Wiceheid

@Ken_Kaniff Depends how you define modern hardware. Defiance is already on PC, and the GOG version got updated last week to make sure it works on modern PCs.

Mark Zuckerberg being good at Civilization is a a bit weird considering his massive role in the downfall of civilization.

When you look at the numbers FFXVI and FFVII rebirth did (and SE's earlier financial report that stated that FFXVI was profitable), I'm 100% convinced that the problem here is those expectations. SE need to revise their expectations for future projects and budget accordingly.
But I think the current AAA budgets are unsustainable and an evolutionary dead end for the industry. The amount of money AAA games cost to make is simply too much money to gamble with, and all innovation is a gamble. Therefore, AAA games are too expensive to be innovative and a part of the entertainment industry that doesn't innovate eventually dies.

@smoreon B before A on the NES controller makes perfect sense. Remember, the designers of the controller are Japanese- they read right to left. So to them, A is before B.

Gvien that Xbox uses the same controller symbols that Nintendo have been using the SNES, but shuffles them all around so all four of them in the wrong place. I'm glad he's confused he's by this. The nuber of times I've plugged my Switch pro into the PC (I don't have an Xbox controller) and just stared a button prompt for about a second before realising where it actually is, is painful.
I can just about cope with the different layouts of the Playstation controllers and the Switch/SNES one because most of the symbols are different. But nintendo controller to Xbox controller just feels like Microsoft were trolling with their controller layout.

@nessisonett I agree.
You know when you boot up Steam if you pay close attention it might look as if Steam is downloading tiny updates for lots of your games. These games have not been updated, Steam is just "phoning home" to make sure these copies have the right licenses.
The Steam Launcher itself is DRM. But no one calls Valve out for that. So if you're buying a game on steam, it's too late for you to "make a protest against DRM"- you already accepted it.

@Mintie With Valve it's deeper than with reddit etc. Some PC gamers look at Gabe Newell like he's some sort of messiah that can't do anything wrong. The myth of "Good Guy Valve" is genuinely weird. If they were better organised they would be a cult.

Yes, giving your data to Sony sucks, but if you're buying a game on Steam, you've already given your data to Valve. A lot of PC gamers have this weird blind spot for Valve- they think Valve can do no wrong, but any company acting like Valve is the devil incarnate.

Love this soundtrack. Even a year later I can't stop myself smiling the biggest smile whenever I hear "To Sail Forbidden Seas". Alongside "Under the Weight" and "Otherworld" it's one of three video game songs I can sing along to.

It's the first day, and tomorrow and the day after are the weekend. It is likely that God of War Ragnarok will hit it's actual peak of concurrent players over the weekend.
It is far, far too early to draw any sort of conclusion about how well Ragnarok is doing, especially based on a measure that doesn't include other PC gaming platforms. And that's before we take into account that figuring out sales based on how many people boot up the game at the same time is an odd thing to do.
You'll know if Sony aren't impressed by whether or not this PC port did well from whether or not they consider future PC ports worth the effort.

One reason I think Nintendo is getting away with remasters in the Switch generation is due to the failure of it's previous platform. The Wii U (that is, the console itself) has sold 13.5 million units. Meanwhile, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (the Switch remaster of the Wii U game Mariot Kart 8) has sold over 60 million units.
There are remasters of WII U games that sold more than the Wii U did. When you have a platform full of games no one played, it's easier to get away with releasing remasters.

Not havinng substantial CPU improvements mean it's not really worth it. Even then, the price is an issue.

One part of VIII's legacy that should be mentioned in this article- Triple Triad. Without Triple Triad there would not have been Gwent.

"A series famed for mapping item and weapon selection to the L2 and R2 buttons, the updated controller settings instead placed the menu scrollers on the left and right buttons on the D-Pad. You then scroll through items via the right thumbstick and let go of the directional input when you've found the correct piece of equipment."

I'll be honest, this concerns me. Because running is louder than sneaking and it's very easy to tilt an analog stick slightly too far the original game mapped walking to the d-pad. So you would use the d-pad when sneaking up behind guards (something I did a lot in MGS3 with it's greater emphasis on melee takedowns compared to the earlier games in the series). It sounds like the makers of this remake, by not understanding the reason why the original made this way have introduced a problem- sometimes Snake will alert guards by breaking out into a sprint right next to them because the player tilted the analog stick slightly too far. That sounds potentially very frustrating.
Unless there is some other control you can use to make sure he doesn't start running when you don't want him to?

I think they do need to provie clarity on this, but not for out benefit. Whenever I see bits of the Xbox fan community talking- they need to know because their morale is so low right now. At this point Microsoft need to tell them how it's going to be. Then they need to explain how the new status quo is going to be good for Xbox fans and Series S/X owners.
That is, they don't need to tell us what's coming to PS5, they need to explain it to their own users in such a way as to give them something to be happy about.
I know this might come across as me gloating about "Xbot tears", but I do genuinely mean this. Every platform's users and fans (i.e. every gamer) should be looking at what's happening on their platform and thinking "this is good!" and I don't get the impression Series S/X owners feel that way right now.

Microsoft are, by market cap, about 14 times bigger than Sony. If Xbox doesn't have the marketting budgets Playstation has, then that is a choice. And that choice tells us that Microsoft doesn't value Xbox as much as Sony values Playstation.

Thing is, even if this one ends up not coming out for Xbox, that doesn't mean Sony had anything to do with that decision. At GDC 24 there were some developers wondering whether it's worth supporting Xbox going forward because their not sure the console has sold well enough for it to be worth the effort. If people are asking themselves that question, sooner or later some dev is going to say "no, it's not worth it." Sony console exclusivity without Sony having to do anything,

I'm a healer main in Final Fantasy XIV. My profile picture is actually the FFXIV White Mage symbol.
This is nothing. Nothing will happen. There was a "healer strike" in the run up to Shadowbringers in 2019 (it may even have been organised by the exact same people), making the exact same points and nothing actually happened.
They do have a point about tanks and damage dealers having a lot of healing abilities (and it's worth remembering that Xeno is playing as a Warrior, a tank whose entire schtick is healing themselves and is thus busted in dungeons due to how those heals- especially blodwhetting work). This is a point Xeno makes in his video about the healer strike. I know when I've queued into a dungeon if I see a WAR it's going to be an easy run.
Besides that, this is typical of the healer section on the official forums. They assume that healing should be designed for the scenario where you and your static are reclearing this fight for the 5th, 6th, 14th time and everyone is doing every mechanic perfectly on muscle memory. Healing in XIV is designed around the idea that you have melee damage dealers who can't see an AOE without standing in it, ranged damage dealers who stand as far away as possible (and thus dodge all your AOE heals) and tanks who think getting their vulnerability up stacks (debuffs that increase how much damage they take) to double figures is a good idea.
Healing in XIV is about being there so other players can survive their mistakes, and as a result if your party doesn't make mistakes you don't have a lot to do. If you're with bad players, even the simplest dungeon can be an incredibly hectic and feel like you're constantly fighting fires. And it can be very satisfying to pull a party to a clear despite their many mistakes. I really enjoy that when repeatedly running the same instance as a healer, every run is different because you have to adjust to how good your party is- that unpredictability makes it my favourite role in the game (as well as many of my favourite Final Fantasy characters being White Mages, so in XIV I want to be a White Mage)
But ultimately, this strike will accomplish nothing because the official forums are a tiny minority of the player base and most healer mains are not on the official forums.

Kind of dissapointed that the tweet and headline went with "Hella f*** off!" instead of "go to Hella".

By not having features like gyro aiming, haptic feedback (both features Switch joycons and pro controller have- although HD rumble is a bit primitive compared to haptic feedback) etc, the Xbox controller is holding back gaming much more than the Series S' weaker hardware is.

@nessisonett Good news! It's not Kevin Conroy's last role. He'd actually recorded his part in two other projects before his death. He's going to be in "Batman: Caped Crusader" (a series which starts in August, although it's unclear if he's playing Batman in this series). He's also playing Batman in Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part 3 (an animated film that comes out in July)

"Subsequently, this caused many staff to depart over Suicide Squad's seven-year-long development after realising they would not be working on the type of game the developer was known for, such as the Batman Arkham series."

That sounds so much like what happened with folk at Arcane Austin who wanted to work on immersive sims and found themselves making Redfall instead.

I think it's great. Playing old PC games is easier and more accessible than playing old console games (especially as continued backwards compatibility is not a certainty). PC versions are good for game preservation, and one day these PS5 games will be old.
Let's look at two PS3 games. Dragons Dogma came out for PC and is easily playable today. Metal Gear Solid 4 was a PS3 exclusive and is now dangerously close to being lost media.
TL:DR, totally in favour, but maybe we could dig into the back catalogue a bit more?

Andrew Wilson is the guy who invented the modern loot box. He's excited about this for the same reason he thinks loot boxes are a good idea. Like his one idea, it'll make more profitable games, but not better ones.

@Fiendish-Beaver IIRC the idea of the activision purchase came from within Microsoft gaming and yes, was then sent to the higher ups for approval.
Satya Nadella pays no attention to Microsoft gaming whatsoever, he just gets briefed before media appearances where gaming might be mentioned.
And yeah, what you said in your third paragraph was what I was saying. Phil Spencer didn't decide that cuts had to happen, but he did decide who got the chop. And while closing studios is never a good thing, closing a great studio like Tango Gameworks after they produced your only hit of 2023 is clearly a mistake. And that was a decision made by Phil Spencer.

@Fiendish-Beaver "Personally, I suspect that Phil Spencer had little say in this. This would have been a dictate from those above him. Spencer would simply have been the one to impart the bad news and to take the heat."

Phil Spencer's superiors aren't paying enough attention to Microsoft's gaming division to make those calls. They'd have told Phil Spencer that cuts are to be made and how big those cuts need to be, but as CEO of Microsoft Gaming it's Phil Spencers job to decide what (and who) gets cut.

Arkane Austin is not unexpected sadly. Most of the team who worked on Prey had actually left before Redfall came out (meaning the studio that made great immersive sims had already ceased to exist).
Tango surprises me and is worrying. Look at Microsofts 1st party output over the last couple of years. Redfall fell flat on it's face and Starfield hasn't exactly set the heather on fire. Meanwhile, HiFi Rush is well regarded and Pentiment is a classic. Smaller, wierder titles (which Tango were good at making) is what they're doing well (and seems to be what moves gamepass subscriptions- which is Microsofts core gaming buisness), not "blockbusters" and the sort of game this restructuring seems to be prioritising.

@Mikey856 it's not harder than normal really. It just scales up enemy stats do you don't stomp them effortlessly in New Game+. It removes button prompts during the occasional QTE's, but that's more annoying than anything else.
The mode for people wanting a challenge is the Ultimaniac mode.

Has anyone actually looked at the garment that's covering up her cleavage? It's black, it looks lacey, it's largely see through. It looks like lingerie to me. You don't make an outfit less sexualised by adding lingerie.

Also, if you look at her top in the "before pic", you'll see that it's showing cleavage because it's unzipped. Wouldn't a "censored" version just be one where Eve has pulled the zip up?

@EchoRange Yes, but most of those (unlike the folk who made Fallout 3) had played the first two Fallouts. Those 7 were also senior people, and many of those who didn't work on Fallout 1 did work on Fallout 2 and/or Van Buren (Black Isle's Fallout 3 which ended up getting cancelled), such as New Vegas' project lead Josh Sawyer.

This nuking of Shady Sands is fairly typical for Bethesda though. They like to destroy the settings of previous games in their series. From Red Mountain erupting and destroying Morrowind, to the Great War wrecking Cyrodil. When Elder Scrolls 6 comes out, expect to discover that Skyrim has collapsed in some way.

@Olskeezy Not just Fallout 2- New Vegas also has a lot of lore ties to the original game as well, but nothing in New Vegas needs you to have played those two games. Also, Fallout 1 and 2 are quite short- they're more focused on having replay value than on being games that demand all of your gaming time.

Even though the gameplay style changes massively, Fallout, Fallout 2 and New Vegas are a great trilogy.

I also don't think the first two Fallout games are that janky. They're much less janky than their contemporaries such as Baldur's Gate. They're turn based, but quite accessible. Just if you play the first one and recruit Ian, don't stand in front of him if he has a weapon capable of automatic fire. Ever.

"Made adjustments to when Torgal can be petted and lowered time before re-petting."

This is the most important change. That dog is adorable.

@ThomasHL Note that your evidence for this is from Fallout 3- Bethesda's first Fallout. But Bethesda never understood Fallout (as Matroska points out with Bethesda misunderstanding the what the pre-war world looked like by making it 1950's rather than "what the 1950's thought the future would look like". Actually the pre-war world in the original Fallout looked more like Futurama than the actual 1950's- it's retro futurism).

Before that yes this was a series that took it's timeline seriously. New Vegas does as well (being developed by fans of the original games and people who worked on the original games) which is why when most major characters speak about their backgrounds in that game they refer to past events and places (such as Marcus speaking about The Master from Fallout 1 and his time as sherrif of Broken Hills in Fallout 2) Fallout hasn't been a series for people who take timelines seriously since 2008, but before Bethesda it absolutely was.