InJeffable

@4fold We're not at the next generation yet. Until whenever the PS6 and the next Xbox come out (late 2027 at the earliest is my guess), we only have PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series pricing to compare the Steam Machine to.

In the UK, the PS5 Digital Edition is £429, the Xbox Series X Digital Edition is £449, and the Switch 2 is £395. (I pulled these prices from Currys.)

Given all of that, £500 for the Steam Machine would be a little high but not completely unreasonable. £600 - £700 and it might die a slow death after an initial sales spike from people who have loads of money to burn and aren't as price conscious as the average consumer.

@MrPeanutbutterz You must not have played the final run of the game where you have to fight multiple regular enemies and even multiple bosses at once. It's crazy. And there are definitely points earlier in the game where you have to juggle multiple regular enemies.

I think Hellblade II's one-on-one combat is the result of the team pushing visual fidelity to its absolute limit on Series S until they had no room for gameplay that was more taxing than one-on-one combat.

My guess is that you can blame the Xbox Series S for the lacking combat. It was probably a bridge too far for them to get an Unreal Engine 5 showcase running on the Series S with the same frenetic combat the first game had.

I'm still a little salty that the original Project CARS never came to the Wii U. They had hyped the Wii U version as the one where you'd be able to use the GamePad as a steering wheel (and I was pretty psyched for it). But then OOPS, they kept adding demanding technical features to the game until it was too demanding for the Wii U.

If I were interested in The Outer Worlds 2 (I'm not), I wouldn't even consider paying $80 for it unless it was some kind of Ultimate Edition that included all future DLC for the game. $80 for the base game is laughable.

@IOI It certainly looks like it would go well with a glass of milk.

@RZ-Atom Yes, this is the first time we're seeing it on PS5. That doesn't mean the game is new or that the premium price is justified. Something else to consider is that Forza Horizon 5 is an Xbox One title that also released on Xbox Series and is now being ported to PS5. Because of that, I would say that the premium price has even less justification.

Yeah, no. This is a 2021 game. It should be $60 for a Complete Edition with all DLC. They're trying to act like it's a brand-new game with this Premium Edition garbage.

I doubt the next Mass Effect is going to even be made by BioWare. They've had three high-profile failures since 2017. Is EA really going to want to invest what would probably be $200 million minimum in another big project from such a problematic studio?

The "mature tone" thing might seem like a no-brainer, but it's an important thing for him to note after Mass Effect: Andromeda. The characters in that game were so casual and quippy that I couldn't take anything seriously. Imagine the tone of Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC spread over an entire game. That was Andromeda.

What's bizarre to me about the Until Dawn remaster is that I think it looks WORSE than the original. In the trailer from a few months ago, there's a shot of Emily that makes her look like a tired middle-aged woman. And the remaster as a whole looks so much more colorful. I thought the muted colors in the original worked really well.

I thought it was fine. 6 out of 10. It had a few interesting trailers on display, like the one for We Harvest Shadows (from the creator of The First Tree) and the one for Reanimal. And the Indy game is looking better. They've definitely tweaked Indy's face design to look closer to Harrison Ford.

The PS5 announcement for Indy was welcome but not surprising to me. The Xbox division of Microsoft is likely in dire need of revenue after all of those studio acquisitions, so putting the new Indy game on PS5 sooner rather than later just makes business sense. (Speaking of which, December 2024 to Spring 2025 is a hilariously short exclusivity period.)

I really need to get back into No Man's Sky. For me, it's the perfect game to chill with. I have it on Xbox/PC, Switch, and PS5. I'd love to jump into the PS5 version on PS VR2, but man is that thing expensive.

@Ambassador_Kong What a weird statement. It's like Druckmann doesn't even know his own game. Joel didn't rob Ellie of her choice. That was what the Fireflies tried to do.

But they'll be issuing full refunds for the purchased digital items, right? ...Right?

It should be illegal for any company to remove access to a digital purchase without issuing a full refund. We badly need laws that would protect consumers from this kind of scummy behavior.

A long time ago, I bought a series of digital fitness videos (can't remember the name of the series at this point) on my Xbox One. When Microsoft eventually lost the rights to it, they credited the amount I had spent on it back to my Microsoft account. That kind of refund makes sense since changes in payment methods over a long period can make it hard to refund old purchases. Sony should have AT LEAST done that kind of refund for those Discovery videos.

@Pat_trick This is why I've been reluctant to take the plunge on BG3 despite the incredible hype. I've watched a streamer friend of mine play it, and my thought on it so far is that it looks like a really well-made game that I would have no interest in playing. For instance, what even is this rolling nonsense? I know enough about D&D to know that that's what it's from, but I've never played D&D. So to me, it just unnecessarily complicates gameplay (not to mention occasionally making it more frustrating than it needs to be). And injecting an element of pure luck into a game that's all about player agency seems counterintuitive.

It might be worth checking out, but I want two important features to be confirmed before I do:

1. Gyro steering that's on the same level as Gran Turismo 7. I've honestly never felt anything like it. It's as close as it gets to steering on a steering wheel peripheral.

2. Split screen multiplayer. I want to race with somebody playing next to me in both offline and online races.

"...this really does feel like a landmark moment for the genre, setting extremely high standards that everything will inevitably be judged against going forward."

The pressure is on for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf to deliver. It's going to be directly compared to Baldur's Gate 3.

@somnambulance A very difficult spot. I imagine they're one failure away from EA shutting them down and shuffling their personnel around to other studios. EA has already done it with BioWare Montreal after the failure of Mass Effect: Andromeda. (Fortunately, that story had a somewhat happy ending with those developers being absorbed into Motive, the studio that would eventually bring us the highly acclaimed Dead Space remake.)