Check out JALI Driven Expressive Facial Animation & Multilingual Speech - there’s a YouTube video about it being developed and used in Cyberpunk 2077, and it actually includes things like the eye twitches as part of creating the facial animations.

And the author of the article is just some blogger paid to write hot takes on Kotaku.

Looking through it, the free track rewards in particular feel really lackluster as well, even at the higher end.

What janky ass battle passes are you experiencing?

That it would use the tried and true approach to Battle Passes that so many others use, where you get smaller increments from just playing and big meaty jumps from challenges.

I don’t think that’s what they are getting at — it’s that if you don’t complete a challenge, regardless of your experience in the game itself — you get no progress. Zilch. Nada.

Doesn’t force you too, but it signposts it twice - once explicitly, when an NPC in a main story cutscene points them out and you see the NPC, and then again when you actually reach the level where you can do it.

Which, so far, has been my experience in B4B. The cutscenes are basically the load-in or load-out moment at the beginning or end of chunks of missions, and outside of the one that plays going from the Prologue into the Fort, are quite short...and barely have any dialog.

Yet the card system, coupled with the modular options on weapons, is what I enjoy more than the “everyone is the same” approach L4D2 uses.

Perhaps an outlier on this website - move into the general Switch owning public and you’ll find that an approximately $4 a month cost for a subscription package isn’t going to be turning heads much.

Pretty much.

The odd part is that for everyone of these removed there’s typically another that has the same kind of humor that is still in the game (minus the ones that tend to trade in racial tropes/stereotypes, gender/sexual orientation, and any that are in the “dubious consent” category like the dwarven one about a drink -…

On New Game+ and carrying things over.

You’re essentially right about her in the first half, she’s very short with pretty much everyone and very standoffish.

The Fiend/World’s Collide similarities are basically the rhymes that you mention.

I hear immediate shifts when they switch between songs.

The part that you’re missing (a lot of people do) is that the GKMM is essentially using a leitmotif from Mog’s Theme.

Good King Moogle Mog (the FFXIV specific song) being similar - in the way that you are suggesting, that there was a degree of intentionality behind it - to This is Halloween is dependent on whether or not Mog’s Theme from FFVI was inspired by it, as that is the song it is heavily based on.

People aren’t happy because there’s 20 years of QOL and standard industry improvements missing

It may not have a place in a modern game, which are often designed from the ground up with things like shared loot in mind.