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If SteamOS comes to dominate the handheld market, I could see them being forced to make an API so that other stores like Epic and GOG can have the same quality of integration in the non-desktop interface.
If you have two products that are both the best at their respective thing and you tightly integrate them, it makes it incredibly difficult for a competitor to match you. That is abusing a monopoly in each space to benefit the other.
Part of the issue is that modern games are usually getting fixes right up to release. Pre-release reviews tend to focus on things that aren’t likely to ever change significantly, like design and writing.
It would be nice if they gave a summary of issues they saw with a disclaimer that they may get fixed instead of omitting that information entirely.
I’ve been playing Gamedle recently. I tend to discover interesting games both as answers and while researching the info I have.
Video games have a very different production flow to film. The same people editing dialog recording are also doing other sound work. The people cleaning mocap also do hand animation. It’s not like film where you hit a brick wall for 90% of your crew if your filming isn’t on schedule.
Things in the short term are done recording and aren’t impacted. Things in the long term can move the resources to other tasks. If a strike goes for six months or a year, they will start seeing issues.
More biomes don’t fix the fundamental flaw in the design. It treats planets the same way Raft treats islands. They become purely a resource hunt for the player, no matter what skin they have.
Raft gets away with it by having your base travel with you, being incredibly hostile, and being short enough that the loop doesn’t get tiring.
NMS and Starbound struggle from the same issues. Infinite tiered worlds end up feeling the same, but also remove all meaning from the exploration. In Minecraft or Terraria you aren’t going to be flying to a totally new place in five minutes, so you want to get to know your surroundings and put down some roots.
Travel time and not having tiered world progression makes the player care about where they are at instead of seeing it as a stepping stone.
The first game has a weird gameplay loop where you get to a city that is very similar to the previous one, have to do a some filler missions (often with no story at all) to unlock the story mission, then do the story mission and move on.
2-Syndicate are much more continuously story-driven. They all have quite a few collectables, but they aren’t important to experiencing the game.
The 2 family is mostly set inside cities, while 3 and after have more world around the cities. They also lose some focus on stealth over time, though it still exists in all of them.
Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla become much more RPG-lite, combat focused, and require you to do quite a bit to keep up with enemy level scaling.
Looping back to the root of your question, the 2 family is often seen as the peak of the core series, with 4 (Black Flag) being up with it but different.
The only downside of the 2 family is that there isn’t much evolution between the three games to make moving to the next game feel like a jump to a new game, but progression is lost each time. It feels like one massive game with weird break points.
My wife and I had the same opinion. Magical to run around the castle for a few hours and do the early classes, surprisingly good combat mechanics, but then… Nothing.
It is really hurt by the inclusion of brooms. They necessitate a huge world so you can’t cross it in a minute, but then it’s too spread out and empty. At least in Ghost Recon my world-design-crippling flying devices have rockets and gattling guns.
Lingo. It tickles my brain in wonderful ways. I’m currently working through the custom level Liduongo, sequel to an earlier map named Duolingo, and I continue to be surprised, delighted, and utterly perplexed.
It’s a rules-based puzzler that doesn’t tell you the rules buried in a confusing labyrinth. The only downside is that it requires a strong grasp of English, limiting its audience.
The handheld PC market is still small. Nobody else in the digital space has taken it seriously yet.
If you look at iOS, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s effectively two products, a piece of hardware and a digital store. To beat it, you have to beat both the hardware and the store at the same time. It took the entire mobile hardware industry forming an alliance with one of the largest software companies in the world to even try to compete with it.