What assets you’re recycling is a huge factor. There are crates in Fallout 4 that were originally made for Oblivion. You almost certainly won’t notice unless you’re looking for it. Similarly, I’m playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and there are a bunch of little things that were reused for Baldur’s Gate 3, like vases. Again, most people will probably never notice.

On the other hand, BioWare reusing animations that were originally created for Neverwinter Nights in Mass Effect 3 is jarring, even though those animations generally worked fine in KOTOR. Or Assassin’s Creed 3 using combat animations in the modern day segments that were designed for the flintlock-wielding enemies in the historic segments.

Cyberpunk also has a nudity setting in all versions.

You can also get really good at Lute Hero, but it takes longer.

The money grind in 3 is easy, too. You just need to buy a house, rent it out, use that to buy another house, etc.

And changing yourself. Frequent magic users would get old and spindly, I believe occasionally glowing. Axe swingers would get ripped. Your character would be a literal representation of your playstyle and that was cool as hell.

It was both more and less involved than that. Putting XP into the Strength stats made your character buff, Skill stats made them tall, and Will stats gave you glowing patterns on your body, except in 3 where they made your tattoos glow instead. What you actually did was irrelevant, just how you spent your XP. In Fable 1, buying levels also made your character older, but age became connected to plot in 2 and was dropped as a morph in 3. Moral alignment in all three and ethical alignment in 2 and 3 also affected character appearance, but the specifics varied a lot between games.

My problem with the Forerunner stuff in Halo 4 is the same problem I have with all the aesthetic changes in 4 and 5 - it’s extremely busy. 1, 2, and 3 have a sleek and simple design language that makes it very easy to tell what’s happening in chaotic combat. The vibrant colors and shiny materials even give Halo 3 an almost heroic fantasy vibe. They deliberately went the other direction with Reach to enhance the grim tone of the game, but environments are still relatively simple so that enemies stand out. 4 and 5 put excessive lines and greeblies on absolutely everything. It’s all so packed with details that you sometimes lose enemies in the background and it can be difficult to tell what you’re looking at.

Nintendo is consistently terrible about not having solid launch titles.

And the point I’m making is that only a handful of games are keys; the vast majority are still on the cart, same as the last system.

Games aren’t “games”, they’re download keys.

Generally agree with your post, but a large majority of games really are games. If they’re a download key, it’s very clearly labelled on the box.

LOST JJ Abrams didn’t do anything other than the pilot and had no solutions to the mysteries said pilot introduced.

I would love if Civilization or Crusader Kings implemented this.

Final Fantasy 9 had you learn skills from equipment.

If you’re only interested in multiplayer then those are solid options. If you like campaign then you should definitely check out 2, ODST, and Reach.

And I’m hoping for them to be flatpacks so they still run five years later. I’ve had to resort to running Windows builds via Proton for games that have native Linux builds because they don’t work anymore.

And x-axis, just to be thorough. Especially for third person games since they still can’t all agree on what the default should be.

Playing as Emily in 2 is really fun. You have the option to ignore stealth, go all out with your powers, and still not kill anyone.

PlayStation is probably going to still have exclusives, or at least timed exclusives, driving some sales. But this announcement may be the final nail in Xbox’s coffin.

I have carpal tunnel syndrome and mouse heavy games hurt, but playing with a controller is great. If this can easily replace a mouse and keyboard setup then I’ll be playing with it a lot, and those track pads are a big reason why.

They’re also good for emulating certain consoles with quirky controllers, like the N64.

Gameplay-wise, Rogue is even better than Black Flag. Narratively, Rogue is a disaster fueled by Shay being painfully stupid.

The 360 had far less RAM than the average PC of 2010, and the engine has had a memory leak since Morrowind. I never finished New Vegas due to that, even on PC. Moving to a 64-bit version of the engine with Fallout 4 helped a lot, just because it took longer to run out of memory.

Fuck yes. A slave that takes on the slave owning Templar? Sign me up all day, I want to run into a confederate camp and crush them.

Freedom Cry, the standalone expansion for Black Flag, was essentially this concept in the Carribean. You play as Adewale, a slave turned pirate turned Assassin, and liberate plantations.

Lightfall sunsetted everything I was using that wasn’t an exotic. Completely destroyed my build.

I love VTMB, but the gameplay was never the highlight, it was always the writing. If the story and characters are well written and it ties into VTMB1 somehow, I’ll consider the title justified. The writing is a pretty high bar, though.

I could be wrong, but doesn’t he own the company?

You made a comment that is typically meant with complete seriousness without any indication you were joking. PETA, for example, has an entire anti-Pokemon campaign built on the premise that Pokemon is animal cruelty.

Microsoft, Sony, EA, Activision, or Square Enix would be my guess.

Only for backwards compatibility titles. PS5 titles have to be run off of either the integrated storage or an M.2 SSD.

DLC playable clans. Toreador and Lasombra NPCs will work fine with or without the DLC. If you want to play as one of those then you need to shell out another $20.

Not sure if this is what they’re talking about, but they made an ARG as part of the early VTMB2 promotion stuff. You had to do stuff within a fake dating app called Tender that was made in-universe to help vampires find feeding targets.

Anything with a cohesive narrative would have been better than the sequel trilogy, including Dark Empire. Hell, Abrams did Dark Empire anyway, he just compressed it into a single film along with ESB and ROTJ because he’s never had a single original idea about Star Wars.

Unbound was basically Underground 3. Story wasn’t exceptional or anything, though.

They had all that free marketting from people assuming the third one would be the 720 and they ditched it in favor of calling it the Xbox One, which everyone was already using for the name of the first Xbox. Still baffled by that one.

In other words, they’re exactly the same as a lot of the games on disc for Xbox and PlayStation.

I think the Great Plateau is roughly the size of OOT’s entire world, so if she only played classic titles that may feel reasonable.

Don’t forget that the Wii U had one of the most incompetent console marketing campaigns of all time. Just two years ago I met someone who still didn’t know it was a console and not an accessory.

You see this with video games, too, where PC games are better optimized when they’re multiplatform releases that also are on one or more consoles near the end of their sales life, just because they had to make it run smoothly on hardware that was comparatively out of date.

Doesn’t work in the remaster; they changed so that all skills contribute to level up progress.

Oblivion and Skyrim are 200 years apart, but geographically border each other. Classic Oblivion didn’t render Skyrim, but that was more for technical reasons than anything else. If you get high enough up in Skyrim on a clear day you can see the entire continent.

I like to describe classic Oblivion characters as looking like they were all carved from the same potato.

It’s also from the era when people were expected to read the manual while the game installed, so the game never has tutorials for certain things, most prominent being fatigue. New players tend to run everywhere, drain their fatigue meter, and struggle to hit anything or cast a spell. Just reading the manual, as the devs originally expected, solves a lot.