I actually make it a point not to fiddle with the tuning in the Horizon games: there are so many cars, but if you wind up tuning everything to the top of its class, they’re all going to wind up driving... relatively similarly, really. It helps the different cars feel different, I think, if you don’t autotune (bu-DUM)…

Narrative-focused stuff is definitely Microsoft’s weakness at this point*, but I feel like Sony’s so over-focused on that very specific band of ‘third person narrative-focused action game’ I kinda don’t mind that Microsoft’s basically aiming for ‘okay, let’s do everything but that’.

And honestly, that doesn’t surprise me: I feel like if you regularly play ‘full simulation’ games, they’re going to be pretty easy to adapt to, since they’re all striving to be as close to ‘real life’ as possible. Whereas more arcade-y stuff like Horizon can still be entirely different from whatever the next arcade-y…

I’m absolutely in that camp of ‘generally don’t love driving games, love Forza Horizon’ (and came to it relatively recently, with Forza 4, thanks to GamePass). I think splitting off the ‘serious simulation’ of Motorsport from Horizon’s ‘just have fun’ is probably what makes Horizon so successful with people like me.

I remember being a little nonplussed when they were first announced as the developers of the new Fable, then thinking about Forza Horizon 4 and going ‘it’s basically set in cartoon England, and Fable’s always been set in a cartoon version of England. That actually makes total sense.’

Cheers! It may be a little tough to go back, though: part of the reason I picked up FH3 more or less on a whim is that it was hugely discounted... right before they took it off the market all together. Which I believed has happened with other Forza games as well.

And honestly, if there’s one thing I’m concerned about with the series going downhill rather than up, it’s structure: I started with FH4, then moved backward through 3 and then 2, and I think the basic structure improved each time*, meaning the older the game was, the more I liked its structure.

Have fun!

I had pretty much the exact same attitude toward the series... basically up until quarantine last year, at which point Forza Horizon 4 essentially became my ‘leaving the house simulator’, a task at which it was fantastic at. (Gorgeous scenery, a sense of speed... and no real need to interact with human beings, even…

For me, it depends on how much text/speech there is - and typically, the more passive reading/passive listening I’m likely to do in a game, the more I prefer text.

See, of the three you mentioned, Cloudpunk’s only the one that managed to impress me - and generally, that was in the larger, more ‘panoramic’ driving sequences, where you couldn’t especially tell it was voxel-style at all. But, like I said: to each their own. Some people don’t think 2d sprites are attractive, either.

Absolutely; gaming’s still a relatively new artform, so we’re kind of just now getting to the point where these things are applicable, where there’s an audience old enough to be ‘nostalgic’ toward the first few generations of gaming. It makes sense to be nostalgic for EverQuest, 20 years ago... but 20 years before…

3D Dot Heroes is two for two in terms of ‘people responding to this comment endorsements’, so that’s good to hear. And I definitely agree with you on the ‘NES vs SNES’ perspective - I’m assuming we see so many more ‘NES art’ games just because, well, it’s less complicated, both from an art and from a coding…

I just kind of wonder if it’s like bellbottoms*: if you were old enough to see them the first time ‘round, you’re not gonna be super excited to see them come back. I still associate voxel graphics with early/mid 90s PC games, and I remember being absolutely amazed when games didn’t have to look like that any longer...…

Okay, so nothing against this game or its devs - I’m sure they’re all lovely - but am I the only one who doesn’t find voxel-style game art attractive, at all? ‘Cloudpunk’ is about the only game I’ve liked that used the style that I really liked, and even then, it was only in moments where if you squinted real hard you…

Yep. I’ve got a Series X, got it at launch, and thus far, I don’t really feel the need for any extra storage beyond the 2TB external (non-SSD) I was also using with my Xbox One. I keep a handful of games on the Series X internal - the stuff I play regularly with co-op partners, mostly - in addition to whatever I’m curr…

My regular co-op partner has a Series S, and it’s essentially her ‘GamePass Machine’. There are only three or four games she keeps installed on it at all times (all stuff we play co-op semi-regularly); other than that, her gameplay is ‘download something from GamePass; play it to conclusion; delete from storage’, and…

I completely understand that perspective; I think it really is just a question of how you look at it. I look at paying for a Destiny expansion (and the seasons) less as ‘what do I get specifically for this money’, and more as ‘a subscription paid to keep playing Destiny 2 in general’. Because I know, if I don’t buy…

Fair; I just refuse point-blank to play this sort of thing with random players, mainly because I refuse point-blank to engage in voice chat with random players. I can handle something like ‘Destiny’, where the content that has matchmaking has pretty clearly been designed with players who don’t use voice chat in…

On the ‘Destiny difficulty scale’, I’d say dungeons were definitely on the harder end, just in sheer terms of ‘how much health the enemies have/how much damage they do/how many of them there are’. In those terms, I’d say the dungeons were about level with the first Nightfall difficulty that doesn’t have matchmaking…