It does, but it’s functionally a burst mechanic, which ArcSys ought to be all too familiar with, and Tokon doesn’t have one. The combos seem long enough in this game for that to be a concern for me, but more concerning is how long it looks like you’ll just have to sit there blocking with no parry, pushblock, Faultless Defense, etc.

Eh, hundreds of other people worked on the game, too. Borderlands is not Randy. I’ll give you something to look for as you attempt to sink your teeth in: the skills and skill trees are sort of based around a meta game. If you choose to engage with its systems and optimize, you’re not just mindlessly shooting stuff. For instance, I played the Gravitar, who gets feedback loops going around “entangling” enemies; by endgame, my ability was basically never on cooldown, and I had incentives to pick weaker guns because they fed into my gameplan better. My friend that I co-oped the game with played the Siren and had a build where he could loop Kill Skills into one another so they’re all proc-ing all the time. I hope you like it! (The story’s not great though.)

I’ve heard that a lot as a reaction to BL3’s writing. I only played through this series in the past year, and BL2 was good, but after playing the sequels, I think it would wear thin for me by comparison over extended periods of time. Especially once you get a new computer down the line that can get past the performance problems, I’d recommend trying out BL4. The story won’t be as good as 2, once again, but man, the encounter designs and class designs are so good.

How did you feel about subsequent Borderlands games? I thought the character classes and skill trees only got more interesting as the series went along, generally.

Skullgirls, for sure. Steam has me at over 1800 hours, but I’ve also played at locals and tournaments. It had 14 characters for the longest time, but now it’s got 18, and the ways you can combine them are nearly limitless, so there’s a high chance one of its most powerful strategies hasn’t even been discovered yet even though it’s now 14 years old. Now and then I’ll see a tournament match where someone brought out something brand new that I’ve never seen before, and I love it for that.

I would love for this game to be as good as its marketing wants me to believe, but I’ve seen far too many large teams form to put out a first project that seriously underwhelms, regardless of the pedigree of the people who formed that studio. I remain pessimistic but would love to be wrong.

From reviews, it sounds like it functions as a normal Xbox controller without Steam running to augment it. Most of the time. I heard Retro Arch reads it as a mouse and keyboard, which is how the old Steam controller worked.

$100 is fairly steep, but I’ll shell out a bit extra for quality. My Xbox controllers have lasted me years, but at least one of the recurring problems I’ve seen with them after so much use could be remedied by the better tech in the sticks in these things.

You gave me a mini heart attack, but I’m pretty sure you mean ~10 years ago.

It’s not that long, and I think the nuance is more interesting than a yes or no answer, but @[email protected] 's answer is the shorter, less interesting answer.

They certainly feel they have to spend hundreds of millions. I agree those budgets can come down, but you need something desirable enough to make the console purchase feel worth it, and Astro Bot didn’t do the trick (with a budget in the tens of millions, not to say that budget is the only variable here).

I haven’t really heard anything to corroborate telemetry as the reason for the PSN requirement, though it could be true. I always figured it was just that they wanted to inflate their active user numbers, which are already inflated by people continuing to use PS4s as streaming TV machines.

They started putting games on PC to recoup some of their costs on these enormously expensive games, and now they’re pulling back to exclusivity because they believe it negatively impacts their ability to sell PlayStations. It just seems very damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

They definitely can’t do what they did during the PS2. Their games back then cost a few million dollars each to make. Now they cost several hundred million. The math works out very differently.

I played Remake before OG FF7, and I didn’t have a hard time following the plot. The ending scene definitely foreshadowed things that made no sense to me until I played the original, but that was it.

The remake of the first Resident Evil is where I started, and it’s where I recommend you start. To me, the series never topped it since. It gets hard to make apples to apples comparisons given all the ways that series changed over the years, but that first game is a really good escape room, where combat measures your ability to manage resources and risk/reward.

If you have the patience for some of the ways that FF7 may have aged, start with the original FF7. FF7 Remake, without spoiling anything, is sort of about the legacy of the original FF7.

I live in NYC, where the median household income is about 40% higher than in Philadelphia. Rent is more expensive in NYC, which drives salaries up for what is otherwise the same job. When video games are sticky at certain price points, like $70 right now, that price feels cheaper to me here than it does just a few hours away in Philly. Money is weird like that, but when you’ve got digital distribution, they’ve got to make some calls about how to price things accordingly. If I buy a 20 oz bottle of Diet Coke in Brooklyn, it might be $2.50, but it could easily be $4.50 or $5 in Manhattan.

Last rumor I heard, and plenty of adjacent insiders think there’s merit to the claim, is that Sony is aiming for a ~$600 handheld SKU of the PS6 that would be the “Series S” to the main PS6’s “Series X”, while retaining the traditional console model. I think both of those things are a mistake, but that’s what they’re allegedly doing.

Mat Piscatella of Circana will frequently state what drove the growth. A lot of times in the past year, it has been higher dollar sales from fewer units sold. In this case, it seemed to be a huge influx of people hoping to get a PS5 before price increases, as well as genuine system sellers for Switch 2 and PS5 by way of Pokemon Pokopia and Crimson Desert, respectively.

Projects, not games, the developer clarified. Some are games, some are DLCs and such.

$10/month for just the cloud streaming of games you already paid for elsewhere (and if I’m not mistaken, there are still limits on which ones you’re allowed to play), which isn’t attractive for many people given the latency and image quality compromises that come along with cloud streaming. You put your fantasy price at $4/month. Maybe that’s what you’re willing to pay, but given that Google put their premium sub at about the same $10/month price, I’d wager the math doesn’t work out to supply it at $4.

Google, notably, also had a hard time delivering the high-end hardware that they promised in their pitch, where you’d never need to fork up hundreds of dollars for a powerful console or graphics card as the end user, because you’d always be sent a stream of the game running on highest settings. In reality, they were often running on much lower settings, because it’s expensive to cyclically upgrade your fleet of gaming PCs to keep up with the latest games.

It’s extremely easy to price something for customers when you’re not the one paying for its capital and operating expenses, so I’m not sure how much value there is in this exercise. Cloud gaming is one that I’m just about convinced will never be able to price itself in a way that people will actually want to pay for it, given those who have tried and failed already.

Many people will claim the USA has suffered inflation, but I think a lot of that has just been price collusion on essentials. The minimum wage is the same.

We can measure inflation. You don’t need collusion on prices when all the way down the supply chain, prices increase for everyone producing the essentials. Minimum wage is the same, but it rarely gets adjusted, and that’s stupid.

Yikes. Could we not?

We’ve got lots of problems if autonomous cars become some sort of standard.

It absolutely does increase latency though. If I’ve got the option for steady frame rates without frame gen, I’ll take it over frame gen. Frame gen was just about mandatory for Borderlands 4 at launch, and it gave me a convincing 80 FPS. After a performance patch, the game can get 60 FPS on my machine for real with a few of the settings knocked down, and it feels so much better.

Most people buying a Wii were doing so for Wii Sports anyway.

At that point, it’s combining SKUs of what they consider to be the main “game”. Non-deluxe Mario Kart 8 is a rounding error. Tetris gets really weird to count.

It is a small indie game. And yes, it sold that much. Every time I see that stat, it blows my mind.

Also 600W is likely several times more power draw than the Steam Machine is aiming for, however much that might matter to someone.

It’s been the play for a long time that being second or third to market is still lucrative. It’s being any later than that that’s the problem.

It got way more complicated than it was just a few months ago.

I think it would be difficult to argue that those two don’t count.

If you haven’t played Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3, I’d say that you haven’t played two of the greatest games of all time. And I love me some Factorio.

The old adage is that nine women can’t make a baby in a month, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a time and place for large team sizes. Large games employ large teams because that’s the only way they get made. I’m definitely first in line to say that lots of large games could stand to be smaller instead, but there are plenty that I like just the way they are, and they’ll need large teams. That means they’ll be expensive to make.

Yeah, that’ll happen. You can’t make Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3 with that team size though.

This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.

Not so much covered in this article, but the vast majority of the spending is in paying more developers, and executive pay, which is largely in stock, isn’t a large contributing factor. Your favorite game from 25 years ago was probably made by 30 people in 18 months, and now the equivalent level of production value today is made by somewhere between 300 and 1500 people over a longer stretch of time.

It’s broken down by scope of the project, into four main buckets, seemingly not by country.

You’re not playing 500 games per year. Realistically, you’re playing a dozen or so if you’re a real enthusiast. Focus on the ones you like, support them with your time and money, and the market makes more of them. There are so many good games coming out in a year that I can’t keep up with them; I’ve got a spreadsheet and something resembling an Agile planning methodology to get through them more efficiently, and I still don’t have a chance of playing everything that looks good. Hardly any of those have any microtransactions (I definitely don’t buy them in the ones that do), and none of them waste my time.

I mean, funny enough, I head to a pub to play board games every other week, including tonight. I was more referring to suburbia and sprawl destroying “third places”, as well as younger folks’ tendency to drink less. It’s possible that online gaming expanded our ability to choose our social circle more than simple geography used to dictate.