Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together on the PSP has to be one of the greatest official remakes ever, it was a complete rewrite and rebalancing, with a massive UI overhaul. The overall quality is 1000% improved over the original SNES cart that shipped to US shores.
Man, that outtro...I was going to say it's worth its weight in gold, but in reality, it's priceless. #ThanksRyan
As for the topic at hand...yes. This is one of the reasons I fell in love with Risk of Rain. I got some word of mouth, a trailer, and jumped straight in. And discovering new items, levels, and unlocking the character classes was an absolute blast.
Just Cause 2 is probably the only game to truly pull off this kind of highly structured game world. It's still ridiculously fun to explore and blow stuff up, even though each base is the same as the last.
I actually never bothered to finish the first Infamous because of this. After so much time in Oblivion and Skyrim, having a map full of markers laid out bare with nothing to surprise me just lost my interest.
I think Blizzard has seen the effectiveness of the world building games like the Elder Scrolls do, and want to dial it up to maximum for Warlords of Draenor. They've always hidden nooks and crannies and made eye-popping environments to hide them in, but Pandaria ratcheted that up a notch, and now Draenor is gonna dial it to 11.
There will be primary quest hubs marked on the map, so it's easy to follow the main story thread, but side-quests, rare spawns, world events, secret toys and goodies and cash, and all kinds of cool stuff will be hidden in the supposedly empty spaces. And the great part? You can't just swoop in and nab it on a flying mount. You have to explore it on the ground.
This, altogether, is how you make worlds engaging and alive. When the map shows you everything there is to do, what reason do you have to do it? Once is enough. Hidden, discoverable uniqueness is the key.
Many individuals in both the Rhode Island government and 38 Studios were to blame for this fiasco, chief among them Curt Schilling and Gov. Chafee.
The big difference, however, is that Curt is the only one out of the two who has shouldered his portion of the blame and is seeking redemption from his employees, investors, and his family. Chafee, like a typical politician, played his hand, absolved himself of blame, removed himself from the game, and hasn't spoken a peep since.
I could understand alien worlds. Draenor, its destruction, Outland, the Burning Legion, and it's destruction of the universe one world at a time are the most aesthetically striking and adventurously appealing parts of Warcraft.
But time travel? The Caverns of Time have done almost nothing for WoW. The Infinite Dragonflight was, time and again, the cackling evil maniac who tells the hero all of his plans before getting trounced. It's been a great excuse to see events from the Warcraft RTS games from a very personal perspective, but no truly compelling storytelling has come of it.
As a computer science major, knowing as much as I do about complexity and redundant algorithms, it really irks me that someone would consume twice as much wattage just to play their PS4 through their Xbox One. It's double linear complexity in the form of power consumption.
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