This is great because I’m just going to shoot for getting the 100% Platinum trophy and then I can uninstall D4. The grind to level 100 is an absolute slog, the seasons/Battle Pass are designed to maximize FOMO and I’m an old man with no time for this nonsense.

“In particular, the side quest where the angry lynch mob got talked down by a pair of orphans was... uh.. optimistic?”

The devs made the decision to spend 40 hours of an 80 hour RPG dedicated to Slavery, but only go as deep as “this little girl treats people like pets! SAD!” examining that choice is fair game.

I basically agree with everything said. The slavery aspect of the game was very much “Slavery Bad” and never looked deeper. “This girl treats a human like a pet! SAD!” Okay game, deep insight, thank you.

A sound and reasonable criticism that will not doubt be immediately turned into a gross looking Youtube jpg that says “Kotaku HATES FF16, Wants All Japanese Devs to Apologize for Slavery” or some such nonsense.

Seeing all the “yeah, makes total sense, why *wouldn’t* you upend all existing subscription policy in order to milk every sale from a purchased property?” comments just makes me a thousand times more confident that my predicitions Microsoft and Activision will do the exact same style thing when their deal goes…

Lol. I *guarantee* they were trying to find ways Jason could have an “accident”, Russian Oligarch style.

I’m always impressed with how swift and harsh the legal system is when it comes to petty bullshit like this, while a corp can commit wage theft to the tune of billions and call it a clerical error.

One of my personal pet peeves about the AI “prompt-gineers” (aside from, you know, the theft of art and labour etc etc all that) is that they will “produce” a piece of work with shockingly obvious issues that wouldn’t fly past the eye of even an armature artist....and just say “fuck it, good enough. Post”

Eight…

Yeah, announcing a game like, ten yeara before release is *probably* a little early there.

Having been introduced to the series when the movie was announced, it seems to be popular for the same reason Ready Player One was popular: It’s a piece of media that basically screams “hey viewer! Do you remember NOSTALGIA!? These are quarters, like from the Arcade! Remember quarters!?!?! Hahaha yeah, here’s a…

“I guess on some level, I find it unpleasant to identify so proudly as a consumer/customer.”

I can’t believe International Football has, just now, for the first time, become POLITICAL.

There would also probably be more reviews if the Games Industry gave reviewers more than 12 hours before launch day to play their 400 hour games.  

It’s going to start getting *wild* as insurance companies drop more and more places as insuring people affected by Global Warming becomes unprofitable.  Galaxy brain move on the parts of Florida Republicans who are going to lose everything.  Can't wait for those bootstraps they always talk about to get used.

This is basically all the Conservative platform is at this point. Well...I should clarify it’s *always* been this, they're just not even pretending anymore.

Except, as I mentioned in my examples, Mr Freeze had his total character and origin story re-written in the animated series. And it turned out to be the version so well liked it’s now the “real” canon.

So I don’t think changing character motivations or origin stories is something that’s ultra sacred and can’t be…

If Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring was made today, in the year of our lord 2023, you *know* nerds would be screeching up and down the hills at the “disrespect of the source material” for Peter removing Tom Bombadil from the movie. They’d find the first woman’s name they can in the writing credits and harass her…

I want to know what people mean when they demand creatives “MUST respect the source material” because honestly I reject the idea that anyone adapting a creative works should have to do that. In fact, there’s lots of examples where deviating from source materials have led to better works.

I will say the memes for Bandai Namco’s fuck-up have been *fire* and I’m loving every minute of it