Looks like fun, but expected full release out of early access in 2026?

That’s a year and a half wait to finish out the story.

A+ game development right there. I don’t like how Nintendo runs their online services (and actively opposes game tournaments), but you wouldn’t expect such a change in Smash.

The game is a mess. I watch my kid play it and it’s so less graceful than smash. Framerates randomly drop, lag spikes happen a few times a minute, hit boxes seem nebulous compared to attack animations.

You can use maybe a quarter of the roster for free. You may be able to unlock everybody from in game currency, but I’m not too sure. They also just… removed a character that wasn’t free. If I paid any money for premium content I’d be pissed

Beautiful music. Looks like a more interactive take on Stardew Valley

They could have just:

“We’ve received customer feedback on our repair process and are reviewing how we conduct operations. We appreciate your concerns and strive to provide excellent computer products with reliable and trustworthy service.”

Doubling down on shitty behavior is never good business.

I look forward to a Backblaze analysis in a few years.

The real Microsoft was the studios we shut down along the way

I hope games will be able to hit 60fps stable or offer some type of 40hz minimums for the higher refresh rate TVs.

Resolution is important, but if the games still perform like they do now, I’d be disappointed.

Hard R, referencing the N word. Not sure the shop is part of the reference

I think you need to re-read the linked thread. Nobody’s as extreme as you’re making them out to be.

The complaints are fairly level headed. I’ve seen worse in Amazon product reviews.

Get back to working on Haunted Chocolatier?

I would have really loved playing this game on my Steamdeck but looks like the only way that’s happening is with some sprinkles of what Nintendo calls piracy

Looks eerily similar to Fortnite.

I’ll miss Timesplitters and those scenarios or whatever with almost impossible gold medal accomplishments. That and the music! Every other track was a banger

https://youtu.be/xWtqc4ERo4A?si=35xWcGLEgNB9o-fX

That’s a PC2 exclusive

They weren’t kidding

I’d love for Blizzard to pursue a genuine passion project. Ask the Microsoft overlords for a few years to put out something not beholden to sales expectations or profit. They can devote a small team to make something that they want to while the rest of the company continues on with its soulless corporate entertainment fabricator to fund the creative projects. You need creative projects to keep the workforce engaged.

If nothing else, Activision Blizzard was seen as a greedy, profit-driven machine which continually pushed out semi-entertaining products with en emphasis on FOMO micro-transactions and monetization schemes. Blizzard is a shell of what it once was.

Let them get back to their roots. Let them focus on engagement and fun.

And even if we could provide the training algorithm a perfectly diverse dataset, who gets to decide what that means? You could probably poll a million anthropologists from across the world and observe trends, but no certain consensus. What if polling anthropologists in underdeveloped nations skews in a different direction than what we consider rich countries? How about if a country was a colonizer in the past or has participated in a violent revolution?

How do we decide who qualifies as an anthropologist? Is a doctorate required, or is a college degree with numerous publications sufficient?

I don’t think we’ll ever see a perfectly neutral solution to this problem. At best, we can come equipped with knowledge that these tools may come with some biases, like when you analyze texts from the past. You make the best with what you have and strive to improve

I remember being excited for Blizzard game expansions. They were so full of content

I share your thoughts. Feels like for better or worse, this generation has exceedingly few true console exclusives. The Xbox ecosystem offers more sales in my corner of the world plus the option for gamepass if you’re so inclined, so it seems like a better value.

I finally picked up a PS5 on sale for a family holiday gift. I originally wanted to grab one for VR, but the longer I hold off, the more I’m seeing that it’s simply not a competitive package for that gaming space. I don’t have a gaming computer, so I’m limited to a few options, but for what my kids are interested in, a Quest 3 just offers more.

It’s kind of dumb. I want to spend my money on VR, but I don’t want to waste it. It’s a bit of a catch-22 where the ecosystem needs supporters now to grow, but people like myself don’t want to support it because it hasn’t grown (to meet the competition’s offerings, anyways)

I appreciate you doing the dirty work.

Who knew the Spyro community could compete with MLP and Sonic for… creative fanservice

Can you post the image? I’m genuinely curious now, but I’m getting nothing shocking from google image search

Ark: Survival Ascended includes all previously released paid DLC and new content of its own, including additional store content, new DLC, seasonal events…

It would be great if Sony would commit to its own creative endeavors.

The PSVR suite has some great potential, but outside of like… 3? first party games, it doesn’t have anything that you can’t find elsewhere. And for the titles that are available on other platforms, they tend to be updated more frequently or are otherwise more feature rich elsewhere. There’s a lot of power behind the platform, but almost nothing to use it for.

PSVR 2 is not compatible with PSVR1 from the PS4, so all of your accessories and games don’t carry over.

The newly updated Meta Quest 3 can run standalone or linked up to a computer. I don’t expect Sony to ever open up compatibility outside of its ecosystem, but history has shown that Sony is fine with abandoning ideas that don’t immediately print money.

I like their DLC policies.

The base game gets updated over a period of what, 10 years? Core gameplay mechanics which don’t work well or at least don’t make the developers happy are tweaked or revamped all the time. I only really play Stellaris, but the changes to the game throughout the years have kept things interesting.

The alternative is… not updating things which they don’t like? Perhaps that means mods never break, but then we’re shifting the onus of fixing the game to a third party, who can decide to quit whenever they want and let their (closed source) code deprecate. I’ve seen that kind of thing in Civ and I wasn’t a fan.

I guess with a studio that has demonstrated a pattern of long-term support for their games, this is what we get.

I feel like Stellaris is a measurably different game than release. I bought the game on steam like 10 years ago and while it looks largely the same, the mechanics have seemingly had complete makeovers or renovations every few years. As far as I can tell most of the modified mechanics have been introduced to the base game as well, so those without DLC aren’t completely left out.

The game used to be some weird rock-paper-scissors game of either wormholes, gateways, and jump drives with corvette death columns. There was an optimal way to play and everything else was a handicap

Exactly. How are they going to sell you new DLC over a decade if you don’t purchase a new game without it?

Poor performance.

Some streamers have had access to the game for what seems like a few weeks now but I haven’t heard of any complaints from them.

For regular users with modest PCs, the game doesn’t run well.

TLDR got a score of 3 for being awful.

Game lasts 5 hours. You can just run through sections of the game, as health replenishments are plentiful and normal enemies exist to pad runtime. Poor level design with frequent clipping bugs.

I see some Final Fantasy mentions, but I’m throwing Final Fantasy Tactics in particular into the ring.

• Great gameplay (min-max to your heart’s content) that will let the player fail. Also will let the player soft lock themselves and require loading an earlier save if they didn’t have “optimal” builds for some encounters…
• It has a story! That moves forward all of the time! Just let it happen and don’t think too much about it. You’re a mere mortal fighting up against gods at some point. Maybe?
• Great soundtrack! My personal favorites are below.
• Apoplexy
• Battle on the Bridge
• Antipyretic
• Trisection

I’m a big fan of creating thousands of folders with machine generated names to house my 27,000 Java files with, you guess it, more machine generated names.

I was prepared to roll my eyes after their introduction which was pure conjecture, but they they started pushing data. Individually these strange practices aren’t conclusive evidence for malware, but combined it’s hard to see any legitimate use for this kind of design for a company acting in good faith.