I was definitely very bummed with just how much Alan Wake ended up injecting itself into Control, and I say this as somebody who loved Alan Wake. I don’t mind Bright Falls being an AWE, and I don’t even hate it getting its own DLC, but they really keep making it feel like AW is supposed to overshadow Control and that…

The amount of times I *haven’t* been trapped in quicksand is a lot more than I was expecting.

Ugh, you hit the nail on the head for everything. I remember reading some stuff ages ago that suggested in an alternate world, you’d have two games, one a galactic war against an interstellar threat—a war game—and the other, the frontier justice story about basically being space cowboys/spies/whatever spectres were.

Oh you know I 100% wasn’t actually thinking about the physical need for her to have done so before the end of the trilogy. That’s my bad.

Though maybe if she “survived” the ending somehow she still could, we just never see it.

I definitely get what you mean. Shepard starts as a good little soldier (I mean, they’re a pretty great one at the start, all things considered, but they are still ultimately that—a soldier, which follow orders), and they grow into this interesting character (on the strength of voice performances more than anything…

Does the galaxy of the future still have to cleave to patriarchal surname conventions? And even if so, does FemShep, of all people, give one single fuck? Her kid’s taking her name and dad’s gotta deal with it.

God, yes, THIS. There will NEVER be a way to satisfyingly answer anything in the OT, not without annoying so much of the fanbase who *didn’t* pick x, y, or z option. But the galaxy is great, the races, the overall dynamics. Just... do that. Soft reboot it if you have to, or set it so far in the future as to be a soft…

Cannot agree more with you. There were so many cool moments and even set-pieces in ME3 but even early on it was clear that the thing they had built was too big and ungainly to deliver on any of them. The best of Bioware’s games of this era (Dragon Age and Mass Effect) were the parts that focused on character (I…

You might like this.

I’ll absolutely take a LoK remake. I feel like it could pretty easily translate to a soulslike formula, but one with a greater focus on story scenes. Conversely, something like Shadow of Mordor would work for Soul Reaver--populate different regions with procedurally-generated vampires, with the fixed brothers at the…

Well that’s what I mean. This has languished in development for so long, been through, what, two reboots—three? Lost a bunch of leaders, like project leads and creative directors. Live service switch turned on partway through, then turned off again. A pandemic.

Good for them!

Yes! That’s the kinda stuff I mean--so out there, so strange. It’s just a shame that even that is just a set dressing, and you can’t really go any deeper to find out more.

I feel that. I’ve restarted a bunch of times and have never gotten to endgame. I burn out, and while there feels like ever more things to do, the actual things you’re doing don’t go deep enough to keep me, personally, going.

When I first tried this game it was like two years after release, and I was blown away by how much of a deeply unsettling cosmic horror vibe there was to it. I was really surprised because I didn’t really remember any reviews or whatever going into that, but I don’t think that undercurrent was something added…

I’m neither Diablo people nor Blizzard people, the only one I ever played was 3 and I thought it was great (I played well after the auction house thing), and then again when it showed up on Switch—and that game felt like it was built for the switch. Portability worked for that style of game way more than being locked…

My god I hated that FFXV felt like a GQ road trip. I mean, I didn’t hate that, I actually loved *that*, it was gay as shit and I made that subtext text in my headcanon, but it was so weird seeing hyper-real looking models in all black silk and leather—camping. Running around in the mud and the dirt and sleeping in…

I agree (especially with FF7r, what a mess that game was, I STILL don’t understand how so many people give it not only a pass, but glowing reviews as though the combat was some revolutionary gold standard), EXCEPT for 12—I really liked 12, and I thought it was a good evolution of ATB. Setting up gambits wasn’t just a…

You could normalize damage in PvP so that (conceptual example) instead of invader dealing 350 damage per swing even though easy-mode player has 1500 health instead of the base 1,000, invader deals 35% of whatever the player’s health is—this would normalize PvP such that extremely overpowered but *technically*…

From frequently spends a lot of time and mechanics making you *unlearn* what the last franchise taught you, BUT since Elden Ring is mechanically almost identical to Dark Souls this is definitely less the case. Bloodborne and Sekiro though? Might actually be harder (in some respects) if you are familiar with Souls.…