I think this highlights a gap in the gaming services market that hopefully somebody will eventually fill. Online play in general has become much simpler over the years, at least for developers to implement. It used to be everyone had to do it all themselves - so much so that the notion that users might pay $50 a year…

Perhaps - but I think that in the grand scheme of things this is probably a net positive for the industry. For better or for worse, it is getting too hard to exist for a long time as a small, independent studio. You need to be aligned with a large group of some kind - if you aren’t, you are either one bad game away…

Ratchet and Clank was at least marketed as being impossible to do without a (reasonably fast) SSD. And in general if you look at later-gen games from the PS4/Xbox One generation in comparison to the 360/PS3 generation, you’ll find stuff (primarily related to world size, but I think perhaps also related to animation…

If you expand the definition to “games that look better than they could on last gen” then I feel like you’d have to include games that are indeed cross-gen, like Forza Horizon 5. The core of Demon’s Souls is a PS3 game, it totally could have existed on PS4 in a less pretty fashion.

Good as it is, that game is only “true next gen” if your definition of next gen is just that the previous gen can’t buy it. If your definition is “game that uses the power of the current generation to do something that was otherwise not possible”, then we’ve got...Ratchet & Clank? I can’t think of another example that…

About time. They were talking about this back when they announced the damn thing (I swear I remember an early version of the box even advertising its presence, though I can’t find the image now). I’ve been harping on them to get around to launching this for a year and a half now.

Ironically, while what you say is true, it is being somewhat abandoned with the presence of VRR. Xbox Series X versions of games actually often have slightly less stable framerates than their PS5 counterparts, in exchange for higher DRS windows - presumably because the devs know that they can let VRR cover up the…

I don’t think there are many of those on the PS5, if any. Every game that has been cross-platform has to be capable of dealing with wildly unpredictable framerates when running on PC, and almost all of them support VRR in their PC and/or Xbox versions. So we’d have to be looking at just the set of true PS5 exclusives,…

I’d say that that means that Apple needs to improve their tools, and at best this policy is premature, not fundamentally bad.

There were rumors that they paid AMD for chipset priority. They also just generally have greater purchasing power because they’re buying a much larger number of chips - not because they’re trying to make way more consoles than Sony, but because they also use those same chips in their datacenter for cloud streaming. I…

Yes, but I don’t do iOS dev. If the toolchain breaks with updates with frequency, then that’s a separate problem and Apple indeed should be called out for it being a problem. We’re not talking about changing language version here, and obviously the APIs still work or else the app would just be broken. We’re just…

When a new android or iOS comes out you should be able to certify for it and leave alone

I don’t actually know that I agree with the idea that this is unreasonable. They aren’t actually asking them to change anything - they just want them to rebuild their app with the current toolchain and re-release it...once every two years. The internals of the compiled binaries will presumably be better aligned to…

Destiny 2 is also PVP and they are really stringent about wanting things to be as close to the same across modes as possible - lots of nerfs are due to that point alone.

Well, kind of, yea. It’s definitely about not trusting you (or rather the playerbase in aggregate). They’re worried that one gun being really overpowered will make everyone gravitate towards it, and then will make them bored, and then will kill their engagement and lower the profit-making potential of future DLC.

I thought they did a much better job in BL3 of making weapons worth using - at least at the higher rarities. They also did a much better job of making weapons worth buying.

They’re instanced by default in BL3, but you can turn on non-instanced loot if you want to.

Elden Ring and Outriders, Dragonball Xenoverse, use the Theory of Asymetrical power balance. True balance comes from allowing stuff to be powerful, and buffing other stuff to the overpowered content.

It begs the question of what sets a BR apart from an old school last man standing mode? Kind of seems like it is the scale to me. This with 12 is going to feel very different from the modes that have 60+

If you read the Waypoint article on this, they do talk a lot about the problems that made king of the hill less fun than it could be, and how they’ve tried to address them. I actually think the new versions sound like a lot of fun but of course I’ll have to play them to be sure.