Matroska

@Flaming_Kaiser I'm saying that so much of GOW, UC and TLoU is just walking along, squeezing through gaps, moving without any gameplay while dialogue sound files play. There are entire chapters in UC where you just walk around and trigger dialogue. Apart from UC1, you can't even fail the climbing sections so it's effectively just slow walking. They're basically little combat arenas and set pieces separated by linear walking sim sections. There's no decision making process here, you just hold forwards on the left stick for huge portions of these games.

Even in levels with "gameplay" it's often just blindly following someone through a linear path and doing what they say, triggering cutscenes and listening to them talk. 38 minutes of that kind of thing in, say, UC4 Chapter 6. No combat and the only way to fail is intentionally swinging on the grappling hook away from where you're headed.

Wolverine's on 3.3 million already, and a good amount of likes vs dislikes (230k vs 8.8k).
GOW's ratio is worse despite actually having more likes (237k vs 110k).
It's striking how much off a drop off there is, though I think Wolverine's being helped by being the featured video so presumably everyone that goes on the Playstation page counts as a view (which would also explain the lower likes despite having a much better ratio). And yeah, that doesn't look good for Marathon.

@LowDefAl Definitely true in general, but in this case I wouldn't be surprised if they'd think an £80 is too expensive but a £250 game with a mass produced plastic statue and some cardboard with pictures printed on is okay. And it's odd because the game itself is much more value for money than the tat they add in to double or triple the price.

You have the thing where some players want live service multiplayer, others want story-focued singleplayer, and they're obviously two different camps by definition. I don't think there's a reason to think people willing to spend at least a couple of hundred on a game plus tat are happy with £80+ just for the game. If they were, you'd think these people would vocally defend really expensive games whenever that question comes up.

"Games are too expensive"
"This game isn't expensive enough"
Hmm.

@wildcat_kickz Well for what it's worth, me and my friend would've been 17 in 2000 and we'd watch Buffy and Angel sometimes. We overall liked it but did comment on the annoying, artificial way people spoke. The very "scripty" dialogue. It bothered me more than him, but I complained about Whedon's dialogue before it was cool, I guess. Also see: Alien Resurrection. I think just being a bit younger (like born in 1990) or watching it after it initially aired at a younger age would make it just seem really cool and fun. But you're definitely right that the more recently annoying and pervasive trends do have their origins in the late 90s. It was at least way rarer then.

@somnambulance To be fair, what people tended to hate was the dialogue and tone of the cutscenes. I don't remember seeing much about the actual gameplay. And a lot of people, me included, are really put off by Sony's love of walking down linear corridors while the character talks to themselves or their companion (likely with MCU drenched dialogue), then maybe you climb something, then a cutscene, then a relatively basic fight, then a cutscene, then walking and talking, etc. It all feels samey and like it's weaving between being a movie, a walking sim, and a little combat arena.

@wildcat_kickz In terms of the millennial cringe, I know what you mean. It's more younger millennials, though. The ones that grew up with the internet rather than the ones that got the internet in their late teens or early twenties, and the ones that really loved the awful MCU style of writing. Older would've started out with CDs, Mega Drives and ringing their friends' parents' landline; younger millennials started out with iPods, PS3s (so online consoles with DLC) and everyone having smartphones. It's weird those two groups are put as one generation.

I think it was good on a technical level. In terms of opening with a big game - which shows confidence and implies they have enough in the barrel to put a major release right up front - and then a good balance of just trailers and trailers followed by a dev talk. It felt well paced and moved along well. The thing for me is that, very subjectively, I don't really care much about anything they showed, and also both Wolverine and GOW were both very cutscene heavy and felt very on-rails to the point that it reinforced the negative stereotype of PS5 exclusives being cinematic showpieces rather than games with depth that people are still playing, speedrunning, discovering new tricks etc, years later.

The exception is the new Onimusha. I loved the older games, Onimusha 2 is one of my favourite games of all time. That said, I feel like I already know what I'll get with the new one. It already feels like an old memory rather than a new experience. I played the demo for a while and it played well but reinforced my feelings; seems like a well-made game but so familiar. Just walk forward through a linear path, slash some guys, the only mental process is which order to kill the cluster of enemies in.

@GamingGod Come on, it's just a jpg of a render of a trophy on an online profile no one looks at. The only way you can possibly justify caring is by saying it's a nice record of something you achieved in a game, and that's still true even if other people got it more easily.

"We're continuing our journey on Xbox, Nintendo, and Steam"
This is like saying a turd going down the toilet is going on a journey.

Interesting that the most recent MK isn't one of games re-entering the top 10 but instead it's the previous two. It really didn't go down well.

@Balaam_ I doubt that, to be honest. The hardcore Gothic fans will be PC gamers who only get games as downloads anyway. They'd be more annoyed at it having poor mod support - and obviously on console it will have no mod support.

@RudeAnimat0r It's basically a survival game, base building kind of game. You can play with friends but it's not forced. Also very comfy although the enemies will destroy you. 😅

Grounded is actually good, I bought it a while ago. It's not a game you have to play online. It's like Minecraft in that sense. It's also pretty tough, at least until you get more established.

"It’s not even summer yet and it’s already scorching outside."
...Just don't look at the forecast for June in the UK. I hope you have a good umbrella, though.

Why do these people talk so weirdly? If I made a mistake, like I knocked my friend's drink over, I wouldn't look at him and say "That was a miss. I own it". It's bizarre corpospeak run through a "make me sound like a normal person" filter that doesn't actually work properly.

@AdamNovice For games that do that, there's normally a mod that stops mods disabling trophies - which is fair enough when it's something that doesn't make the game easier. Unless you're talking about TW3 on PS5 (though I didn't know it had mods so I'm assuming you mean PC).

@get2sammyb They're cheats, though, just by another name. We accept games like GTA5 disabling trophies when you activate cheats.

>"sometimes it feels like the only answer is to cause as many explosions as possible"
There are some powerful people IRL who feel the same way.

Anyway it sounds good. I'm in the mood for more of an interactive movie kind of experience after not playing any games for a couple of months.

@datamonkey Go back and play Goldeneye now. It's rough. It wasn't great at the time, to be honest, with weird aiming and it running at between 7-20fps. I still liked it but it already felt dated back then.

@get2sammyb Are you sure this was actually at the Cannes film festival? They've banned AI from the event. There's something called WAIFF which is all about AI which is taking place in Cannes but isn't part of the actual Cannes film festival.
>"79th Cannes Film Festival by Prada"
Also, I just looked and Prada doesn't seem to be sponsoring Cannes. They have their sponsors at the top of their website.

Edit: As you say, this is promoting the Prada Mode thing in NY. But I think there's some wires crossed - not that it massively matters since the main point is Kojima is seemingly okay with this.

@Balaam_ Well you got expansions on PC way before consoles started having DLC. They were always proper expansions, like Lord of Destruction for Diablo II and Brood War for Starcraft. Or the WoW expansions. From the offset of the use of the term DLC for console things, it was really crappy little add-ons. The infamous Oblivion horse armour springs to mind. Typically more PC oriented developers have stuck to the expansion idea whereas with more console oriented games you get new cars, weapons, skins etc. The main exception that sticks out is Fromsoft's various Souls (and similar) games.

@Hylian-Likely @Deadlyblack The female character has a name so she's not going to be a protagonist. They also said in the past that it was too expensive to have two protagonists.

@VeganH 11cm high, 20cm wide. So it'd fit a smaller handheld inside but I don't think a Switch 2 would fit (assuming it's like the first one) unless you took the joycons off. I've never seen a Steam Deck IRL but it seems quite chunky.

@Nei I know what you mean, but even with the original concept, it was never going to be really that dark or mature. It wasn't going to be like Berserk. And the series has always had things like that, but just not overtly highlighted. Like how in V you have the hero with a dead mom, his dad is on quest but dies before he succeeds, then you get made into a slave for years, your only friend there dies after you escape, then you reunite with your wife to find out your son is the legendary hero. So in a way, your dad succeeded because his original quest led to you meeting your wife and creating the chosen one - but he died before he got to see it come true. And you had to suffer for years as a slave before knowing it worked out in the end - and lost your friend in the process - and now your kids have gone through several years without you being around. It can be missed, but there's a grimness to it and a maturity via it taking three generations to get to where the original plot was headed. Patience and loss, not just a simple victory based on prophecy.

Just read the 5/5 review on the Guardian. It sounds good but I think I'll wait a bit. At least for the weather to get bad again.

@get2sammyb Well you've waited this long; it feels a bit silly to play it now right before an improved version. Kind of like ruining your appetite by snacking right as the meal is being brought to the table.

@get2sammyb I take it you were undercover as a Nintendo fan at the time?

It's bad enough you have to pay to play online. Paying to watch ads is like some Black Mirror idea.

@MickOnYourFace
Same. It's nice to do the platitude of "just do what you enjoy and it's not wasted time" but there's a lot more to enjoy in life more than sitting on your own looking at a screen for hours pressing buttons on a little plastic box. You and I have spent almost three entire years of our lives (16 hours a day, I'm taking into account 8 hours a day for sleep) doing just that. 🫣

16,238 hours 😬
That's a lot of idling, to be fair. Also the time tracking seems odd. No way did I play .hack//G.U. for over 400 hours.

>1500 hours
With the exception of my 1000 hour paladin in WoW (thanks months of depression causing me to never leave the house) I've never played any game anywhere near as long as that. I get massively put off by repetition, kinda makes me feel like I'm doing a job where a man next to me smashes a toaster, hands it to me and I fix it, then he smashes it, then I fix it, etc.

Point is, that is pretty hardcore. Though I did once see a guy with 10,000 hours in Dark Souls.

This is a dream game if it's not basically a reskinned KCD. They're great games but it doesn't fit the setting - but the attention to detail, atmosphere etc is something they can do well and bring that to a LotR game.

@THEBrew You create your own character so don't worry about that.

Do these people do nothing but keep refreshing Rockstar's Twitter account while also reading tea leaves for signs of GTA news? And all any trailer is going to show is GTA-type stuff, like driving cars, shooting people, strip clubs, car chases, clips of a crime-based story with no further context...

Agreed. But part of me wants them to do it in a "just want to see the world burn" kind of way. Sort of come in at the end and light a cigar on the raging inferno that followed. But yes, it's a really bad idea.

@BusyOlf Yeah, I dont get this. Do these people talk like this in real life? So many weird repeated phrases people use that makes it sound like they're all the same person that talks like no one IRL does - like "this sent me" when something is funny.

@LastNorth_16 Probably "Well that happened!"

The negativity is internet bubble stuff, as other people have said above. There's a strange schism between internet "discourse" (to give it too much credit) and general day-to-day life of everyone else. For example, purely going off "real life," I wouldn't even know the Switch 2 exists. I've never seen one outside of the internet, I've never heard anyone mention it outside of the internet. The little kids of my friends that had a Switch now have or want a PS5. Yet say that on the internet and it's like kicking a wasps' nest (at least in some places).

If I said "Are you going to watch the State of Play?" to any of my friends, even ones with a PS4/5, they wouldn't even know what it is.

@wildcat_kickz
>"phycological horror"

I know what you meant to type, but phycology is the study of algae. 😂

@8th_Observer D&D is a ruleset and it's this wasn't going to be an actual representation of that, it was an action game. It's that odd, misleading thing where often when something is "a D&D game" they just mean it's set in the Forgotten Realms.

Also, even if it was actually a virtual version of D&D... Well I loved games like BG1-3 and Torment, NWN etc but whenever I've tried to watch people play actual D&D I started longing for something more interesting to do, like watch paint dry.

To be honest, I find myself in a weird position with this kind of thing. On one hand I like unlocking trophies and I'm not the kind of person who refuses to see any value in them. That said, it does tend to take over the experience. Like, you feel like you haven't really finished the game unless you also did it on hard mode - or maybe you have to finish it multiple times. Maybe some trophies are unfairly missable (there's a few of these in Crimson Desert).

So to be honest, whenever I play an older game that doesn't have trophies, I actually just feel really relaxed. Like, now I can just enjoy the game instead of worrying about this virtual checklist that I won't even care about the day after I finish the game.

I remember playing the first one years ago when I had PSVR. I enjoyed it though I do think it's a bit basic for normal play. Also, I remember that you could sometimes see your own reflection in water, if your IRL head was in the right place, and you looked like No-Face from Spirited Away. I wonder what they'll do with that in non-VR mode.

The Thaumaturge is very good in several ways but after a while the combat became an unbearable slog for me.
Broken Sword is one of the best games of its genre, though.

This feature really needs options to filter out stuff like multiplayer, live service, and to limit it to certain genres. Like, only show single player RPGs, for example.

@get2sammyb Yeah. It's like with puzzle games. If you think about it, something like Tetris deserves a 10 as it's seen as a perfect game of its type, but imagine something like an AC would have to do for the same score.

Its not the first time we've had a young Bond. Hopefully this time will be better.

@For-Kier I think it's 100% relevant if what we're talking about is specifically anticipation for a game since wishlist numbers are just a direct manifestation of anticipation. But you're right that there's a weak correlation between wishlist numbers and sales.

https://www.techspot.com/news/109938-steam-wishlists-have-little-impact-game-success-new.html

In a sort of "such a massive dose of hopium I have to be hospitalised" kind of way, DQXII would be nice. On a more basic level, a confirmation and date for Fable.