Cheski

It’s easy to pick apart his argument. No one is buying a single game and playing it 2.5 hours a day for a year. Publishers would be happy if people are still spending money on their games after the initial purchase, and playing beyond a month.

What I find amusing though, is I don’t entirely disagree that certain games are underpriced (while others are overpriced). Games are cheaper now than they have ever been, and offer far more content than SNES and N64 games I spent $80 on at launch.

I’ll be making a sizable purchase tomorrow from My Best Buy’s early access. Definitely going for Shadow of War at least, and a few others.

I let my PS+ expire and didn’t renew. I might jump on this.

Yikes, this sounds awful.

I kind of want NHL 18, but I think Best Buy's Black Friday deals + GCU will end up being cheaper.

I can respect that, but I'll be curious to know what they are going to do to replace it.

Reading through their responses in the Reddit AMA makes me not really feel bad at all for DICE. I particularly enjoyed this:

"As we want to let players earn Credits offline via a more relaxed game mode, we needed to also find a way to make sure it wouldn't be exploited in a way that would impact Multiplayer. Because of that we made the decision to limit the number of Credits earned to stop potential abuse. We will be looking at data continually and make adjustments to make things as balanced as possible."

They don't want multiplayer being abused by people earning credits in an offline mode. Paying for credits though, that doesn't break the game

I do feel bad for the DICE guys, at least a bit, but at this point, I think the damage is done among gamers who tend to spend time on game sites like this. Regardless, this game is going to sell, and lots of people will still spend lots of money on the in game purchases.

Both Sonic and Need for Speed have looked like hot garbage since they were announced. There have been too many good games this year to bother with either of them, including another Sonic game.

I'll wait to see what it is. It could be something separate from the main game, like an included Gwent-like card game.

Uncharted 4 was my favorite, followed by 2, then Lost Legacy. 3 was decent, but I preferred the first game to it.

I would be ready if they released it next year for the right price, but I am not expecting it before Holiday 2019.

I am not terribly interested in subscribing to even more things. Between Amazon, Netflix, PS Vue, and whatever else, I feel like I am more likely to remove some of these as opposed to adding more.

For me at least, I don't really have the time to justify a gaming subscription service, let alone several if more publishers adopt this approach.

The Harry Potter universe has a lot of potential for a series of games. I don’t think it really needs to center on Hogwarts or a school at all. Looking at Shadow of Mordor/War or the Fantastic Beasts movies as examples, I think they could set a game in a different part or era of that world, and have more room to breathe regarding story and gameplay options. I imagine it will be inspired by the Arkham games. I was thinking the other day that the rumored console RPG might be what Rocksteady is working on.

I am tempted by a PS4 Pro, but I have so far been happy with my vanilla PS4. I think the best bang for your buck is to just go with a PS4 Slim and a Switch to have access to the best first party content. I think the Slim is going to be $200 for Black Friday, so you could have both for the price of the Xbox One X. That is, if Nintendo's first party content is appealing to you.

I probably have played Mass Effect 2 like a dozen times lol. I hope for the best regarding the future of the series, but Andromeda was just so mediocre on the heels of some truly special games.

I’m just hoping for a God of War or Spider-Man release date.

How are the facial animations? I never really had an issue with them to begin with (I played Mass Effect Andromeda right before I started this), but I heard they are improved here.

God of War and Spider-Man will keep me busy next year, but it will be tough to top Horizon.

“Better than Bubsy”. Sounds like the perfect tagline.

I am definitely interested in seeing more of this.

I thought it was good. TLOU2 looks great, Spider-Man and God of War continue to look great, and Ghost of Tsushima was definitely intriguing. Hopefully we will have a concrete release date for God of War at PSX, since that is early 2018.

"Going to be a wild day". Not too subtle.

Hm, I still have a few games that are already out that I am planning on getting. I don't think I will be getting anything new, other than Sims 4 for my wife.

I think Playstation Experience will be their main show going forward. I expect a few smaller announcements at Paris Games Week, but anything major will be at PS Experience. These events are so close to each other, and with everything else at Paris Games Week, PS Experience will be the place where they can really bring the focus on their own stuff.

Sony and Nintendo seem to be doing fine with them, so I am not bothered if MS wants to focus on other stuff. With the original Xbox, MS experimented quite a bit with different types of games to see what would stick. They offered a decent variety of single and multiplayer games. By the end of that gen, it was clear MS would focus on online gaming. Now, I don't even see the point in them attempting something like BotW or Horizon. MS can keep focusing on the stuff I am not interested in and appeal to a different type of gamer, and I'll just play the games I am interested in where they are at.

Despite Andromeda's mediocrity, I would have been happy with some story DLC. With all of it's flaws, I still think Andromeda has the best combat the series has offered so far, and some action heavy DLC that focused on the missing Ark would have been cool.

Sunset Overdrive was a lot of fun. I think it would have been a lot more successful on PS4 though, so it would be nice if the sequel ends up there.

Big publishers have just created an unsustainable practice for themselves with these $100 million budget games, which is a shame. I am intrigued by the world they created for Anthem, and I was excited for Visceral's Star Wars game, but I am just not interested in the loot box mechanics.

I have purchased a few of EA's games this gen, Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda being the biggest. A few sports games as well. But I likely won't be interested if they keep the loot box approach. I am concerned about Dragon Age 4.

I can't remember the last time I played an online multiplayer game. I exclusively play single player these days. I do expect the number of single player experiences to continue to dwindle. Production costs are just too high. You either end up with Tomb Raider 2013 that sold millions of copies and was still a failure in the publishers eyes, or teams getting dissolved altogether. I expect we will get more games like Shadow of War from third parties. Special Editions and season passes will be offered and in game purchases will be available to offset the higher production costs.

This game looks about as bad as every other 3D Sonic game. I won't say Sonic was never good, but 3D Sonic has only ever been mediocre at best. I'd rather just continue to see Sonic Mania games. That was fun.

I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I need to see more.

Probably a BattleTanx reboot.

Great article, I completely agree. I recently replayed Dragon Age Inquisition myself earlier this year, and noticed a lot of the same issues as you mentioned. I played that immediately after playing Final Fantasy XV. Again, same issues. I have played through a bunch of open world games this year, and they are all littered with fetch quests, boring collectathon sessions, and annoyingly slow traversing to make these things a chore. As far as open world games go this year, I played FFXV, Dragon Age Inquisition, Breath of the Wild, Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Shadow of Mordor, and all three Arkham games.

Right now, the term "open world" does not sound at all fun or appealing. I have had my fill of pressing X at point A, slowly crawling to point B and pressing X again before returning to point A. The games mentioned above all do this to varying degrees, and some are better about it, but I'd rather have a shorter and tighter experience instead of a bunch of ! markers on the map with nothing interesting to show for it.

Outside of video games and beer, golf is my biggest hobby. I am a sucker for golf games.

I will get that condor. I might not be sober when it happens, but I will get it.

I'm still early in The Lost Legacy so I can't comment too much yet, but I definitely agree with Horizon. Aloy never seemed like she was treated as a sex object by the developers. I never felt like she was there to be a sexy thing for teenagers to look at as they played the game. I certainly don't remember her outfits/armor getting more revealing as it got more powerful Her determination made her an interesting character, and that is probably the main reason why I cared about her story.

Now it will be a long wait for a sequel.

I have certainly played worse games, but on the heels of some truly remarkable games including Horizon and Breath of the Wild, Andromeda was just OK. My issues with it are primarily concerned with the common issues across most open world games. Uninteresting side quests, and the need to fill the map by working my way from A to B to do some uninteresting task. In the case of Andromeda, this included the mindless task of driving across barren landscapes to markers so probes can launch. At least filling the map in Horizon was fun.

I finished the game before all of the patches, so I experienced the poor animations. Again, coming off of Horizon (and a replay of Uncharted 4 just before), it was hard to ignore. Voice acting was OK, but nothing to write home about. The characters themselves were less memorable than anything from BioWare.

Having said that, the combat was at it's best for the series. Enemy encounters felt a bit challenging at times, and required one to maximize swapping abilities on the fly.

In the end, I think I could have spent my time with a worse game. I replayed the original trilogy multiple times, but I doubt I would ever be interested in playing this again. I expect more, much more, from something with the BioWare name, regardless of the team behind the name.

My wife is not a big gamer, but she enjoyed watching Horizon when I was playing it. She might give it a shot with a difficulty setting like this.

I'll be curious to see more, especially gameplay. It seems like it could be fairly unique.

It sounds like something that might be fun to check out once it drops in price a bit.

This looks awesome. It is crazy how much this game seems to be getting right, while Forces just seems to be getting everything about Sonic wrong. The developers behind Mania seem like they understand what made Sonic popular to begin with.

One thing that would entice me maybe is if they offered an automatic 20% discount on the digital version of retail games for PS+ subscribers. I purchase the majority of my games physical due to Best Buy's Gamer's Club Unlocked 20% discount. I would gladly go with digital versions if the digital prices could compete with it. As it stands now, for a day one buy, I am either looking at $48 for a physical copy, or $60 for digital, and that choice is easy.

I stopped subscribing to PS Plus a few months ago. I am not really interested in online multiplayer games anymore, and what I would save in discounts wasn't really worth it for me.

I really want a Spyro trilogy remaster.

I'm planning on picking it up this weekend. I played the first two games, but never got a chance to play 3.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy are the two I am planning on picking up day one on PS4 at least. I'll be getting Super Mario Odyssey on Switch.

Around an hour conference of just showing game trailers and gameplay focusing mainly on big first party games is the way to go. I am fine seeing stuff I would be playing in the next year. I enjoyed all of the "Live at E3" coverage that was offered, since that was a way to dig in a little deeper with some of the games and hear what the devs have to say. I think that is a better avenue for it than the press conference.

I expect another side story featuring Sam and Sully at some point, and wouldn't be surprised by another Chloe and Nadine game after Lost Legacy.

I am definitely liking big games coming out in the first half of the year. Hopefully this is true.

I definitely enjoyed Tomb Raider 2013 and Rise of the Tomb Raider. I expected the next game to head to Central America due to something in Rise of the Tomb Raider, so maybe these are Mayan pyramids or something. Either way, I will definitely be excited to see it.