I think the smart money is on them continuing to do what they’ve been doing for decades, which is the kind of campaign they’ve made for decades, especially since there’s no online mode out of the gate.

This expectation is crazy to me. Most of what we’ve seen in an official capacity is cut scenes for a story mode resembling what they’ve been putting out since 2008, and that’s if you ignore the fact that gameplay has leaked multiple times and there won’t even be multiplayer at launch. Smart money is that there’s a campaign like they’ve always made and then the online rolls out months later, like their last two games.

Someone is probably far more likely to pick up a game like that that they just didn’t know was out rather than one they’ve never heard of before. If they could pull that trick on any game, they probably wouldn’t let a day go by without a banner, like today.

The reality is they want you to find those other games to maximize profit, which is where all of their work into recommendation engines and personalized release calendars has gone. But it’s not going to convince millions of people who want to play NBA 2K that they should buy the latest indie game instead.

I never felt like I formed a community on servers out of a server browser. I did get that years later on Discord. Matchmaking was always a far better experience, but the population will drop eventually, so you need the server browser.

Money. If you can host your own servers, you won’t be peer pressured to buy the latest skins.

It does.

PlayStation multiplayer games suffer when there’s no one to play with, so there’s a chance.

These days I find I’m drowning in a deluge of game releases, so even filtering those down to prioritize the ones on GOG first is a form of curation that helps. Regional pricing doesn’t affect me, but I feel for you. And there are exceptions to the multiplayer problem on GOG, which is what makes it harder than if it was just a blanket bad option for multiplayer. I’d love to see GOG implement something that allows for truly offline implementation of their Galaxy backend so that devs taking the easy porting route can still say that their game is 100% DRM-free; as it stands, I’m writing off buying a game like MechWarrior 5 on GOG.

It’s a shame, but GOG is still my default store. They make it difficult to shop for multiplayer games there though. They need to create some kind of incentive (carrot, not stick) to make sure devs keep their games in parity. They all talk about how hard it is to support multiple stores and then also complain about Steam being a monopoly. The reason they have so much market share is staring at the developers in the mirror.

Well, when something like Alan Wake II comes around, the problem for me is that I have no guarantee from the seller that it will continue to work on my operating system. If I’m an officially supported customer, I have some recourse if they push an update that breaks compatibility for me.

The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room.

It was salvaged from an entirely different game design altogether, likely with pieces they could use and pieces they threw away, and I’m sure there were limits on how much they could redo. When it was a multiplayer game, it may have been written so every player was the star, which could create this sort of dynamic. That’s purely conjecture, and I haven’t played the game, but there are a lot of reasons why it could have manifested that way without it being HR’s fault.

I’m not a fan of this lady. Her channel is used as a justification for right-wing channels complaining about “woke”, which makes it no surprise that her first cited video is from Colin Moriarty; or that the recommended next video after this one is “The Woman Who Ruined Videogames - The Story of Anita Sarkeesian”. Meanwhile, last I saw before tuning this lady out, she put more fuel on the fire about games media being told how to review a game by citing phrases that they used in common (that’s not how it works). At best, this video seems like a different perspective on the pitfalls of what happens to all companies as they grow large, and at worst, it comes across as some weird kind of conspiracy for corporate power.

The FF7 remake is for sure not just doing the original game again, but the combat is far from button mashing.

There have been lots.

Some consider it to be sacrilege, but I think Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is a fantastic remake. Yes, it makes parts of the game significantly easier, but they’re parts of the game that I would argue are more difficult due to unfortunately cumbersome controls that were outdated only a few short years after MGS1’s initial release. I think this one is a matter of which game you played first, because I played Twin Snakes first. It does have the unfortunate effect of making MGS2 far less impressive though, since all of the graphical and mechanical upgrades were carried over to the first game, so when you continue the series after Twin Snakes, it just feels like you’re playing that game two times in a row.

Then there’s stuff like the Baldur’s Gate enhanced editions. I’m sure I’m enjoying countless quality of life improvements over the original versions of the game, not the least of which is support for modern monitors, resolutions, and aspect ratios. I know of a couple that I’m quite thankful to have, like UI improvements for information display and inventory management.

Remakes like these really do breathe new life into old games, and the lack of one for something like Goldeneye 007 is a major barrier to me going back and playing a game like that. Maybe we were okay with 13 frames per second in 1997, but I can’t say I am anymore; I probably stopped being okay with it just a few years later. Then you’ve got the System Shock remake. It goes pretty far with how much they modernize that game, but I ran into a loop of dying, not having enough resources, and losing those resources again to respawning enemies. It would have been nice if they brought those quality of life features far enough that I could change the difficulty settings halfway through the game, but that’s not a feature it supports.

I have no idea why we’re remaking a game like Assassin’s Creed 4 or The Last of Us or Horizon: Zero Dawn already. That’s just going to make the market prematurely sick of something that has legitimate use cases, like what Hollywood did to 3D.

I can’t believe you’d just put spoilers for real world history in a comment like that, but at least you put it in spoiler tags. /s

Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply he’d be the main character, only that you can keep working with some of the actors they’ve already hired and get along with, keep using the locations and game systems they’ve already built, and start the player on fresh ground without having to hit his head to reset him back to a low level character sheet.

Conjecture on my part, but I took “Deliverance” to be Henry’s story in this world, based on some interviews with the devs. Plus he has a pretty solid conclusion to his story at the end of 2. So if we’re dropping “Deliverance” from the title, I’d expect it to follow someone else. There’s a pretty significant main character of KCD2 that, I’m told, the thing he’s known for in history has not happened yet by the time KCD2 ends.

It’s a pattern as long as you ignore the examples that break it, and you don’t lend more credibility to whatever follows the phrase, “my guy”.

The script was flipped on licensed games somewhere around Arkham Asylum in 2009. Spider-Man is one of Sony’s best-selling games ever, and Marvel Rivals is tremendously popular. There was never an extended period of time without a good, popular Star Wars game since the early 90s. No, licensed games don’t always fail or suck.

Avengers, Suicide Squad, and Concord were all on record as having lost hundreds of millions of dollars, which is nearly their entire development budgets. I don’t know how much Redfall lost, but we know it sold incredibly poorly, and the studio was shuttered in its wake.

Quite frankly, Rockstar’s shitty practices only affect the multiplayer. In which case, you’re either okay with it, because GTA Online has tons of players to this day, so they’re not boycotting it; or you come to GTA for the single player mode, where you’ll never see any of the stuff that bothers you.

Rockstar has even been on record stating that they were targeting console players first instead of PC because they’re more susceptible to their psychology department and spend more money on crappy FOMO microtransactions.

Feel free to cite the exact quote here, but the ones I can remember, without you editorializing it, are that console players spend more. I don’t think that’s down to them being more susceptible, because they’re not some other class of human being. On PC, custom servers that bypass the official ones are quite popular, and Rockstar can’t really advertise those microtransactions to players as effectively there. Their tactic for GTA6, best we can understand from behind the scenes reporting, is to let those servers remain operational but also hire the creators to work on officially supporting things like those roleplay servers in GTA6 in a way they can monetize. Be disgusted with that if you like, but I still fall into that single player camp. I’ll never see the parts of GTA6 that bother me. The fact that it comes to PC later means I’m just waiting for a sale. The copies they’ve sold already are to people who aren’t so precious about playing a PC version.

Ubisoft is currently struggling to exist as a company, having already explored new ownership structures and tons of layoffs, because people are no longer pouring money into the bullshit they complained about. I didn’t even list their Avatar and Star Wars games in the above.