FO3 and 4 are not bastions of light and happiness, though. FO3 has the whole thing where you can blow up the entire first major town of the game and in FO4 you can make decisions leading to hundreds of people (in the Institute, or on the Brotherhood flagship, or both) being effectively murdered.

To be fair, the state of NV was also on Bethesda because they were in charge of QA and didn’t allow QA to do their job.

There was a recent interview with Todd Howard where he indicated the game is currently in an excellent state and they probably could have hit the November release date and it’d have been fine (well, by Bethesda standards, which is a different discussion), but they decided to just take that extra time to polish. On…

Police Quest certainly did a splendid job of disabusing anyone of the notion that police work was 24/7 car chases and exciting showdowns with villains. It also had a legendarily pedantic approach. I recall the very first time I was actually in a gunfight (many hours into the game) I hit “fire weapon” and blew my own…

A fairly small one, but vocal and extremely annoying.

Yes, there was a beginning, of sorts, 10,000 years earlier when the forces of Chaos went to war against the galaxy for various complex reasons that have not been fully resolved (in fact, Chaos has gained an upper hand recently). There could be a resolution, but that would only be a victory over Chaos (basically,…

Hardspace: Shipbreaker being a brilliant game and a meta-commentary on video game unionisation and labour issues (from one of the better video game developers for how they treat their employees, down to their four-day work week) I think has to be up there as well.

I was put off by this, but a friend who knows of my enduring love for the Memoir 44 board game and its various variants (BattleLore, Red Alert, Battles of Westeros, etc) pointed out it’s similar to that, where you have a hand of cards and can only choose from the abilities on those cards, but the abilities are…

The good news is they are now working on a new Deus Ex game, although it’s unclear if it’s a sequel to the Adam Jensen series, a reboot, or a far-future sequel or whatever else. I guess it’ll be a while before we see anything of it.

The article mentions exactly one guy. I’m sure a few others have moved on over the years and others have come in, but Jake Solomon, the creative lead on XCOM and XCOM 2, was also the guy in charge of Midnight Suns.

They do. They have the Civ team, who pretty much only make Civ, DLC for Civ and, when that’s run it’s course, the next Civ. They also have at least two other teams, this one which previously made XCOM, XCOM 2, War of the Chosen and now Midnight Suns, and a new-ish team which made XCOM: Chimera Squad.

If you mean Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, they are probably the best expansions for a video game ever made (or at least in that conversation).

That’s The Witcher 3 in a nutshell.

Yup, Horizon: Zero Dawn was the first game I saw which really went to town separating its quests into categories. They might as well have called them, “DO THIS,” “PROBABLY DO THIS,” “IF YOU HAVE TIME, DO THIS, BUT DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT,” and “LOOK, FRANKLY I WOULDN’T DO THESE BUT IF YOU WANT TO, KNOCK YOURSELF OUT.”

Looking at the available figures and projected sales growth, Skyrim has sold at least 40 million copies and probably a fair bit more, and Fallout 4 around 30 million copies (which makes why everyone talks about Skyrim every 5 minutes and Fallout 4 almost never a bit weird, since FO4's sales compare pretty well given…

The goal is to grow the Game Pass sub base, which can be accessed on multiple devices. MS will happily take a hit on overall unit sales if they can entice even 5% of people who’d play on PlayStation to instead access Game Pass via PC, mobile device or streaming, and they know a big Bethesda SP RPG is the kind if…

It’s doing completely its own thing. Vault 33 doesn’t appear or is even mentioned in any of the existing games, so they’re doing basically what a new Fallout game does: create a new story with a new protagonist leaving a vault and getting into Shenanigans.

Yup, and I believe one of their biggest influences was the city of New Crobuzon from China Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels (especially Perdido Street Station).

Dishonored had the same art director as Half-Life 2.

They didn’t say that, they said they wanted to release the second and third games within 6 years of the first game’s release. So that’s Game 1 + 3years + Game 2 + 3 years + Game 3. Not all three in six years. I’m guessing they’re hoping for all three in ~9 years, but the first game might take longer given they’re…