‘Your entire arsenal can’t be Wardcliff Coil’ - I remember this being a huge problem, in that every. Single. Gun. Had some kind of ‘wacky’, screen-filling craziness that made everything a riot of particle effects and bright colors... but if they all do that, then all you’ve left me with is the sensation of playing…

Yeah, Borderlands 3 very much felt like ‘the sequel they should have released 2-3 years after the second game’, rather than ten years later. It just felt like a ‘late 2000s’ shooter, which, given how much FPS games improved over the last decade, meant it felt like it was twenty years out of date.

I’m another in the ‘beat 2 multiple times; made it... maybe halfway through 3' group. Even played it with the same co-op partner as 2!

As a fan of the art form of video games (but personally completely out to sea on actual programming and coding and whatnot), it’s always cool to pick up these little details of ‘how the sausage gets made’, so to speak. Thanks!

Which, honestly, is the interesting part of this story to me: it’s not that we should be ‘celebrating’ Paradox for meeting the bare minimum of a response - what’s worth celebrating is the fact that the report was commissioned and allowed to see the light of day at all, which is, of course, down to the unions who…

Fair enough - though I think you’re probably underselling the work it takes to do cute well. I also think the very notion of ‘glut’ complicates your thesis, somewhat: if everyone’s doing cute for their ‘broke and desperate’ games, it’s going to be much harder for any given developer’s cute game to get any traction.

For sure; in terms of ‘this is where the industry as a whole is at’, it’s a damning indictment. If a similar report had come out about, say, Coca-Cola - or even another tech-centered company, Google or Facebook - I sincerely doubt anyone would be lining up to hand them plaudits for meeting the baseline of…

I’ve had it (and ‘Signal From Tolva’ from the same devs) on my list of ‘pick these up when you finally get a PC that can run a game more complex than solitaire’ for... well, quite some time, now.

I’m probably reading way too much into this, but I feel like the pendulum started shifting toward ‘cute’ during the Facebook/mobile gaming era - as a response to the ‘frat bro grim ‘n grunty’ attitude of console gaming at the time - and hasn’t quite evened out since.

Taking all these together as a kind of unofficial ‘state of the indie games industry’, I find it fascinating how much ‘cute’, as a general aesthetic, has kind of come to dominate. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily - I certainly prefer ‘cute’ over ‘aggressively grim’, ‘needlessly sexualized’, or ‘Mountain Dew style-XTRE…

Yeah, the main character never exactly struck me as a brain trust, but that’s the sort of thing I can forgive if it’s being done on purpose, which I sort of thought that it was? My issue was more that, because each episode took place in a new location, they had to spent at least half the episode sketching out an…

I mean, you’re not wrong, I just don’t know that ‘hey, they managed to clear the absurdly low bar of having some form of cohesive response’ is really worth celebrating, you know? Especially since this isn’t the first time this sort of thing has come out about Paradox - I distinctly remember something a couple of years…

Well put. If you want a recent version of this narrative, look no further than CDProjektRed, who worked really, really hard to portray themselves as the ‘goshdarn good-natured lil guy up against the big mean bullies of gaming’... whilst putting their employees through exactly the same hell as those ‘big mean bullies’…

Yeah, it’s a decent enough response as that sort of thing goes... but it’s also exactly what you’d expect that response to be. No company with a functional PR department is going to respond to this sort of thing with ‘yeah, working here sucks, especially for women, but whatchagonnado?’ (I’m still amazed Activision…

I didn’t realize that, thank you! That at least puts it back on my ‘pick up on sale at some point’ list. (For the original poster: Deck 9 was responsible for Before the Storm.)

I don’t necessarily plan to play the new one; like you, I really enjoyed the first one, thought the second one was... a bit much, and was relatively apathetic toward Tell Me Why and Twin Mirror, so their track record is pretty rocky at this point. I will say, though, if you enjoyed the first one, I quite liked the…

I also think it’s slightly ironic that a LOT of those policies that doomed the initial Xbox One, from the perspective of hindsight, were very clearly meant to smooth the way toward a GamePass-like subscription service, and GamePass is a large part of the reason Microsoft is considered the more ‘consumer friendly’ of…

I’d be curious to know if purchasing habits, at the very least, skew less toward digital in the Japanese marketplace - if digital sales aren’t ‘big’ in what Sony and Nintendo consider their primary market, it might explain why they’re not reacting as quickly to this sort of thing.

I think you’re definitely right - with the Dreaming City, and I’m starting to get there with the Moon - I just feel like there are things Bungie could do to try and stop that from happening in the first place, you know? Spread the activities out a little bit; not every single piece of new content for an expansion…

I’d always assumed that said ‘10 year plan’ with Activision influenced the structure of the game’s narrative as well, to a certain degree: granted, television doesn’t work like this, but if a network said to a showrunner ‘okay, you’re guaranteed ten years on the air’, said showrunner would probably start designing a…