablo 2 and is often regarded as the better product over Diablo games since.
You also have games like Undertale and LISA that are clear spinoff inspirations from the old Earthbpund games.
You also have hybrid spinoffs like Hollow Knight that wanted to take Metroidvania and inject Souls formula.
Like spinoffs often become their own thing entirely.
Well thats always debatable because unless it's a clone, spiritual successor seems to be just a matter of opinion on how much is inspired, borrowed or taken by another game.
Id argue any game drawing heavily from a previous title in clear fashion is a spiritualnsuccessor and that list is large. Just a few other titles I know come to mind, and I bet I could find 10 or 20 more:
Pizza Tower seems heavily inspired by and a spiritual successor to the Wario World games.
Pillars of Eternity is clearly a spiritual successor to the Baldurs Gate style of games.
The Outer Worlds a clear successor to Fallout (even made by Fallout devs from Obsidian.)
Path of Exile is most certainly a spiritual successor to Diablo 2. I could probably link over 100 sources of the lead developers for path of exile citing diablo 2 as their main inspiration and the catalyst for path of exiles existence. Here is a Chris Wilson, a founder and ex lead developer of Grinding Gear Games discussing how path of exile came to be during a keynote he presented at the NZ Games Developer Conference just a few weeks ago. He says that no other arpg hit the same as Diablo 2 and so, "So, we said, you know, Kiwi attitude, we can just do it ourselves".
I would argue that very few games fall under the "spiritual successor" label more than Path of Exile does.
Haven't played system shock so I don't have an opinion on the matter. I was only parroting the general consensus, but it could be out of Bioshock's sheer popularity and relative recency compared to system shock.
A spiritual successor (sometimes called a spiritual sequel) is a product or fictional work that is similar to, or inspired by, another previous product or work, but (unlike a traditional prequel or sequel) does not explicitly continue the product line or media franchise of its predecessor, and is thus only a successor "in spirit", despite the usual lack of actual spirituality.
For example:
System Shock -> Bioshock
SimCity -> Cities: Skylines
Banjo-Kazooie -> Yooka-Laylee
World of Warcraft is simply another game in the Warcraft franchise.
Elden Ring from Dark Souls, Dark Souls from Demon's Souls/King's Field, Dragon Age: Origins from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, there's plenty that went beyond its originator.
One of them is being made by the OG Bioware/ME devs. Bioware is my intro into gaming greatnes since 1998. Black Isle/interplay were the only big ones for me before that, but that was like a year. Bg1 forwards, I was there. I'm still advocating MDK on every "what remake do we need" on every post that asks that question and no one knows what the hell I'm talking about. I supported them for almost 2 decades, and followed their every step. This "thing" that's closing now, if true, is not Bioware. And it hasn't been for a loooong time now. The more they sold themselves out the more obvious it was that wasn't the same studio. I checked out after inquisition. This is a death of a rat that was piloting a corpse. EDIT: the pupeteer is EA. They are the grim reaper/cespool of the downfall of western gaming studios. I hope one day all EA shills and dimwits that buy their products get gonorhea and just straight up shit themselves to death.
Says you. BioShock, Dark Souls (stretch since it's the same studio), Cities: Skylines, Undertale, Project Wingman (though Ace Combat is still running), Telltale Games to old LucasArts games (some are the same franchise.)
I got a chance to play Exodus at Gamescom and..
It does hit. I was really impressed with it. The voice acting is a little overdone but the actual gameplay is rock solid.
Pretty sure two spiritual successors are exactly the reason why ea shut down bioware. They saw they can't turn new ME into another live-service trаsh for hmаn trаsh, when there were two potentially good games in the same setting on the horizon.
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u/countryd0ctor 7h ago
How utterly ironic that this happens when we have two spiritual successors for Mass Effect in the development from different devs right now.