User reviews still have value as a whole. Review bombings are the exception, not the rule, so it’s important to maintain perspective.

If I recall correctly, the only impact your decisions made was whether or not certain squad members survived until the last game. In the case of ME2, squad member deaths felt pretty random. I assigned Tali to hack the gate and she got shot in the head. There was no logical correlation between my choice and the…

That would make sense for a game that hasn’t been announced yet. This game has been announced and gameplay has been shown so I’m sure what the point of secrecy would be.

True, if you’re reading Eurogamer, you’re probably more knowledgeable than 90% of Nintendo’s fanbase so you already know that Nintendo outsources most of its games.

Everyone? I’d be surprised if even 10% of Nintendo’s user base knew that. The average gamer doesn’t even know the difference between a developer and publisher.

Maybe they’re worried about how people would react if they knew that Nintendo outsourced a lot of its games’ development? They probably assume that the Nintendo branding is a key selling point and that’s undermined if it’s readily obvious that Nintendo didn’t actually develop the game.

True, though they’re also more likely to give your game negative reviews on Steam, Metacritic, etc. As a general rule, when you’re running a business, you want to minimize negative PR as much as possible. It’s better to just ignore the whiners than to engage with them in an antagonistic manner.

It’s not really the correct response if you’re running a business and trying to sell a product to customers. That’s why PR training exists and why employees without said training usually aren’t allowed to interact with customers.

Yeah, nobody cares when a white guy goes around killing white people (Spanish people are white), hence the lack of controversy over RE4. If RE4 had taken place in Mexico and you were primarily killing Hispanic people, that would have been controversial, just not as controversial as a white guy primarily killing black…

His examples seem to suggest that he’s offended by the presence of any black women in games, playable or otherwise. That’s why he brought up Jedi Survivor and said that it felt like every western AAA game in the last 18 months featured Debrah Wilson, even though she was only in Jedi Survivor and Suicide Squad.

Once again, Sony’s shitty pricing strikes again. $60 for a port of a game that came out 4 years ago? Come on now. The game routinely goes on sale for $30 on PS5 and $20 on PS4.

It did. Sheva, who was a black woman, was the second playable character but that’s not really relevant to the controversy of a white man running around Africa shooting black people. The narrative context (that the black people are infected with a virus that turns them into homicidal monsters) was essential there.…

BG3 had trouble on XSS due to the split-screen co-op that allowed players to separate and move to opposite ends of the map.

The Rachni Queen’s long term “consequences” cracked me up. In ME1, they made it sound like sparing her would be a huge, monumental choice but in ME2, all she does is send you an e-mail and in ME3, you just get a few points added to your war preparation rating.

“Culminated” in just giving you arbitrary war preparation points that ultimately didn’t matter.

Most publishers support PS and Xbox equally. That means simultaneous launches on both platforms. Square does not so Xbox is not as high a priority to them as it is to other publishers. That’s why they’d be willing to accept Sony money to permanently keep their games off of Xbox.

The problem with the endings is that Mass Effect was pitched as having meaningful choices with persistent, long-term consequences. The endings should have been the culmination of the choices you made across the three games.

It was timed exclusivity in that the PC version wasn’t allowed to launch simultaneously. As for Xbox, I’m guessing Sony just paid Square to permanently keep the game off of Xbox. There are a lot of Square games that aren’t released on Xbox (Forspoken, Valkyrie Elysium, Tactics Ogre Reborn, Star Ocean Second Story, etc)…

I assume the majority of developers are white dudes and the majority of players are white dudes. Larian released a picture of the most common character creation in BG3 and it was a generic white dude.

Wish they would just say “Sony paid us for timed exclusivity” instead of this nonsense. If they recognize the fact that accepting timed exclusivity deals is bad for PR, maybe they should just stop taking those deals..?