Comments 592

Re: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth PS5 Sales Still a Secret as Square Enix Reports Year-on-Year Decline

StrickenBiged

Less than 35% of players (on PS4) completed the final chapter of Remake, according to the trophy data, so unless those that didn't finish it want to skip the rest of the story and go straight to Rebirth I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't selling as well.

There's probably more people like me about who are waiting for them to complete the remake in its entirety before they jump in too.

Re: Yep, Filming Is Underway for the Until Dawn Movie

StrickenBiged

@riceNpea I'm decidedly not suggesting multi-verse. I'm suggesting time-manipulation. In a decent writer's hands that could work for adapting a game like this where the fun comes from seeing the different ripple effects of your choices. I'm sure someone smarter than me could find a way to do it intelligently, like how Cabin in the Woods cleverly messed with the audience's expectations. There'd be no need for McGuffins or Deus Ex Machina either, because the protagonist could learn through trial and error and application of intelligence!

Re: Yep, Filming Is Underway for the Until Dawn Movie

StrickenBiged

Do we know if the movie is telling a particular through-line from the game, or is that just an assumption that everyone is making? It strikes me that they could borrow the conceit of the Butterfly Effect movies and give one of the characters the ability to do-over their decisions, leading to progressively worse and worse outcomes.

Re: Elden Ring 'Really the Limit' for How Large FromSoftware's Games Can Be

StrickenBiged

No complaints from me. Elden Ring outstayed its welcome after Leyndell, IMO. And too many bosses were re-used and too many dungeons had rewards that were useless to my build. I enjoyed my first playthrough but bounced off a second once I realised that I was making a beeline for the items I wanted for my build and, actually, without the sense of discovery it wasn't that interesting.
I'd much rather see them go back towards something like Sekiro.

Re: The Last of Us Season 2 TV Teaser Trailer Revealed

StrickenBiged

Really interested to see how they handle S2 of the show.
I enjoyed TLoU: Part II a lot, but was a bit disappointed with some parts of the story, which I felt relied too heavily on plot contrivances and some characters acting out of character to get to where it needed to go. I get it, Game Dev is hard and for all we know there's a level left on the cutting room floor that would have explained some of those decisions by the characters involved. I'm hoping some of these inconsistencies in the writing are addressed in the show.

Re: This Could Be Your First Look at the PS5 Game from Sony's Newly Established PS Studio

StrickenBiged

I quite like the art in that picture, personally. At least, it's got tonnes more character than Concord.

Curious what you'd get from mashing up those genres... sounds to me like a platformer with fighting-game style one-v-one combat, with Moba-style multiplayer missions, and some downtime between missions to do life-sim stuff with your roster of characters. No idea what to make of 'frog-type' though.

Anyway, it sounds somewhat original, which is encouraging.

Re: Reaction: Sony's Billion Dollar Bungie Buyout Is Looking More and More Like a Blunder

StrickenBiged

Hindsight is always 20:20. At the time, I think the acquisition of Bungie made sense. They looked to all the world like they had the live-service game figured out with a very popular franchise that had multiple tiers of recurrent spending, and the technical chops when it came to developing FPS games, which Sony's other studios were not working on at the time.
What I think did for Bungie was the boneheaded decision to lock older expansions away and make them unplayable. This killed most interest from people who hadn't made a start on the franchise yet - would you jump into a TV show at the latest season, or want to start it from the beginning? - and meant that their audience shrank from expansion to expansion as the people dropping off outnumbered the people joining in.

Re: Bungie to Lay Off 220 Workers, Will Be Further Integrated into Sony

StrickenBiged

Deciding to send Destiny 2 content to the Vault or Archive or whatever they called it killed any interest I could have had in the game, and I am sure I am not alone in saying that. I wouldn't jump into a long-running TV show at season 4, I'd want to watch it from the start, and similarly there was no way I'd be jumping into Destiny 2 only to play the latest expansions without the prior context. They should have found a way to keep older seasons available and, who knows, I might have booted up Destiny 2 at some point (thanks PS+ essential for making the base app available anyway).
I hope the Destiny talent is distributed around SIE's other studios sensibly though. Sending some to Firewalk might not be a bad idea, I have a feeling based on playing the beta that Concord is going to need some serious help, and a big 2.0 revamp and associated marketing push, to make any appreciable impact. Good on Sony for trying to save what jobs it can, at least.

Re: It Doesn't Sound Like Braid: Anniversary Edition Quite Set the World on Fire

StrickenBiged

The industry is harsh these days. Great games can come out and be entirely overlooked in the churn. That something as influential as Braid didn't manage to make waves might suggest a poor marketing strategy.
I picked up a copy because I loved the original Braid and while Blow has some weird views, I can respect him as a game dev and wanted to hear what he had to say in the commentary on the game. I'm yet to get really stuck into the Anniversary Edition, but looking forward to doing so once I've finished a few other things.

Re: Ubisoft Responds to Assassin's Creed Shadows Criticism, Apologises to Japanese Players

StrickenBiged

AC is historical fiction. I'm not going to say on behalf of the Japanese whether this is offensive or not. And it appears that there is a kernel of truth to the character of Yasuke on which they could base this character.

For myself, my test for whether something is offensive is to reverse the situation and ask myself how I'd feel about it then.

What do people think the reaction to this game would be if AC's first mainline game set in historical Africa had a Japanese protagonist?

Re: Publishers Bail on Live-Service Flops Too Quickly, Says Warframe Boss

StrickenBiged

@PloverNutter Oh, I'm fully aware that Bioware wanted to make Anthem - for better or for worse - I was referring more to EA likely being behind the decision to pull the plug rather than stick with it. I can't imagine the devs who put so much time in and presumably believed in what they had managed to make were keen to abandon it so quickly.

Re: Concord's Free Open Beta Is Performing Abysmally on PC

StrickenBiged

I gave the beta a few hours of my time this weekend. I don’t like it. My problems:
1. Apparently no incentive not to quit a session and no option to join an ongoing session. People would just quit as soon as the opposing team pulled ahead, guaranteeing a loss. Hopefully that’s easily fixed by launch, but annoying for now.
2. No sandbox to try the characters out. I was picking characters on a pure guess as to what their kit would do, and then be a total liability to my team as I experimented.
3. I didn’t think the abilities gave enough feedback on what they were actually doing. Sometimes I’d get a direct hit with something and it was unclear whether the ability had done damage directly, or was applying a debuff causing my teammates to do more damage to the enemy, or… what? In comparable games I’ve played, it’s been much more obvious what your abilities were doing.
I wish Sony and firewalk well with this one, but not for me.

Re: The Obligatory Helldivers 2 Isn't As Popular As It Was Headlines Have Started to Emerge

StrickenBiged

I'm still playing and having fun, but they need to give me something to work towards again soon. Once I get another 200 Rare samples I'll have enough to buy the last 2 Ship modules and unlocked everything in the game.
And I doubt Sony or Arrowhead are too bothered about the numbers at the moment. It blew through all their projections, everything from now on is just pure gravy I'm sure.

Re: Best Uncharted Games

StrickenBiged

Lost Legacy is probably in the right place for ranking the games overall, but if you were ranking just particular set pieces from the games, then the final sequence of Lost Legacy would be #1.

I'd swap U4 and U2's ranks in this list, but otherwise I'm in agreement.

Re: UK Video Game Retailer GAME Will Reportedly Stop Stocking Video Games

StrickenBiged

I tried. I'm lucky enough that paying the couple of £ difference between Amazon and GAME's prices wasn't a big deal to me, and I used to go into my local GAME to get physical games whenever I could to try and support the local High St (or, if you rather, the local 'House of Frasier GAME Concession Stand' as it later became). But our local House of Frasier closed a few months ago so that's gone too now.
Over to Amazon I guess.