Sea of Thieves seems to be doing pretty well, but yeah, I doubt MS was aware just how much talent Rare lost when ex-employees formed Free Radical a couple years before MS’s acquisition. 

1oo%. Almost every person I’ve talked to who screamed about videogame journalists being biased shills has done so because the journalist didn’t support their personal brand of vg bias enough.

Kinda cheating because it’s a BotW/Assassin’s Creed hybrid, but Immortals: Fenyx proves to me that Ubisoft can pull off what you’re looking for. The game world isn’t BotW big (at least, I don’t think it is, but it’s been a couple years since I touched BotW), but the entire thing is 1) distinct-looking and 2)…

This is a nice, and patient answer from you, Dennis. 

I just said that people get hyped up for shit they want to experience themselves, and you said “people will discover on their own.”

I meant hype for the individual players anticipating new loot/events/storylines/etc., not for the game. You’re right that the game itself is pretty much set at this point.

I mean, I’ve definitely run into random comments in the main Destiny sub that have spoiled shit for me, because it’s hard to police every single comment on such an active sub.

I get both sides on this, because datamining shit does ruin some of the fun, especially in a game like Destiny where you’ll have community-wide events to try and figure riddles and stuff out.

don’t tell him about Mario Maker

“Only as hard as Dark Souls 3!” probably isn’t a ringing endorsement to people who haven’t been able to get into From’s games until now due to difficulty, lol.

Totally feel this. The Dark Souls games are one of the very few exceptions to my “I’m lazy and just want to have fun, so I’m not playing a very hard game” rule. 

It’s pretty easy to figure out why they’re losing money on GP currently: They’re probably paying a bunch of money to get games on the service, but more importantly, they also gave out a ton of free or discounted months as upgrades for those who had XBL Gold.

This is actually one of my favorite side benefits; playing games I already own without the disc (...which was something MS promised initially with the XB1, and then had to take back when the internet freaked out about always-on internet aspect). 

Totally agree, and I feel better reading most of the replies to your comment.

I’m not sure that’s true, loadtimes on XSeX are already very fast.

To be clear, I was saying that the reason open world games get a bad rap is that the design can come off as lazy in some games (the same dialogue being said by 9000 different NPCs all over the world, every cave looking exactly the same, etc.).

It is, but it’s still not that fast, especially compared to From’s latest games (and Elden still looks faster than DS3, at least based on what I saw).

I think you meant: “Microsoft continuing to show gamers already in their ecosystem that they don’t need to purchase additional hardware”

I don’t think open-world and beautiful design are mutually-exclusive, I’ve played a few games that prove it’s just devs being lazy.

1) You could’ve told me this was a Dark Souls game completely without GRRM’s involvement, and nothing in the trailer would’ve seemed out of place.