PC (and X-Box One) release should be in a year’s time, once the exclusivity contract with Sony expires.

They’re remaking the story, not just the game, and whilst the main thrust will/should be the same, I suspect they are much less settled on side-quests and ideas for tangents. Those could still add a lot of unintended work to the game.

I think modern video game development is so full of unexpected minefields and unintended complexities, that no company would or could make such guarantees. Valve’s experience with Half Life 3/Episode 3/unexpected VR interquel. the repeated delays on Star Citizen (almost nine years in development and counting) and…

If you have a PC, there is a great mod called the Remako Edition. It uses AI and machine learning to upres all the 2D backgrounds and FMV to 720p, which is as good as it can get. It looks great and still plays well.

Part of what Jason is talking about (I think) is that the game takes a very large flashback sequence from much later in FF7 and puts it at the end of Remake, before that story is really set up in the original, so the impact is different.

In addition to Kethe’s excellent explanation, the “locked” class miniature and relevant cards, character sheet etc are all sealed in tuckboxes in the game box. You’re not supposed to open any of them until you unlock the class in-game (obviously you can if you want, but it defeats the point of the game).

There’s also the big problem of getting together to play board games. I have a group that used to meet one weeknight a week and then again once a month on a weekend, which is obviously on hold for the time being. Playing via Tabletop Simulator or online versions of popular games works as a stopgap, but obviously the…

Half-Life: Alyx seems to have worked in terms of development time (at three years it’s positively been rushed by Valve’s standards) and cost because Valve used a bunch of assets they’d already created for VR experiments and a lot of what they created for the game were HL2 assets updated to modern standards*. There’s…

It was important in the sense that it originally happened, G-Man showed it to Alyx and he made her willingly change it and thus become his new minion, abandoning Gordon in the process. So the fallout of the event was important in that it changes Alyx’s destiny for the worse. It also changes the storytelling stakes and…

Alyx’s problem is that its ceiling is determined by the amount of VR tech in homes, and that amount is very low. If it sells 2 million copies worldwide over its lifetime, it will be doing very well. I don’t see it driving massive sales of new hardware. Maybe Half-Life 3 might be better at driving sales (at least among…

Amazing.

I think chronologically that’s not possible. Portal takes place during the Combine occupation of Earth, but Portal 2 takes place several decades later. Unless Gordon is frozen in time again, I can’t see the two linking up.

Marc Laidlaw’s outline from 2017 - which Alyx has now very much made non-canon - was pretty solid. Things still carried on, but the link between Earth and the Combine homeworld formed by the original Black Mesa Incident was apparently severed forever. The ending then set up a possible further sequel where Gordon and…

To be fair, a side-game being VR-only is I think acceptable. HL3 itself being VR-only I think would be completely unacceptable. It’d be like George RR Martin releasing the next Song of Ice and Fire book solely in Esperanto, and the only way to learn Esperanto is to pay a thousand dollars. Sure, someone might…

I thought it was a good move. If they’d done it immediately after Episode 2 came out, it would have been more annoying, but as a statement of intent that they’re now back in the game and are not going to be following Laidlaw’s outline, it did its job.

They have resolved it, but have now set up another one.

Half-Life: Alyx unexpectedly answers your question (although only briefly and at the very, very end).

Summer this year. Timing could be interesting. If it’s early, it’d tide PC gamers over waiting for Cyberpunk 2077. They might want to avoid going up against the PC launch of Death Stranding in June though.

Yup. What will be really interesting is if they’re going to release via the normal stores (Steam, GoG, Epic etc) or if they will tie the games to PlayStation Now. Having their own exclusive storefront on PC could be a tempting route to go, especially if they add more ports later on like Bloodborne, Spider-Man and Last…

Resting, until his hour comes again.