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I just wish they’d dedicate one or two of their major updates to integrating all the random features they added into a cohesive whole. Right now there are dozens of systems that are almost all pointless shallow grinds as well as completely isolated from every other system. It’d give the game some real depth if these mechanics interacted with each other in any way.
That, and fix their damn inventory system. It’s been a decade and multiple overhauls and basic crafting and inventory management remains unpleasant and tedious.
They kind of tried that, but unfortunately it wasn’t very good.
Right, but there’s a difference between automating a refund if they can detect the purchase happened in the last two weeks and has less than two hours of playtime, versus complex support problems being handled by an LLM that can be mislead or hallucinate.
I suppose it’s fine if it’s limited to giving advice on solving the problem and has to escalate to a human if any server side action is required, but it being tied to anti-cheat has me worried that’s not the case.
I know Valve wants to remain a small-ish company, but automating in-house support has literally never improved things for the customer. It’s even worse if it’s tied into their anti-cheat - a false positive can lock you and your entire family out of multiplayer, and good luck getting a human to overturn it after the former support staff is moved to other teams.
I’d say it’s weird they didn’t focus on using this to help fix their nearly nonexistent community moderation, but I’ve been told their hands-off approach is deliberate due to a libertarian bent among the higher ups.
How the hell would it have connected to MGS and not just Metal Gear? 🤨
The ending shows that the whole game exists to explain a “plot hole” that literally nobody cared about (how Big Boss survived his “death” in Metal Gear). The scrapped final mission, Mission 51, would have come before that and finished Eli’s plotline, setting him on the path to becoming Liquid Snake by the time of Metal Gear Solid.
And Ground Zeroes was always planned as a separate game to MGS5. They were supposed to release at the same time, but 5’s development got delayed.
I’m going off of what people said around the time of Kojima’s exit, which is that Konami were unhappy with how long V was taking and forced Kojima to release Ground Zeroes as a standalone. It seems I misinterpreted what that meant!
The ultimate crime of MGSV is that they cut the ending mission that directly tied it to Metal Gear Solid. Without it the game’s more a prequel to Metal Gear than the Solid series.
That and cutting Ground Zeroes into its own game when it was originally supposed to be a chapter in V. It should have been retroactively included.
So the next day, I asked him, “So how is it?” He was shellshocked. “Snake died, man.” Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn’t check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far.
Sounds like you asked him right after he finished the Tanker chapter but before “Iroquois Pliskin” showed up on the Big Shell.
I didn’t play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.
The ending was mangled due to 9/11 happening right before the game’s release and them rushing to recut and sanitize the finale, which had huge swaths of Manhattan being leveled by Metal Gear Arsenal ramming through it.
Presumably the original cut was more coherent, but I’m guessing nothing could have lessened the final mindfuck of “every leader of the Patriots has been dead for over a century”.
I’m more impressed by his ability to get players to like Raiden later on. He’s still a massive cringy dork in MGS4, but now he’s an edgy Gray Fox expy and that was apparently enough to change player’s minds about him. He’s gone from the most hated to one of the most popular characters in the entire series.
Kpjima later did something similar with Otacon using a completely different approach. Otacon was introduced as a coward and a naïve fool, and though he improved with every game, many players didn’t like him due to that poor first impression.
The prequels featured Otacon’s father, who all we knew about beforehand was that he committed suicide years before MGS1 because he found out Otacon was sleeping with his stepmother, and managed to make him a more hateable character than most of the actual villains. He has the exact same voice and appearance along with all the same personality flaws as his son, but those flaws were all turned up to eleven and he lacked any of Otacon’s virtues to counter them.
And his character spiraled downwards from there - it was basically Kojima rubbing into your face how much worse Otacon could have been and shining a spotlight on the importance of character development.
What I like about Enshrouded’s world is how every setpiece tells a story. Not just in the omnipresent side quests and lore notes, but in how every ruined house feels authentic. They’ll almost always have a kitchen, cellar, outhouse or latrine, bedrooms, etc, and many of them have tableaus suggesting what happened in their occupants’ final moments and/or what caused them to fall. It feels like a place people actually lived in.
They could try by being the only place to get Star Wars games or Marvel or any of the many, many other IPs Disney has accumulated over the years. It’s how they got Disney+ off the ground.
Like I said, others have tried this approach and failed, but Disney might actually have the critical mass to get people to use a client other than Steam. Or at least attempt to and make getting certain games a nightmare for a few years until they come crawling back, like EA/Ubisoft/Microsoft/all the others.
I don’t care about them buying Epic, the game developer. I do care about them buying Epic, the game store owner, and trying to do to game distribution what they helped do to streaming (fragment a unified and beloved system into a dozen enshittified walled gardens). Other megacorps have tried and failed, but Disney is greedy enough and owns enough popular IPs that they could do some serious damage to the entertainment ecosystem if they try to go exclusive.
The pattern from every previous Disney acquisition is the same. A minority stake, then deeper integration, then ownership. Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm all started as partnerships before Disney moved to close the deal entirely.
Epic looks like it is following the same path, and the only thing standing between Disney and a full acquisition is Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, who retains full voting control over the company and has given no public indication that he is ready to sell.
We’re stuck counting on Tim Sweeney’s ego to save the day. What strange times we live in.
Neither did many of the miners. There was pretty famously a near-universal shortage of GPUs for several years because crypto miners were buying so many cards - online, direct from the manufacturer, even big box stores; they drained them all. Most of those would be indistinguishable from a normal purchase (a lot of miners only bought one or two cards; there were just a lot of crypto bros looking to get rich).
For an example, see the leaked Heart of the Swarm ending animatic (StarCraft spoilers, obviously). It’s a super janky rough cut to try out the scene’s flow before pouring their full resources into it. They had most of the art assets already in place since it’s a sequel, but for the parts they didn’t they used concept art and even music ripped from the Transformers movie.
With the high quality of free engines and the resulting explosion of indie games, nearly every genre has a constant stream of titles coming out. At this point I find my enjoyment of a game comes down to how many quality of life tweaks it implements more than any other factor.
So many otherwise great games stumble here. Take the survival crafting genre: basic things like crafting from storage or stacking to nearby chests make a game so much more pleasant to play, but it feels like half of all games neglect to implement them even when players request them from day 1 of Early Access.
Franchise rot is real. You’d think they’d learn when their most talked about games are always the early entries in a series, after the devs have hit their stride but before execs have ruined things with dumb ideas and fad chasing.
I haven’t played an Assassins Creed since Black Flag. I remember watching a preview of (I think) Valhalla showcasing the stealth. They snuck up on a boss and “assassinated” him, which… started the normal boss battle with the boss missing a bit of health. What’s even the point, then?
deserved bonus
Contractually mandated bonus, but I wouldn’t call “more than all Unknown Worlds games have made combined” a deserved bonus.
The CEO was an idiot for offering a quarter billion dollars extra for a simple milestone bonus on a game that almost certainly couldn’t earn more than a fraction of that, and that’s on top of everything else they paid for the studio. Them using ChatGPT as an advisor explains so much about their terrible legal and financial decisions.
because you initially thought going with AI generated crap is fine, just so you can save some money and pad your managerial/C-suite pockets.
It’s worse than that. A lot of places are pivoting to AI despite knowing it’s terrible and self-defeating, simply because adding AI to a product is the only way to get investors interested right now.
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My experience with autoresolve is that it punishes you for not fighting manually. You can basically always get better results if you take charge, and in the (old) Total War games I played resolving often cost half your army even when you vastly outnumbered/leveled the enemy.