Matroska

@get2sammyb Yep but FW only sold about 1/3 of what ZD did. It's also about spin-off potential. Well over half of all sales from all four games are just from ZD. The Lego game peaked at about 600 concurrent players on Steam.

It's not really on that real breakthrough level where you get the MSM media talking about it like you do with things like Fortnite or Wii Fit or Wii Sports Resort, let alone GTA or Minecraft. When 16 million people that bought the first game don't want to buy the sequel, it doesn't look good for the series' overall appeal or vitality.

It takes a lot for spin-offs to succeed, while we have Mario Tennis et al, even series like FF struggle with different genre spin-offs, like Dissidia and that kart game from several years ago.

@naruball He-Man wears a skimpy X-shaped top that exposes his nipples. None of the women above have visible nipples or are completely topless like Conan. Plus, the argument was "isn't armour supposed to protect your whole body?" and it's simply a rhetorical question that is applied unevenly.

Now we've moved past practicality, since it's clear it's okay for men to be near-naked in battle, men and women generally wear different types of clothes with different levels of exposure. Imagine Hercules and Xena's outfits being switched. Switching outfits even seems silly when the clothes aren't remotely sexualised; like, imagine your dad dressed as a Girl Guide or Brownie.
And can also seem silly within sexes, like imagine the Queen dressed like Nicki Minaj or Joe Biden dressed like a Ozzy Osborne. It's not really proving anything other than different things suit different people.

"Isn't armour supposed to protect your entire body from attacks?"

People say this but no one complains about Conan or He-Man. Or just generally loads of less immediately iconic appearances like orc armour in various things, like Blademasters in Warcraft. Same as when people complain about breasts being sculpted into female armour yet real armour would have things like nipples, abs or even a penis at the crotch area sculpted into it. https://ibb.co/YFfB5vNm

@Sonofken I'm from the UK and don't know anyone with an XB1 or Series X. I've never seen one IRL. I guess they sell so badly internationally that the UK might stand out as being less bad than other places but they still haven't registered much here.

Obviously people bought them, I'm just saying not enough for it to be visible to most people. I genuinely wouldn't know Xbox was still going it wasn't for the Internet.

@PuppetMaster Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei (and yeah, it would be easier to figure out if it was GoT and GoY). As for "Ds" he might mean "DS" meaning Death Stranding. Or "Ds" might be some abbreviation for Destiny I haven't seen before. This is why capitalising things properly is important, kids.

"The Game Business reports that 41% of US players said they picked their platform of choice because of exclusives" @get2sammyb

So in other words 59%, the majority and approaching ⅔ of players don't pick a console due to exclusives. Very weird spin on data that shows one thing then being used to "support" the opposite. I know you'll say "yeah but it was highest percentage of all of the reasons given" but that doesn't change the fact 59% of people didn't give it as a reason, or the main one.

Imagine a survey about "what is your favourite food" and the single highest percentage response is "hot dogs" at 2%. No other food has 2% or more. Would it then make sense to say "human beings prefer hotdogs to all other foods" when 98% of humans prefer other foods to hot dogs? And here you've oddly concluded this is the reason for "gamers" buying a console when most gamers don't give it as a reason according to your own quoted data. And also you have @Carnage's extra information above.

How would anyone outside of the planet know no one's ever escaped? Someone could've escaped and just not told anyone. Kind of weird. It's like looking at a random house and saying "You know, no one's ever eaten chocolate in that house".

I imported this from America a few years after it came out. It's very good, one of the better Tales games. Never finished it so it'd be good to eventually do that.

If it has an RPG adventure mode like SC then I'd be very interested in it.

@Yousef- Which of the two Greedfall games that you haven't played, with one of them being unknown to you, did the Internet people you don't know say that about?

Pre-launch they mentioned a mode that's more for a sandbox with no story where you can make your own character. I hope that's still planned. Even if they don't, it's still an amazing game. I don't get this beta testing obsession some people have. Did they also think they were beta testing Resident Evil because it got several improved versions and a remake? Or OoT, LttP, MGS3, FFVIII, Mario 64, any Civilisation, Tomb Raider, Star Ocean, and TW3 (and the first two) etc? BG3 got an insane amount of stuff added post-launch and that was simply welcomed and not criticised. Very weird how some people are so antagonistic towards this game.

@DogPark It's a pretty standard thing in gacha games. After you do a lot of pulls, you're eventually guaranteed to get something if you kept getting rubbish. It usually takes a load of pulls and maybe the 'something' isn't even that good (though it can be the featured character that you were going for - but typically you need a lot of dupes of a character for them to be good).

Or sometimes there's a selection of older characters that you can buy with a unique currency you get from usual pulls, so even if you keep getting crap, you're guaranteed your choice of these particular characters eventually.

But it's all part of the trick. If you're vulnerable to these kinds of games, this just adds a extra "well eventually I'll get something so it's not really a waste of money and/or time!"

@Oram77 He's not missing the point, though. He's saying there's a difference between making a cinematic trailer or a great opening and ending cinematic, versus the entire game just being a conveyor belt of corridors, "puzzles", basic combat and imminent cutscenes - and that being excused as simply being "cinematic". It's also just the basic difference between "cinematic" as a noun ("a cinematic," meaning a cutscene) and an adjective ("Uncharted is a cinematic game") where the latter is almost like a genre of its own.

At this point thinking this will be a success is like thinking maybe Tom will catch and eat Jerry this time.

@Pat_trick I know what you mean. It's like movies by The Asylum (e.g. Sharknado) where they're intentionally bad to appeal to people who want to ironically enjoy an ironically bad movie. As opposed to the real gold standard which is an honest and earnest attempt to make something good that ends up going wrong in such a weirdly unique way (like Ed Wood's films).

That said, this is probably the best you can hope for with SF. Trying to do it straightlaced only really works in anime form. It looks fun enough, a real drinking movie, but yeah the overly self-aware thing is off-putting. At least on the most basic level, it'll feel like the actual characters fighting, unlike the first live action.

@CaptainWow I assume he means Hernand since lots of players spend absolutely ages just in Hernand. It looks like the game contains five countries: Hernand, Pailune, Demeniss, Delesyia and finally Crimson Desert.

@JB_Whiting The problem isn't the story per se but the connective tissue. Like in the opening, you're just told by the quest log to do arm wrestling, then it tells you to give a coin to a beggar. If Kliff said "Oh, they're doing arm wrestling? I was always good at that, and what better way to get to know the patrons and get information" and then it appeared as a quest, it'd flow properly. Then when he leaves he sees the beggar asking someone for money but they kick him away, then Kliff comments on feeling sorry for the beggar, it'd feel appropriate when "give the beggar a coin" becomes a quest step.

I wouldn't say the story is amazing but I personally feel more invested in gathering the Greymanes again than I did in any story element from any Elder Scrolls game. And also, how come games like BotW get away with it? In that game the story is that Link was almost killed by a robot, took a century to come back, then has to get strong enough to go to a castle and fight Ganon. Link has no personality, no dialogue, you can't make your own character and have a preset one forced on you. No one complained, yet people complain about Kliff. It's odd.

Love this game. I found out last night if you wield a banner as a weapon and do a double jump, you pole vault with the banner's pole. Also, my pet dog picks up things the the ground and they go to my inventory, so if I bash into people that are carrying something good (a rare fishing rod, maybe) they'll drop it and then my dog picks it up - doesn't legally count as theft, though.

Also if you send out people to repair a bridge or building, you can actually go there and watch them repair it in real time. I did that and one of them said they'd see me in the pub later. I went to check at night and he was actually there.

@lordzand CDPR patched an improved control scheme into TW3 and that game's seen as an all time great. It also ran at 20fps in certain areas on PS4 and was insanely glitchy. But because it had a lot for things people really loved as well, its reputation was still untarnished. It's not some conspiracy, people make allowances for things they like a lot.

It's interesting how AI has moved the goal posts. Previously, using a device to scan a face rather than crafting it from scratch would have been seen as not particularly artistic. Just using a computer to skip actually modelling something. Same with mocap rather than hand animating the character. Things that were previously seen as too tech focused rather than hand-crafted are now profound artistic creations because at least they don't use that type of tech.

@AnginaPectoris Not really. Skyrim was in a much worse state on consoles, countless quests could permanently break, it had far less to do than CD, terrible combat, a forgettable story, no memorable characters, no real feeling of it being a living world, worse exploration and traversal options, PC gamers consider it a terrible idea to play without mods and fan patches, etc and it was heralded as a masterpiece.

BG2 is seen as an all time great yet had a patch that fixed over 2000 bugs and even after all its patches there were still countless bugs. BG1 had a companion quest that was literally impossible to complete which never got fixed. DAO has endings that are impossible to get, over 100 skills and spells that didn't work as intended (Haste slows you down, Shield Defense does nothing, Holy Smite has a 33% chance to crash the game, moves that are meant to have a chance to stun actually having a zero percent chance to stun, etc). All fixed by a fan patch but never fixed by Bioware. Still seen as a masterpiece.

@Pat_trick Yeah, exactly. I think the main difference is that as Internet access was less common then, people were less aware of how bad glitches were. Check out this polished, classic (unpatchable) game:

"Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest contains the "Castle Crush" glitch, which can cause the game to crash permanently or corrupt save data on original hardware."

Imagine if Nintendo released that now (£120 adjusting for inflation, 5 hours to beat) with its permanent crash possibility. Ah the good old days!

@rjejr Not sure, but I get the impression that you're reading "power" as in "this console is really powerful" - like what you say in your first post only seems to make sense if the PS6 has the same hardware as the PS5, and also doesn't take into account increasing efficiency with new generations of hardware - but all it means is "power" as in electricity, juat a lower power draw, not less impressive graphics. Sorry if you already got that, it's just that the way you're phrasing it makes it seem like you think they're talking about making the games "less powerful" rather than simply testing ways to get games to run without draining a portable battery too quickly.

Assuming the PS6 is a handheld and can be docked, that won't even matter in docked mode. But obviously you want games to run more efficiently for a handheld but across generations that doesn't mean compromising graphics (at least not noticeably on a smaller screen).

@Oram77 To be fair, the MLB was founded before the equivalent rounders thing in the UK. Also the word baseball predates rounders:
"Played in England since Tudor times, it is referenced in 1744 in the children's book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book where it was called Base-Ball. The name baseball was superseded by the name rounders in England, while other modifications of the game played elsewhere retained the name baseball."

So yeah, actually rounders is the British renaming of baseball 😃 I'm not American but I did get into baseball for a bit about a decade ago.

@carlos82 lol, yeah. It's a new take on the "uh, I was hacked!" excuse people use after everyone sees something awful they posted on social media.

@1970sGamer This argument, which I've seen before, doesn't quite add up. The idea is that if you buy something for, say, £500, then later buy something else for £700, but trade in the first thing for £200, then the second thing only cost £500. Then the conclusion seems to be you only spent £500.

But it's as if the initial purchase is forgotten in this. Across both purchases you've spent £1000 overall (would be £1200 but you traded in for £200). If you simply waited to buy the second thing without buying the first thing, you'd only have spent £700 overall.

@ChikaBambus He's saying it's copied to the SSD and it's being played off there, not the disc. He's right. Once installed the disc is basically just a license key to allow you to run the game off the SSD. The need to download additional data to play is a separate issue. A lot of crossed wires all around.

@RoomWithaMoose @Nei There's also Megami Tensei from 1987 in which demons join your party if you successfully negotiate with them. It also effectively has breeding but in this case you fuse two demons to make a better one. Obviously this went on to be the SMT series and also branched into Persona. It was on the Famicom so Nintendo knew about it. There had been 6 games in the series before the first Pokemon came out. You even store your demons in a PC, like in Pokemon (which doesn't really make sense in Pokemon since they actual animals whereas the demons are "digital devils".)

What might be more relevant is player numbers compared to the budget. There are plenty of bad or mediocre games with big player numbers, and excellent lower budget games with small player numbers. Planescape Torment is often said to be one of the greatest RPGs of all time, and I'd agree, but it sold terribly. So a game seen as a stone cold classic would be a "flop" according to this, and some churned out franchise slop would be supposedly an amazing game.

@Theamazing1 @Exerion76 It's not so much a young person thing as it is an anime geek thing. The average kid has no idea this exists. I only know about it because the only person I know that watches this stuff (or even knows what it is), a 43-year-old man that's never had a girlfriend, likes watching it. Even in Japan, anime isn't really mainstream. You get kids' stuff put on right after school, then the more otaku stuff that's typically on from about midnight to 3am. Some stuff breaks out into being genuinely mainstream, like how The Simpsons became an American institution, such as Doraemon, One Piece, and Studio Ghibli films.

@Leetware1 I don't know, but I'd guess it's to do with the ability to enforce the contract. This isn't about pay, it's about him not wanting them to use his voice for AI training in the future. So let's say in 8 years he finds put they have actually done that, what does he do?

Personally pay for a lawyer and all legal fees and single-handedly take on a massive international corporation? Knowing they may well somehow wriggle out of it, but even if they don't it will still be a huge financial burden on him? But presumably with a union contract, they take care of all that and have for more experience and money than a lone person.

To be fair, all people are doing is seeing if it's worth getting into the game. You don't have to be unemployed to spend 10 seconds to check a site. It seems pretty petty to resort to playground insults over it. And as one comment said in response to the "maidenless" comment:

"Don't you work for a company that just got sued by the state of California for being a bunch of creepy perverts?"

If it's pathetic to check player numbers, its even more pathetic to get so annoyed by that you get upset on Twitter. Saying this as someone who has no interest in OW or Marathon and how well, or badly, they're doing.

This would be cool. DDS1+2 are two of the games I most got into at the time. One thing with the regular SMT series I wasn't keen on was that you fight with your demons rather than yourself (like Pokemon where your trainer isn't a battle character) so I loved how it's the actual story characters fighting but in a very SMT setting. And the Demi-fiend, the MC from SMT3, being the ultimate boss and one of the hardest bosses of all time adds to it too.

@MichaelNau Thanks. I just wanna point out, I love this guy and was looking forward to this so much. But the pun just presented itself and I couldn't not say it lol.

I remember liking them both. They didnt quite stick as fully nostalgic things for me. For me, those are things like hearing old Sonic music - or certain levels/areas, and even sound effects, in SMW and LttP, but I do get like little memory gifs in my head of certain areas or bosses. I remember a level in the Lion King where you had to jump across animals like giraffes. I remember it being really annoying. And fighting Scar where you have to do like a Ryu-style back throw to throw him off the cliff, IIRC.

@GirlVersusGame Well I actually played the first Yakuza when it came out but didn't finish it. I've played a few, always liked them, but 8 (Infinite Wealth) is the first I actually finished. The Kiryu stuff with his memories, especially going to Kamurocho, hits pretty hard if you played the previous games - and also because it of course makes the player reminiscent about their own life 20+ years ago.

I didnt get burned out by Yakuza 8, though I admit I couldn't be bothered to finish Dondoko Island. It's Avowed that did that. Terrible combat, janky, kind of empty and shallow feeling, plus the stuff I said last post. I think if anything, coming at it from the overflowing, characterful and soulful Yakuza 8 made it feel even worse.

Nothing. I finished LaD: Infinite Wealth a few weeks ago (loved it despite a pretty bad story, albeit with some great moments) then got Avowed. It crashes numerous times every time I play and is generally quite lacklustre and underwhelming. I can cross a point of no return and enter the final dungeon but I'm not really feeling it. Probably just go for some runs and watch some films (not at the same time.)

It's terrifying that was 5 years ago. Jesus...

The Man Who Erased His Game...

@LordAinsley It's the other way around:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1457670/us-adults-emoji-usage-frequency-age/

Though there are certain things, like the thumbs up emoji is seen as a sign the person is old by younger people. And different generations see the same emoji as meaning different things. But I can't believe you haven't noticed how zoomers often react purely with emojis, like a skull for finding something hilarious, or the fire emoji if they think something is "fire". Millennials just tend to do a smiley face at the end of a message to show they're joking, things like that. Not to mention Twitch chat is often just floods of emojis.

@Yousef- "Take your time, slow and steady wins the race."
Not if there's someone fast and steady in the race 🙃

@UltimateOtaku91 I'm not a hater, just not my cup of tea, but its only the 22nd most played game at the moment. Games like Slay the Spire 2 have more players - in fact that has over 5 times the player count of Marathon. A game called Bongo Cat has 4 times the players. Counterstrike 2 has over 20 times the players.

@PuppetMaster It doesn't really mean that. There's no evidence that the people that pirated it would've paid if piracy wasn't an option. Imagine if someone was giving out free chocolate, they give out 1000 bars in a day. It doesn't mean they'd have made £100,000 if they'd have charged £100 per bar.

The sales figures you saw for these games on PC was the number of people that thought those games were worth paying for. It's similar to PS+ when you play a game because it was "free" but you never would've paid for it.

@Balaam_ It would have to be anachronistic since, even if we accept them speaking English instead of Old Norse, English at the time was like this:

"Fæder ure
ðu ðe eart on heofenum
si ðin nama gehalgod
to-becume ðin rice
geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum."

And swearing isn't some new thing. Translate this Latin phrase: futue te ipsum. And no, it's not aimed at you. 😉

@Americansamurai1 I would've guessed 9 or possibly 10 but I googled it and he's 12. He is pretty baby-faced so maybe they're going for Atreus being more obviously just a kid in season 1 and in season 2 they're banking on a growth spurt, dunno.

@Ristar24 Completely agree and I think that maybe Miyazaki does too which is why he blocked it.

@HRdepartment You've misread that. It's not saying it does a 30fps graphics mode and a 60fps performance mode. It's saying it does the graphical fidelity you'd get in 30fps mode on the base PS5 but at 60fps. So it's graphics mode quality at a performance mode framerate.

@Americansamurai1 I'd guess they're taking into account the gap between each season and how he'll age. If they picked a 14 year old now, he'd potentially be in his 20s by the time they get to the parts where it's relevant he's about 14 (like romance stuff). Basically he can age I to the role rgid way instead of out-aging it.

It's like with the One Piece live action show; if they ever get to, say, Thriller Bark then Luffy will be like 30 something when he's meant to be 17. If they miraculously get to more recent manga events, Garp's actor will be long dead and Luffy will be 60 or something.

@OldGamer999 "The world’s been like it for probably 4 years"
Yeah, I remember in the good old days when all we had to worry about were two World Wars, the holocaust and nuclear strikes on populated cities. I can't believe the world's gone so downhill since then that we're now getting game dev studios shut down! Where did we go wrong?

@gigiard Haseo in GU can use 4 different weapon types, though, 5 if you include the new epilogue. He's effectively 4 or 5 different classes if we're seeing it as weapon = class. There's also various magic spells, though i didnt really use it much.