There’s very little out there that will check all of those boxes. Never Knows Best did a great video on it. Lots of imitators have decided to hone in on a few of those aspects that make Bethesda games tick without spreading their focus like Bethesda games do, because one can easily argue that in a Bethesda game, no one part of the formula is every truly great on its own. That said, other than KCD2, which you’ve acknowledged as non-fantasy, there are two other options that I know of.

There’s Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon that came out last year. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I hear good things. Never Knows Best had his own issues with things that it did worse than Bethesda, but I think that was while the game was in early access or something. The other is called The Lantern of the Laughless Saint that I first heard about on the Computer RPG community here on Lemmy; it isn’t out yet, but has a release date listed as 2026, which might be early access for all I know. They put together a somewhat funny stereotypical TikTok trailer for the game where they’re really honing in on the systemic nature that people romanticize about Bethesda games, touting that you can use magic to make yourself jump so high that you won’t survive the fall.

Yeah, it’s a great game. It’ll check every box for the OP except #6.

EDIT: Actually, thinking about it, there might be some asterisks on #2 and #4 too, as they’re only partially satisfied the way OP wants.

You already named Baldur’s Gate 3, and I don’t think I’ve found one more interesting or elegant than D&D 5e. Maybe other folks are more well-traveled than I am, but I’ve played most of your examples, and 5e still takes the cake. You can still do better, especially since not every attribute is equally important across classes, but it still makes for fun synergies as is.

It’s way easier to get rid of an entire computer second hand than it is bespoke parts that you’ve replaced, so this is what I do too. I used to be on a 4-year cadence with new PCs, but then I kept getting more and more mileage out of my machines, since graphics don’t leap forward so quickly like they used to. My current machine is 5 years old and still runs the latest games on high settings.

Highgaurd didn’t even last a month, and they definitely didn’t have the funds left over to make that game self hostable while they were in their death throes, even if they wanted to.

The studio’s previous game, which is very similar on a gameplay level, sold over 1M copies. Saros costs $10 more than Returnal cost and almost twice as much as Xenonauts 2. Beyond that, Returnal was a difficult game, and trophy data shows lots of people didn’t get anywhere close to finishing it; distaste for the previous game and a slightly higher price for what is, by Sony’s standards, less production value than you can find in other PS5 games at $70, are far better explainers for Saros’ performance.

No, I was commenting on just the first paragraph. January 2027 is too soon for any game that’s currently in development to be reasonably expected to pivot by then, and the same goes for any game that’s already available and expects to have a long tail on its sales, so it’s sort of like lighting the fuse on a bomb. The licensing argument is stupid nonsense, and they know it.

It is very much not clearly indicative of that. It has 1/10th of the reviews because it is expected to be relevant to far fewer people than Saros. The audience tends to value games that they’ve had marketed to them, which is a correlation for what should be obvious reasons.

Not being able to sell in California is a huge loss though. I agree January 1st is a little too soon, but better to have a little bit of pain now to make things better later.

That is not made by clear by comparing those two games the way we just did, no. Game review and news outlets cover the games most likely to be of value to their audiences, partially because they foster that with their own interest, and partly because the data tells them what their audience is reading or watching. Saros got 130 different outlets reviewing it because it’s generally seen as a big deal for their audiences. Xenonauts 2, not so much, which is why it was only covered by 1/10th as many publications. We’re here on Lemmy because we’re more likely to leave a thing we don’t like even if we’re used to it, like reddit. If you don’t like traditional games media, fair enough, but I don’t think either that preference or our choice of being on Lemmy is representative of broader trends. I was just at a board game night where we had to give clues about Sabrina Carpenter, and I knew nothing about her. It doesn’t mean her publicist is bad at marketing; it means I’m not the target audience for it.

This is the only gaming space I’ve encountered on the internet that has this many people unaware of Saros’ existence. The prevailing theory elsewhere for its lack of success is launching at $70, only on PS5, and people having already bounced off of its predecessor, Returnal. There aren’t 130 outlets reviewing the game because no one is reading them.

Rumor has it the Kingdom Come: Deliverance devs are doing a Lord of the Rings project, so if that’s the case, then they’re outsourcing a lot of risk.

I played Artful Escape for 10 minutes on a PAX show floor years ago and knew that game was not for me, so I expected Mixtape to also not be for me. I have access to it via Steam family share, and I figured I may as well play it, given its runtime. This is better than Artful Escape; I’m about halfway through it and will finish it tonight. I can at least sort of dig the characters and story, and I’m definitely into the presentation, but I’m not getting anything out of any of the interactive bits of it. So far, I think I would have enjoyed it better as a movie.

“Is Mixtape a game?” I remember Telltale discussions years ago, so we’ve got younger folks re-litigating this. I figure it doesn’t matter. It’s a “video game”, because we’ve got nothing better to describe it, and people who play/review other products built with the same technology that run on the same machines are best equipped to partake and enjoy it. I’ve seen many examples where, outside of accomplishing an objective or trying to “win”, the interactivity was used to great effect to convey the story. There’s a famous example at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3 where the game won’t move forward until you do something as simple as press the square button on the PS controller, but the context around that made it extremely emotionally effective in a way that movies can’t do. In the first half of Mixtape, I haven’t seen anything close to that, and that’s where it’s not blowing my mind.

Several million hits across Saros’ trailers there. It definitely comes up on all the biggest gaming podcasts. So I’m not sure what the other poster’s blind spot is, but Saros is definitely there.

At the same time, that’s not them setting the game up to fail; that’s you purposely excusing yourself from everywhere that people normally hear about games. I’m not sure by what metric you’re basing declining track records on, but wherever you hear about games on Bluesky or YouTube is probably still one of these outlets. Right here on this Lemmy community, we cite those same outlets for news, and Saros has been posted here four times on its own, as well as in a Sony State of Play mega thread.

What sites do you follow for gaming news? OpenCritic aggregated 129 different outlets that reviewed it, and it’s a front page sort of deal for any of them.

I’m not sure we can help you if you’ve never heard of this game. It’s been in every major gaming news site’s release calendar, reviewed very well, and it’s been in several of Sony’s showcases.

EDIT: Folks, I don’t care if you also personally never heard of it. That wasn’t the point. This game had a marketing budget and was not set up to fail.

When I see a new company formed, raising $100M, touting how it’s led by some big name you’ve heard of from some different studio years ago, the odds are against it. This game had only barely started development when we saw a CG announcement trailer. Hudson doesn’t want to spend 5 to 7 years developing it, but I noticed he didn’t rule out 4 years, which is still a long time for a brand new studio.

From experience, don’t get your hopes up for this game. If it doesn’t get cancelled before it’s finished, it’s unlikely to blow your mind. Starting a new studio with a project this big has historically not worked out most of the time.

Both of those are coming back, but I’m curious to see how you make Crazy Taxi make sense more than two decades after the death of arcades.

It’s extremely easy to see that that’s what’s going on, if you’ve tried buying your own memory or storage lately. They’d love to lower the prices of their hardware, all three of these console manufacturers, so that you end up spending more in their high-margin ecosystem, but this is the reality of the situation. Too many companies are bidding on the same parts right now, at least until the AI bubble fully pops.

In response to component price increases.

I agree, but it’s still difficult to tell someone who spent years of their life building something that it isn’t very good.

Weird. When I went to PAX back in the day and a dev asked what I thought about the game, I felt like it was really difficult to say that I didn’t like it, even if it’s what they wanted and needed to hear.

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.