Not playing tons of FPS games can only help, for sure; I hope you’re still able to enjoy them! They’re definitely solid games - it’s not like they’ve aged poorly, so much as the rest of the FPS market just caught up with them, so playing something like, say, Far Cry offers similarly strong shooting mechanics, but with…

That’s pretty close to my experiences as well; I can still go back to Doom for an hour or so and get that rush of nostalgia, if nothing else, but I don’t quite get that with the Halo franchise. I think part of it is that those games are in a weird place, age-wise, where they don’t feel different enough from the…

In my experience, Halo is one of those weird, ‘it was so influential, if you didn’t play it at the time, it’s a little hard to see what makes it special now, just because its various mechanics and innovations have been so widely copied since its release’.

This sounds like it’s pretty much perfect GamePass material for me, honestly: a well-made example of a genre I’ve never particularly liked in the past, but am still vaguely hoping to have that ‘click in the back of your head, Saul on the road to Damascus’ moment where all of a sudden I do really like a game in that…

Ha! I’m actually the rare beast who thinks Dragon Age II is the best of the Dragon Age series (by the individual metrics I’m interested in, anyway), so I won’t disagree that its approach to both ‘personal’ characterization, and also morality, were significantly more nuanced.

Yeah, I phrased some of that poorly (or rather, unconscious bias made me phrase it poorly since I, personally, played as a Paragon): typically, either Paragon or Renegade choices are consistently ‘better’ than the choices that don’t align with either.

I do think it’s worth noting that one of the things I feel like Mass Effect ‘loses’ on later playthroughs is that... once you’ve played through any one of the games (as a Paragon), you’re pretty well aware that the ‘blue’ options are always guaranteed best-case-scenario outcomes. Like, I think there’s exactly one point…

Mass Effect 1 remains the only game I’ve ever successfully done that with, for pretty much the same reasons you’re describing: it just doesn’t ‘feel good’ to be an asshole, really. Like, in the real world, people make those ‘selfish’ decisions all the time, but that’s because there’s usually an actual, concrete…

Could be, though my impression - from this review and some of the other coverage I’ve read - is that the ‘everything is really fiddly’ approach, in this case, comes across more as ‘the game performing exactly as the developer wants it to’ rather than bugs or kinks or someone not necessarily thinking part of the…

Cheers, thank you! I’m honestly curious how I’ll feel about in 5-10 years as well, because I could see it going either way: if the tech continues to improve and all of a sudden 240 is the standard (or even higher), then, yeah, comparison to 30 will probably feel ‘significant’ even to me. But on the other hand - it’s…

A good thought, but I’m using the HDMI cable that came ‘in the box’ with the Series X - and if Microsoft packed in a cable with their machine that stymies that same machine from taking full advantage of its own hardware, well... that’s honestly a more interesting issue than the relative value of fps!

I’ve had my eye on this for a while, but chances are, I won’t pull the trigger: it’s the sort of thing that’s really impressively ambitious, and I love the various interfaces, and the aesthetic just in general... but just nothing I’ve heard about the gameplay convinces me it’s actually very fun. It all seems to be one…

I dunno; I tend to the think the actual intended audience for the letter is, well, us, more than the actual brass - I read it as more about putting even more external pressure on Activision, really. If nothing else, from an external perspective, it completely undercuts the notion of taking their ‘official’ responses…

And maybe it is the fact that I’m not (primarily) seeing it on a PC; I’m primarily seeing 60fps on a Series X hooked up to a television, and maybe being, you know, six-seven feet away is the difference. If that is the case, though, I’m curious where using the Steam Deck would land, either as a handheld or ‘docked’. (I…

I didn’t say going from 1080p to 4K is unnoticeable, though: I was using that as an example of something that is immediately noticeable, in a way that fps increases just aren’t, to me. But I don’t think anyone would claim that going back from 4k to 1080p was somehow ‘impossible’, which is a claim regularly made by…

Yeah, and that’s the thing: my primary experience with 60fps has been with Destiny, as well - just on a Series X, versus on an Xbox One at 30. And it’s just not that big a deal to me to go back and forth. Like, I register the difference, but it doesn’t ‘throw’ me at all, and it certainly doesn’t effect my gameplay - I…

Yeah, whereas I think I have much the same attitude, but just a little lower down: 30 is a necessity, and 60 is more a luxury. Like, I can tell there is a difference between 30 and 60, I’m just not overwhelmed by it in that ‘I can’t even imagine going back to 30!’ kind of way a lot of people seem to be.

Yeah, that’s the thing with me: I’m in the same boat (playing on a Series X at 60fps, and I’ve gone back to a standard Xbox One at 30fps a couple of times over the six months or so that I’ve had the newer console), and I just... don’t have that same ‘oh god, this is barely playable!’ reaction most other people seem…

Yeah, but that’s the thing: I definitely notice it in Destiny - which lands in two of those camps, in that a) it’s an FPS and b) I play a whole hell of a lot of it, both on my old console and on my new one, so it makes sense the difference would be apparent - I just don’t find it inherently better, and don’t really…

Or at the very least, they could offer some sort of ‘Steam Deck stamp of approval’. Like, given the sheer number of games on Steam it’s probably not fair to expect Valve to optimize Every. Single. One. But I feel like, what, the top ten percent most played, even the top twenty-five percent most played, something like…