I’m more or less in the same boat - at this point, I flat out don’t buy games until they’re on sale (DLC or expansions occasionally, but never new, full games) - but it still rubs me the wrong way, just the fact that the clear intention is to ‘trick’ people, I think. I also think it stands out a little just because Mic…

If there’s one thing GamePass is great at, it’s getting me to try games I never would have otherwise, for sure. (I’m a Forza devotee because of GamePass as well.)

Oh, I absolutely agree with you that’s the reasoning; I just don’t think it’s necessarily good reasoning. But it’s rare I’m going to come down on the side of ‘we should provide consumers with less information in order to trick them into buying something they wouldn’t have bought if they had more information’, which is…

I’ve thought the same thing - ‘I could pick this up, but stuff from this publisher/developer has wound up on GamePass before...’ - and I feel like it’s something Microsoft could help mitigate by announcing what’s coming significantly further in advance than ‘a couple of weeks’. I’m assuming these deals are all in…

I definitely think you’re right about that multiplayer ‘pressure’, not just from friends that you play with, but in general, the online communities around the game as well: in my (relatively limited) experience with competitive multiplayer, the longer a game is around, the more the user base gets whittled down to just …

It’s definitely been fascinating to watch Bungie and Destiny, not just to see how they try to navigate relatively uncharted waters, but to see how the players react, and why. There were definitely folks who felt like they were being ‘stolen’ from when the content went away: it was content they’d paid for, and now they…

Getting a bit off topic, but one of the interesting things about Destiny, I think - just in terms of player reaction - is that they’ve gone to both ends of the spectrum: jumping from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2 meant you lost everything you’d worked for across three years of Destiny 1, which pissed a lot of people off...…

I get what you’re saying, but I think I’m significantly more sympathetic to the reviewers, just because they have to play so many games that don’t innovate or change or improve, really. To continue with the metaphor I made up top, it’d be like being forced to eat nothing but fast food for weeks at a time - I’d get…

Ah, okay, I didn’t realize it had been quite so long since Horizon 4. I thought I came to it relatively close to release, but it must have been a couple years afterward. 

A) Thank you! and B) no, because I am old and do not know what that is. (You kids these days with your twitching and your discordance and your stacking subs. As bad as the flappers I tells ya!)

I’m really looking forward to this one as well, but as someone who came to the series relatively late - the last title was my first - I feel like ‘three years’ is almost the perfect time between games for this sort of thing. It’s short enough that it’s still ‘comfortingly familiar’, but long enough that it’s also…

Exactly - if you have to have a Shepherd on there for some reason, just slap them in the starting N7 armor, complete with face-obscuring helmet, and be done with it! It’s not like Halo suffered from branding or recognition issues because you can’t see Master Chief’s face.

Hmmmm. I can’t say I 100% agree with your read; frankly, I think you’re giving Ubisoft’s writers a little bit too much credit for what I always took as a much more typical ‘push the envelope just for the sake of shocking the audience’ approach, which has always struck me as more lazy than anything else.

Yeah, it’d be one thing if all I played were this sort of dopamine-extracting, dumb as a box of rocks AAA franchise slurry, but, well, it’s not, and I’m not really gonna feel guilty about enjoying one every once in a while. I just think Far Cry stands out a little to me because I can’t really defend it in any terms oth…

I find it absolutely fascinating that we’ve gone from the FemShep days of ‘pretend it’s not even an option! Put her on the inverse of the game’s front cover so you have to reach in and flip the piece of paper around to see her!’ all the way to ‘pretend the male version isn’t even an option; we want credit for having a…

I get where you’re coming from, but honestly, I tend to prefer the silliness over the stabs at attempted pathos... mainly because I think they’re so much better at the former. You’re right that Far Cry 4 is probably the best of the bunch in the ‘has an actual emotional arc’ category, but it’s not like that ranks it…

I mean, I definitely think that would help, for sure - I just think it’s a lot harder to achieve than that! (Look at how many shows have tried to be Buffy, for example, Charmed and Smallville included.)

I definitely think any gaming series that doesn’t go more than a year or two between games is going to have a bit of that ‘sameishness’ to it, for sure; that’s just part of what happens when you’re designing to a formula. (And that definitely applies equally to your CODs and your Assassin’s Creeds and your…

I definitely think (and admittedly, I’m probably stretching the metaphor too far, here) that there aren’t many I wouldn’t ever have played... but there are more than a few I wouldn’t have gone back to time and time again. And since something like Back 4 Blood requires an outlay of $60 or so (if you’re not on GamePass)…

For me, this is a serious hit to my excitement (I’ve got GamePass, so it’s not like I was going to pay for it anyway) not because of the achievements, but because of the progression. If I can’t ‘move forward’ with the progression system playing solo - which is how I’ll wind up playing most of the game, probably; my…