My understanding is that Nintendo has some strange company philosophy towards online connectivity that greatly prioritizes privacy/non-discoverability over everything else. My layman’s take would be something about how Nintendo products are so frequently aimed at children and how there’s a very real brand risk for…

In a word: reach.

First thing I thought was “Survival” as in the genre of the game. It doesn’t really make sense as an answer, but with a big of English-as-a-Second-Language going on, I could see it as some (weird) way to show excitement that this game is a Survival-style horror game. It’s unsatisfying as an answer but I think the…

Just think, someone (probably several someones) looked at that and thought: “This is a good idea.” Christ.

Silvio Dante disliked that.

Couldn’t agree more. I’m 39 with a family and a full-time job. Games like Sekiro look fantastic—and I did buy it and play a bunch of it—but eventually I just didn’t have enough time to master its unforgiving mechanics and gave up on exploring what was undoubtedly a very, very cool world past where I got stuck. In that…

pro-life

I didn’t follow very closely this year but seems like most releases are 2022? If so it’s a bit disappointing, though I like Nintendo’s strategy of waiting to announce close to release dates--quite a few items I’m interested in there.

I think you can have post-apocalyptic and not lonely all in one package. Fallout has done this well enough, where obviously you’re in some kind of wasteland but people are trying to make a go of it anyway—sometimes in hopeful-ish ways but very often in darker, dire ways that help sell just how rough things are.

Agreed. I don’t need multiple towns/lived-in spaces on the scale of a huge JRPG but it would be nice if they could make it feel less... lonely? I’m also very much hoping for full dungeons this time around and a better variety in boss battles.

Lots of good advice to you in this thread but I’ll add a nuance: Get it to market. Trends do happen and if you’re self-publishing, you will want to ride those trends before the niche/sub-market is saturated. Case in point, Dark Fantasy/Grim Fantasy. There was a time when people were really getting excited for it…

Oh I’m sure you’ll change your tune when you find out Elden Ring has decided to take a note from Returnal’s book and not include being able to save the game #gitgud

Not that I particularly care, but it is funny to me how Western appropriation of non-Western culture/mythology often gets heat but Japanese appropriation of any culture is seen as amusing/exciting/benign.

All I want is to be given some options on how to play. As beautiful as Sekiro was, its singular focus on a specific type of combat which I am absolutely terrible at made it so that I eventually just gave up. I get that different Souls-y games have different shticks, but I’d much prefer variations like with Bloodborne…

That brings up an interesting question: Is what limits the playerbase for narrative games the budget?

The exception may be hardware that does something more than show games and have a basic input method (controller), which is in some ways Nintendo’s recent wheelhouse. If you need to own a piece of hardware to get a certain experience, then it creates an option to pull away from the box-less streaming set--unless of…

I’m not sure it’s as easy a jump as Sony thinks it is. Consider that MS has an entire very successful cloud infrastructure business which they can learn from for their gaming streaming and Sony doesn’t have anything comparable, to my knowledge.

I’ve heard the point about CYOA + narrative games and their foray into Bandersnatch, but it just doesn’t seem like a big enough of a genre to be worth the investment, though who knows. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to the option for free though I doubt I’d pay for it.

Very true--I was sort of talking about this gen but it’s really not fair to say that yet. I really enjoyed my 360 and its line-up (and boy do I wish the Xbone had more stuff for it not on PS4).