“Then he said, ‘I’m going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.’ And he changed stuff in the script and the way some crucial stuff [happens] in the game because he thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions.”

Is he saying people thought the script was too good? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the first game… but never in a million years would I say that the script was good. Apparently Kojima is so allergic to good writing that he uses positive feedback as an excuse to self-sabotage.

Honestly, I’ve always felt Kojima’s greatest strength was his ideas and his greatest weakness was his execution…

If someone with a little more, uh… discretion, I guess? was given the seed of a Kojima idea and allowed to run with it without Kojima’s incessant need to over explain and over indulge, I think we’d end up with something really magical.

And it still has a thriving competitive scene more than 25 years later.

In fact, ASL (the biggest SC tournament) is going on right now!

Fingers crossed that Rift gets a similar revival… the game whose initial success paid for Defiance in the first place

Escape will make me God

Other than the setting, this was the only reference to the original trilogy that I spotted, and man… the way it’s used here is just so disconnected from what made that line iconic and cool. I was cautiously optimistic before, but the media blitz they did today has completely killed any hope I had for the Marathon IP.

Dancing through the wreckage of a beloved Bungie IP, Durandal was laughing fuming.

Hades 2 is only console exclusive to the Switch 2; it’s also releasing on Steam.

I suspect that Nintendo is offering them more than enough money for exclusivity to make it no longer ‘questionable’ for Supergiant, at least from a financial perspective.

Shouldn’t you be laughing?

Yes, and lawmakers should also do away with all safety regulations! Workers can simply quit jobs that they feel are unsafe!

/s

puke

Adblockers are your friend.

This was inevitable as soon as games started getting the budgets of blockbuster movies. No one wants to invest that much money into a project without getting some oversight and control in return.

Of course, very, very few people who have access to that kind of cash have any design sense whatsoever, and even fewer understand the creative process, or what makes games “good”… so they ask for shit that they think will be “safe” money-makers, and we get what we get: endless, samey, soulless shlock.

The one advantage I can think of to this approach is that it makes it harder to “snowball”.

Civ VI had a big problem with this were you’d end up so far ahead by 1000 AD that you were all but guaranteed to win the game… but you’d still have to play through multiple ages to get to the end and there would be very little challenge left for the multiple hours it would take to grind through to the end. I think I got bored and just restarted more often than I actually finished games in Civ VI because of this.

If you have multiple soft resets along the way, I could maybe see that giving the devs some ability to reset the “power curve” periodically so that you’re always dealing with some manner of challenge as you move from age to age.

20 hours in

Pssh… at least finish a full game before you post a review!

So the plan is to reduce input lag by…

checks notes

…using a tool that’s notorious for being extremely computationally expensive. Surely that will improve performance.

It’s entirely possible these aren’t real players, but are actually some kind of automated testing scripts or service monitors that someone forgot (or just never cared) to turn off before getting sacked, running on a forgotten QA box somewhere deep in the bowels of Sony.

Honestly, I’d love to see games set in the Alien universe that have absolutely nothing to do with the aliens. The whole design concept for the original movie was “truckers in space”. So where’s my space trucking game?

Why don’t they just hire more people with the $700 million they’ve raised?

At least horse armor was good for the memes. This is so bland no one even cares to meme about it.

Estimates have put the game’s budget at upwards of $250 million, so they’d need to sell at least 5 times as many copies to even break even. Games (from traditional studios, anyway) are crazy expensive now.

TBH, I really wish he would’ve just shut up and let the gameplay breathe for a while. They started the showcase explaining how this game isn’t going to hold your hand, but then spent the next fifteen minutes over-explaining every little detail, lol

No Dark Souls?

Shame! Shame!

Epic vs Steam isn’t much of a turf war as far as the fans are concerned. Everyone universally hates the Epic Games Store and loves Steam. The only reason EGS has so many timed exclusive is because Epic pays out the nose for them.

Can’t find your game? We’ve tried to include all games that make it into the top 200 on the App Store charts.

This appears to only cover mobile games. I’d love to see something similar for PC/console releases…

Did someone say [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]?

Curious how they quantify ‘attractiveness’. Is it self-reported, or are they attempting to use some kind of qualitative metric to rate the attractiveness of participants?

If the former, you could just as easily draw the conclusion that more confident people spend less time gaming.

Person says thing will happen “at some time”.

If Elmo doesn’t terrify you at least a little bit, then I seriously question your humanity.

And also, I mean, like… you guys have all seen the moustache, right?

Fromsoft PC ports have always been notoriously bad, but it blows my mind that after 15 years, they still don’t support something as important as custom keybinds.

Big “Deranged Nazi doctor in an old Indiana Jones movie” vibes.

Apparently they announced the game at the same time as the layoffs so they’d be able to release a demo and some promotional material. That way the people they laid off would still be able to show off their work to prospective employers as they job hunt.

I’m sure it’s also a final hail Mary effort to attract the attention of investors so they might fund the rest of the game, but still, seems like a pretty practical way to shelve a project — definitely not as crazy as the headline makes it sound.

Todd Howard looks exactly like a grown-up Todd Flanders and not enough people are talking about it.

UN JOUR JE SERAI DE RETOUR PRÈS DE TOI

Maybe an uncommon opinion, but as someone who’s invested hundreds of hours into both games, I actually prefer the 2d experience of ROR quite a lot more than the 3d of ROR2.

RIP

Hopefully this means more games like Soma, which had much more of an emotional core than the rest of their catalog. (I know, I know, Soma was also a horror game, but the horror elements were arguably the least interesting part.)

I blame RimWorld.

Mental Break: Riot

The last straw was: institutional corruption

I have a feeling this article only exists to harvest outrage clicks. I doubt there’s anyone left who sees Molyneux as anything more than the washed-up snake oil salesman that he is.