There was a car interstitial that was throwaway, but the parts I was talking about were one where you chased a plane and one where you ran a garbage truck through an alley like a tank, both of which are pretty on-brand.

Wow, I didn’t know that. Those sections are just supposed to be moments that feel cool and stitch together other parts of the game, so they help pacing, but that game’s use of vehicles in general was pretty underwhelming.

It wasn’t even that difficult! That meme had been circulating for years, but it only took me like three tries.

Destiny was running the studio into the ground regardless of Marathon. Behind the scenes reporting says it had been a while since Destiny turned a profit, and by the time The Final Shape came out, the damage was already done. The reason they’re not continuing with it is that it just burns through money.

They’re reworking it into something else now in an attempt to salvage it, but for me personally, unless that involves being able to host the server myself, I’m not giving it the time of day.

How is this being written as some sort of success story?

Because this is still somehow better than what Sony is doing, as they have no plan for backward compatibility with your disc games. I agree that people portraying this as a success story are very shortsighted.

The other gaming-related thing he’s famous for is being responsible for Sneak King, the official Burger King Xbox 360 stealth game about sneaking around as the Burger King macot to feed people Whoppers or something.

And that will help as well, but wherever you spend your money, or don’t spend it, is effective. People just like to ignore the times that it’s visibly caused change and focus on the ones where they can’t see it or it hasn’t happened yet.

I already outlined two things you could do instead. Casually overheard on the subway, I know the average Joe who just plays NBA 2K is becoming more and more aware of his other options as the one he liked grows to be worse in some way, whether his line in the sand is physical media or not.

Yes, Netflix got worse; buy some Blu Rays instead…you might find that they’re higher quality video than what Netflix has been sending you anyway, and you can get them pretty cheap on sale. PlayStation got worse; play your games somewhere else, even old or low spec ones that run on machines you already have or that you can afford. You won’t be the only one in this predicament, and game developers are going to have to start targeting a lower spec to survive. These companies get you used to a thing and either cut benefits or raise prices or both, but they’re not essential to your survival or happiness, and there are other things you can do in response.

And even if it was, we’re long past the point of voting with your wallet anymore in this age of tech oligopolies.

Respectfully, the hell we are. Telling yourself there’s nothing we can do about it perpetuates the cycle. For one thing, you could probably stick to just the physical media that already exists and never run out of great video games to play, and besides that, depending on what’s important to you, there’s DRM-free games.

They’re quite different, but I think the more you try to adhere to classic Tomb Raider, the more visceral distaste you’ll get from people about how poorly those old games controlled. The puzzles in that reboot trilogy, though they often could have benefited from multiple additional steps to make them more interesting, were better than anything in Uncharted, since Uncharted loved to just give you the answer out of a magic notebook rather than let you solve things yourself. The second and third games in that TR trilogy were better about this than the 2013 game. The Legends era of Tomb Raider didn’t have much in the way of high highs, but there were definitely very low lows, and you end up with RPG skill trees in the reboot trilogy so that you can both A) decide how much optional content you want to do but also B) have a tangible incentive to do it, unlike what SkillUp pointed out in Wolverine’s progression elements in how those systems can be thoughtless.

As for chasing trends, they did a bit, but it became a real ouroboros when Uncharted 4 added a mechanic or two from the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy into its kit, and at least if TR was going to rip off some stuff from Uncharted, the combat in those three games was the best across either franchise.

I’d also recommend that recent Indiana Jones game, if you haven’t played it, speaking of ouroboros.

All of those things were in the reboot trilogy, and those games hardly played themselves.

It was a total loss on their books either way, so it sure looks like free to play would have failed exactly as hard.

Alternative theory: launching a free to play game in any genre these days may as well be buying an extremely expensive lottery ticket. The top 10 charts in player numbers, not just on Steam but on any platform, are entrenched games that have been out for 10+ years and perhaps Valorant. It takes a lot of players to financially sustain a free to play game, and without the price tag, they would have only burned through money faster. When the game was free pre-release, it had already proven that there was no interest in the game. 2XKO was one of the most popular fighting games out there by player numbers, but for what it needed to make that make financial sense, it was nowhere close. Highguard was free to play and had a tremendous amount of players at launch, but it barely lasted longer than Concord.

This used to be pretty standard! If it weren’t for all of Blizzard’s other nonsense, I might applaud this.

StarCraft II is one of my favorite games ever, but I have no faith in modern Blizzard to make a game that isn’t wrapped in trappings that would piss me off. Back in 2010, it was extremely annoying that the game required an internet connection and made us go through all sorts of wacky solutions just to have a LAN party. Nowadays, an online-only game is a non-starter for me. The story in SC2 jumped the shark after the Wings of Liberty campaign anyway.

It wasn’t damage control when the size of Concord’s loss was leaked to the press.

The weird one to me is that, if they’re going to cancel a Kojima game, they still haven’t cancelled Fairgames/Break-In/Project Espresso. One of those two is far more likely to break even.

Yeah, it’s not new, but it’s gotten more egregious, and everyone keeps pulling from the same bag of tricks regardless of how much sense it makes. Uncharted has a lot of climbing bits because it’s riffing on Indiana Jones, but why is James Bond doing the same climbing bits as Nathan Drake? And why are they so simple that my inputs hardly matter because the only path through the level is so telegraphed that it’s visible from space? Games need downtime between action sequences for pacing reasons, and while I could tolerate it in Gears of War because of their brevity, our answer to this problem needs to be more sophisticated than just holding up on the analog stick.

I ran into a lot of “AAA disease” when playing through 007 First Light recently, where the game has a lot of walk-and-talk and doesn’t respect your intelligence, but it’s a criticism that doesn’t permeate the entire runtime of the game. I didn’t realize how much worse it could be, but Ralph makes his case quite clearly in this video.