djsoren19
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There’s two issues with this thinking. The first is the assumption that the additional money is going to the developers. Considering Microsoft continues to layoff developers, I think we can safely rule that out as a possibility. It’s going to the c-suite and maybe marketers.
The second is the assumption that games are more expensive than ever to develop. This is beyond untrue; games have actually never been cheaper to develop. That’s a big reason why indies have exploded in popularity, and in many ways have supplanted AAA as the primary drivers of innovation in the industry. AAA games are bloated because business executives want to chase infinite money, and put ludicrous amounts of man hours chasing the dragon of graphical fidelity. I strongly believe that more mid-budget titles focused on solid gameplay fundamentals with good art direction would result in greater success, but since that won’t make infinite money I doubt the shareholders will ever take that route.
Okay but seriously, why are there old trenches on Tau? I can buy that the Orokin, constant assholes that they were, came to Tau along the solar rails to kill the Sentients they created and claim their new solar system. That contradicts a lot of the old lore, but makes some logical sense. They presumably have the Tenno at this point though, and they have the Infestation; why would their tactics involve trench warfare? They could virus bomb a site from orbit and then send Tenno in to annihilate anything that still moved. Trench warfare isn’t really efficient, there’s a reason we don’t really see it anymore, and the Orokin have tech far, far beyond what we have today.
Also if this update doesn’t let us finally see The Sounding of the Naga Drums I will be very sad.
Dark Souls 1 is like a nice palate cleanser after Elden Ring; much easier, much quicker to go through, really only like 1-2 really difficult encounters by modern standards.
Dark Souls 2 has kinda become more interesting over time. You can start to see the bones of what would eventually become Elden Ring with mechanics like powerstancing and armor sets with bonuses, but the differences in healing and the mistake of Adaptability turn a lot of people away.
DS3 is honestly just “another one” in retrospect. It introduced what would become weapon arts and simplified magic to use a mana system, both things that would continue through to ER, but I very rarely return to it.
If you can find a way to access it, I’d also highly recommend Bloodborne. It plays the most different to the rest of the franchise, while still retaining a lot of the Soulsian trappings.
If you seriously don’t understand how often queer content is falsely linked to sexual depravity in order to censor it, please take a closer look at the rhetoric of the far-right in the United States and U.K. It is absolutely not a false equivalence, it is a very serious threat that other queer game developers are now very concerned about.
This is exactly why I was railing against some of the earlier protests which featured politicians openly asking protestors to take out their phones and send texts to opt-in for fundraisers. Besides all the obvious bullshit, it put those protestors who didn’t know better at serious risk.
Thankfully, I haven’t seen too much of that at the protests I’ve been to recently, but this is a good reminder that we have to keep educating people to leave their phone at home.
Eh, I think there’s just as many examples of burned out creatives not wanting to make a sequel, being forced to make a sequel, and it turning out poorly. A recent example would be Matrix 4.
I agree that continuity is important, but I think inspiration is the most important thing. If somebody doesn’t have a good story to tell in a universe, it doesn’t matter if they have perfect attention to continuity, they’re telling a bad story.
One of the wild hypocrisies of living in Capitalism is simultaneously hoping that an entire economic industry collapses, because it clearly deserves to do so and is not at all sustainable in it’s current nonsensical state, while also not wanting any of the innocent workers like Heather to get impacted in the process.
It sucks that it’s going to take even more suffering and people losing their jobs, but AAA Western gaming has gone full enshittify and needs to be weeded out by the roots. We basically need another crash on the level of the 90s before the C-suites at these shitty companies finally realize they have no goddamn idea what they’re doing and they need to listen to their developer teams again.
On the one hand, yeah definitely export your own cultural weirdness. Part of the joy of having so many other cultures in the world is getting little peeks into them via art.
On the other hand, some of my favorite games of all time have come from Japanese developers fetishizing American culture and trying to pretend it’s normal. Deadly Premonition, Metal Wolf Chaos, all the works of Hideo Kojima. I think there’s something to be said for the strange fusions that can occur when an outsider makes art in the style of a different culture.
The bottom is kinda falling out of the market and investors have dried up, largely because AAA has had too many extremely costly fuck-ups recently. Now the whole sector is looking bad, and it’s been trickling down into impacting the ability for AA studios and indie teams to find funding for their projects.
Same reason Skyblivion is allowed to exist; they’re making all the assets from scratch. Usually, the issue developers have with in-engine remakes has little to do with the modification of the engine, but everything to do with the mod team basically stealing assets from a different game. In truth, there’s no difference between Skywind and your favorite Skyrim overhaul mod besides the scope and scale of what they’re trying to do.
Hey wow, look what happens when we don’t buy their games and loudly organize to tell others not to buy their games over this bullshit!
There’s still nothing Sony puts out that I really think is all that good, but hopefully this serves as another message to the industry to stop with this dumb bullshit. Funny how Sony has been getting a lot of those kinda messages recently.
Actually super agree, and surprised people aren’t as on board with this.
Why the fuck should anyone have to do Ogrila dailies in 2025 if they just want a cool item for transmog? What is the point of currencies that trade for other currencies? Does anyone really need to make going back through Warlords of Draenor any worse?
Blizz already has converted old currencies to gold in the past. Would it really hurt the old and forgotten content of Retail if it was made more accessible to new players?
I mean, most AAA titles don’t even run on launch nowadays, so I’m not really sure how the quality can get much worse than “unplayable.”