Mythologue

@Cashews With all due respect, he tried that before, and he was indicted for it. It was notably worse than what's being discussed in this article.

Baldur's Gate 3. Possibly the first game I've been genuinely excited for in more than three years. If it's anything like what the critics (and early access Steam reviews) claim, it's going to be a veritable landmark in RPGs.

The first game on Steam is a lot of fun and usually pretty cheap, I think. It's a good way to enter the franchise without having to worry about a huge investment cost. I'd recommend it for anyone who wants to try it in VR, just as a quick taster.

I've seen this exact aesthetic in science fiction probably around two dozen times or more. I can't be the only one who's just absolutely sick to death of it at this point, surely? What happened to that cool, blocky retro future like in Alien Isolation? That raygun gothic appeal of Fallout?

Should've asked for the best deuteragonist. IMO the protagonists always take second place to their allies.

I find that this is fairly common, especially in the mobile market, where untested developers rely on existing brands to push their own abysmal games. The Day Before is another, using a title that resembles Days Gone, and a typeface that conjures images of TLoU. It's deliberate. It also goes without saying that the developers are practically never competent, and usually just con artists.

There's nothing wrong with large, sprawling games, but at least populate it with meaningful stories instead of tired, exhausting, repetitive fetch quests and collectibles. There are precisely zero developers who can keep a 100+ hour game fresh. Just give us linear adventures with semi-open environments, that last around 10 to 20 hours. I don't know why that's such a taboo these days.

@Cordyceps Lord Doctor Traine of Fopsley-Bealestone

It's a shame that MM are often overlooked solely on account of how niche their games are. Dreams would've absolutely slayed on PC, with an extensive modding community and a suite of FOSS tools.

I don't know how many people are a fan of cringe comedy. I mean, it can be done right, but you need very good writers to make it work. I can't see this pushing through to a renewal.

I own Diablo 4 and play with my partner. It's a lot of fun. The main problem is that you always sense the "live service" air hanging over the whole experience. To even start the game, both of us had to log in to Blizzard, use a code, then link accounts. It was about three to five minutes for each of us, but playing a dark fantasy and being immediately prompted to "log in and enter this code" is a huge mood killer. A damn shame, too, because I think we both enjoy the cinematics and general underpinnings of the game.

@LifeGirl They should really be spending less on games. I can't say I'm an expert in business management and finances, but wouldn't it make more sense to develop smaller, cheaper projects, market them for less, develop and release more, and rely on the sheer quantity of sales to keep them afloat within the same time window? What's this obsession with excessive production value anyway?

IIRC Skate actually began as a Criterion project, before it was offloaded to Black Box. It's a pretty decent series of games, but (from what I remember) incredibly tricky. I can't picture myself playing this, though. It's got flop written all over it. Skate in nought but name.

The best games usually seem to be somewhere between five and 20 hours in length. The greatest RPG games will often have you wrapping up the story in around 40 hours. Anything more than that, it just becomes exhausting, needless padding.

That might just be the case, but I'm of the opinion that this is just Ubisoft's MO these days. They don't seem to be able to focus on anything outside of their usual purview. Namely, AC, Far Cry, and The Crew. Even Rocksmith took a huge hit with their seemingly distracted, divided attention. Still sore about that one...

I sense the possibility of mass redundancies in the very near future.

Pikmin isn't surprising, although I hadn't even heard of a fourth game. It's a fantastic franchise. The first one is still mightily nostalgic to me, perhaps even more so than Crash.

A new IP would be nice. Installments and re-releases within existing franchises feels a little stagnant.

@Kanji-Tatsumi I'd recommend holding off a little longer. There isn't really any reason to rush into the current generation just yet, since we still seem to be in the interim between the PS4 and PS5.

It's a shame that so many gamers seem to assume that open world game side quests necessarily have to be needless filler. We're so far from the days of Fallout, Fable, and The Witcher, which populated their worlds with all flavours of stories and quirky characters, that it seems most of us have forgotten what actual side content should look like. FF16 could be a fantastic experience, but I just can't move past this. It's anathema for game design, and it's a plague on the AAA industry.

Another live service game to throw into the ever growing mass grave of live service games, just tumbling off into the abyss like lemmings.

Looking forward to Call of Duty 20: Modern Warfare 3 2

Always viewed Apple TV as kinda meh, probably one of the weaker services out there, struggling to keep up with Disney, Netflix, Now, and possibly even Prime in terms of USPs. Nonetheless, I'll see if my partner wants to watch anything on there. That's half a year of experimentation for nothing, so why not?

The one thing that's missing from my games; feeling like I'm at death's door while I'm playing them. Ubisoft, once again nailing the superfluous instead of developing high quality IPs. Never change.

I'll believe it when I see it. They've all been pretty disappointing up until this point.

The whole bear thing was a bit of a viral shock story. Nothing wrong there, though. I imagine it's almost a parody of the romance options in RPG games. Just something a little bit silly, takes the edge off.

That aside, I can't imagine it was really a contributing factor to the meteoric rise of the game. Baldur's Gate 3 just has the appearances of a very good RPG, and they've let people test that by jumping in early. It's very promising, and I'm hopeful it'll shape up to be a solid entry.

@Jamesblob I can guarantee that you're wrong.

I imagine if people wanted to play these games, they've probably played them already. I mean, if you haven't already played Undertale, where have you been?

I absolutely would like to see how this game turns out. Only problem is that titles like Divinity, Wasteland, and Pillars of Eternity have never fully appealed to me. I never got along well with turn-based mechanics.

Like if an AI generator generated an AI generator, and then got fed data about cakes and pastries halfway through.

@trev666 It's for the Plague team, so it's pretty much a given that it'll be related to Plague Tale.

Nintendo are still practically playing a different game to Sony and MS when it comes to competing for a share of the gaming market.

I don't know what to expect from this. I'm hoping it'll be true to the Test Drive name and have all of the original features (property, garages, dealership showrooms, etc.) from TDU1 and 2.

I also don't really want to get my hopes up, because I don't think these developers have really proven themselves yet. I also really don't want this to just be another FH or TC.

It just generally seems like a swing and a miss to me. A great misjudgement with respect to whom this game might actually appeal. Is it for a Japanese audience, or a western (British, American, Cont. European) audience? Because, from what I've seen, it struggles to appeal to either.

In all honesty, I think I've probably had enough of RDR for now. RDR2 was so bulky and content rich that there's really nothing that could add to it. Especially since the original will now feel archaic by comparison.

The Day Before has a contender. In all seriousness, I'll regret the day when these awful knockoffs dry up. Like watching Neil Breen films ironically, it's a unique form of entertainment.

Amnesia would probably be my personal choice.

Depends on which of those three titles they lean more into. If Dark Souls, I'm all for it. GoT, ehh, maybe. AC, kill it with fire.

I've been using the PS5 for half a year now and I don't think I've even once come across this service.

I didn't really need a part II. The first game ended perfectly well. There's nothing inherently wrong with II but it just feels like a developer trying to drag out something that could just as easily have been a one and done thing, like SOMA.

I've never once spent money on virtual currencies in games, and I never will. It's a crying shame that others who are in the same boat are forced to accept MTX in games even though they consciously do everything in their power to avoid it, and to avoid encouraging it.

I haven't really found much worth playing on the PS5 recently so I'm back to playing DA:O on Steam, alongside my usual obsession with RS14.

Probably the first time in a long time I've actually been quite happy with PS+ games. Not massively thrilled, mind, but I've been meaning to play Alan Wake again and I'd like to give CoD a shot.

But it's a given that this is just going to be a soft remaster, in the sense that it's the same game with sharper resolution and more detailed textures, right? I can't picture this being a full reboot. In that case, I don't much care for it. Black Flag was fine, a solid 7/10, but that's really all I can say about it.

You spend forever fighting these bugs. At least it's honest on that front.

A live service game that is sold, not available as a free download, struggling to maintain even passing interest. These companies are genuinely delusional.

@Quintumply Well, I certainly walked right into that one. Well played.

Good in a sense. ME and DA are what Bioware do best (aside from the fairly catastrophic Andromeda). I'm holding onto hope that ME:A and Anthem were just hiccups. Can't imagine there's much lamentation for the inevitable loss of a prospective Anthem 2.

@Triumph741 Yeah, how many studios have they shut down in the past two decades? Something like four, five? I recall Visceral, Black Box, Pandemic, maybe a couple others (I don't know if Ghost are still around, Criterion has been gutted). EA might be playing the reaper yet again.

This is it. We've officially hit the bottom.

Seems like this game is its own A Machine for Pigs, or Penumbra Requiem: lacking in overall engagement with emphasis placed on atmosphere and puzzles, with little else to interact with or enjoy. Certainly seems like an acquired taste.

This seems to be a decent month, to my surprise. Alan Wake Remastered alone would be worth a go, and I'd been meaning to try this entry of CoD but didn't want to put money down on it.