Countdown to him getting fired in 3…2…3…4…8…49…

Because companies ultimately seem to love leaders that are toxic these days.

I’d recommend you don’t watch this if you’ve yet to play the first game (either iteration). A few spoiler elements.

It was kind of a given that this would be made, since, while the first has a great set of conclusions, it also sets up a really compelling cliffhanger element. The two games were supposedly written as one originally, and then split to two since it was getting long.

Still, part of me predicts some people will play the upcoming remake, and then get so wrapped up in the ending they’ll just buy the old-fashioned SC so they don’t have to wait for the remake edition.

This often happens to me in RPGs because I’m missing some combat mechanic or fundamental.

It’s made me want to design better optional tutorials for those games to help people discover certain strategies. Eg;

“Hey, you have many different tuning macguffins on this character, but it means their stats aren’t built to any one strength. For an example, try using 8 yellow macguffins to build them for taunting/defense so they can use their self-heal unique, and build up stun on enemies each time they’re attacked.”

Those things feel so witty to discover, but many RPGs now build up and prioritize so many systems it’s understandable people aren’t quickly attuned to them. What often gets me is thinking I’m not making the right decisions mid-combat, when my menu decisions around equipment/abilities are completely wrong.

I never played Remake, but when a YouTuber recently did a comparison video between some of their major scenes, I ended up respecting the original so much more.

A great one was when the plate falls. The original made directorial choices that emphasized the brutality of it all so much better, especially by choosing to cut the music. It just seems like Remake’s director was adding so many things simply because he could, making short and direct scenes so much worse by excess creation.

Of note, another JRPG from that general time period, Trails in the Sky, is being remade soon, and that one seemed quite a bit more faithful to me. Still taking liberties to change dialog, but only where it makes sense - they also greatly retooled the battle system with full respect for classic turntaking style.

That’s not always true when members of the team feel really motivated and inspired by a concept.

I’ve been in that zone a few times before. “Well, I’ve been working for a few hours. I guess I should take a break and play a game. …Or, I could just keep at it…?”

Of course, with such large teams now, you’re unlikely to see that happen to many of them. They’ll be working late, but usually zombies.

Playing an indie mystery game called Dragon Detective. I’m on case 4 so far, it’s definitely held my attention with the story. It manages to do a good job with its worldbuilding.

I’ve still been using it lately to animate a video. It’s nice that so many tools have been refined in that time.

This makes me realize the last time I interacted with Digimon was the age-old TV show that began with an Isekai.

I’m curious how the series has changed. Apparently some of the newer stories lean a bit darker?

When I run a social media site, it will be a rule to use uncensored terms, and any use of asterisks or alt-words like “unalive” will result in a warning or suspension.

I mean, you changed the topic onto the subject of pricing, which is the main thing driving sentiment that Microsoft is anti-consumer. There are other smaller gaming subscriptions out there, and I don’t call many of them anti-consumer.

It sounds plausible Sony and Microsoft don’t have very fair algorithms to decide what a dev earns for their subscription. That’s an internal element, and we don’t get to see that calculation.

Imagine a guy hears about Game Pass, and sees he can play Spiritfarer on it. “Spiritfarer!? That awesome emotional experience that everyone says they cried at? I’m definitely playing that!” 5-ish hours later, they’ve finished the game, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but the subscription is still going.

At this point, the subscriber decides they may as well play State of Decay 2 mindlessly the rest of the month, often without much interest, but trusts another excellent singleplayer indie darling will arrive next month.

I’d bet the algorithm may pay the SOD2 devs far more in that case because numbers show that’s what “kept them engaged”, not to mention live service games like SOD2 have DLC to entice people into.

Theres absolutely a danger in that thinking, since most people bought a PS5 after seeing Sony’s incredible singleplayer games, and I believe that’s primarily what gets people into Game Pass too.

So this is basically an observation about raising prices. But I think there’s a misconception on social media that you have to be reading the news and on your soapbox to alert people to those things.

Pricing has always very readily affected people’s spending behavior. Not just people that follow gaming news, but people browsing GameStop for whatever’s new. We’ve even seen that - stats are showing people spent much less on games this year. Some people are even spending less through the option of going for a subscription rather than buying 8 games through the year. The publisher plan is certainly to tune up that cost with time, but personally, I don’t think that plan has a high chance of success.

And there’s a very worrying reality on the publisher side that gamers have many alternatives, especially as quality falls in these AAA products. You can imagine someone starved for a Soulslike might’ve spent $70 on generic copycat “Folly of the Dodgeroll 7”, if not for seeing Hollow Knight Silksong for $20 one shelf over.

So basically, I never hated the subscription model itself as a “weapon of capitalism”; just the constant attempts to shrinkflate as has been happening to most else.

I have different reasons I hate MS and Game Pass specifically, but I was never convinced by this argument.

It works on the argument of “We would like to stop offering direct purchase models, and require consumers to play by subscription.” But no one has done that. No one has really come close to doing that.

People argue the price will steadily go up; and that’s one of the reasons I don’t play Game Pass anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t maintain access to the games on there, which is why I bought the ones I wanted to keep playing - not very many.

Much as I’d predict support for that conclusion, I feel like there’s room to doubt the survey process used - as has often been the case for studies on gamer behavior.

Many FromSoft games don’t strike that balance right. The ones I’ve tried, even the ones I successfully beat, gave me a groan of “Fucking FINALLY, now what mediocre reward and fresh hell do I get for that!? In fact, why am I playing this…?”

Another example, Stellar Blade. I enjoyed the difficulty, and got pretty good at the parries against bosses; but usually only hit about 60% of them. That wasn’t good enough for the very final boss, which takes off about half your health for each one you miss. Only for that fight, I ended up turning down the difficulty - and it was still tough! And, I still felt rewarded at the end.

One final example, Another Crab’s Treasure. It has some hard fights, and many difficulty options. I’m glad those were there…but I also just never used them. Also, it now has a NG+ that gets even harder.

I never actually liked FromSoft’s themselves, but several Soulslikes I really enjoyed did away with runbacks, or always had checkpoints right before bosses.

I really just want people to start evaluating each design decision Dark Souls made on its own - stop worshipping the whole as being perfect, because it most definitely is not. So many of the knowledge checks (poise, anyone?) are just there for experienced players to lord over confused shrubs.

I certainly remember getting some meaningful and surprising twists in the Telltale game, at least.

One game that nailed PS2 aesthetic while also having its own identity is Homebody. It’s mostly puzzles, but has a very creepy mansion aesthetic and always has you worried about the monster. It’s a “Groundhog Day” game where the protagonist remembers dying, and is caught in a loop.

Another one I enjoyed with a bit more combat is Tormented Souls. The sequel is coming soon, too.

I’m gonna be real with you: I don’t like Dark Souls. It felt poorly designed and obtuse with no payoff. But, it took me a long time to learn it’s completely unconstructive to bash it in places where people are admiring it. Whether I like it or not, other people do.

If you must, give a word of caution so people know what to expect. “It’s a Metroidvania, I didn’t like it because it’s very black and white, and goes hard on difficulty.”

Sometimes it’s an unfortunate demo effect where the devs have a form of gameplay they prefer that just doesn’t impress investors on a big screen. So, they shift toward the run-and-gun playstyle.

I seem to remember getting surprised by some AAAs in this way, where I expected them to be brainless action, then find myself strategizing in ways that E3 didn’t show since those bits are slower paced. Haven’t watched the video just yet though.

That video is completely out of date. I watched a sampling of the bugs they were showing, and none of them appear for me, even when playing with bots.

I remember it being shared on release, and its focus on things like physics within maps was a very specific thing - after Half-Life 2 many games gave up on physics especially in online, because it was more likely to lead to glitchy and unexpected behavior than emergent gameplay.

There’s so much in that video you’d have to pick out what matters to make your case, but to take melee reactions: B4B didn’t want the shove to be so powerful or delay the horde much, so it made sense zombies wouldn’t fall to the ground from one shove; the animation length would end up locking up the difficulty.

Death reactions is another gameplay choice. With automatic weapons, I wasted alot of ammo in L4D2 simply because it wasn’t instantly clear an enemy was dead - they were just playing out their lengthy Oscar death. Sometimes it’s a tradeoff between showcasing the enemy design, and showcasing the weapon’s effects when dozens of other enemies are bearing down.

I feel like a growing solution would be to simulcast to Twitch as well as other platforms, and hopefully slowly encourage users to view via the other platforms.

Kudos to the OP - I stopped watching Twitch when Bezos went full Nazi, but couldn’t get YouTube off my list.

Maybe it matches with my hate of L4D’s high-level-focused Versus mode, but I couldn’t make it past two games of Evolve, while I’ve played a lot more B4B.

I’m still not sure what people disliked most about it. I installed it again relatively recently and had a lot of fun.

It’s certainly following some different concepts than Left 4 Dead, but I really like some of the resource management and build planning you can do.

That’s honestly exactly what’s kept me away from CRPGs. The premise often seems to be based around something like ruined worlds or corrupt empires (both, in Wasteland’s case), with little hope for massive change. The old poster child, Fallout, runs its whole train off of treating endless grim fighting as an absurd thing to not even care about, with its tagline “War never changes”. Fun sometimes, but never meaningful.

Something I realize I never touched on is the specific way emotional extremes tie in to specific characters.

Quite often, what I enjoy most about story-driven games is the way you either see characters change, or get to see different sides of them. The moment that the quirky and silly kid turns deathly serious and speaks directly. The moment that a calm, collected tactician falls into a panic attack and runs away. The moment that an emotionless assassin is pressed into laughter for the first time.

One specific game that gave this feeling in spades is JRPG “Trails in the Sky”. I think it sometimes forces its extremes a bit, but it’s very good at spending a long time building joy and normalcy before establishing how much trauma and violence exists in the history and near-future of the world.

But while JRPGs can bore people with their 50-80-hour runtimes, one game I think demonstrated that principle fantastically was “Elite Beat Agents” for the DS. Within the scope of a 5-minute pop song, a focal character may go to the lowest point of their life, and bounce all the way back to happiness. Pushing the idea along with a frenetic musical pace makes it more acceptable, but it shows the importance of taking someone to both extremes.

Doesn’t need a run button. And, something kind of useful is that while revving, the game changes from strafe controls to tank controls, making it easier to orient at an enemy around a corner since you can’t reach your camera thumbstick.

The excitement of F1 racing is unattainable to most people, which is why it makes sense as a game, but bikes are pretty tame. However, one thing that makes bikes interesting is their smallness, ease and simplicity. The Yakuza series has started picking up on giving protagonists such small vehicles, including a skateboard and a segway, and they make much more sense within those worlds than full vehicles.

I feel like this could be envisioned as part of a larger open-world game, not as the vehicle itself as a means to fun. Something like: You have an open world game, and it has cars, and they are faster than your bike. But they are far more nimble, can go in tighter areas, and can be stored in larger vehicles used to get around. So, something like picking the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2, they’re a tool that’s fantastic for making use of the environment for better results, but not a “first-order strategy for movement”. This is even sometimes how they work out in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Doesn’t this touch on the premise of Death Stranding?

The only real lesson here might be that both Western media as a whole, and the Eastern anime industry, have regressed a lot. Rambo in particular is marked by tragedy with the way sequels warped him into a false image of raw masculinity. Many anime authors have even said as much. But the Eastern gaming scene appears to still have some very dedicated auteurs.

It’s even sort of harmed the feminist movement for Western media to be so simple - often showing women as unemotional, infallible badasses to try to “equal the score”, ultimately just causing people to hate them and even misconstrue women as being the issue with those movies.

But I’m also glad to get more examples of poignant Western media; I felt upset that I could only think of Eastern examples, when I know there are some great ones made more locally.

It’s hard to tell which extreme is going to surprise people first with Valiant Hearts.

Like, it’s a WW1 game so of course you’re expecting it to be brutal. Then, it’s cute to have so many stories of soldiers not based around killing people - just adventure, puzzle-solving, making friends across country lines, as well as the heartfelt letters written.

Then it gets to Chemin des Dames, and holy shit, not even the most brutal shooters evoke the unfathomable amounts of death happening in those meat grinders. Neither element would’ve hit so hard without the other giving you that kind of whiplash.

Sorry I should have clarified.

I specifically meant hunger and lust. I will begin removing other examples.

I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.

The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.

The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.

If you’re able to get a good internet connection, you could run anything on Geforce Now’s list. Not the most optimal gaming experience, but it can be satisfying enough.

To give something more specific I enjoy, try Backpack Hero. It’s a roguelike on the easier side, built around making absurd combos.

That might be underselling how big the series is - not to mention that many of them have been completely re-done in HD so they’re no longer on GBA graphics.

These are generally pretty big games. A lot of “mystery” games are about one mystery, but every AA game has at least 4, the last of each game being a giant epic journey.

I mean, if digital games were always excluded from this form of preservation, and digital game cards are just a step up in terms of store discoverability, I think it did.

They’re obviously incredibly inferior to full game cards. They’re not much better than digital games, but they’re better than “We’re not releasing on Nintendo Switch because no one will see us in the eshop and since the game sells for $10 we can’t afford game cartridges.”

I might’ve tried out Nikki if it’d been okay with some amount of “sexy” outfits - like, I know not to expect any bikini-model type of garb, but there’s still a midpoint that could feel appealing but also classy.

Either way - still a gacha game with a pretty incomprehensible story.

To clarify, the idea would be to have smaller studios each independently making games. So for half a year, one studio may only have the responsibility of a single 3-hour demo.

Damn man, I love Resident Evil and have never finished an SH game, but we have so many of the former (especially considering the indie scene) this seems like an excessively presumptuous comment.

I definitely want to see more publisher-driven “game experiments”. Imagine a studio putting out a 3-hour vertical slice of a PS2-era-style experimental game idea for $5. Now imagine, a publisher puts out about 20 of these such games a year (and mostly loses money on them - since $5 isn’t a lot and those 3-hour segments need polish) but then, occasionally one of them hits it big - and then the publisher grants them a greenlight to make a trilogy of 14-hour games after figuring out that people enjoy it.