I don’t know if I agree Nintendo customers will get upset that the console may “outdated” in a couple of years.

The Switch was outdated on day one. It struggled to render Kakariko Village in BotW at a steady frame rate. But did that really stop the system from selling millions? Not really. The average consumer kind of doesn’t care about that stuff.

That said, the Switch 2 is certainly more expensive than the Switch 1 so things may be different this time.

Right?

Sold more than predicted at launch (wasn’t it one of the fastest selling consoles ever?), had a steady holiday (I assumed everyone that wanted a Switch 2 got one by Christmas or bought one as soon as they could because of tariff threats), then this spring I remember seeing they had really strong sales numbers again.

Link sure does run like a super dork in this one.

Never liked his running animation.

That said, this is running pretty great on my Mac mini. I installed the 4K textures, too, and it’s not hitting it too hard.

That was never Nintendo, to be fair. They’ve never really played that game like Sony and MS did.

I was doing the latest raid series with some friends this weekend who were catching up with the content, and they didn’t know the fights.

The first battle has new mechanics, and some people died to them. There was one guy who piped up, “This has been out for two years! How are people still dying to [mechanic]???” We beat the boss so it didn’t matter, but several people chimed in to say “hey, there are some new people here; it’s new to them.” Everyone was defending the people who died.

THEN, oh boy, this guy - would you believe it - DIED in the next fight. And the crowd then… oooo did we make fun of that guy.

What I’m getting at is that one guy out of 24 tried to be a bit of a jerk, but then everyone else was like, “No. That’s not this game, bro.” It’s a community. It’s great.

At the end of the raid when we were all waiting on rolls for items, someone disconnected. “Hey, [another player] DC’d. That’s why the rolls are taking long.” Everyone was like, “no worries.” I said, “That’s fine. DC is better than Marvel right now anyway…” and then the group got to talking about movies and super heroes for a couple of minutes while we all waited for this one person to restart the game.

WoW could never.

I was scrolling down to find someone list the best game and here were are.

I’ve been playing since beta for 2.0, so it certainly is my most played game.

Hell, I played some over lunch today.

Oh yeah, good call.

That’s good to hear about the /kick. The last time I saw someone get kicked was years ago during a Prae run (back when it was still an 8-man) where the person was not actively helping do the activity. They’d just stood around while everyone else did the work. And then they had the audacity to say to US that it was OK because Prae was easy now so they didn’t need his help anyway. While true, you don’t get tomes for free, bro, and after a couple of bosses we kicked him out.

For OP: Yeah, Sprouts designate someone as a newer player so everyone knows they may be seeing or doing some stuff for the first time.

Like the other replies have said, it’s now very solo friendly. You might have to party up here or there, but for the most part the MSQ (Main Story Quests) now offer a path to bring in NPC characters to help you through dungeons and the like. So if you are just in it for the story and simply don’t want to play with people, then you can do pretty much all of that solo.

HOWEVER, this is not a community like WoW where it’s toxic as hell. Everyone gets extra rewards if they play a dungeon with someone who has never done it before so it’s actually nice to have a newbie in your party, and generally people are super chill if you say “hey, it’s my first time” when going into a group activity.

The amount of content you can get for free in this game is insane.

Is there any other game that gives out hundreds of hours of content for free without any poking and prodding for micro transactions the entire time?

I love my Switch 2. I was just playing some Vampire Crawlers on it over lunch.

But I thought the Switch 2 was doomed over the holidays because [of reasons]!

The funny thing is I’ve had the same PSN account since the PS3, and it’s old enough to vote.

I mean, sure, you can put 1,000 sandwiches in one room and put a bucket over the shop keeper to fool them.

But after you do that once is it really that fun?

Turns out: Pokemon.

I tend to only play a Pokemon game every decade or so because the formula has been basically the same since the original: you catch pokemans and then cock fight them. And I just only have so much bandwidth for that.

But over here in Pokopia I’m building habitats for them and we are all hanging out, and it’s awesome. Yes, I will build you a little house, Bulbasaur.

Even the “big map” thing is done better by other companies at this point.

There’s basically one loading screen in KCD2 (besides pure fast travel) and it’s between the two giant maps in the game. Otherwise, you can walk Henry’s silly ass from one end of the map to the other and go into any number of buildings and never see a loading screen.

And most games do this type of asset streaming now, so when Bethesda rolls up with a “open world” RPG with loading screens all over the place it’s like “what is this?”

I feel like Bethesda had their moment in the sun with Skyrim and Fallout 3, but since those days they really haven’t made a big RPG that’s felt good.

And as I enter hour 120+ in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, still happily playing DLC and side quests, I can’t imagine wanting to go back to play a Bethesda RPG. They’ve been lapped, in my opinion, at this point.

Had the dumbshit U.S. president not shit out a bunch of tariffs along with every AI company buying up future stock of computer parts, I really don’t think Sony would have increased the price of these consoles.

They know it’s a bad look to do so. Microsoft also had to raise prices on their consoles last year.

I love this game. Spent enough time with it to get the Platinum. I still listen to the soundtrack, and a couple of tracks get me teared up because they are really beautiful and remind me of events in the game and how they made me feel.

Definitely my GOTY from 2025 over some of the other games that were nominated.

Children yearn for the mines Superman 64.

Tell me more about this…puff puff

You’re welcome.

And I agree: demos are so few and far between it’s hard to even think about them.

I’m actually curious if any of the reviews talked about the kind of atrocious pop-in this game has - at least in the main castle town you start out in in the demo.

I’m not a “graphics above everything” kinda guy, but when walking through that town you see all kinds of characters pop in at such a short distance it’s jarring - as if it was a 3D Pokemon game (not you, Pokopia, you are perfect).

I tried the demo first on my Switch 2 and saw this behavior. I assumed maybe they had to scale the game back some for the console. But then tried it on PS5 and it was the same.

There is a demo if you are unaware to get a feel for how it plays.

I feel like Geoff really did a disservice to this game. It might actually could have ramped up some dedicated players as it built out its vision. But Geoff swooping in and saying it’ll be the next, greatest game did it zero favors.

[x] Doubt

Chicken Little grew up.

I’m not the OP here, but while the DS games are not everyone’s cup of tea, which is fine, I think DS2 is an SS tier game and was my favorite of 2025. This game had me feeling all kinds of big emotions. It’s great. And the gameplay is very tight.

Man, that’d be sweet.

“We could hold a certain percentage of our supply off to the side for consumers so they can afford our products and have a backup for when the AI bubble bursts, but nah let’s just fuck everyone because line is going up right now and MBA brain means that’s all that matters.”

I have learned this over the last week. I got it on sale just after Christmas and basically spent the whole week playing it.

I think I’ve done like 1 of the main quests and have just been fucking around with side quests. But it’s been so fun.

Too late, I’m fully stuck in on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and I do not have room for anything else in the “big, open world RPG with swords and armor and shit” genre.

I literally finished E33 a couple of hours ago, and while I do think it’s a quality game, I just couldn’t really connect with it on any emotional level. I do like the combat system. It’s fun. But the story just didn’t really grab me. I have friends saying they cried at certain scenes, and I’m just like, “Really?”

Meanwhile I got some fat tears flowing during Death Stranding 2. But everyone is different.

Plus, while E33 has really good art direction, on the PS5 every environment seemed to have this haze going on. And there were lots of weird graphical flashes of artifacts or lighting. The game looks good and also doesn’t in a way. It’s hard to describe.

Sad my GOTY Death Stranding 2 didn’t win anything. But oh well. I hadn’t played Clair yet so I started it today. It’s good so far. Don’t know if it’ll top my Norman Reedus with a Fetus* yet though.

I actually think it’s time to retire flute guy. I think flute guy has jumped the shark, bringing in pvc pipe whatever instruments that you can’t even hear. You had your time in the sun flute guy.

Overall, I thought the show was OK. They need better pacing on when they are actually giving out awards. It seemed like there was a stretch of an hour where no awards were announced.

And I agree with the whole of the internet that the last trailer was a fat lot of nothing. Sorry to that team for working on a “dead” genre for years. I only say “dead” because by this point everyone has picked their game they like in that genre, and trying to add a new one right now is a terrible idea.

*toddler

Give me some WOODKID performing songs from Death Stranding 2.

I need a good cry.

Honestly, if I was really into AC still I’d be ok paying for the work of some devs of a five year old game if it made some good quality of life upgrades.

JJ Abrams?

The Star Wars JJ Abrams?

It’s an older game, but Downwell is fun. Just a little action/arcade game where you fall down a well and try to get combos by not touching the ground by bouncing off of enemies.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devolver.downwell_rerelease

I feel like this is pretty reductive, really, to blanket all AAA games as one thing that are all bad. Just like all indie games aren’t great. In fact, the vast majority are kinda trash, really.

For every Call of Duty, you can find amazing games like Death Stranding 2 that have insane budgets but swing for the fences (and succeed in my opinion). And on the flip side for every Silksong you have three million, anime-girl-on-the-cover trash indie games.

There’s no “one is better than the other” when comparing the totality of AAA vs indie.

Rockstar probably: “Well we just can’t afford to do a 60fps patch with these sales numbers…”

(I know it’s because they are greedy shits and just want to do a HD version or something on PS6.)

I’m not a big MH head or anything, so MH Wilds was my first game in the series. And I enjoyed it a lot!

HOWEVER, playing online with my brothers took so much trial and error we only did it a few times until we beat the story. Then it kinda wasn’t worth the hassle.

It’s so obtuse I can’t imagine how it even got that obtuse.