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elvenbeard · 1 year

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I was at Phantom Liberty Tour Cologne and this is how it went!

Img: A screen showing Johnny Silverhand with tickets to the Phantom Liberty Tour Cologne and the title "Phantom Liberty Tour - 25. August 2023 Köln"

The following is 100% an expression of my personal views! I experienced the Phantom Liberty Tour event in Cologne as overall extremely positive, I had been very hyped about it in the weeks and days before, and CDPR did not disappoint me in any way shape or form with what they put together! For transparency, I didn’t have to pay for anything beyond my own travel costs and accommodation, everything else was included solely in my application for the event being accepted.

This post is intended as a way to give a glimpse into the experience to everyone who couldn’t go or whose application wasn’t accepted -and I just wanted to share my thoughts xD It was a very small and exclusive event with very limited tickets, and I still feel super priviliged to have been able to go there. I’m aiming to share my experience with everyone reading this now and give you at least a little peek behind the scenes of it all!

We didn’t have to sign any NDAs or such, we only weren’t allowed to take pics/videos or make audio recordings of the showcased gameplay!

If you’re also going to one of the upcoming events in your respective countries, maybe wait reading this until you’ve been there to not ruin any potential surprises! And also, if you don’t wanna be spoilered about anything Phantom Liberty as such, meaning, the actual game and story, but still wanna know about what the event was like: I will put a warning onto sections that contain spoilers for the gameplay, so you can skip those!

How me and my sibling even got invited in the first place

I only learned about this event more or less on accident when my sibling sent me a screenshot of an Instagram post about it XD So, big props to them for giving us both this chance! XD That was back in May, the post said “tell us why we should invite you to the PL tour in Cologne” in its sign-up form. I did, and then waited patiently to maybe hear back from them. Originally, after sending my submission, I received a reply saying that “if you’re invited, we (CDPR organizer team) will get back to you until August 4th “. In my submission I wrote something along the lines of that I’m relatively new to the game and fandom, but it quickly evolved into my new favourite video game and unlocked so much creativity for me, so that I’m making my own mods for it now, create art, and write. My sibling was a fan of the first hour, preordered the Collector’s Edition for PS4 back then, and now we can both simultaneously get hyped for Phantom Liberty. It would be an amazing opportunity if we could also attend this event together!

When I hadn’t heard back by then I accepted that I hadn’t been selected, was a bit sad, but it was alright. But then, a few days later while I was at work, I got an email with the headline “Hey Choomba” and I was like wtf? So, turns out, due to the insane amount of submissions they pushed back the notification day about a week. Around 1,500 people sent applications that the organizers all looked at individually, and only around 250 guests plus team members and special guests were actually present that night. I didn’t know about the delay in response, because I’m not active on social media beyond Tumblr… lemme tell you though, that was such a nice surprise, and I was super happy and would’ve been none the wiser had I not been picked xD

Due to the shorter timeframe though it was now a little harder to find a hotel still, as the PL Tour took place during Gamescom week. So, half of Gaming Europe was already in Cologne for that convention and hotels were scarce. On the one hand, it obviously made sense they put the date this weekend, so the devs already in Cologne anyway could swing by with ease. On the other hand, if you were, like me, definitely not from Cologne or the general area, a little more prep time ahead would’ve been nice.

Still though, my sibling and I still found a somewhat reasonable hotel and drove to Cologne in the early morning hours of August 25th!

Img: The door to the venue with a bright red "Phantom Liberty Tour" banner above the entrance

(cont. below the cut, long post with many pics, beware!)

The Venue, the Queue, the Delay, the Tickets

The sole information we had in advance was an address, to bring our ID cards as they’d make sure we are on the guest list and are 18+ years old. The event would start at 6pm and last until 12am. It said that "cosplays are very much appreciated" so I went in casual cosplay as Vince, because why the hell not XD But that was it in terms of what we knew about what was going to happen.

At around 5.20 p.m. we were at the location given to us via E-Mail. Parking was eh, but alright, we found a space close by, and as we drove past the venue, they were just in process of setting up their flag and banner. So yay, we’re in the right place! :D

Img: The black CDPR flag above the entrance :3

I was so fucking hyped, I couldn’t last in the car a second longer, so we just joined the queue and waited despite the occasional rain shower. We got talking a little bit with the people around us, there were some fellow modders, everyone was wearing some kind of merch, there were lots of fantastic cosplayers, too! Miles Tost, CDPR level design, was there and briefly talked to us all waiting patiently. Then we were informed that sadly there would be a little bit of a delay. I think at around 6.30 or so the queue finally started moving and at around 7 my sibling and I were inside the venue :D The reason of the delay is and was unclear, we learned later though that the guy responsible for the organization had set up something like this for the first time iirc, and therefore I’ll happily forgive the slight delay. Overall, the night was fantastic and I sure as hell couldn’t have done it better!

After checking our IDs, the lovely people by the entrance handed us our numbered tickets! One of the staff then asked us if we’d already played Phantom Liberty at Gamescom, which we hadn’t, so we also received one of those yellow plastic throwaway bracelets. Those who had already played it got a red one. The reasoning here was that they only had a small play area upstairs, so not everyone would be getting a chance to play the demo of the game, and people who hadn’t seen it yet would be preferred, to keep things fair. During the night some people with yellow bracelets would then be randomly approached by a member of the team and invited upstairs with a “mystery ticket”. I sadly didn’t get to play the game myself, neither my sibling, but we still got to see the gameplay anyway :3 We’ll get to that in a minute.

Img: Mine and my sibling's tickets, front and backside respectively; the bottom text on the backside says "be careful not to damage this section as you may still need it over the course of the night!", both tickets feature prominent circuit board and barcode designs

CDPR also invited us to free drinks with little tokens, and there was a broad selection of non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages at a small bar! I would’ve loved for there to be something like a Johnny Silverhand or Jackie Welles to order, but I guess it wasn’t the Afterlife after all. Still though, free drinks, even if generic, pretty cool :D

Activities within the Venue

While we were queuing outside still, we’d also heard about various activities that had been offered at the Warsaw station of the tour, and those were different from what we could do in Cologne!

After receiving our tickets and everything we were free to explore the location for a bit, as the actual show wouldn’t start until 8pm (originally 7 pm but well… delays :D).

There was the main floor with a big, convention center style setup with rows of chairs and some bar tables. There was the huge screen, the bar, and a really cool netrunner chair for taking pictures that the cosplayers rightfully loved :D On the left side were also a small Xbox play area where you could test out some Xbox game pass games XD The event had tons of sponsors contributing something cool.

Img: The main area of the venue right before the show begins, an industrial-style interior with bright red and white lights, and many people looking at a big screen at the wall featuring Johnny and a welcome text in German and English respectively

Next door was a little secluded area for a podcast to be recorded later during the night, as well as a booth where visitors could record video messages for the devs (I missed my chance here and that’s what I regret most about not doing during that night ;A; but I think/hope a lot of others present seized the opportunity to send some love to Poland for this amazing game and team <3).

Img: A small square room with four high-end gaming PC stations sponsored by NVIDIA; the screens are currently showing the main menu screen of Cyberpunk 2077 - can I just take one of these home with me please?

Then there was the upstairs area with the gaming corner, as well as another little recording studio set up by an independent German filmmaker team who were documenting the development of Phantom Liberty! We could’ve also contributed to that, if we had wished to, but I preferred to stay behind the camera this time around xD Looking forward to watching the documentary though once it’s out!

Img: a Netrunner chair replica surrounded by screens and gadgets

There was also an outdoors courtyard area serving as a chillout zone with food (vegetarian options available) and a really cool live medieval folk band playing songs from the Witcher OST :D The various walls on the inside were decorated with photos showcasing German cosplayers and works of fan artists, and those of them who were there that night were allowed to take their photos home as a little extra special keepsake!

Community Love

The community love was so, so real and despite being comparatively new to the game and fandom still I felt super at home and comfortable and welcome. Kind of like, “I’m in the right place”, if that makes sense XD

Speaking of community… while we were still outside in the queue my sibling pointed out to me that there was a Kerry cosplayer in the line behind us, and lemme tell you, I was fucking hyped and made it my mission to greet them over the course of the evening xD I’ve been to a few smaller, less gaming-focused cons this year and there were few Cyberpunk cosplayers, no Kerry so far, so this was my chance!

Turns out, the Kerry in question was none other than fantastic @ophani (you can follow her on Instagram as well and check out what she’s working on atm!) who had been one of the first Cyberpunk people I’d ever followed on tumblr after becoming more involved in the fandom xD So yeah, the fanboy moment was even more real once I’d realized that. Also, there with her, amongst others, was @korribancosplay (also on Instagram!! Go check out his fantastic work <3) who actually recognized me first for being there looking sorta like Vince. He recognized that specific V with that hair and tattoos from my art xD I was like whaaaah! Honestly, that was my highlight of the night hands down in regards to meeting fellow fans :D Again, big shoutout to you two for the lovely conversation and everything, we’ll definitely stay in touch, and I hope I can venture over to NRW again in the future to meet up! xD

Img: Left, ophani as Kerry Eurodyne in his 2023 appearance <3, right, korribancosplay as Goro Takemura - I wish I'd brought a proper camera, blurry phone pics that I tried to somehow save through editing ftw :D

There were a lot of other amazing cosplayers, accompanying the two mentioned, and others as well that I didn’t all get to talk to but yeah… it was amazing seeing them all regardless and the love everyone poured into their costumes! Really got me hyped about getting back into cosplaying as well!

Let the Show Begin

But then it was finally 8pm and everyone gathered in the main showcase area.

None other than male V’s German VA Björn Schalla opened the show with a little speech (“I guess I don’t have to say who’s speaking right now”). That already sealed the deal for me in terms of “okay yeah, CDPR not playing games (figuratively), this is gonna be an amazing night if literal fucking Voice-of-V is here as a special guest”.

Then the German community managers joined for a little introduction and walkthrough of the schedule, as well as all the devs and CDPR team members present for the night came on stage to kick off the event officially with a big selfie. Shame on me for not really knowing who exactly everyone was, I’m too new and not as well versed in the who-is-who yet, but there were some very big names that people got super excited about so o.o

Img: Left, Björn Schalla aka German voice of male V, giving a little introduction speech reading out loud some randomly picked names from the guest list; right, the CDPR team and devs at the venue on stage together

Pretty much immediately afterwards, Miles Tost came back on stage, and we got to experience about an hour of gameplay of Phantom Liberty! If you don’t want spoilers for the expansion, skip the next section until the “Spoilers end here” line! I will try not to take too much away, but I want to give an honest and thorough review of what I’ve seen!

SPOILERS START HERE

The Game Showcase – Public Demo

The way this worked was, Miles stood on the front stage and narrated through the gameplay shown on the big screen, while the German community manager (iirc) Ryan played the game following a predetermined route I assume. He very strictly showed specific features, locations, and took a few very specific dialogue choices, always omitting the blue optional ones and just going with one of the generic yellow ones. The V in the demo was a male corpo, and Ryan never chose any of the plentily available Corpo dialogue options (and I’m very thankful for that, so we as players get to explore those ourselves somewhere further down the line :3).

Miles mentioned that the build shown to us was around three months old, and the first half hour of the game we saw revolved around Songbird guiding V through Dogtown prior to Myers’ plane crashing. They showed some minor NPCs running shops, the new Ripperdoc interface, and so on and so forth. I liked the new Ripperdoc animation but would’ve loved it to be even more expansive than it was in that build XD It was more a “sits down, selects cyberware to buy, then sits back up again after a short black screen, wiggles briefly then ventures forth” moment. Not comparable to the first scene with Viktor, when V gets their optics installed in the main game, but it still adds a little immersion!

V was also wearing very funky purple tights (the same level of tightness as a netrunner suit, but textured sort of like crocodile leather? I have a mighty need for them), and very sporty white sneakers that I also didn’t recognize from the main game. Everyone in the room very much loved his extravagant fashion sense XDD

So far so good, V walks through Dogtown a bit more and has some fun banter with Songbird who is not there physically, but also not quite on the phone… Then the president crashes into Dogtown kind of how it was shown in one of the trailers, and V has to go and save her, obviously, fighting Kurt Hansens forces! Up until this point of getting to and saving Myers from the wreckage was part of the publicly available demo that could also be tested at Gamescom and that I think was also showcased in recent dev streams.

The Game Showcase – Extended Demo

BUT THEN we got to a screen that said “extended demo unlocked” and got to experience some more, so far unseen content!

There was a bit of a time skip, V now traveling with President Myers and trying to get her to safety. Then we quickly got to a scene I had been kind of anxious about: V having to take an oath to become a special agent working for the NUSA. Thankfully though: you didn’t actually have to take the oath as shown in the trailer, and I was relieved, because being forced to do that that would’ve ended the expansion for my V then and there XD You still get to work for Myers though, and then V actually ventured out to find Solomon Reed! :O

We got to see quite a bit more of Dogtown, which is much bigger than I had assumed o.o Like, big buildings, proper streets, etc. etc. - not massive, but also not small! It seemed to sort of seamlessly blend into Pacifica, maybe… But in the showcase we didn’t venture far enough to the limits of the area to really be able to tell how exactly it is integrated into the world. Also, no visuals on the new Badlands areas or anything beyond this little story mission, but I think for a showcase like this that would’ve been too much! Mr. Hands called about a gig though that he maybe shouldn’t have, interrupting Miles' speech a little XD I don’t recall the exact details, but it sounded like a "SOS: Merc needed" type gig. I’m super excited about that, too, there's tons to do in this area!

They also showed the new phone interface, as well as the completely reworked skill trees, which is something @darcidarlin asked me about!

For the phone interface I’m so so thankful! It was so much bigger and organized, much easier to handle and read.

About the skill trees I’m super torn in a way… they’re different and simpler now, but sometimes simpler isn’t necessarily better imo. I’m used to my current build and skills, I like the attributes, and I don’t really see yet how my old playstyle is gonna translate into this new version. Basically, what they did (or at least how it seemed to me) was replace the attributes with "Skills". There is a "Relic" skill, an "Edgerunner" skill, and so forth, at least I saw nothing labelled "Cool", "Strength", "Tech" in the way I'm used to, but the glimpse we got was too short and superficial to really get a good idea of the new menu layout and contents.

The combat they showcased looked very fun, but it was all very centered around hands-on fighting, guns, swords, heavy cyberware. They showed very little stealth and no hacking/tech, and me being a predominantly stealth/hacking/tech player I was a bit “meh” and beginning to wonder if I’ll still have fun with what’s to come in the same way I do now. They kinda quickly flicked through the skill trees and I almost had the impression they completely remodelled Tech into a Cyberware skillset now, with armor fully tied to cyberware as well… I really don’t know XD Right now I can do a tech-heavy build without getting chromed up to my teeth, and I’d like to keep it that way… But I’m not sure if it’ll still work out like this in 2.0. Not much info on Cyberpsychosis either, only that again, with Tech perks, you can increase your threshold in terms of how much chrome V can stuff into their body before suffering an "overload". My low-on-chrome but otherwise tech-loving V is crying a little bit about this change XD

But yeah, this build was 3 months old. And my impression of the skills way waaaay to brief, so it's likely I'm getting upset about nothing XD Specifically for getting a closer look at combat and skills I would’ve needed to test the game out myself, so take everything about this with a big grain of salt!

Next up Ryan made a savegame and they showed the reworked police system a bit. Calling his vehicle in the middle of Dogtown was hilariously difficult, as it kept glitching and crashing into some parked cars the AI just didn’t seem to recognize, always ending up lying on its roof xD Miles joked “Oh no, some glitches just persist no matter what we do… but I bet your car can’t do this!”

Once Ryan had finally managed to get into his car though he started shooting. When you commit crimes in Dogtown, the NCPD will actually not come after your ass, but instead Kurt Hansen’s Barghest, which is neat! They are similarly equipped and will put up a bit of a fight for sure. There is now basically a 5-star system like I know it from GTA, and as soon as you reach 5, MaxTac will show up and whoop your ass. And man, they did not mess around XD MaxTac is not unbeatable, V put up quite the fight and managed to take down a couple of them, but in the end he got overwhelmed and taken down xD It did take a considerable amount of effort and destruction and killing though to even get to five stars, so much so that both Miles and Ryan were getting a bit desperate about it taking so long. So yeah, you really kinda have to put some actual effort into even getting MaxTac’s attention was my impression, and I do like that a lot to keep it balanced!

After this little demonstration of the police system, V went on to find Solomon Reed and damn, the first encounter with him is so fucking cool… I will not spoiler it here, because yeah. Wait and see! I really loved it, Spy-Thriller vibes over 9000, they definitely hit the mark on that XD

There is also so so so so much lovely new banter with Johnny. He was very present throughout this second part of the demo and had a lot to say on his past as a soldier, which I was really hoping for!! So, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how deep it’s gonna get and even more so how it’s gonna end o.o

So much though to the gameplay I saw and my impression on it! There are more details I can share on request, so hmu via DM or ask if you wanna know more! There definitely were a lot of little choices in dialogues, and there seem to be a lot of choices that you can mess up that then have consequences, too :o High risk, high reward vibes, fitting for the high stakes this story seems to have.

One other random sidenote: the music is insanely beautiful o.o There was a new sort of action-packed background track for finding President Myers in Dogtown. And at the end of the demo there was another new song playing that was sort of… “dreamy, but in a dreadful way” sounding? A female vocalist, no actual lyrics, electronic music with similar vibes to the “V” main menu song, but quieter and calmer and sadder. My sibling found it annoying after a while XD But I really enjoyed it, and I kind feel like it could’ve been Songbird’s theme!

I got a question by @cheapcheapfaker about updated character models and animations that kinda fit into this section of the post! So… sadly I cannot answer it for sure because we only got to see the expansion characters and never ventured out of Dogtown (and I didn’t get to play the game myself to test out if it would’ve been possible to go and meet somebody else). What I can say is, I personally didn’t notice much of an update of Johnny’s appearance or facial animations at all actually. I know others did in regard to the same build of the game I got to see. There was no opportunity to ask, and a lot of questions that went sort of deeper into the territory of technical or story stuff, Miles wasn’t allowed to answer at that point. I think they played the game on the highest graphics settings, too, with path tracing on, which was also was something I’m not used to seeing with my rig. Johnny looked somewhat different to me actually, but not in an improved or updated way, more in a higher/different settings way.

What was confirmed during the Q&A though that followed on a different topic later (I made a post about it here already), was that they did go back and fix some voice lines in the main game that turned out weird in the German dub. And I read somewhere else before that “no system was untouched” for making Update 2.0, so maybe the other characters also received some minor updates and final polish. But nothing concrete sadly that was said or came up during my experience of the evening!

SPOILERS END HERE

Meet and Greet with German V

After the showcase of the game was over and some people had received mystery tickets to test Phantom Liberty on their own time, the crowd dispersed across the venue for a variety of activities. I tried to get into the “leave a message to the devs” booth, but it was occupied quite permanently, so I went back and then sat and waited for the Q&A, because that was super-duper down my alley, and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it. In the podcast room next door some devs had come together to talk a bit more about the expansion as such, too, including Miles.

I had to gather all the fucking courage in my body, and I think being sorta sleep deprived and pumped full of adrenaline helped, but before the Q&A started, I went up to Björn to ask for an autograph and we very briefly talked. I got to tell him that I loved the way he played V so so much, lol XD I wasn’t very coherent, but he was very kind and funny, super chill guy!

Img: My ticket now signed "Für Elven, von 'V'" and Björn Schalla's autograph - need to get a fancy frame for it asap xD

I’m so glad that after the Q&A, of which you can find the detailed content in this separate post I made already, I went up again to get a pic done with him and Localization Director Mikolaj! :D So yes, this was definitely my personal highlight of the evening’s program, maybe even more so than seeing the new exclusive gameplay!

Img: Left, the Q&A with Björn and Mikolaj, right, Mikolaj and me and Björn XD

Raffle and Goodies

Towards the end of the night the live band that had been playing outside joined us in the main room (because, of course, the neighbors had complained about the noise… the peak Germany experience, the organizers got threatened with “we’re gonna call the cops if you continue playing music outside after 10 pm” x’D). But like this those of us who had been mostly inside watching the show at this point also got to experience the music a bit, which was very nice!

We were getting close to the end of the night already, and then people with goodie bags started walking in from all corners :O So I ventured forth once more to score one, but I think there definitely was enough for all, and at the end of this post I’m gonna show you what was inside :3

Img: Me holding my roughly letter-format sized Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty paper goodie bag :3

The last item on the agenda was called “Quiz and Raffle”, due to the delayed start of the night though they decided to skip the quiz, or rather, do a quick run of some of the questions they had prepared. It was all something like “What was the name of the character that X called to take over his shift?” or “What was the sign above the location V had to go to during X section of the gig?”, so nothing super hard. You just had to pay a little bit of attention during the game showcase. But yeah, the quiz was skipped and instead the raffle prizes were handed out a bit more freely and damn… there was a lot o.o Displate had gifted a super limited edition illuminated poster, as well as several of their tarot card metal posters. There were gaming keyboards, custom Cyberpunk themed PC cases, some leftovers from the Gear store, figurines, and so on and so forth. Some of the bigger prices were given out via random number generator, where our individual ticket numbers were important again, others were just handed out a bit more freely.

Ryan: “Damn, I have so many gaming mice left, what am I gonna do now…” Random Audience member: “Can I have one?” Ryan: “Sure! :D” *hands them a mouse*

Img: Ryan and Carolin of the German Community Management team at the end of the event with some closing words on stage

This part of the night was honestly just very lighthearted and funny, and I really felt entertained from start to finish XD There were no boring moments or situations where I was like “urgh, I wish we could just continue now” because even during the breaks I talked to people or was still recovering from a previous encounter or experience XD

The End of the Event

The event then ended pretty much on time a short while after midnight, some people had left a bit early to catch their trains, some lingered a little while longer. Lemme tell you, I didn’t wanna leave, I just wanted to move in and live with all these people forever in an amazing little Cyberpunk bubble. But I was also running on like 3 hours of sleep at that point, was extremely overwhelmed with so many positive experiences and impressions, and so we then left after taking some final snaps here and there and walking through the venue once more.

Img: The exit of the venue late at night with the Phantom Liberty Tour Banner now glowing

10/10 would go again, it was a blast, and I wouldn’t have minded for it to go on another six hours xD Not that I managed to sleep much anyway that night, because my brain was still going BRRR from all the impressions and conversations and encounters (still is to a degree right now, but I’m slowly getting calmer again xDD)

The Goodie Bag

Finally back at the hotel I got a proper look at the goodie bag!! All of this was also included in us just *being* there, like, whaaat...

Img: an overview of a variety of items featured in the goodie bag!

The goodies everyone got: a t-shirt with the Barghest logo in front and the Phantom Liberty Tour locations on the back. It was available in a lot of different sizes that you could ask for quite easily, and I hope there was one available for everyone and every body!

Img: A bright red, VERY WRINKLED t-shirt with a graffiti-style Barghest logo on its front in orange, and a white and orange print with the Phantom Liberty Tour locations on the back

The shirt is 100% cotton and made in Poland, but it smelled really really bad, coming out of a plastic bag XDD Not gonna put that on before it goes through the wash. But the quality seems very decent, and the color and print are really nice ;A; Could wear this casually under a shirt or zipper hoodie without anyone even being able to tell it’s gaming merch, and I love me a versatile piece like that!!

Then there was a Phantom Liberty themed sticker sheet with a nice rainbow holo effect :3 Some factions, some people and places, some more generic stickers. It’s very pretty and I think I might actually just frame it together with my signed ticket XD

Img: A holographic Phantom Liberty themed sticker sheet including faction and Night City logos amongst others

What I really really really loved though were these two Cologne-unique pieces: another sticker and a patch :O These seem to be 100% exclusives to the Cologne event, and I figure you can get something similar at the other events as well! Will treasure these like hell <3

Img: A blue and orange fabric patch and a holographic black and white sticker showing the same design: Phantom Tour Cologne below a stylized moth

And finally, everyone got a little mystery bag within their mystery bag, containing one of 6 keyboard cap thingies (don’t even know wtf they’re called but they’re cute XD). They were modelled after the various ingame factions, even including Barghest I believe! :O You can swap them out with any key on a mechanical gaming keyboard. I got Maelstrom, my sibling had the Mox :D So you could’ve definitely swapped with someone else for your fave faction, but I was actually quite pleased with Maelstrom :3

Img: Two small keyboard key replacer thingies... I don't know what to call them. One is red, featuring the head of a maelstromer on top, the other is blue, featuring the pink skull-head with bob haircut and bow of the Mox

So yes… that was my Phantom Liberty Tour experience! I apologize for the insanely long post, but I do hope you enjoyed reading it!

I tried to keep it somewhat concise and coherent and could definitely go more into detail about the gameplay elements we saw, the venue, the people there, and so on and so forth. So, don’t hesitate to hit me up with your questions :D And obviously, thanks so much for reading to the very end <3

#cyberpunk 2077 #cp2077 #cyberpunk phantom liberty #phantom liberty #phantom liberty tour #phantom liberty spoilers #elven attends phantom liberty tour posting

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memoryoflooping · 5 months

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have you seen the santae vps? they're in alpha and accepting applications atm. love your energy and just wanna see you have thoughts about it, if it interests you.

^^ industry plant anon ask bc true harley warriors know i don't like neo-clones

anyway real answer is i heard of it from promo posts and blocked the main blog immediately bc the way they were promoting their site was annoying. sorry but spam tagging every popular petsite on earth, wtf ? the art is nice, but again i don't like neo-clones and i would need to see gameplay to see if it does or doesn't fall into the dappervolk pit of game that is vastly unpleasant to play.

also wtf is this.

i'd be the worst fucking person in the beta test, noooo way around that LMAO. like i could give them criticism from my experience with dv, goatlings and eggcave but i vastly prefer breeding sims. i am way too much of a hater imo, and this is part of why i said "industry plant anon" bc i literally am such a picky person and don't like some sites and loooove complaining. since its such a new site i don't think it could work around the flaws inherent to petsites in its current state and i would be like a wild animal maiming it. also if the rpg part depends on pets having different skills depending on species like lorwolf its going to go to hell, no way around that. idk if they have ks exclusive stuff but by the looks of the blep um. well they'll get it eventually but if it turns out to be optimal you start to have a problem there.

ALSO i'm going to personally kill the person who did the css for doing the font through google fonts. can you people download and self host your fucking fonts they don't work on my end and they end up looking like garbage with the slimmest line weight on god's green earth look at my screenshot example and compare it to the wayback screenshot of the alpha testing announcement post actually on the site. I'm going to have to write my own stylus style to even be able to play, and you know damn well the site's going to have a blanket ban on extensions like every petsite has to.

(wayback screenshot)

anyway if they have gameplay previews and they're locked behind needing to be in the discord goodbye forever LMAO ! i'll def keep an eye on it infrequently but generally this probably isn't going to be a site i like unless they do some aspect besides the art really well bc the appeal is the beasts to me. if they accept my alpha test application they make a mistake imo, i'll sign up for funzies bc i like the blep beastie

also full disclosure me calling you a santae staff member was a joke LOL, if i was right i'm right but sometimes thangs happen for real.

#Anonymous #asks #santae #santae pets #<- idk hwat tag they use but they could at least use the font advice if they see this

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hwd405 · 2 years

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Spyro 3 - The GameSpot Build and Lost Media

I've been actively researching and documenting early builds of Spyro 3 for something like 7 or 8 years now, and while I feel like I've made a significant impact, there's always going to be people that have never seen any the content that I've helped to document - so, every now and then, I get the urge to infodump about one piece of my research to a new group of people, to help make sure that the documentation I've done isn't only known to a very small group of people... that'd defeat the purpose of documentation, to an extent, I think.

Sometimes, outreach ends up being extremely important to the research and preservation of prerelease content - and this is no better exemplified than with Spyro 3's "GameSpot build".

On June 23rd, 2000, several websites and publications revealed early previews of Spyro: Year of the Dragon - this date was probably some sort of online embargo date.

The "April preview", an early build which seems to match the one used at E3 2000, was used by most of these publications. A few of them, according to accounts from those that wrote the previews, received exclusive gameplay sessions from the likes of Mark Cerny - these previews apparently took place quite close to the embargo date and certainly would have used a later build than the April one. We know that IGN received one of these sessions (but, according to the author of the preview article, was allegedly unable to record gameplay during this session, which resulted in IGN having to use the same build everyone else did in their preview articles), and it's a pretty safe bet that GameSpot did, too. In GameSpot's case, we actually got to see what this build looked like:

As expected, it's a later build than the April prototype - this one seems to be from around the same point in development as the earliest demo disc version, though we're not sure if it's an earlier build or a later one. Three main characteristics stick out in these screenshots:

We don't ever see what the eggs looked like in this build, but the fragments use this bizarre ornate gold texture.

The HUD uses a green egg sprite similar to some of the eggs seen in the April build; the earliest demo disc version also uses this sprite.

For some reason, transparent polygons are a solid black colour, making some screenshots look sort of ominous and weird.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about this build is that the gold egg fragments it uses, which to most players would be completely unrecognisable and unlike anything they've ever seen before, actually do appear in the final game. And they hatch from every egg in the entire game. In most cases, the fragment flies off screen before the player can spot it.

The earliest demo build, which seems to be from around May 25th, 2000, does not include this texture at all, which has called into question the timeline placement of the GameSpot build. On one hand, they might've used the final egg texture momentarily, switched to the gold one, and switched back, accidentally leaving one of the textures intact. On the other hand, there have been cases in many Spyro builds of random early assets weeding their way back into the game via means that we don't really understand. Look no further than the August 27th, 1998 localisation prototype of Spyro the Dragon, a post-final build which inexplicably re-uses an early Gnasty Gnorc model, textures, and animations, from around 2 months earlier in development:

The info we have on this build doesn't just stop at screenshots, though! GameSpot kindly uploaded 5 videos of the build - labelled "Movie 2" through "Movie 6" (thanks GameSpot. that's not confusing at all) - to their website. Most of these videos were later temporarily put behind a paywall, and in 2014, 4 of these videos were deleted during a server move, with only Movie 2 (the one never put behind a paywall) remaining. The one movie that remained didn't even play properly in GameSpot's video player for years, so I had to download the video from the API to view it at all:

youtube

While the video is an important piece of history, and did reveal to us that the early Sgt. Byrd theme heard in some old IGN videos of the April preview had a previously unheard guitar section (this was prior to the public release of the April preview), it doesn't tell us very much new about the build. If we really wanted to more precisely date the build, we'd need to know what the eggs looked or sounded like - but the egg collection section was entirely cut from the video. As of yet, we just don't have this information.

As for Movies 3 - 6? These are now lost media. They were up on the site for 14 years, we know that people saw them, and I suspect there were people that downloaded them. However, since they were deleted nearly 10 years ago, nobody has come forward to say that they have one of the videos and to show what was in it. Anyone that does come forward with this info should be met with some scepticism, of course, but I think the only way we'll ever see more of this build is with a greater outreach and more widespread knowledge of the missing videos - the videos were readily downloadable from the website, and so someone still has the videos, I'm sure.

And before anyone asks, yes, the WayBack Machine has been very extensively searched for these videos - we can't find them, there's just no trace of them on there.

Judging by the video descriptions, Movie 3 would have focused on Bentley, Movie 4 on either Sheila or Agent 9, and Movies 5 and 6 on Spyro gameplay.

I've only ever encountered one person who claims to have seen these videos, and whether they're to be believed or not, they claimed that one of the videos showed Sunny Villa using Fireworks Factory's theme (levels using the wrong themes was very common in early builds of these games! Additionally, Fireworks Factory's theme is very likely to have been present around this point in development), and another showed Agent 9 gameplay using a track that didn't sound very Spyro-like, but more like "something from James Bond".

When the April preview released later on, it was discovered that early Spyro 3 builds actually do have a number of entirely non-Spyro themes, all by µ-Ziq and Propellerheads, left unused in their soundtrack data. The tracks in these builds seem to line up with the levels present in an earlier build of the game, and by this metric, it seems that "Spybreak!", a theme from the Matrix soundtrack, would have (fittingly?) lined up with Agent 9's Lab, and possibly would have been used in that level in internal development builds. Sure enough, my contact agreed that this was the theme they heard, when I sent them the track - if this is indeed the case, then this build is very very weird indeed.

It remains to be seen whether we'll ever learn anything new about this build, but we can only hope. I've linked to an archived 7z file containing all the screenshots uploaded to GameSpot below, as well as a link to a TCRF article detailing some of the known differences spotted in this build:

Archive.org

TCRF

#spyro 3 #spyro #spyro the dragon #spyro year of the dragon #spyro: year of the dragon #spyro prototype #prerelease materials #press materials #press screenshots #gamespot build #gamespot #playstation #sony ps1 #lost media #lost videos #prototypes

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kira-moonrabbit · 3 months

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many many years late... my big criticisms (not review!) of limbus company just from a gameplay standpoint. tl;dr... its kinda bad. this is both my opinion, and also how i explained said opinion, but i need it off my chest.

so preface: i dont play limbus anymore, but did for about one and a half cantos when it was brand-slappin' new. when i say brand new, i mean fresh out the box when there were still big server problems killing everyone's ability to play the game.

i went partially through the intro and then i had to sit through some more issues; then i had to replay the intro AGAIN when i came back. i figured skipping it would still allow me to view the in depth tutorial for how the actual game mechanics work in the same sequence; it did not give me this luxury and i had no idea how to re-find the tutorial. i had to scrape by with half-remembered fragments from watching someone else stream limbus and manage to view the whole danged thing. such is my preamble.

unfortunately i dont have the energy to find screenshots to use and i am not about to re-install limbus at 4 in the AM just to make an angry post about it. i'm opinionated, not petty.

i believe that a game should, even without a tutorial, be able to have its mechanics gauged just from looking at the UI and just generally observing. obviously tutorials are good, and not everything should be given to you this way, but as a rule of thumb you should be able to at least pick up a few rules about how things work just from watching un-commentated gameplay. lobotomy corporation has this. library of ruina has this. Limbus Company does not give you this.

the game is dogshit at explaining what the hell skills are. you are told there are coins, that are flipped, and dice are rolled. there are comparisons on the upper screen as to how two different skills will match up... and looking at these things, gave me no indication as to how the hell everything is CALCULATED! People who view with no commentary need a whole paragraph explaining the topmost UI! at least with ruina the dice math is simple. limbus needs a god damn calculator for every step.

disembodied micro-nitpick corner! the game doesnt tell you exactly where to go to uptie things, or when you unlock this ability. AND, it takes two whole cantos to unlock a way to earn major resources like, yknow... basically anything other than just more Lunacy for more gacha-ing.

defense skills are also not entirely perfectly explained. you think your "fuck shit everyone is targeting me" buttons would have a little more explanation behind them to help you use them better, but the descriptions for them completely sailed over my head and i had no idea which situations were and were not appropriate to use them. and each person has their own different defense skill so you better hope you have the right one for the situation when you need them! Else, S.O.L.

but yeah. i expected i'd have a handle on things by Canto 2. but by then, i just felt more confused, because in dungeons you just have a different combat system than in the main game for some reason??? one that i think is better executed because you actually have decent control over who's receiving what attacks. i had no idea what the hell i was doing the entire time still. i was just throwing out attacks and hoping the UI wasn't lying about matchups. my trial by fire wasnt even a trial, it was just... arson.

my other major criticism? sin. you know how one of the first things the game explains is sin resonance and absolute resonance? before the actual mechanics for how to calculate sin clashes? yeah, absolute resonance is literally just a damage boost that you can MAYBE hope is convenient. delibrately going for sin resonance was just getting my butt kicked. the game said to do this as much as possible but it just acts as a red herring for ACTUALLY learning skills that will get you further in the game.

sin in general feels like such a nothingburger of a mechanic. Cool, an elements system! to go with the last game's elements system! the two systems stack! i thought it was gonna be cool! But nnnope, its mostly just fuel for EGO. things DO have sin resistances, but they just feel like an afterthought.

what i liked about pierce, slash, and blunt is that they each had a slight archetype! Pierce was mainly status effects, Blunt was mainly damage, and Slash was something of a middle ground that focuses on power stacking (long live swordplay of the homeland with purple tear and slash power stacks).

with sin, its like... they're the colors attacks come in? and they have a status effect they're associated with. it doesnt feel like it adds an extra layer of much. i probably can't go as far as to say you can take away sin and lose nothing, because it does fuel EGO, but its... i dunno, it just feels like it's not needed.

i'll spend less time on the gacha because we all know gacha is gacha. but its like... ruina felt good, because you slowly accumulate more and better resources for the challenge ahead. you feel yourself slowly progress. In a gacha system, things have to generally remain at the same level of power as each other, give or take. And some things are just... better than others, yes. but there's very little in the way of like, teambuilding opportunities. you use the same really good units for pretty much everything. there's no progression aside from gacha, gacha, gacha over and over.

and this makes the reward for beating story missions just more gacha-ing, and lore. no feeling of getting stronger... no new toys to play with. the side resource modes, too, only serve to pump up your units. there's no customization of how you tackle things. i guess that ties in to the disconnected side bit a little, but still.

if you want my opinions on if the story is good, i cant give them to you though. i'm a gamer. i have practical opinions. to jump into the story would fall under the purviews of things like literary analysis.

but there is also a minor thing i will bring up that has to do with the story, in a way.

and there you have it, a casual gamer's opinion of limbus company as a game. a common person's opinion, in short. i'm not going to claim my opinion is the be all end all, far from it. I'm sure others have put the same ideas forth more eloquently. but sometimes you gotta hear what just a regular person who plays video games to have fun has to say about something.

Limbus Company all but demands you to have played Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina before playing it. the loading screen explanations do shit to tell you the kind of world you're getting into. some concepts don't quite go fully explained. and the things in the prior games are essential to the understanding of limbus company, such as the reasoning behind why L-corp fell, just what the Smoke War even was, and just what caused the Distortion and EGOism phenomenon. Anyone jumping in because "ooo, nice gacha!" is going to write off the prior games as useless, when they're actually incredibly important for understanding the story and why certain things are the way they are, and for understanding the whole game's themes!!! as to WHY they're important, I'll leave that to the more wordsy folk. [EDIT: it was brought to my attention by a kindhearted anon that i was wrong about how much story you need to be able to understand limbus. this is why i wanted to keep my story-related opinions to a minimum, as i havent played much past canto 1 myself. i admit this paragraph is a little bit brought on by me being grumpy that many players who play limbus just because its a gacha completely disregard the previous two games. all in all this paragraph isnt very fair.]

and before anyone says anything... i will not be arguing over this post. if i said something wrong, i said something wrong, such is life, pobody's nerfect. i am also not asking for tutorials about how to play the game, either. i feel like the game itself should be able to give me a satisfactory one for me to want to play it.

and lastly? i will ESPECIALLY not be arguing with people who have spent money on a gacha, any gacha. i feel like this should explain itself.

#limbus company #project moon #yeah i guess i'll maintag. its 4 am ive had worse ideas

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kuriboo · 3 months

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hey have you seen the Nintendo direct today & if so how ya feelin

I saw some tweets earlier so I knew a bit of what I was getting into but I just watched it and HOLY FUCK MAN.................

under the cut i'll scream about everything i'm excited about! but this is one of the best directs of all time! this is SUPER long sorry but please know i am SO HAPPY this is one of hte best directs of all time i think

I WAS SO WORRIED MARIO AND LUIGI AS A SERIES WAS DEAD ;; I'M SO HAPPY IT'S COMING BACK!!! IT LOOKS SO GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!! THE ART STYLE, THE GAMEPLAY! IT'S MARIO AND LUIGI!!!! I'm SO EXCITED!!! I'm behind on this series I still need to play dream team (I should probably start it over at this point, I have this digitally it came on my original 3ds and I've transferred it between systems twice now) and paper jam (I OWN THIS SOMEWHERE but my stuff is in disarray from room renovations...I'll find it some day) but I'M SO EXCITED! FOR BROTHERHOOD!

I'm more excited for the Dragon Quest remakes than I thought I'd be! I saw they were being remade and I was like okay yeah sure...this already was released on switch my brother already owns these...but this remake actually looks way better than the previous release on switch! I'm into this! I'm down for this!! It looks a lot better! I beat dq1 a while back, I need to restart dq2 because I haven't played it in so long... and I was just told I should've started with dq3, which I haven't played, LMAO so

Super Mario Party Jamboree...a third Mario Party on Switch! I'm excited for the return of Western Land, I'm excited for another Mario Party, I love Mario Party it's a longtime family favorite (though we barely played any between 3 and super, we have super and superstar on switch though) so anytime there's new Mario Party content I'm happy! I think I would've preferred an update/dlc of superstars, but...I can see why it's not! I'd like to play this online with family! I'm just a little scared at the possibility of not being able to play with pro controllers again...joy con exclusive gameplay is scary

ECHOES OF WISDOM! FEMINISM WINS! I saw screenshots of this on twitter but oh the trailer has me so hyped.... ZELDA SAVING LINK LETS GO........ I LOVE ZELDA'S OUTFIT AND HER FAIRY COMPANION AND MAGIC LOOK SO COOL! This is gonna be so fun to play. And I'll probably be a lot less anxious playing this than botw/totk since there shouldn't be weapon durability? so this might end up being my favorite switch zelda pretty easily lol. I'VE WANTED PLAYABLE ZELDA FOR SO LONG I LOVE THIS

Hello Kitty game I might pick up depending on the price.... it looks cute!

The Looney Tunes game looks so funny I kinda wanna play it SPACE JAM!!!!!!!!!

I'm probably not gonna get Luigi's Mansion 2 HD anytime soon but I LOVE LUIGI HE'S MY GUY HE'S THE DREAMBOAT THE GOAT THE DREAMGOAT.... I've never played any Luigi's Mansions though! I think I have 2 on 3ds but again, I'm not sure where it is.... Idr if we have 3 or not? We might? I'd like to play a Luigi's Mansion game someday but it's not my biiiiiggest priority. As much as I love Luigi, I love him so so so so much, but without ever having played it, I have this nervousness that I might not like the Mansion series...

I WISH I HAD EXPANSION PACK I WANNA PLAY FOUR SWORDS SO BAD

I have been screaming about the ace attorney investigations collection ALL DAY dude. This games have SUCH a good story (I've only watched playthroughs) so I'm excited to play them myself!!! The fantranslation has definitely impacted a bit of my excitement though. The name changes in particular... Verity Galile is honestly a good name, Eustace Winner is growing on me (I'm worried what they're changing Blaise to...), but Eddie Fender............I'm sorry but that is RAYMOND SHIELDS i DO NOT like the name eddie fender i CANNOT get behind it sorry.... BUT THE STORY OF THESE GAMES MAN I'M SO EXCITED!!! I JUST GOT THE APOLLO JUSTICE TRILOGY FOR MY BIRTHDAY (a couple of months late, but, uh, extenuating circumstances led to my dad keeping forgetting to order it, i am not mad) so i wanna play that before AAI and I STILL NEED TO PLAY THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY COLLECTION TOO..... BUT MAN I LOVE ACE ATTORNEY I'M SO EXCITED I WANTED TO CRY

metroid prime 4! i still need to get into the metroid series (i need to give it another try, i haven't been able to get myself to really enjoy it yet) but i'm excited for metroid fans! this is such a long time coming...and now it's so close! the graphics look really good! i don't have much else to say about this one.

AND MAN

MAN

THE UNEXPECTED GOAT

I DIDN'T SEE THIS GAME BEFORE WATCHING THE DIRECT BECAUSE NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT

BUT OH MY GOSH

PHANTOM BRAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PHANTOM BRAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NEW PHANTOM BRAVE GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i love phantom brave SO SO SO SO MUCH i wanna CRY i'm SO SO SO HAPPY!!!!! ASH AND MARONA ARE BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I NEVER EVEN THOUGHT WE MIGHT GET ANOTHER PHANTOM BRAVE! IT WASN'T EVEN A HOPE BECAUSE I JUST DIDN'T THINK IT COULD EVER HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!

PHANTOM BRAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

idk about the mech part that's gonna have to grow on me but YOU CAN FUSE CHARACTERS WITH MARONA AND GIVE HER CUTE NEW OUTFITS???????????????????????????

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

PHANTOM BRAVE PHANTOM BRAVE

when this came up in the direct i literally could not stop stimming and shaking i SCREAMED i am SO SO HAPPY

i think i'm more excited for htis game than anyone else because literally no one that i've seen is talking about it but!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PHANTOM BRAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#inbox #ddxcrow #the way i could not focus at work at all today because i was so excited about the direct man

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mariska · 2 months

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nobody asked but i am Making A Post About It Anyways Because I Asked Myself If She Wanted An Update And They Said Yeah I Want An Update Thanks For Asking, Me. and i said No Problem, Me.

a lil update on my new baldur's gate 3 dark urge drow character Zore (pronounced 'Zor-ah' i always feel the need to include that alongside her name lol) that i made a post about the other day!

so i had mentioned previously that i'd had a specific like, purple/blue/pink kinda general color scheme in mind when i was first making her in the character creation screen pre-gameplay and that, because i can't play on a fancier more modern type of TV that has those super hd/more detailed color/resolution etc. type of options, the way colors look on the 10+ yr old regular flatscreen Living Room Family TV are pretty different than how everything looks in screenshots i take on my ps5 and then save to my camera roll or any other non-ps5 device. and because of that, Zore's skin tone (which i had attempted to make like a light blue with a lil bit of a grey undertone) just looked completely grey in pics i've been taking of her even though on my screen it was much closer to that blue tint i wanted her to have.

anyways i used one of those magic mirrors in my camp to go back into the character creator and made some tiny tweaks to try and fix that with.....Limited Success? she is still showing up pretty grey in certain environment lighting especially in screenshots, on my tv screen shes like undeniably light purple or lavender, but. frank sinatra voice Thats Life ! comparison of how her skin tones looked in screenshots before and after adding more purple:

this was the original one (Wisteria Tone 4), looked like much more of a subtle blue/purple overlay on my tv than how grey it is in the screenshots,

this is the newer color i ended up going with (Violet Tone 1), obviously shows so much more of that exact kinda blue/purple/slight grey undertone in screenshots that i was going for originally and looks like a brighter blue/purple on my tv....idk why she's still kinda showing up as mostly grey in so many of the actual gameplay screenshots i've been taking of her but i think its probably just certain areas of the map with bright daytime lighting that wash the non-grey colors out or something, its annoying. LOL. especially since i think the newer violet tone rly compliments the pinks i used for her hair and eyes and makes those pop a lil more and its very pretty, maybe once i get to a spot in-game without the light of 1000 suns hitting her directly she'll actually look purple/blue in more of my screenshots of her fnsjsgssgsgshshsf

one more 'character creator' screen view of her followed by an in-game pic (i think u can def see the blue and purple tones better than all my other pics of her in this one thankfully so thats why i feel like its probably just a bright lighting issue that sometimes turns her completely grey lol)

got to the area of the map where u recruit Karlach before i stopped playing last night (which i have been going back and forth feeling hesitant about whether i wanted to recruit her to my camp and/or party at all because she is my absolute fav companion and in my main save file shes my character's girlfriend so i KNOW.....that she has the sweetest most compassion filled heart of gold......and i KNOW my girl Zore will make so many decisions and actions that Karlach will absolutely not be approving of 😭 but i rly didnt want to leave any of the main act 1 companions behind so i'm just crossing my fingers that maybe if i have her stay behind at the camp most of the time she won't get so disappointed in me that she'll just leave all together 😭😭😭😭😭😭) and took a million screenshots of the whole introduction scene bcus i love Karlach so very much, so. please enjoy these two silly pics i edited of that scene as well

also accidentally took a pic of this dead npc floating in the air while Zore took his brain tadpole out for herself and it cracks me up so much, i was trying to take pics of Zore but the scene kept switching characters too fast it makes me giggle every time i see it

Rise.....

#oc zore #long post #blood tw

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jurassicparkpodcast · 3 months

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Check Out A Brand New Look At Jurassic Park Survival

Courtesy of the folks at IGN, we have a brand-new look at what Saber Interactive have been cooking up in their creation lab with a closer look at some new screenshots and concept art from their upcoming game Jurassic Park Survival, alongside an internal Q&A where Universal Pictures and the Saber team discuss the upcoming title.

An interesting note in the Q&A is how focussed both the Universal team and developers at the game’s studio are on bringing to life locations which are both familiar and new on Isla Nublar. The interview references how we might see distant buildings and visitor accommodation, and the concept art gives us a flavour of this – showing that the decrepit and overgrown emergency bunker we see in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom may have actually been a functional and state-of-the-art piece of island infrastructure in the early 90s.

I really love how the focus here feels firmly on the experiences that visitors would have had when visiting Jurassic Park. In-universe this is, of course, meant to function as a luxury resort – with the novel even referencing swimming pools and tennis courts as mainstays of the luxury location. It is exciting to think about where the creative teams may choose to pull from this reference material. If we get to see a tunnel behind a waterfall created in the style of the Jurassic film universe, then I may explode with excitement. Needless to say, there is a lot of potential to craft a really compelling environment to explore on Nublar.

Whilst the team were still tight-lipped on whether we would see any dinosaurs in the game which do not appear in the 1993 film, they did share that consideration for the terrain on Isla Nublar is a critical part of gameplay. How this transitions into what Maya is doing within the game remains to be seen, but I imagine that a wet and slippery environment may make rock climbing or other accessories much more dangerous, therefore presenting interesting and challenging dynamic which players are likely to have to weigh up.

There is also a reference here to the importance of patience – something which we have seen in other survival titles like Alien: Isolation, where the player sometimes needs to take shelter and wait for the Xenomorph to pass. The article does also hint that there may be more characters left on Nublar than just Maya – implying the InGen evacuation was not as thorough as we would like to believe, or that there may be other shady individuals attempting to take advantage of the ensuing chaos.

Addressing the elephant in the room, Saber Interactive did confirm that the game will not release in 2024 – meaning that recent rumours of a 2026 release date may be accurate when considering recent news about a third entry in the Evolution franchise. In my opinion – let them cook! This is shaping up to be an exciting adventure game which will allow us to truly immerse ourselves in Isla Nublar in a way which has never been realised before. I believe that taking the time to really develop this game and deliver an interesting and immersive story with compelling environments is critical, so I am VERY happy to wait for as long as this game needs.

It’s fair to say that Jurassic Park Survival is one of, if not the most, anticipated projects which is currently being developed for the Jurassic franchise. A survival-adventure game grounded in the nostalgia of the 90s era is something which many fans have been longing for, and I know that I personally cannot wait. I’m incredibly excited to see more from this game – with this initial update already having me VERY excited for what might be in store.

What do you think? Are you excited for Jurassic Park Survival? Let us know in the comments below, and stay tuned to The Jurassic Park Podcast for all the latest news on the upcoming title.

Written by: Tom Jurassic

#article #steven spielberg #steven spielberg mattel #mattel creations #mattel creations jurassic park #mattel creations steven spielberg #steven spielberg toy #jurassicworldchaostheory #campcretaceous #jurassicworldchaostheorytrailer #jurassic park 7 #jurassic world 7 #jurassic world. 4 #jurassic world 4 #jurassic 7 #jurassic world chaos theory

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superfamiblog · 2 years

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How I Make My Gifs: A 2,000 Follower Special

Earlier today, I finally hit 2,000 followers on this tumblr. Hooray! I’m glad there are that many of you who are interested in my blog.

To commemorate reaching the big 2K follower milestone, I thought I’d celebrate by letting you guys get a peek behind the scenes of this blog. Specifically, how I make those fancy animated gifs I post every so often. Let’s get started, shall we?

1) First things first: whenever I play through an SNES game, I always keep an eye out for moments/setpieces/animations that I think look interesting, be they particularly atmospheric, or impressive, or beautiful, or funny, or what have you. I don’t have access to a photo editor that can convert movies to gifs directly (more on that later), so I used to just focus on short, simple loops: flickering torches, brief idle animations, stuff like that. But as I kept making these gifs I picked up some tricks that made it easier to capture more complicated animations (like, say, this one). Again, more on that later.

2) I capture the screenshots that make up the gif on SNES9x, my emulator of choice. Sometimes, if it’s simple 4 frame loop, I only take about as many screenshots as the loop lasts for. Other times, if I’m capturing something more complicated (such as, say, something moving on the screen), I can take upwards of one hundred screenshots or more. Again, it depends on the situation. For example, here’s a look at the screenshots that make up a gif I posted a while ago:

Now, for fairly complicated gifs like that one, I used to just crank down my emulator speed way low and wing it, rhythmically timing the F12 presses to hopefully get something useable, and to an extent I still do that, but for more action-based games like Zelda or platformers, I make an SNES movie (basically a replay file), record myself playing for a bit, then replay that on the emulator and take screenshots then. It’s still rather fiddly, but it makes capturing complicated scenes where everything, including the player, is moving around on the screen (like this gif) possible.

3) Once all the screenshots have been captured, I open up my photo editor of choice for animated gifs, a browser-based Photoshop clone named photopea (note: website contains ads), and plop the screenshots down in sequential order, on separate layers. Then, once all the screenshots have been placed into layers, I start converting them into animation layers, which is what photopea uses to make animated frames. This can get pretty repetitive, especially once there gets to be more than about 30 or so layers/frames to work with, so I usually do these gifs in batches and listen to something in the background.

(Above: an animated gif in the making.)

4) Oh boy, now for the fun part: Timing! Since making these gifs screencap-by-screencap can get pretty fiddly (to put it mildly), timing issues are almost always going to crop up. It’s not helped by photopea’s gif timing thingy being pretty much a slider. I usually try to compare with actual gameplay to make sure everything’s moving at the right speed, but eyeballing the timing is hardly foolproof. Sometimes I just say “screw it” and wing it, as well. If you’ve ever noticed some of the gifs looking fast or slow or just wonky in general, this is most of the reason why.

4.5) After finishing and downloading the gif, I let it fallow for a while in a folder I keep specifically for this blog. Sometimes I save a post (or series of posts) for a particular holiday or special event, but mostly I just try to build up a backlog. Here’s a look at it from a while back:

I upload these posts in batches, usually about a week or so worth’s at a time, and chuck the pics in a special folder once I’ve used them. There’s more to it than that, sometimes, but that’s more or less the process I use.

#Fami talks #retro games #gif making #I hope you guys find this informative and/or interesting

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guzsdaily · 10 months

Text

Killing Demons

Day 34 - Dec 9th, 12.023

With a title like that, you're probably thinking that today's topic is something like: "killing your inner demons". But nop, I just don't have any good subject that I want to write today, so I will just talk about one of my favorite games that I played today.

GO FUCKING PLAY THIS GAME. I don't care if you like boomer shooters or first-person shooters, go play this fucking piece of art. This is simply one of the best, if not the best game I played in a long time. I not even good at it and a love it.

This game is still unfinished, but I think I never had so much fun with a game, the sound design, the graphics, the hidden lore, the soundtrack, oh my fucking god the soundtrack. I will try to be straight to the point and explain without giving spoilers, but just let me say, talking about this game in text, is not an easy task. However, let's just say that if this was a video essay, I would be screaming.

The Gameplay

I will just say this out of the gate: I'm not good at shooters, and even worse at fast-paced ones. I died a lot in this game, every single boss needed me at least 7 to 10 tries in this game, and the more difficult ones (I'm looking at you V2 and Gabriel) I lost count of how many tries I needed. But I think I never had so much satisfaction with a difficult game in my life.

This game is a boomer shooter, but not like your typical Doom, no no, this is Doom on fucking steroids. While games like Doom I would say it's just a walk and shot, I can't really say much because I never play it, but from what I seem it is somewhat to the ground. Well, let's just say that in this game, good luck being on the ground for more than 10 minutes without dying. Want to be in one place waiting for the enemies and being a tank? You will probably die instantly. I never played a game that makes me have to move and go around this much, while still needing to aim and kill enemies. I really wanted to have screenshots and videos for this entry, but unfortunately I didn't record any of my runs, but just fucking search it on YouTube or something, and you will know what I'm talking about.

And this isn't the best part. Again, I'm not good at this game, so unfortunately I can't really say that much. But the sheer amount of guns and attack combos you can do in this game is something which makes even my humble programmer mind blow up trying to figure out how much there's it. I think that the best way I can really tell about the combos is: you can toss a coin from your revolver, change to a laser canon, and shot that coin in the middle of the air to make the laser ricochet to the back of an enemy, killing it instantly most of the time. I almost am never able to shoot the coin, but when I do, the dopamine hits hard.

Also, the Enemies

I will not turn this entry into an entire essay, I already plan to do it on the future, but I just wanted to highlight the design of some of the enemies here, because as someone who likes design characters, they are an inspiration I would say.

This first fella has a flamethrower, and if you toss a coin behind him and hit it, the bullet will ricochet to its gas tank, blowing him up.

These two made my life be miserable... but also a lot happier.

Images taken from the ULTRAKILL's community wiki.

The Lore

I will pass this paragraph because I've to admit that I didn't yet dig deeper into the lore and didn't finish the game yet. However, just the fact that that angel is called "Gabriel, Judge of Hell" and "The Apostate of Hate", is already a win for me. Just want to say that this game seems to have a lot of secrets, because it has a lot of actual hidden levels and sections, but also a lot of secrets and history telling in his characters and world in general.

The Soundtrack [and Voice acting]

This is something which I need to talk about, because it was what made me actually dragged to play this game in the first place. The soundtrack of this game makes my blood flow faster, even more when you mix the voice acting, I wanted to be lying here, but I actually feel hotter and something when listening to it.

The best way to describe is showing, so just listen to it:

youtube

I can feel the hatred of Gabriel, and when the music kicks in, it just makes me scream in a sense. I'm not a violent person, I'm not someone who feels hate or any similar feeling. However, this song, makes me understand what hate means in a way. Also, I cannot stop thinking about fight scenes and characters in an epic battle fighting for their deaths when I listen to it. It's the last breath, it's this or nothing, I can't die now, I will not die now.

The album arts

Never in my life I would think that a cover art for an album/song would inspire me so much.

I would like to again be lying here, but these cover arts actually made me create an entire section of the fictional universe that I'm writing/creating for my art and characters. This duotone style and even more the blend between holy and tech/industrial is something which I personally never seen, and simply love.

An inspiration in the form of game

This is probably stretching too much, however ULTRAKILL is somewhat of an inspiration to me. One, this game is made by mostly one guy as its seem, and he was able to make such a game design that I have never seen in other games. Two, every media that I consume of

it makes me be somewhat inspired to create my world and characters, from music to art. Three, it made me remember what I love in games, which is see your progress and skills improving over time, challenge yourself, actually give focus to the game instead of having it together with a video in the background or something like it.

Yes, it can be "just another boomer shooter", but it actually made me enjoy games again as a hobby and made me feel a lot more inspired, even more now when I'm focusing on work and job, and almost forgot for my love in video games, art and even video making. I have to admit that I almost forget to play it sometimes unfortunately, because it is comforting just sit and watch videos all day, but playing this game again really made me remember to also focus and have fun doing things that I love and can improve upon. Even when what you're improving is how fast and stylish you can kill a demon in a virtual game.

So go fucking play this game! And remember:

Mankind is dead. Blood is fuel. Hell is full.

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Today's Artists & Creative Things

Game:ULTRAKILL - by Arsi "Hakita" Patala (published by New Blood Interactive) - Go play this game.

Album:Ultrakill: Imperfect Hatred (Original Game Soundtrack) - by Heaven Pierce Her (Hakita) - Go listen to this album (I personally prefer this act/soundtrack/album).

Song:The Death of God's Will - by Heaven Pierce Her (Hakita) - Go listen to this song (Personally prefer when it has the voice acting together, but even then it stills superb. Just the name of the song is already a piece on its own).

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License

#daily journal #ultrakill

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