They do make a third season, but confusingly it is an interquel that takes place between Seasons 1 and 2 but also retcons the ending of Season 2. And is only available on Quibi.

That said, they do have a lot of background material for the characters, which may make it easier to spin off their own original story, whilst if they adapted Half-Life or Portal they’d be much more boxed in by the stories in the games. 

Choosing the Valve game with arguably the least amount of narrative (apart maybe from Counter-Strike) as the basis for a TV show is an interesting choice, not with Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, even Team Fortress on the table.

Remedy are definitely a company who make very interesting games and try to put spins on established formula, even when they don’t quite work every time, and always get a Day One purchase from me for that reason.

I think Remedy would love to do an Alan Wake 2 as well, but at this point they’d probably need to do an Alan Wake remaster to justify it.

I think it’d be a bit of a difficult sell. For an X-Box 360/PS3 game, having the rather small and empty “cities” of Skyrim made sense, and then with the next-gen remaster just a couple of years later people understood it was a graphical rejig of an older game. However, for a next-next gen remaster I think people would…

ME1 didn’t really have an open world though. It had traditional hub/linear mission combos. The only open bit was the option Mako missions, but those were seriously weak and the rewards for driving your terrible car over these huge maps were nominal. The fact you could completely ignore them (apart from the few you had…

I think this is a much wider problem. Games in general are getting too long and bloated. The reason is that the perception is that games have increased in price significantly. That’s not necessarily true outright (inflation has been a killer) but it certainly feels like games are way more expensive now than 15-20…

Reportedly, Dragon Age: Inquisition was the result of an EA mandate to “make the game like Skyrim” even though open-world games are not one of BioWare’s strengths (and after Inquisition and Andromeda and arguably Anthem, I think we can conclude it’s not an area they’re getting any better at).

The Army of the Dead works much better in the book, though, because they’re a one-time use thing. Aragorn uses them to take over the pirate ships at Pelargir and the Army is like, “Right, laters,” and fades out of existence. Aragorn has to rally some actual human troops from Pelargir and the surrounding towns and take…

I had a couple of problems with Stadium Love before I realised that what was happening was user inputs were interrupting the custom animations in the mission and preventing them from running, or anything from happening.

My main takeaway isn’t about this specific game, but the thought that maybe Gearbox and Blackbird could get a licence to do a Star Wars space strategy game in the vein of Homeworld.

Those distinctions seem pretty arbitrary. For example, The Witcher 3 is much more of a roleplaying game by your definitions than several Obsidian/Black Isle games (at least considering The Outer Worlds, Alpha Protocol, Icewind Dale and The Stick of Truth) because it has far more characters, settings, and story reactivi…

RPG means roleplaying game, CRPG means Computer (or Console) Roleplaying Game, so by definition all RPG video games are CRPGs. There’s no distinction there.

I think they did. Adding a third-person mode to a first-person game is normally totally impossible (unlike the reverse; there’s a solid first-person mod for The Witcher 3, though you can’t fight or ride with it on), so the fact that modders have done it, albeit jankily, less than four weeks from release suggests that…

They’d never made a CRPG

It’s interesting that Rockstar went the other way, adding first-person modes to GTA 5 (after release!) and RDR 2 due to highly popular demand. And there’s a very popular Witcher 3 first-person mod as well. Plus of course the Bethesda games are predominantly first-person (they have an optional 3rd person mode which is…

Originally the game had way more third-person cut scenes where you’d see your character and what they’re wearing (you can see that in the 2018 gameplay demos, the mission with V and Jackie rescuing the girl from the tub opens with a cut scene with V busting down the door). At some point they realised they couldn’t…

The Fallout and Elder Scrolls games do, but they were janky as all hell, and arguably 3rd person mode wasn’t good enough to be fully playable for long stretches until Fallout 4 (maybe Skyrim if you were a bit more forgiving).

They had 8 years (the game was announced in late 2012), but it looks like the pre-production team was pulled off the game in 2013 to join in the company-wide mega-crunch on The Witcher 3 and they didn’t get back to Cyberpunk 2077 until well after Witcher 3 and its DLC was released (so early 2016). And when they did…