I don’t believe that for a second personally. Sony may not have explicitly told them to cut staff, but I guarantee you Sony would have had to approve the cuts, and that Sony would have done the numbers, realized they were going to be making a major loss and gone to the studio heads and basically told them to find a…

They allocated $1.2 billion for ‘staff retention’ as part of the acquisition, so to turn around a year later and gut the studio really seems like Sony just setting money on fire.

Mass Effect 1 had a whole bunch of procedurally (they were pre-baked, but had been clearly built procedurally) worlds to explore and a core set of crafted story planets too.

The follow-up stuff (Advent Children etc) was set directly afterward though, that post-credits scene in the original game was meant to be hundreds of years later.

I don’t replay that much, but I *do* have a significant backlog, and there are usually games coming out for the old system for a good couple of years. When you have backwards compatibility it means that even if the initial game lineup on the new system isn’t amazing, you can still switch to the new system and pick up…

Disagree that The Answer is not worth playing, it adds a lot of closure that was missing from the original game.

Maybe. They use the Cyclone V IIRC, same as the MiSTer (which uses the DE-10 Nano which is a Cyclone V board), and that’s a ~5 year old SoC and they’re actually getting quite expensive to source since Intel sucked up Altera. There are more powerful FPGAs on the market but they’re maybe not as flexible, however that…

It’s no longer offensively massive but the design is still bad corporate sculpture, gives the old old George Foreman Grill PS3 Phat a run for the money for Ugliest Sony Console IMO. The tacked-on disc drive still looks like an afterthought, you can see what direction Sony really wanted to go with regard to physical…

Their stuff isn’t usually that expensive, the issue is that they sell out in seconds, usually sold to scalpers that throw them up on ebay for eye-watering prices.

This is mainly because the idea of “iconic mascot characters” really largely fell out of fashion during the bulk of the 2000s. Even Sony doesn’t really have the iconic roster you’re making out. Kratos and Nathan Drake and the Sackboy and Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank and beyond that you’re already starting to…

I ended up 100%ing Valhalla due to sunk cost fallacy, cleared everything from the map. It was not worth it. It’s exactly what you say, the game was far too padded out with nonsense and repetition, there was a good 25-30 hour game trapped inside a 80+ hour experience. I appreciate that they wanted to make the world…

Oh, now I understand you. Yeah, that is actually a bit odd. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what that’s all about. There’s a good chance the stuff with Zack and Cloud together is misdirection to suggest he pulled Cloud out of the rubble when actually it’s events that happened before the start of Remake too.

In the early 90s games varied *massively* in price, mainly depending on how complex the cartridge was. Some of them certainly were $40. NES games generally were in the $30-40 range, but SNES was $50-60 with some carts going as high as $75-80 at launch (FF III SNES (i.e. FF6) for example was $79.99). N64 carts were…

Maybe, and I know this is a radical idea, but maybe rather than trying to squeeze customers for ever more money for the same mediocre by-the-numbers AAA garbage, it could be an idea to get the budgets under control by making more tightly scoped games? Not everything needs to be padded out to 60-80 hours with open…

Yes, but what is your point? Everyone who’s played the game knows this, I’m not sure what you’re trying to convey by pointing out the obvious here. It didn’t happen in the original, but this isn’t the original and it clearly does happen in Rebirth.

Yes, but this isn’t the original game any more so I don’t see how that’s relevant. You didn’t have to fight off Sephiroth as he fucked up half of Midgar at the end of the first act in the original either.

Pretty good chance it *does* involve Astarion and the reason he knows about it is that he had to do some kind of work for the segment, and was told the context of where it appears in the game, which is why he’s one of the few people who does know it’s there.

There’s been a couple of shots in trailers that seemed to show the crew getting hauled out of the rubble from the ending of Remake on stretchers and stuff, so presumably a “they took all our stuff / all our gear got broken” situation.

This is pretty common with Squenix stuff, they want people to buy the Digital version (as it has much higher margin due to no need to produce and distribute a physical disc) so they often give it more bonuses.

“intends to whittle down the number of smaller titles and decrease outsourcing to focus on big-budget games with higher potential to improve the company’s profitability.”