Look up Soma Transmissions. There was also a bunch of short stories about the game. The one about climbing the big orbital gun to the top really stuck with me.

And there was more characters than just the scary proxy things.

Soma is far far more than a horror game. The horror aspects are secondary to the transhumanist questions it raised every hour you were playing it.

Unepic wasn’t bad, but doesn’t hold a candle to Terraria. It’s still my favorite sandbox game.

The fact that this headline has to call out the studio that made a 30-year-old game speaks volumes as to why they have to lay people off.

It’s been especially bad over the last year. WB is in freefall at this point.

It seems it would be pretty easy to blame this on David Zaslav, but the games department specifically has been fucking up like never before: Mortal Kombat, Multiversus, Gollum, Kill the Justice League. Just name a WB game that came out, and it’s been an abysmal failure, with similar games from other studios doing much much better.

I second Disco Elysium’s voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.

The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.

Especially from places like RPS and Kotaku.

Huh? For £70 I’m getting

Based on what? You don’t actually know until it gets released. Sure, past history and reputation are certainly things to factor in, but we’ve seen plenty of major gaming companies shit the bed, despite their reputations.

Wait until it launches and the reviews come in.

Release timing is always a critical thing to think about, whether you’re talking about games, movies, TV series, or toys.

The portal gun doesn’t really fit in a Half-Life game. The mechanics of the gun almost demand an enclosed space, with flat surfaces and puzzles that require the player to understand that they’re solving a puzzle. The portal gun would break the outside world too easily, as players figure out how to just zoom past everything, and not follow the linear path that FPSs like Half-Life guide towards. Testing surfaces for game breaks and boundary checks would be a QA nightmare. It doesn’t kill enemies in any useful way, which is the primary function of a FPS weapon.

It is a puzzle gun, in a puzzle game. And that’s okay.

BG3 is the triplest of triple-A. It’s a four studio game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, a major IP license and half a decade of development.

The budget was $25 million for BG3, not hundreds of millions. It is not a “four-studio game”. It’s ties to D&D are far far easier to license than most IP, since it’s literally called the Open Game License.

Concord cost $400 million. The latest CoD game cost $600 million. Starfield was $200 million. The latest Assassin’s Creed was $300 million.

If anything, the AAA guys are still raking it in.

Ubisoft is in trouble. EA is in trouble. Games divisions for Sony, Microsoft, and WB are in trouble. These are all AAA studios, not the “middle of the pack”.

Soon.

AAA studios are bleeding money out of every orifice because nobody gives a shit about their bland and boring games. BG3 was where the potentials started to show, but it’s going to take another few years of studios tripping over themselves before the ones with actual cash are going to start investing elsewhere.

He’s definitely right that the industry isn’t throwing money at the wall to see what sticks anymore.

Depends on what you mean by “the industry”. The indie scene is doing exactly that. Every flavor of game in every type of combination is being done right now, all at the same time.

Yes, it’s essentially this except with games, and PC Gamer is still kind of in the middle of the chain here.

I wish they would link to the original GDC talk, at least. Instead, all of their “sources” are their own articles.

Wait, wait, wait… Eurogamer stole it from PC Gamer?

That’s rich. Especially since it’s a barely a page long, and is just a very loose summary of what was said in a GDC talk. I’m sure they’ll drip-feed tidbits as “articles” in the coming days.

If it’s been rooted, why can’t it just go all the way? There has to be a layer where the read-only hardware has to talk to critical read-write files.

Maybe don’t launch live service shooters? They are a dime a dozen.

Just wanted to point out that wiki.gg is out there as a replacement. There’s even a wiki.gg Redirect plugin for Firefox that takes you to the right place, if you hit a Fandom link.

Roblox and Steam shouldn’t even be used in the same comparison.

Is “my homie” the new “some people say”?

Ditto.

This is also a really good game on phone. Easy to pick up, very good UI for mobile, and you can pause at any time.

I think the only hard part is trying to figure out what you need to do next, which a walkthrough can help with, if you’re stuck. The combat and puzzles are challenging, but it wasn’t overly difficult, IMO.

I was hoping this, too. I know the SS1 Remake had a long history of scope creep, so maybe they didn’t have the appetite to tackle the same thing with SS2.

But, even if they took what they had with the SS1 engine and build the same thing with SS2, it would have been much much better, and not take nearly as long as the SS1 remake. They already have most of the assets and interfaces built.

Then look at the other sources.

Consoles have essentially become obsolete, while PC gaming is at an all-time high.

Consoles are more expensive than video cards, except you can’t upgrade them. GPU processing power hasn’t been jumping exponentially, like it had in the past, so you can still play most anything with a decent 5-year-old card. Hell, with AAA gaming falling behind indie games, there’s not really a point in investing so much in graphical output, and you have far far more indie game options with PC.

Console exclusives are a thing of the past, so everybody has the option to jump ship to a PC version. While some of the console->PC ports can be pretty bad, most are starting as PC-first and then moving to console, which ends up with bad porting quality happening in the other direction. Exclusives used to be a huge driver of buying a console (like Metroid Prime for GameCube or FF7 for Playstation), and now PCs have the most access to almost every game.

Steam Decks are starting to drive the industry, pushing Linux gaming to the highest its ever been, and is making Nintendo worried enough to push Switch 2 as a competitor. A vast vast majority of PC games are on Steam, and a vast majority of games in general are on PC. So, accessibility to play just about anything you want on both PC and on a portable Steam Deck makes it way more attractive than anything the consoles could provide.

Consoles are already dead. They just need another 10-15 years before their respective industry leaders finally realize that. At best, Nintendo would carve a market with their own brand of exclusivity and first-party titles, but even that will fall.

The disconnect is real between the games “journalists” and the YouTubers who actually played the game:

• GmanLives
• JuiceHead
• ACG
• Luke Stephens
• MrMattyPlays

What the fuck is up with all of these glowing opinions, just from the large games “journalists” sites? Are they getting paid by Obsidian?

This is looking like another Outer Worlds or Starfield situation. Hype the shit about it, make sure the major sites give it high scores, and then months later, when people actually play it, the scorn and mid-ness of the game is too hard to ignore.

Because Hideo Kojima believes you should worship the ground he walks on and memorize every word uttered from his games.

I feel like these commenters didn’t watch the disaster that was Elon pretending he was the greatest PoE2 player of all time.

After that, I think it’s fair game to write shit about his gaming setup. It’s a puff piece, for sure, but it’s a well-deserved one.

I’ve lost count of the number of companies EA has murdered.

In Other Waters was another great OST from Amos as well. Pretty fun game, too.

No, you need Marvel, like real Marvel, not GotG-lite.

ATARI is just a brand name at this point, trying to feed off of people’s nostalgia. There’s nothing left of the company that made this stuff in the 80s.

Isn’t that another “can’t count to three” moment?

Too many imps in the center square. Too easy to just get ganged with fireballs. I found that I needed to hang out in the hallway and get the marines that were coming in.

WTF? Is this Nightmare difficulty? Just how many enemies are crammed in the hallways here.

I get that this is a joke project. But, if you were to reduce the difficulty to some common denominator, it could actually be a viable CAPTCHA. Then again, there’s already good AI bots that could dominate this.

Ignoring indie games here is ignoring the answer to the entire premise. It’s part of the equation.

It would be like complaining that there’s no place to see big cats, while not mentioning the zoo at all.

This author has no fucking clue that the indie gaming industry exists.

Like Balatro… you know, the fucking Indie Game of the Year, that was also nominated for Best Game of the Year at the Game Awards.

Localthunk was able to build this in Lua… WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!

I mean, if these guys are willing to do morally reprehensible stuff like this, then it should just be expected that they would do the same kind of thing for whatever new products they develop.

Why? I think the only thing that is bad with the practice is involvement with kids. Enforce age limits within the gambling sites, and really that’s up to the FTC and gaming commissions.

Typical RPS.