@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.

@Mes_Urson The main story is single player but there's a hub town where you can do boss fights (sometimes with normal enemies before) with other players, IIRC. The fights are difficulty graded like MH and typically players are doing the hardest stuff they can manage so generally a really powerful player has no reason to do lower graded stuff.

>"trajectory of content"
Games are art, everyone! Also it sounds like a polite way of referring to projectile vomit.

@Dogbreath The thing about sales of one game being based on impressions of the last doesn't really hold up.

• Dragon Age Inquisition is Bioware's best selling game ever, but it followed DA2 which was almost universally hated. Inquisition, doing so very well, should mean that the next game did incredibly well but it did so badly it killed the franchise.
• RE6 is seen as bad but it was the best-selling RE at that point, best-selling Capcom game so far in general. So it followed a RE everyone loved, right? No, it of course followed RE5.
• Horizon Forbidden West has only sold about ⅓ of Zero Dawn. Where did about 16 million potential repeat purchasers go?

Loads of games do well despite a previously maligned entry and lots of games do badly despite a high sales figure, critically well-received previous release. Each new Uncharted is the rare thing where sales went up and up with each new game, but even that fits this because by far the largest uptick in sales was after UC3, a game most saw as disappointing after 2.

Didn't SF5 do this too? And some ArcSys games. To be honest, most people just put it on easy and button-mash mindlessly through story modes. What you want is an actually engaging single player thing like SC's RPG thing or SF6's similar mode. MK1 had that board game thing, but that was awful. But the actual cutscene-intensive story modes where you just button-mash don't really lose much from this. Unless it's like BB where you get branching stories and different endings.

If she was in my local Wetherspoons

I love it. This is what you get for being obsessed, suddenly you're the main character in some sort of conspiracy theory thriller movie. This is by no means the worst example of this, but it's at least more jumping at shadows.

@ShadowRJ Well Amy Hennig left ND 12 years ago. And you mean Andy Gavin? He and Rubin left 22 years ago which is obviously longer but all three of them left a massive amount of time ago. Probably a huge chunk of most of this site's users' lives. None of them are really modern ND. It's basically a different studio now.

Ah, one of those articles that's basically an advert.

@LifeGirl I think they faded away about the same time "arcade perfect" stopped being a complimentary thing in reviews. There was this big thing where arcade games were seen as the ideal. I remember a boast of Sega with the Dreamcast was the VMU could be plugged into certain arcade cabinets and import your data from the DC, like IIRC your character customisation in Virtua Fighter. Seems so quaint now.

What a masterpiece this would've been if it wasn't the victim of the most effective, and mysteriously unprovable, sabotage campaign of all time.

I always think about the difference Tim is highlighting here when people say "reviews are just opinions". They are more than that because they also include (or should) factual information like how levelling up works, what happens when you die, what other games it plays like, is the UI any good, does it have character creation, how long are load times, etc.

A review that says "Clearly inspired by Tomb Raider, you'll be exploring ancient tombs, dodging lethal traps and tackling challenging environmental puzzles," isn't an opinion. Saying "this game is made by Brazilians and I hate Brazilians so this game sucks," is an opinion.

@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.