It isn’t that much of a stretch to think the completionist ending of ME3 is the true canon one.

I don’t know if the licensing costs are that much of a factor actually. The thing is that that license was acquired at the Squenix level, it wouldn’t be part of the accounting for each studio. And it’s likely an ongoing business expense to hold onto it, not something directly factored into the budget for each game.

That’s actually a really good point regarding the Uncharted comparison, that definitely had to be in their minds when they did the reboot. And to be fair, building a whole bespoke engine for the games rather than using something off the shelf likely was a big part of the extra cost and aside from Shadow still being a…

Felt like they also didn’t really market it. It felt like it was shown at E3 or something to pretty mixed reception - didn’t demo well, had same issue as Avengers with the “MCU but with the stunt doubles” look and feel. Was not at all obvious it was a proper single player RPG. They never really bothered to try and…

I don’t know if it’s true they can’t afford to be in it, but rather that they can’t afford to be in it without stuff that is a sure-fire hit. Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy 16 are both AAA games which will easily make back every cent they spend and more. I think the last couple expansions for FF 14 were…

The faulty assumption here is that account freeloaders are actually potential subs in the first place.

Honestly I think that’s part of the problem too - does Tomb Raider *need* to be an epic AAA experience with performance captured dialogue and all that? Or would people be happy if it was just a fun action platformer that was light on story and strong on Tombs and the Raiding thereof? It’s quite possible that they were…

They all made perfectly fine numbers. The problem is that to be significantly profitable they needed to make much higher numbers. It’s a risk/reward thing - spending $95 million or so to only make $100 million is not really that compelling a proposition, that’s a *lot* of money to invest and not much return even on a…

Might depend on your headset and your personal physiology. I played through the entire campaign in two sessions without too much of a problem, and it was the first substantial thing I played in VR on a then brand new headset (HP Reverb G2) so hadn’t really built up any tolerance. Worst it did was make me sweat a bit,…

To be fair, if you look at the financials for the studios they’re selling, they are barely keeping their heads above water. Eidos Montreal had revenue of nearly $100m in FY 22 but their net profit after expenses was around $650k. Crystal Dynamics fared slightly better, but cost about as much to run and their profit…

If you’ve got a VR headset, strongly encourage trying out Squadrons in VR. It’s already a solid game but the VR elevates the experience enormously. 

Yeah this has been my experience too. Great game right up until it glitches out on you. Probably about the same point as you in terms of how much I’ve done of it all, have only just arrived at Maz’s so not sure I’m stuck yet. Have had the game lock up and require a forced quit & restart five times, one infinite death…

Who was it that decided to wish for a new Jet Set Radio game using a monkey’s paw?

Patching out things that players were using to have fun. They truly have become Bungie’s successor.

Discord is at least an attempt at simultaneously replacing IRC, voice chat, Wiki pages, Gamefaqs and Forums.

This isn’t a unix epoch overflow thing (that would cause problems in 2038, not 2022), obviously there is a system somewhere online that gets queried whether the downloaded game has expired or not and it is either timing out or returning an error, and as a result the timestamp being looked up is 0 (which is midnight on …

IMO this ends up being unplayably dark in a lot of the footage. Doom’s levels were not designed to be properly lit like this, so there’s a lot of areas which don’t have any proper light sources and without those, the areas are not lit up properly at all.

Commander Keen exists though...

“but while gifs have always held at least some basic animation functionality, that aspect of their use didn’t really take off until the 1990s”

That’s what the chip they install at orientation is meant to do, isn’t it? :P