I use a controller and I’d never played an MMO before. It’s probably easier for a new MMO player because they don’t have any preconceptions about how MMOs work with keyboard and mouse.

In some ways the base game + expansions is kind of like a series of single player RPGs. Playing through the story of each one takes about 50-70 hours.

The other day Kotaku had an article praising how seamlessly your data migrated from the demo to the full game (and presumably how saves for PS4->PS5 upgrades also work seamlessly). It just works!

To be fair to other developers, this isn’t completely comparable to games which have an awkward PS4->PS5 save transfer system. It’s not necessarily that those developers haven’t put the work in to make it seamless, they simply don’t have the tools to do it.

It is both things. It is technically difficult to bring PS3 backwards compatibility to PS5, and Sony doesn’t think there’s enough money in it for them to bother trying.

A couple of years ago I dug out my Gameboy games, and my Pokemon Blue save was still there. Pretty impressive that the save still works after 20+ years considering it requires constant battery power to retain the data.

Ala Mhigo is middle eastern, but for some reason they all have Yorkshire accents. I’m all for British regional accents (the Dragon Quest games are great for that), but I wonder why they associated that accent with that location.

At a minimum, Sony really should have added a way for PS5 games to read PS4 save data. Even if it’s not seamless like it is on Xbox, if there was a way for a PS5 game to directly import save data from a PS4 game it would make things so much more convenient.

I think this is why Sony didn’t put that much effort into this cross-gen stuff. Yeah it makes the transition to the new generation more cumbersome, but in a couple of years it will be irrelevant and no one will care.

Are they loot boxes or are they “fun surprises”?

Part of the reason is memory fragmentation. If you selectively unload assets you end up with gaps in memory which might be the wrong size to fit in the new assets you need to load and you run out of usable memory.

Your egg inventory is limited though. The faster you can hatch eggs, the more chances you get. So in other words, you can pay for more chances to get something you want.

They absolutely are loot boxes. Maybe Pokemon Go’s implementation of loot boxes aren’t as predatory as other games, but fundamentally they are still loot boxes. The fact that you don’t “need” to buy them doesn’t stop them being lootboxes. That’s the same in a lot of F2P games where you can grind lootboxes through play.

It’s difficult to get the balance right. If there are too many viable ways to play it can sometimes feel like it doesn’t matter what you do.

It’s funny, in the UK the gambling commission uses the opposite reasoning for why video game loot boxes don’t count as gambling. They say that as the items you win have no real world value it doesn’t count as gambling.

FFXIII really is the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. It is easily the least Final Fantasy-like Final Fantasy, and as such I always find myself wondering how much better received it would have been if it simply... weren’t a Final Fantasy game. Maybe if it weren’t tied down by the “Final Fantasy brand” then it…

I’m no expert, but I’d have thought it would count as copyright infringement if you decompile the code and then distribute it, even if the EULA didn’t explicitly prohibit it.

The eventual PC version, which will support higher resolutions and frame rates, will also cost $40, which is not remotely fair but oh well.

But at the same time it’s a shame Kotaku has lost this talent, and now has to report on it second hand.

Blue Dragon was also ok. I haven’t played it, but I’ve heard The Last Story was also decent.