But you didn’t really do them at the same time, just very close together...

“What are we going to do tomorrow night?”
“The same thing we do every night, Pinky - look to see if Kentucky Route Zero Act V is ever coming out.”

That’s basically how book advances work too. Publisher pays writer $X (probably not $10M) and then once the book goes on sale, the book must make $X back before royalties begin to be paid out.

I’ll say... I played BL1, Bl2 + Expansions, and then the Pre-sequel and enjoyed all of them quite a bit. Certain stretches of BL2, particularly when you go underground for all the Dahl mining stuff, were fantastically done I thought and super atmospheric.

“try tongue, but hole”

Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champuru are both stupendously sad and nihilistic stories when you get down to it

At the end of the day, most of those are still a bunch of words attached to a collectible trinket. Which is fine. It’s just not particularly engaging when you look at the wider world of games and how games with far less graphical and technical prowess manage to share lore and tell a story.

Totally agreed that high energy / action + stopping to take in lore doesn’t work. But I wouldn’t mind mixing up the core shooting loop to include some downtime exploration that lead to lore-crumbs or activities that encouraged exploring more of the gorgeous environments.

One of my bigger regrets is how so little of the gameplay lets you interact with and explore this lore. The gunplay is fantastic in Destiny and there’s a generally addictive loop, but I really wish a bigger part of that were cerebral and lore-y because when I do dig into it I’m usually very happy.

Everyone’s sitting here excited for these indie games, and I’m just twiddling my thumbs, waiting for Kentucky Route Zero Act 5 (+ TV Edition)....

Are those three flying stars I see?

Am I crazy, or has Kotaku been plugging the hell out of Fire Emblem?

Nah the purple/orange (spice?) actually looks great for a contrast set. Though it is surprising that Nintendo hasn’t leaned into some customization options for a premium surcharge or something.

One word for you: gatekeeping. If an experience can be had by those who didn’t “earn” it the supposed right way, it retroactively devalues the experience had by those who did supposedly earn it.

“One of the neat things about Respawn’s approach to lore is the way that it suggests ideas but never really confirms them, letting players fill in the blanks and come up with stories of their own.”

DERD

“Superior Cockpit Room”

Seriously. An article on best/worst sour candies is one thing, but this is a pretty anemic chart considering how many sour candies there are in the US alone, not even including European items.

You don’t even have all the sour candies in your hero image in your chart...

I thought ‘stan’ was a portmanteau of ‘stalker’ and ‘fan’.