StrickenBiged

@Tomato_Goose Thanks for confirming, I'll bump it a few spaces up my imaginary wishlist.

Other than BG3, this list reads like my hit-list of games that I need to check out from 2023. I've just been so enamoured by BG3 that I haven't played anything else since it launched.
Does anyone know if Jedi: Survivor in a decent state yet? I recall that it wasn't well optimised at launch and have been waiting for the 60FPS mode to be up to snuff before I picked it up.

If it means I no longer have to sacrifice the added benefits of "graphics mode" to play at 60FPS, then I'm all over it.

@CharlieChooChoo Maybe we'd get adverts for government assistance programs, food stamps, etc.

@CharlieChooChoo So that they can know what brands should be advertising here. If the readership median income is higher than the general population's for your region, they'll get more high-end/luxury brands advertising. Or vis versa.

Remedy, Epic, I'll buy it on a physical release. Just so you know.

@Mintie Halfling's don't roll nat-1's.

Well, they can roll a nat 1 twice, I suppose, but the odds there are 1/400, so you'd have to be really unlucky.

Looks like this new mode will be worth the £10 for me, and is the only part of the package that I'm excited about.

Looks like just more GTA to me, apparently with a focus on spoofing TikTok. I'll wait for previews/reviews before I get excited. I'm hoping to see R* expand on the way missions work; I'm tired of seeing the mission failed screen for daring to put one toe out of bounds.

How weird that the marketing fluff on PS Direct says "Fans of The Last of Us HBO series can continue Joel and Ellie's story five years later". Like, their copy writers do realise that it was a game before it was a HBO series, right? TLOU: Part 1 doesn't even get a mention.

A good way to recruit Minthara! Great, because I can never bring myself to side with her in Act 1, even when playing as Durge.

As someone who has never played Destiny or Destiny 2, I think the Destiny 2 model has revealed itself to be fundamentally flawed. I occasionally hear about the fun that community is having over there, and think "hey, maybe I should give it a go". But then I remember that most of the historic content is now gone from the game, so it would be like jumping into a TV show at Season 5 or something, and my interest is immediately killed. I imagine I'm not alone. So there's this huge barrier to entry for new players, who don't want to join a game and have no idea what's going on. I also imagine that the community erodes over time, as it does for every game, as new releases and new interests take priority. (Plus 2023 has been absolutely full of really good, longer games which would take players away from Destiny for long stretches...) So you've got a model that increasingly makes it harder for new players to onboard, while losing old players.
Perhaps the model should be more like FF14, which everytime I read about it it's going on about how the community is growing and very loyal.

Glad they fixed that Wares issue. I accidentally sold a tonne of stuff that I wanted to keep to a vendor because it had all mysteriously become "Wares" and I hadn't noticed it.

I'm in. Great game and I'd be keen to check out the commentary.

I can see Sony maybe agreeing to allow Game Pass onto PS as a subscription that is restricted to XBox exclusive games. Anything wider than that would compete with PS+ tiers.

This is very cool. I very much hope FS return to Sekiro, it's my favourite of their games.

Larian has apparently quenched the thirst with a hotfix reverting these changes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO__JxNH4rI

And there's my reminder to jump into the Directors Cut at some point and experience GoT again on PS5. Is there an upgrade path available for those of us that have the PS4 version on disc?

Destiny contracting this year is no surprise at all. 2020 and 21 were boom years as everyone was stuck inside looking for something to do. And 2023 has seen a glut of great games be released - look at how many releases scored 90+ on Metacritic this year alone, it's twice as many as normal - so it's not surprising that people are spending their time and money on new releases rather than on something like Destiny. I predict that we will see something like 45-50% of game purchases in 2023 were on new releases (well above average).
Sounds to me like Bungie's forecasts were at fault, and they failed to properly account for market trends and conditions (covid is effectively over) and competition.
In any case though, even if they had got the 2023 forecast right, they'd probably still have had to fire the people to maintain the bottom line, they'd just have realised it sooner.

All the lay-offs are unsurprising. 2020-21 and the global lockdowns caused an abnormal growth in the games industry as people sought out some escapism. Go back 2 years and you will see article after article about how devs were finding it hard to retain and attract people. Lots of individual developers would have been hired or retained through the use of salaries and other incentives. Now that the world has reverted to a new-normal, the industry is contracting again.

Ragnarok also released on a Wednesday, so had an additional 48 hours to secure its place in the charts.

I got S-M2, and have installed it, but haven't played yet. Like others, I'm still playing BG3. I want to get my first play through completed before I dip into S-M2. Larian's masterpiece deserves savouring, and I'm doing just that.

Definitely on my radar now. Thanks for catching this one @get2sammyb

Yeah, right, after all the Bethesda games went exclusive (aside from those which were already PS timed exclusives), forgive me for not believing a word that Phil says when it isn't backed up by a legally enforceable contract.

I'd splurge on a Pro model. Ideally it would be powerful enough that it could run current "Fidelity Modes" at a steady 60FPS. But I'm happy enough with Performance Modes as they are at the moment.

The UK's territorial emissions have not been so low as they are now since the days of the horse and cart (per capita, our emissions are the same as they were in 1860 or so). If JSO was rational, they would take a global view and point out that the UK's total carbon footprint is higher than it could be because (a) the fossil fuels we do still use are for the most part produced abroad, and then shipped here; and (b) our goods are for the most part produced in parts of the world where emissions are worse, and then shipped here. They would go on to point out that there would be less carbon emissions globally if the UK turned back the globalisation tide and on-shored (a) more of its fossil fuel extraction (for as long as we still need them while the energy sector is electrified) and (b) production of the goods that it consumes. They'd point out that yes, this will be more expensive than buying everything cheap from China and what have you, but we would be putting less into the atmosphere.

JSO are not just annoying, they are annoying and wrong, which is a pretty bad combination.

Remember when this sort of cross-game content was given away for free?

Wishlisted. The trailer makes it look very interesting.

A great music track too - is that original music? Shazam doesn't recognise it.

My problems with BG3 are good problems to have. First, Act 1 is so interesting by itself that I haven't moved on, I'm still seeing how all the permutations play out. And 2, related to this, I keep making new characters because I want to try all the classes and races, etc, and see how they differ.
Loving the monk at the moment, next I want to try a bard, I think.

@SillyBoyJudas In many jurisdictions they would need to unionise and hold legal ballots first before being able to go on strike. If un-unionised staff are talking about going, or purporting to go, on strike, they may find their roles are first on the chopping block when downsizing comes around. I'd be careful if I were them.

The industry is contracting. It's no surprise - lots of people started or increased their gaming between 2020-2022 for obvious reasons, and developers were being offered huge salary bumps as competition for talent went mad for a while. Now things are settling down again as the world has gone back to normal, and managers at devs are noticing that they are paying way too much on staff.
Telltale also has a unique problem in that all its games are licenced properties. I wonder if they'd ever be able to make something completely original that wouldn't come with licensing fees that eat into their profits.

Maybe it's just me having moved to PS after the 360/PS3 generation, but I've always found asymmetric sticks more comfortable. I've gotten better with symmetric sticks, but I still find my characters listing slightly to the right when I'm trying to go straight ahead on PS.
I had the first "Pro" PS4 controller Nacon put out and really enjoyed it. It was a major help playing Overwatch, mapping jump to the extra triggers allowed me to jump and wall ride as Lucio while still aiming, and being able to dial in the thumb-stick's acceleration allowed me to have precise aiming control with smaller movements, while being able to turn around almost instantaneously if someone had managed to get behind me.

@Perturbator How about a comedy instead? Mythic Quest is a decent watch, and Danny Pudi's character is basically the slightly villainous 'Monetisation Designer' on the team.

If they're looking for another name to put on the box, mine can be had for much cheaper than 140m Euros a year... just saying.

Good review.
I think what it helped me realise is I really want is a marriage of modern HITMAN's stealth and freeform assassination gameplay with AC's historical setting. This game sounds - like you say @ShogunRok, for better and worse - like a return to the series' roots. But I've played all those games already and I don't need to revisit that type of game.

No one has the time to play all these live service games. Focus on one live service cash cow if you must - heck, that's why you bought Bungie - but there's a hard ceiling on how many hours there are in a day, and days in a week. At some point, all these live service games must start to eat one another. Even Epic is laying people off as it pivots Fortnight to focus on user created content to try and promote the game's longevity.

Great that they've added a slider for people who want more control and challenge. I'll experiment with it, but I never had a problem with the original. It's a bit like that "why does my horse dodge trees" thing that came up a few years ago (in relation to a Zelda game if memory serves) and the developer responded "real horses won't run straight into trees". I've treated S-M's swinging like that: S-M is good at what he does and won't just swing face first into a wall, so why does the game need to let you do that? It might detract from the power fantasy to set the slider so low that it becomes immersion breaking.

Is "nuked" really the correct analogy? That implies a big detonation, whereas from the article it sounds like Sony is keeping this as hush as possible. It might be more apt to say "evaporated" or something else akin to a process that one does not notice happening.

I've re-started this game three times already, with three characters to level 3. So far the half-orc barb is my favourite. When that enraged triple-value crit goes off, ooooh it feels good. I think I'll stick with this guy for a bit, but I'm also keen to try on a warlock.

Best of luck to him going forward. PS is doing gangbusters and, whatever the enthusiast/hardcore audience may have thought of him, he's clearly steered the ship well. While he can't hold a controller, he can certainly lead a party of more capable adventurers. The bard who leads from the centre, perhaps. (I've dove deep into BG3, can you tell?)

Star ratings are dumb. As the screenshot in the article itself demonstrates, the majority of people tend to go with either 5 or 1 star and ignore 2-4. Valve fixed this ages ago on Steam with their average rating based on a simple 'would/not recommend' system, later expanded so you could see how that rating had changed over time.

Well deserved. IMO it's the best of FromSoftware's souls-type games

Unity has never been profitable, so I can see why they want to increase the price - it's existential. And when you consider how many engineers they have working to make the engine better, then compare to a simple mobile game built on Unity that suddenly goes viral, well I can see how Unity HQ are looking at that and thinking "when you tally up the man-hours that went into making that game possible, we put more time in than that dev who just imported a few assets in and played with the physics model a bit to make their infinite runner" (for the sake of argument). If the status quo continues, then Unity will eventually go pop, and then where will the indie devs that rely on it be?
That being said, the way they have gone about trying to make the changes happen has been cack-handed in the extreme. If it were up to me, I'd say that no game that was released on the old fee-structure should be affected, and that there will be a 3 year period before the fee changes come into effect (giving devs who are still making their games plenty of time to consider their options). And I'd make the new fee-structure a lot simpler, a straight forward revenue split, regardless of how well the game does, no tiers at all, and maybe whack it up to 5% or something. That's easy enough for everyone to get their heads around, and if indie games need to become ~5% more expensive to account for that, then fine, it's £3 on a £60 game, I think the market would swallow it.
But then Unity seems in an awful hurry to do something now, so maybe they are closer to running out of financial lifelines than we appreciate or they are letting on.

Glad I didn't pre-order this game and waited. Sounds like it might finally be time to jump in... After BG3... and S-M2... and finishing up H:FW... that should also give CDPR enough time to do some smaller patches to catch the unexpected.
Mad respect to CDPR for the care and support they show to their portfolio of games. Just a shame that they didn't have that attitude when it launched. Hopefully they learned a lesson, but given the mad amounts of money they made despite the state of the launch game I fear not.

Nooooo! I've been enjoying the court and regulator disclosures and leaks too much. If everything is almost done and dusted then the rare insight that we have had into the workings of the games industry goes away, and the industry goes back to being a black box out of which we can only draw speculation and inferences.

Sad times...

Presumably then they'll be taking the ground-pound move out of the game? It makes no sense that a fall could hurt the Spider-Men, but deliberately smashing oneself into the ground with enough force to create a shockwave that knocks bad-guys back wouldn't hurt you too. Maybe a ground-pound will also cause damage?

Finishing up 100% of the trophies in S-M:Remastered ahead of S-M2 at the moment, and then I might give Baldur's Gate 3 a go. With so little gaming time available now that I have a little one, I prefer to spend my money and time on games that review phenomenally well, or which come highly recommended by reviewers who's taste is similar to mine. So I might pick Lies of P up along the way at some point, but I don't think it's likely if I'm being honest.

Mine is still too young, but I can see this being a massive hit with my nephew. I might get it soon so that we can distract him when my brother comes to visit with something that my sister-in-law will be happy for him to play.

The link in the article appears to take one to an extract of a deposition of Phil Spencer, rather than the email. There's no discussion of WB or Nintendo in that extract.

This sort of thing should have been announced at least 3 years in advance. I think that's a reasonable timeframe for the game devs that use Unity to be able to stop and say "ok, this is what it will cost if we go with that engine, how does that affect our financial modelling" and any games in early development still have the opportunity to turn around and go "nope, that breaks the maths for us, let's go with [Engine B] instead".