yep it all depends on how agregious the grind is. My personal favorite battlepass implementation is super animal royale. you can earn experience on the current battlepass while also earning on an archived pass which actually encourages you to only play as much as you want as taking a hiatus just means you earn double…

These things should be the norm, not the exception. I’m hopeful the game is good because I’m hopeful all games are good, but I’m especially hopeful this game blows up because everyone else doing live service games need to learn these lessons and apply them. No more FOMO, let people keep the content they pay for, and…

They did the never-expire Battlepasses for Halo Infinite and depending on how it’s done, it’s not necessarily a good thing. The amount of time to clear a battlepass for that game was pretty high for my kid (they stopped bothering after realizing they were playing not for fun but to get their quota each day - a…

Honestly? Rocksteady might’ve cracked the code, despite not wanting a live-service game, everything they’ve revealed so far for their live-service game sounds pretty good.

Exactly. The pacing complaints are generally made by people who hate the game because Joel died but they want to have a more rational complaint or by people who are trying to find some sort of middle ground to explain the backlash to the game. 

Exactly this. If you know Abby’s reasoning before Ellie has completed her mission, it completely blunts the impact of that reveal. We better not learn why Abby did it until Ellie has killed EVERYONE.

Not to add to an already absurdly long comment, but I just realized that I should stress that my approach of analyzing art initially through the lens of the artist’s intent is not the only approach. Some people reject that line of thinking outright. That’s why the phrase “death of the author” exists.

Moving Joel’s death later would only work if they want to tell a completely different story with completely different themes. What about any of their public comments or handling of the first game would make you think they’d do that?

This happens all the time to projects that are two years into development. Six? That’s a little unusual. But if anyone would do it, it would be Blizzard (and I mean that as a compliment, not an insult).

$69 billion merger, missed growth projection for GamePass, standard merger practice of playing off redundant positions, and the beginning of a fiscal quarter.

It absolutely worked. There is nothing wrong with storytelling being manipulative. Complaining about it is more an indictment of the complainer and not the media itself.

This is the worst possible way to do it. The entire point is to hate Abby the way Ellie does and THEN seeing the other side 

I am so tired of reading about how difficult these decisions are to fire people when companies constantly do it. Must be as difficult as forcing developers to use a broken engine because it has a feature that has execs seeing dollar signs

That said, Blizzard cancelling a game codes as good news to me, they haven’t released a good game in nearly a decade.

the “Report:” in front of stories like this should hopefully clarify that this isn’t an original story and is largely based on reporting from another - or multiple - pubs

For those of you who don’t parse marketingspeak, this means they are *not* going to sue Palworld.

Scarlet and Violet launched with the most sales of any single-platform game in history, and twice as many sales as Palworld managed in the first weekend.

This is quite a rambling manifesto. Who took it out of the grays?

I’m too old to think that this will have any effect on Pokémon sales at all.

Yeaaah, I seriously doubt anything will happen, it’s been looked over multiple times by attorneys and the game’s been known for 3 years, if something was going to happen it would’ve and the designs don’t get close enough to infringe on anything.