I played Artful Escape for 10 minutes on a PAX show floor years ago and knew that game was not for me, so I expected Mixtape to also not be for me. I have access to it via Steam family share, and I figured I may as well play it, given its runtime. This is better than Artful Escape; I’m about halfway through it and will finish it tonight. I can at least sort of dig the characters and story, and I’m definitely into the presentation, but I’m not getting anything out of any of the interactive bits of it. So far, I think I would have enjoyed it better as a movie.

“Is Mixtape a game?” I remember Telltale discussions years ago, so we’ve got younger folks re-litigating this. I figure it doesn’t matter. It’s a “video game”, because we’ve got nothing better to describe it, and people who play/review other products built with the same technology that run on the same machines are best equipped to partake and enjoy it. I’ve seen many examples where, outside of accomplishing an objective or trying to “win”, the interactivity was used to great effect to convey the story. There’s a famous example at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3 where the game won’t move forward until you do something as simple as press the square button on the PS controller, but the context around that made it extremely emotionally effective in a way that movies can’t do. In the first half of Mixtape, I haven’t seen anything close to that, and that’s where it’s not blowing my mind.

Several million hits across Saros’ trailers there. It definitely comes up on all the biggest gaming podcasts. So I’m not sure what the other poster’s blind spot is, but Saros is definitely there.

At the same time, that’s not them setting the game up to fail; that’s you purposely excusing yourself from everywhere that people normally hear about games. I’m not sure by what metric you’re basing declining track records on, but wherever you hear about games on Bluesky or YouTube is probably still one of these outlets. Right here on this Lemmy community, we cite those same outlets for news, and Saros has been posted here four times on its own, as well as in a Sony State of Play mega thread.

What sites do you follow for gaming news? OpenCritic aggregated 129 different outlets that reviewed it, and it’s a front page sort of deal for any of them.

I’m not sure we can help you if you’ve never heard of this game. It’s been in every major gaming news site’s release calendar, reviewed very well, and it’s been in several of Sony’s showcases.

EDIT: Folks, I don’t care if you also personally never heard of it. That wasn’t the point. This game had a marketing budget and was not set up to fail.

When I see a new company formed, raising $100M, touting how it’s led by some big name you’ve heard of from some different studio years ago, the odds are against it. This game had only barely started development when we saw a CG announcement trailer. Hudson doesn’t want to spend 5 to 7 years developing it, but I noticed he didn’t rule out 4 years, which is still a long time for a brand new studio.

From experience, don’t get your hopes up for this game. If it doesn’t get cancelled before it’s finished, it’s unlikely to blow your mind. Starting a new studio with a project this big has historically not worked out most of the time.

Both of those are coming back, but I’m curious to see how you make Crazy Taxi make sense more than two decades after the death of arcades.

Unity somewhat fits that description, but it was definitely net negative for their business, and with how long it took them to walk back from it, I don’t think they had any plans to walk back before the backlash. Microsoft has been slowly making Windows worse for a long, long time; it wasn’t something they did all at once and then issued a “we hear you”. They are legitimately scared of losing their market dominance right now.

I am not aware of any company that has reversed course on enshittification once it has begun

It happens when they’re punished for it in the market. Microsoft finally realized they’re bleeding Windows and Xbox users, so they’ve got major initiatives to improve both. Unity tried to make the worst business pivot I’ve ever heard of, and their customers were very clearly and vocally jumping ship in response, so they undid that pivot. Plex’s only competition is an alternative that doesn’t have a business model, so if they bleed enough users to Jellyfin, they’ll either reverse course or stop just shy of some threshold where people leave Plex; or their business will die, which is also an option on the table.

I’m still learning what I need to do in order to get up and running on the internet, but I think my plan for my dad to connect to my Jellyfin is to build him a Raspberry Pi and just hand it to him.

It’s extremely easy to see that that’s what’s going on, if you’ve tried buying your own memory or storage lately. They’d love to lower the prices of their hardware, all three of these console manufacturers, so that you end up spending more in their high-margin ecosystem, but this is the reality of the situation. Too many companies are bidding on the same parts right now, at least until the AI bubble fully pops.

In response to component price increases.

I agree, but it’s still difficult to tell someone who spent years of their life building something that it isn’t very good.

Weird. When I went to PAX back in the day and a dev asked what I thought about the game, I felt like it was really difficult to say that I didn’t like it, even if it’s what they wanted and needed to hear.

It does, but it’s functionally a burst mechanic, which ArcSys ought to be all too familiar with, and Tokon doesn’t have one. The combos seem long enough in this game for that to be a concern for me, but more concerning is how long it looks like you’ll just have to sit there blocking with no parry, pushblock, Faultless Defense, etc.

Eh, hundreds of other people worked on the game, too. Borderlands is not Randy. I’ll give you something to look for as you attempt to sink your teeth in: the skills and skill trees are sort of based around a meta game. If you choose to engage with its systems and optimize, you’re not just mindlessly shooting stuff. For instance, I played the Gravitar, who gets feedback loops going around “entangling” enemies; by endgame, my ability was basically never on cooldown, and I had incentives to pick weaker guns because they fed into my gameplan better. My friend that I co-oped the game with played the Siren and had a build where he could loop Kill Skills into one another so they’re all proc-ing all the time. I hope you like it! (The story’s not great though.)

I’ve heard that a lot as a reaction to BL3’s writing. I only played through this series in the past year, and BL2 was good, but after playing the sequels, I think it would wear thin for me by comparison over extended periods of time. Especially once you get a new computer down the line that can get past the performance problems, I’d recommend trying out BL4. The story won’t be as good as 2, once again, but man, the encounter designs and class designs are so good.

How did you feel about subsequent Borderlands games? I thought the character classes and skill trees only got more interesting as the series went along, generally.

Skullgirls, for sure. Steam has me at over 1800 hours, but I’ve also played at locals and tournaments. It had 14 characters for the longest time, but now it’s got 18, and the ways you can combine them are nearly limitless, so there’s a high chance one of its most powerful strategies hasn’t even been discovered yet even though it’s now 14 years old. Now and then I’ll see a tournament match where someone brought out something brand new that I’ve never seen before, and I love it for that.

I would love for this game to be as good as its marketing wants me to believe, but I’ve seen far too many large teams form to put out a first project that seriously underwhelms, regardless of the pedigree of the people who formed that studio. I remain pessimistic but would love to be wrong.