Even Terminator 2 changed the time travel rules established in the first movie, but at least it felt like its ideas were still original. And I didn’t even mind Terminator 3.

I played the 2018 one and not Ragnarok, and that might be true, but what an awful way to introduce people to this game during a showcase, lol.

They understand, but they also understand that when they need to make something new, and the old classic already had a complete story, their best chance to make money is off of something familiar. So not Tom Bombadil, but that’s how we ended up with Solo: A Star Wars Story and every Terminator after 2.

I was disappointed in Uncharted 4 for a few reasons, but it’s got other components to its gameplay loop besides shooting, and some of them are better than the shooting too. I’d expect this new God of War game to have some light puzzles and decisions around gear, but they couldn’t have baked more of that into the opening 20 minutes? Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year is very story-heavy, but they’re gracefully integrating introductions to mechanics (“tutorial” has connotations that don’t really apply here) all the way through the first 5 hours of the game while setting up the story. Even the introduction to your own character allows you to make decisions around how to spec out his character sheet.

That was a pretty brutal 20 minutes. If the game was coming out on a platform I own, even if I was excited for how the combat works, that was barely interactive, and I wouldn’t be looking forward to sitting through that again. In The Legend of Zelda, you hold up for about a second and a man immediately gives you a sword; I couldn’t help but think of that during all that story setup.

Not that stable. This game went through a form of development hell long enough that they had to lay off some folks to survive long enough to finish it.

This game is very good, but boy is it stressful. I can’t play for long sessions before I end up needing a break.

Yeah, any earlier than that and I’m hunting down scanline filters for RetroArch to dial in the look. Having a proper CRT and old consoles is too much for me, but CRT scanlines very much affect the look of those old games.

6th gen = Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox

7th gen = Xbox 360, PS3; optionally Wii, but this is the spot where Nintendo systems sort of stop aligning with other console generations

It was speaking more to point #3.

Both Spider-Man 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows sold multiple millions of copies and made a substantial profit. They sell to the kind of the person who only buys 1-4 games per year, which is the largest segment of the market.

That’s a little tangential though. When I’m saying (and Schreier is saying) people are expecting more, they’re expecting Spider-Man or Assassin’s Creed to last longer than 10-15 hours. Someone else already made Minecraft.

You can go on any gaming forum, including this one, and see people distill a game’s value down to how many hours they get for their dollar, so there’s definitely some amount of truth to it.

You won’t hear arguments from me on that, but it’s still a problem that happens along a spectrum as you scale graphics up, too.

BG3 has plenty of other strengths over its predecessors. It’s just not its main villain. Gortash and Thorm were both great, but our attention was divided amongst several antagonists rather than how much of the spotlight Irenicus got.

I’ve never heard of anyone taking a game job because it pays extraordinarily well compared to another job they might be able to get with the same skill set. Definitely not recently. I’ve turned down a programming job in games because my non-game job paid way better, and that job I turned down didn’t even exist a year and change later, because the industry is so volatile and competitive.

Astroturfing works where everyone is anonymous, but I don’t know how you expect it to work when every reviewer has a byline and an incentive to reveal corruption.

Oh no, not even because they’re feeling guilty. If anything, those same YouTubers who get their audience angry for a living would have a monetary incentive to present proof if it existed. Actual astroturfers advertise their services on LinkedIn, and in order for this conspiracy to work, you’d have to pay off people who don’t astroturf for a living.

Actual astroturfing often has a paper trail. “Citizens Concerned About the Whatever” publicly listed as funded by companies who directly stand to benefit from Whatever’s opposition. If it was so easy to buy good review scores, why did Microsoft not purchase them for Redfall? Why did Sony not purchase them for that 2D God of War game? Why did AnnaPurna buy them for this game but not the dozens of other games they publish? Why is the Steam user rating for Mixtape also very high if it could only achieve such ratings via bribery? Is the only explanation for Mixtape’s reviews that they were paid off? Or, perhaps, could it be a bunch of people who don’t have to prove that they’ve even played the game leaving 0/10 reviews on Metacritic en masse because they were riled up by Asmongold or some other influencer who traffics in getting their audience mad about “woke”?

The line that stuck with me most was where he picked a random-ass woman, briefly told her life story, and then said, “and now she’s dead”, and killed her in an instant. All-time great villain.