I feel like “clunky” here is a bit of a misnomer. It was FromSoft that essentially created modern action combat. A lot of the innovation since then has been to make combat easier (eg, expanding parry to perfect+regular parry instead of perfect+no parry), which goes against the philosophy of this game. The large input…

Agreed. This interplay is a big part of what makes XCOM tick. To be fair, a lot of “games like” articles tend to miss the forest for the trees, usually serving up games in the same genre that feel completely different to play.

Elden Ring’s massive open world and gameplay philosophy are clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

FYI, the fowl foots seem to have a dramatically higher drop rate for the crows/penguin things.

a 16-year-old living at his mother’s house

While I completely understand the sentiment, using the word “open” to form a literal argument seems odd. It would be like calling Destiny a bad FPS, because it’s a first person shooter with melee and magic.

While I completely understand the sentiment, using the word “open” to form a literal argument seems odd. It would be…

I honestly don’t understand the cloud for video games. The idea behind the cloud is to utilize the downtime of a computer, since most of the time your computer sits there doing nothing, with small spikes in activity. So the cloud distributes the load, handling the work of several machines at the cost of a single…

Engines are becoming too crazy and tricky to wield. If raytracing ultimately succeeds rasterized rendering — which would be a long ways off — engines may become easier again.

Wouldn’t Bethesda be similar? All they did was Elder Scrolls for years (and Fallout is just post-apocalyptic ES, much to the chagrin of actual Fallout fans). CDPR made three Witcher games, all of which — iirc — were considered good.

Really? They patched it literally the day after I finally beat Radahn!? Oh well.

UE5 also introduces Lumen, a real-time global lighting solution. It’s not really new tech per se. Microsoft had demos of something similar running as early as GDC 2018. But I think it’s the first large scale engine to fully utilize it, and it includes various optimizations that were missing from earlier tech demos.

You don’t appear to understand how it works. You can’t load more data than the console’s RAM can hold. This means that assuming 100% efficiency, you can fill the RAM in around 2-3 seconds. It’s impossible to load a “larger” level than that, no matter how big your world or how complex your textures.

Sadly, this is pretty accurate

It would probably be sufficient to make Square and Triangle / A & X the two right hand attacks. This would make one trigger activate the item submenu, which works well. But it would make the other trigger “use active item” which probably feels a little weird.

Genuinely curious: Is this style of play common for gamers? I know I keep playing one game until I’m done with it, then move on to the next.

This reminds me a bit of when Tim Rogers mentioned that in Japan, if you want to be successful you have to be a smoker. Because a lot of deals get made while workers are taking their smoke breaks.

This took a weird turn in my head. I thought this was going to be about the long hours making it really hard to create a work-life balance, so it’s understandable that the employees would lean extra hard into their lunches as “break from work.” But then you went the other direction with it!

I do feel like this country in particular has difficulty differentiating between sexuality and sexism.

I think the thing that gets me the most is, re-reading the “people who menstruate” headline, you can read it entirely innocuously. As in not applying to post-menopausal women. But, nope, that’s not where JK’s mind went, at all.

Well, it would certainly minimize the instances of “Can’t talk, in a fight.”