I’d argue it was more, “Despite how much fans clamored for couch co-op, we knew intimately how few people used it, and decided it wasn’t worth the development time and resources. We just can’t say that because it’ll cause an even bigger shitstorm than lying to you all.”

It was truly astonishing how out-of-touch with a general audience the Wildstar devs were. The “attunement” grind for their raid instances was pulled straight from World of Warcraft... something that WoW dropped pretty much entirely after Burning Crusade, because outside of a small handful of raiders that loved the…

I remember back in the day when I actively played World of Warcraft. Nearing the tail end of Cataclysm, the rift between “hardcore” raid and PvP players and “casual scrubs” was reaching a crescendo, and throughout the raiding guild I was in, were whispers of “WildStar;” a game that understood what “real MMO fans”…

Freelancer had a lot of good stuff about it.  It's ending missions clearly suffered from a rush to get the game out on shelves, but there was definitely a great game in there that capable management could have coaxed out.

Alternate headline:

A lot of the issues that people claimed to have with FF13 (the abandoment of illusion of choice, limited exploration, etc...) had their roots in FFX.  It just came to a head with XIII dialing it up to 11.

I think he was trying to say they had a direct line to hardware makers that Western developers didn’t have, which gave them an edge when it came to creating software that could take full advantage of that hardware.

Also to note; Nintendo is able to keep doing this specialized hardware thing only BECAUSE they have so much internal talent and IPs to lean on. Without it, they would have failed as hard as any other Japanese publisher (and even WITH those internal advantages it got pretty dicey during the Wii-U period).

Well, there was also that entire part where he supported the Gamergate movement unironically, because he genuinely thought they were actually about ethics in gaming journalism.

I’m more amused that she thinks it’s not already too late.

Nintendo was flooding my social media with posts and ads about it. Probably just the mighty algorithm targeting me as a likely buyer, I guess.

No lie, I had no idea it was a multi-platform release because I only ever saw promotion of it from Nintendo.

I’m not going to give Twitch chat the benefit of the doubt.   They don’t deserve it.

What I’ll say is that the promotional material for the expansion didn’t suggest new tracks or characters to begin with... so I’d say the statement released does NOT inherently preclude outside characters, either.

Translation: “We want the AI that’s capable of telling transphobic jokes for... ya know... reasons.”

I’d contend having the option of being an asshole without consequences is an ideal of the people who made this game.

I guess my question is... how many of the guys actually meet the standard you’re looking for? Because honestly... as far as characterization goes, it’s ALL relatively thin gruel.

I have two thoughts.

The problem there is that fans and consumers have rather conclusively demonstrated they don’t want new IPs. Look at pretty much every top-seller list among any type of media. They are overwhelmingly dominated by sequels, reboots, and remakes.  New IPs breaking through the morass are exceedingly rare.

The problem is that the money they want isn’t in single player RPGs. It’s in the micro-transaction, season pass, nickle-and-dime, massive multiplayer mobile-style games.