I feel like between FFXIII, FFXV and even the initial reveal of FFXVI there was a kind of built-in expectation that this would be a multiplatform title, and then when it wasn’t, you are going to lose people there. I don’t think you need much more than that to explain it. There are people who otherwise would’ve bought…

What do you think “fantasy world” means. Seriously. Do you think they invented all new kinds of sentient creatures and spun out completely alien societies and modes of interaction whole cloth? Or do you think they made stories about human beings that are heavily based on actual human cultures and told stories about…

For real. I’m not a Cavill fan and I thought his casting was dreadful, until I watched the show, and then it was blatantly apparent that he was Geralt. Doug Cockle aping notwithstanding, the man just so clearly has dedicated his whole being to embodying the character.

My biggest pet peeve of armchair development is when people try to compare completely different issues and be like “see, they just hate players.” Yeah, I’m certain that’s it, and not just that one is a server-side toggle where they can just remove items from the global loot pool and the other required an actual client …

I mean, that’s all broadly true, but after they did all that they also raised the XP rates of everything to match what the most efficient XP farms were delivering before. This is me being a bit more charitable than they likely deserve, but so far it feels like its mostly protecting players from themselves. Running the…

It’s not doing that. I’m not sure you’ve ever played Elden Ring, tbh. The character never “dodges”, that’s part of the animation of the L attack combo, the movement of which is relative to character facing, which is always towards the boss since he starts the fight by locking on. He literally only does R and L attacks…

It’s not staged. This is like attempt 100. You can clearly see the fish’s movements map to the inputs, theres just some delay from the processing pipeline and also because Elden Ring buffers inputs.

I think the sequel has a pretty good chance of being exceptional. In addition to the moderate ‘casualification’ of the original, it seemed pretty clear that Obsidian was trying, for once, to not have their reach exceed their grasp in terms of scope. The end result was Fine. But Obsidian is so much better than fine,…

I think part of the reason the humor works so well is alluded to in the article: it’s not trying to be a “funny game.” Some games seem to fall into the trap of being self-consciously a Comedy Game, and it just puts way more pressure on the jokes to land. It’s a lot easier for a good joke to breathe if it’s just used…

I’ve got this little indie novel for you, French, very underground, you haven’t heard of it, it’s called Les Misérables, you should check it out!!!

She literally said that herself. She acknowledged “living your morals” is a privilege, and she doesn’t begrudge small streamers getting their bag. But xQc, Amo, and her are all multimillionaires. All of them can afford to not take the money of an obvious front for a shady gambling scheme. That’s exactly her point.

NMS didnt really know what it wanted to deliver, and the thing I wanted from it seemed to only be a passing vision of what they wanted the game to be, and the one they ultimately landed on post-launch was a completely different thing. It’s hard to be too mad at them for that, but moreso just the absurdity of a…

Absolutely livid that it’s sounding more and more like fucking Starfield is going to be the game to give me what I wanted out of No Mans Sky.

Just gonna say at the top I don’t think this acquisition is good for the industry long-term and I think it should probably continue to be blocked.

That said, Sony’s continued temper tantrum increasingly gives away the game, which is effectively “we are already pretty anti-consumer, but if you do this, we’ll get even…

Which, to be fair, is basically all that Fortnite is. If you treat it as a Fortnite-esque experience, you can more or less get the same thing out of it. But if you want the full picture, there is just a lot more there that makes it tough to just jump in at any given point.

Yep, over the years they’ve gotten pretty good at zeroing in on “so much you can do, very little you must do,” which I think is overall the right balance to try to strike. Just wish it weren’t presented in such a new-player-hostile and, increasingly, unstable package.

Destiny 2's biggest issue is also the reason that, for whatever good things I have to say about it, I would not recommend you play it. That “trial and error” churn along with a constantly shifting monetization framing has made it aggressively hostile towards onboarding new players. They’ve been working on improving…

Its consistently one of the most played games on Steam, and unlike most of the other games in the top of the list, that isn’t the primary/sole place the game is played. Everyone likes to shit on Destiny, no one more so than Destiny players, but it’s pure delusion to act like they haven’t made something work that…

You’ve got the broad strokes right. There’s an annual expansion release with a full campaign, which is also accompanied by a season release. Then every 3 months a new season drops, which generally contains ~6 weeks of story missions that revolve around whatever new activit(y/ies) were created for that season. Every…

Well, for niches like speedrunners and ladder grinders, most of them are doing something most people can’t do. But for the general “playing games normally” streamers, that’s true. And you’ll see hundreds and hundreds of people streaming themselves playing games better than the big streamers, and getting 0-2 viewers,…