It’s bit cheesy because they’re only supposed to be 15-16 (Season 4 takes place three years after Season 1, when they were 12) but it’s not the worst. Sex Education has actors ranging from 23 to 29 playing 16 and 17-year-olds (although in that show’s case, there’s at least an explanation why they’ve cast waaaaay older…

I thought The Terror S1 suffered from peak-TV-itis. Huge amounts of filler (including a lot of stuff not in the book at all). It would have been an excellent 5-6 episode mini-series but at 10 it hugely outstayed its welcome.

I think Daredevil and Jessica Jones both justified 13 episodes in their first seasons, but after those two, they should really have been 10 episodes max. Luke Cage and Iron Fist Season 1 should have maybe been 4-6 episodes, they didn’t have enough story to fill out the run times (and LC made a huge mistake in killing…

Human Revolution was interesting because they wanted to set it a generation before Deus Ex, which meant setting it only 16 years after it came out (5 years from now!), when it was very clear that tech was not developing remotely fast enough to get to that point (China still hasn’t gotten around to building the Hengsha…

CP77 is based on a 1988 tabletop roleplaying game created by Mike Pondsmith, who famously didn’t get around to reading Neuromancer until years later. His primary inspiration for the RPG was Walter Jon Williams’ considerably more obscure Hardwired. CDPR were surprisingly robust in taking those influences and not…

That was a leak, not official information. I believe Starfield being a registered IP from Bethesda actually came out around the same time, which is the first time the name was ever heard.

Fair point. I should have said it was more Bethesda Game Studios’ MO, the other Bethesda subsidiaries have always done marketing differently (Doom Eternal was id, Dishonored was Arkane).

The 2006 game was fine, but it was a linear FPS with some nice ideas with portals and a solid protagonist and not a lot more (okay, very nice use of Don’t Fear the Reaper at the start). The 2017 game is much more freeform, giving you much greater freedom in choosing what to do next and how to customise your character,…

I just replayed Arkham Asylum and Arkham City in the last couple of weeks and I have to say those games have aged very well. They’re small and tight enough (Arkham City’s open city is minute by modern standards) that you can complete the main story and most of the side-content and collectibles in under 20 hours each,…

This was Bethesda’s previous approach with Fallout 4 and 76, which we didn’t know even existed until 6 months out from release. Announcing Starfield’s date 18 months before release was probably inspired by Microsoft, who wanted to get more excitement building about their 2022 Xbox exclusive lineup earlier.

It’s very much Bethesda’s MO not to show anything at all from the game until almost the last possible minute, to avoid over-inflating hype. I think the last game they showed any gameplay from more than six months from release was Oblivion, sixteen years ago.

For 76, maybe (I played it 6 months after release and it seemed fine, at least bug-wise). Fallout 4 was fine on release. I actually had way more problems replaying it a couple of years later, after one of the patches apparently made it so that NPC heads would occasionally just disappear.

We can hope it’s on its way. The XCOM team have been making that Marvel Tactics game that looks less and less interesting with every preview, but they had a secondary team that worked on Chimera Squad and War of the Chosen, and hopefully that team has been working on XCOM3 in the meantime. If not, they might want to…

I think they registered the name back around 2012/13, so the name’s been doing the rounds for even longer than that.

I suspect it will be like Skyrim or Fallout 4, with an added layer where you are piloting your spacecraft between planets. Bethesda’s not to going to change their formula too much, and they’ve even called it, “Skyrim in space.”

Not showing game footage until 6 months or less before release is kind of Bethesda’s thing (we didn’t even know that Fallout 4 or 76 even existed until that point), so that was never the problem. If anything, the shock was them announcing as much as they did 18 months before intended release, and then releasing more…

The Mafia 1 remake does remove the necessity to obey the traffic laws and refuel the car, so I assume any new prequel would do the same thing, or make it optional.

Mafia 1 was wholly in the 1930s (1930-38) and Mafia 3 was wholly in the 1960s, and in fact in one year (1968). Mafia 1 also had an epilogue set in 1951 (crossing over with Mafia 2). Mafia 2 is the outlier in having one part of the game set in 1945 and another part set in 1951.

Mafia 1 starts in 1930 and jumps forward in stages to 1938, with an epilogue set in 1951. Mafia 2 starts in 1945 and then jumps to 1951. Mafia 3 takes place entirely in 1968.

Mafia 3 I think has numerous problems, including the very repetitive mission structure, an absence of memorable characters beyond Lincoln himself (and the characters it inherits from Mafia 2), fairly rote combat and open world stuff, and being quite a bit too long. I did enjoy the game, the New Orleans atmosphere was…