There is a difference between a AAA game and a game that sold a lot of copies or made a lot of money. For example, Paranormal Activity made almost $200M, but isn’t a blockbuster movie.

Paradox are the kings of getting lots of value out of the AA space. But that’s very different than AAA development.

Yeah, this feels way more original than I was worried about. I thought it was going to be to Harry Potter as Kaldhiem and Theros were to their respective mythologies.

For a long time I wondered why more of Chrono Triggers innovations didn’t become standard in JRPGs, the on-screen enemies/non-random battles chief among them. Then I realized that basically every single battle in Chrono Trigger was, essentially, hand crafted and the entire levelling system had to be able to flex…

If you “let the Animus decide” then “historical” Eivor is a woman and the Isu ancestor is a man. Which sort of gels with the other two who have similar facial structures, but aren’t exactly the same. (Much like male and female Eivor do)

The main difference is that Odyssey doesn’t let you know in the game which is the canon version of the character. If you choose the “Let the Animus Decide” option in Valhalla, the game pretty expressly shows that the “historical” Eivor was a woman.

It’s Apple Arcade, so also, Mac and AppleTV, I believe.

So since this is an Apple Arcade game, that means it will actually be playable on AppleTV and Macs, right? Not just stuck on mobile?

FF7 Remake very deftly took a five to seven hour section of the FF7 and turned it into a pretty great 25 hour game. The main problem was that 25 hour game also had about 15-20 hours of chaff on top of that.

Yeah, seconding AC:Unity being fine at launch. The only thing that was notably wonky about Unity at launch was the multiplayer connectivity, which people didn’t really want to play anyway. One of the most overblown “broken” talking points I can remember.

(Which isn’t to say there weren’t DESIGN issues with the game,…

It should be noted that more so with this console generation than any in the past, video of games is going to look significantly worse than the game actually in action. Compression does a number on a lot of these, and the video itself is almost always going to be coming at either a lower resolution or framerate (or…

I agree with this 100%, but I would also make a note that this kind of console tribalism has been stoked, hugely, by company marketing campaigns designed to sell products and tie people’s identities to brand loyalty.

I would contend that the really busy Microsoft UI only really works on the Series X|S. Was still chonky as heck on my One X (which, as you say, was primarily purchased for me so I could watch 4K Blurays).

Honestly, the real reason the Xbox One felt superfluous was that due to various reasons (the 2013 launch hardware…

Yeah, the Xbox One wasn’t exactly a “bad” system, but it felt really pointless, and the launch version was inferior to the PS4 in just about every important way. Even when I got a One X, it was very rare that there was anything different enough to make me switch it to the “good” HDMI port (the one with HDR/60) in lieu…

Hold up: Is that TV on a board on top of a radiator?

I don’t know if it’s “Japan to English” lyrics so much as it’s a recreation of the lyrics in Bond themes. Or maybe both are one and the same.

If I had to rank all of the James Bond themes through the years, I almost think Snake Eater is the best one. Yes, the pastiche of a James Bond theme is better than the actual James Bond themes. And so much of that comes down to Harrell’s voice.

That’s only supposed to work if you take out their shield generators first!

For what it’s worth, the turn-based combat of BG3 is much closer to actual D&D 5E combat than Baldur’s Gate 1/2 were to D&D 2E combat (DOS is too, for that matter).

Not that it matters much if you aren’t having fun.

FWIW Baldur’s Gate 3 absolutely leans on the whole “the floor is covered in oil and is now on fire” thing much les that OS2 did.

The combat is for sure turn-based and tactical, but that’s more that DOS/DOS2 are fundamentally inspired by D&D 5E combat. An accurate representation of 5E combat is going to feel like DOS2

It’s a D&D game set in the Forgotten Realms specifically in and around the city of Baldur’s Gate and it specifically treats the other games (which happen 100 years before the current D&D timeline) as canon.