Very nice tribute. I could watch that gif all day long, it always makes me laugh, large sombrero yanked off to reveal a tiny sombrero lol. Ryan was one of the funniest and most genuine people I've ever seen in this industry. I grew to like everybody on the cast, Ryan, Jeff, Brad, Vinny, and Patrick all in their own ways. Ryan and Jeff probably brought the laughs hardest for me, but they took the cast in lots of directions and it wasn't always about laughs. Ryan really was a master at running the Bombcast ship every week, and he always brought a remarkable enthusiasm, positivity, humor, and insight. He really loved what he was doing and he loved the people he was doing it with, I will always remember him that way.
When I heard the DA people mention save importing it didn't make sense to me because the new game is coming out on next gen systems. The wikipedia says it's coming out on current gen as well, so they may be able to do more importing with that version of the game, but the next gen versions will probably just be picking pre built histories. I'm optimistic about Inquisition but the fact that they're trying to go for a Skyrim feel kind of worries me. Both Bioware and CdProjecktRed are pushing to make Dragon Age 3 and The Witcher 3 into a Skryim type of game and it's not that I doubt the studios skill and financial backing but even Bethesda spent like 5 years on Skyrim and the quality across the multiple platforms was inconsistent. And Bethesda has been doing this all their lives at that studio. Elder Scrolls is their greatest passion project and they spend half a decade making each one of those, and it's still messy out of the gate.
I just hope that Dragon Age and Witcher don't just go for broke on the Skyrim thing and end up with games that are stretched thin creatively and a technical mess. I love open world games, but pure scope is becoming less and less impressive to me over time. I really love what Johnathan Blow is doing with The Witness, he's been taking shots at other open world games as you'd probably expect him to do in the process, but he makes good points and I like his philosophy about making the world in The Witness as small as possible but as densely packed with interesting things as possible. In most open world games the novelty of the immense scale gets old pretty fast and most people end up using the fast travel systems anyways.
I'm not opposed to these games going full blown open world like Skyrim, but I just want them to realize you can make a game with diverse ecologies, weather, regions, and impressive spectacle without making the world the physical length and width of the world so huge.
When you watch people play open world games and they come across buildings you can't go into they often mention that they wish they could. When I listen to people as they experience these types of games they seem to not want things bigger, but more densely packed and interactive. People don't want more non-interactive space, unusable buildings, more sprawling mountain ranges and plains without too much to do, etc.
I think that the most compelling open world games will probably come from the indie space in the coming generation. Indies like open world designs too, but they don't have the budgets so they are most likely to do something like The Witness by changing the philosophy, less size but more interactivity and experimentation. Smaller stories with more options for personalization, smaller worlds with more interactivity.
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