Talk about bait and switch headline

The price is too high. They are going to sell skins and characters. The game is going to be fluffed with open world sections instead of actual content. I probably won’t enjoy it.

My kids will though

I mean who really cares for pub matches? If you are worried about competitiveness then play pugs. Team stacking and pub stomping isn’t competitive

Well if you had community servers instead of brain dead match making this wouldn’t be a problem for PC players

My 7yo is the heaviest user of our PS5 but he pretty much only plays Fortnite on it and plays everything else on his switch.

I think the convenience of switch and mobile games are something that todays kids have that we really didn’t have and that’s why Netflix is saying this.

I agree with the author’s assessment that Uncharted and the Last of Us use the right tool at the moment for their stories.

I don’t get the criticism about Call of Duty and Halo following Half-Life’s success of limited cutscenes and scripted events to tell their stories. In fact as soon as the article started these were the exact games I thought of to rebut his point. They are the best story based FPS games of their generation and they don’t need an open world that’s believable in absence of its own protagonist.

Far Cry/The Division/Ghost Recon are all Open World shooters with a believable world. They have terrible (IMO, feel free to disagree) stories though.

I thought his analysis was interesting just not sure what the point was and if it was what I thought it was that Half-Life negatively influenced stories in games then I disagree.

Yeah this is pretty bad for families who want to load a game to each child’s switch without having to buy multiple copies for each child

Upscaling an old game on fixed hardware that can’t output at high resolutions is good.

Upscaling a new game as part of the graphics pipeline instead of optimizing it is terrible and shouldn’t be accepted by gamers that have to spend $1000+ on a GPU

That quote is just horribly disturbing to me. He’s basically letting the mask drop that their endgame isn’t to make great games, it’s to make you hopelessly addicted to screen time that you obsessively play and spend

All time favorite game is so hard to narrow down. I’d traditionally always say Mario 3 and I stand behind that but there are so many great games that stand beside it. Donkey Kong Country, Half Life, San Andreas, red dead redemption 1 and 2.

I think if I was trapped on a desert island, I’d be fine with any of these as my only game

My kids don’t play it, but the whole model is so exploitative to both the “game makers” (the ones who make the various experiences) and the players.

Basically every second of every game you are being bombarded with a prompt for a microtransaction that lets you skip to the end, or buy a pet, or buy ways to grief the other players.

It’s then marketed by YouTube’s who acquire $1000s worth of in game currency and spend it on every single thing in the game. I don’t see how any of those things are fun but it makes me sad that these are the kind of games the next generation have as there foundational games.

Anyone who thinks gaming isn’t shit now and was better 20 years ago is kidding themselves. And thanks to Roblox and Fortnite it’s only getting worse

Oh I was referring to FH but yeah that makes sense for Split Fiction

Why do you need an account of any kind to play a single player game?

Glad to find out we aren’t the only fools that push to prod at 5pm on a Friday. Big companies like Sony do too!

I don’t understand people who think Half-Life aged badly. On a Rail and Interloper aren’t the greatest chapters in a video game but no game is perfect.

I do need to try Black Mesa and see how it improves on those chapters.

Killing windows would just be a little happy accident

I have no idea about the game and whether it actually contains gambling content or is just being auto flagged due to the title but this kind of crap is why I hate big tech and is why I hope we eventually have a future where decentralized services rule over big tech.

I don’t think we are going to convince each other, I am glad that you find value in being able to sell skins that you don’t want on the marketplace for credit. That is why the system was designed, not for it to be abused by others for gambling.

I more-so have problems with how the system is rife for abuse, and I think that it should be up for debate whether valve should have to do anything about it.

I actually don’t think they should have too, I think more responsibility should be on the individual and responsibility on the parents for minors.

I do think that we should expect easier parental controls with more granular settings to be able to allow parents to protect their kids from risky trades rather than basically just enable or disable the entire social features.

You can’t convert steam credits to cash directly, that’s true. But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino, but then just rely on 3rd parties to launder the credits to cash/crypto, I don’t consider that an real distinction even if it is a legal loophole. It’s just the same as a pachinko parlor.

I guess that makes it more on the level of Dave and Busters or Chuck E. Cheese, except nobody is really serious about exchanging prize tickets from those places to cash/crypto like they are on steam. I suspect if they had a black market like skin gambling in CS:GO does though, there would be a similar push back as there is vs Valve in this scenario.

I do agree with your point about TCGs, they get by on the fact that commons technically allow you to play the game but they are similarly exploitative.

Yes eBay and Amazon is responsible for not vetting sellers and buyers on their platforms and why the experience is so terrible for honest sellers.

The other examples aren’t applicable because Ferrari, wüsthof, or local taxpayers don’t make money off of vehicular manslaughter, murder, or war crimes.

You acquire items of arbitrary values for real life money by random chance and call the other guy stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling?

Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.

Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them

I don’t know if I’ve seen split opinions on Naughty Dog Crash games. It’s pretty much always been praised. Post Naughty Dog is a different story as well.

I think I like the author’s point of comparing the nostalgia most gamers feel for series like Crash Bandicoot compared to the nostalgia that modern day viral games will bring Zoomers and Gen Alpha but I also can’t help but be deeply offended by it.

Whether there is something wrong with doing that is a matter of ethics and personal values…

Regardless of those, it’s profoundly stupid to taunt Nintendo with confessions of piracy and threats to commit more

A live service game failing isn’t newsworthy. It’s newsworthy when one isn’t completely terrible

After 6 months VC money demands they move on into live service and other ways to screw their audiences

I buy Nintendo games but I don’t believe they have should have any right to block me from running their software that I’ve dumped myself on any device I see fit. How does that make me entitled when I purchased their software?

Glad I hacked my switch before Nintendo all went to shit. I am done buying Nintendo products. (To be fair I will never have time to get through my back log anyway)

Or in this case die a hero and then someone pays to desecrate your corpse and reanimate you

I don’t recommend it, but going bass-to-mouth was a very popular and hyped feature addition for SEGA Bass Fishing. I’m surprised this is the first you are hearing of it

Actually RDR2 came out nearly 6 years ago.

I feel sorry for the goobers who bought this game before the mod was released. Sad thing is that activision could do this themselves but then they couldn’t gouge gen Zers with micro transactions so they won’t

If Apple wants to compete in the gaming market they need to release an Apple TV powered by the Apple Silicon M series processor and a big SSD.

Only the $1000 latest pro phone can play the AAA games. No one is buying a thousand dollar phone for Resident Evil when it’s $70 for the console they probably already have.

If you can convince people to get a $300 Apple TV whose games you can also natively play on your phone you might have a chance

PSN account required to wear Palworld merch incoming

The RPG mechanics didn’t ruin the genre although I did prefer the mechanics of earlier CoDs where in multiplayer everything is unlocked and you just use whatever you want.

What ruined the genre was the free-to-play style monetization and season pass paid update model.

Black Ops 2 was the first CoD to have paid skins, but we would have no idea how bad things would become. By the time Fortnite came along the multiplayer FPS genre was already long ruined

Isn’t Tommy working for colecovision?

Edit: we have too many visions from the late 70s/early 80s

With all the launchers, DRM clients, malware anti cheats, early access scams and what not. I think on the whole that PC gaming has gotten worse compared to 20 years ago. You can still get good experiences but it won’t be AAA. Also gaming sucks in general these days, not just PC gaming

Its next on my list!

Probably a Link to the Past. Although I’ve only played the games in the series up to Link’s Awakening so that might change although the game would have to be pretty damn good

I think it’s really hard to quantify. They are both masterpieces even if you just consider the state they are today and not just the era they are made in.

Sure Red Dead Redemption 2 has “better graphics” but Link to the Past looks great in its 16 bit art style. I wouldn’t want to change the graphics. I don’t think A Link Between Worlds or the switch remake of Link’s Awakening improved the graphics for instance.

Red Dead Redemption 2 might have “deeper” gameplay mechanics but I don’t actually care for them very much. The cores system I think distract from the game, and Arthur is honestly a bit slow and clunky to control during fights; unlike A Link to the Past where fighting with the sword is smooth, blocking with the shield is easy to understand and the items add a element of strategy to the combat.

Ultimately I think that red dead redemption 2 is the better game and part of it is because the modern era it is in allowed the developers to tell an story and create a character that I was invested in more than any other in gaming. But ultimately I think it comes down to personal taste. Earthbound is another game that made me feel similar to RDR2 as far as story beats go. And if I had to pick one game to play for the rest of eternity, I’d be fine with either choice.