ThomasHL

@somnambulance Nintendo sunk down because Pokemen Violet / Scarlet was a technical disaster and Switch Sports was a big miss.

Nintendo only had one truly outstanding game this year (Xenoblade Chronicles), everything else (Bayonetta 3, Splatoon) had asterisks' mostly because the technical quality and online set up was poor.

@B-I-G-DEVIL your system would have a massive bias towards games that had more reviews. If a publisher put out one big hit and ten shovelware titles, their overall score would look identical to one big hit.

I can see the merits of that system, but I certainly can't see why that's the 'proper' way to do it. If I had to pick between the two, I'd pick Metacritics method over yours.

Square Enix getting absolutely slapped about this year, ranking alongside the shovelware publishers

The new WWE game looks great. They've turned things round from the total mess it was before. It's amazing what even a years break can do

The extra time they spend on it is just throwing money away. Accept the sunk cost and move on

DONTNOD don't always make great games, but they always make interesting ones. The concept of Vampyr, and the beginning where you're walking around the hospital uncovering everyone's secrets is great. They're one of the true AA studios out there.

Things that are bad flop.

The original Saints Row games were already some of the best out there for acceptance. You could be whatever Boss you wanted, big, small, fat, thin, male body female voice, w/e, and the game would go along with your personal chaos.

The new Saints Row didn't recognise that and tried to chase a young audience they didn't understand, with bad characters and removing the anarchic soul of the series. 'Trendy' isn't a substitute for good writing and good game design.

I'm definitely on the side of 'just make it a toggle'

@Jey887 Fire Emblem: Three Houses came out in 2019 and was a big hit, 3-4 years later we get a wave of SRPGs. The timeline fits

I don't think they've actually shown anything that impressive, but for some reason I really want this to be great.

In the old days, this wouldn't be crazy for a good competitive game. Get a couple of months out of it and move on. Publishers need to publish games around those expectations, because there can only be one or two games that people keep playing forever.

What a trailer!
"I'm an Olympian, by which I mean to say I became a TV chef, which is all to explain that I'm part of a Hong Kong SWAT team"

DONTNOD are always worth paying attention to. They're always willing to try something

I'll pick it up and play it at some point this year

Live services games are even more winner takes all than ordinary games.

But the thing about most of the recent shut downs is that they were niche games that couldn't generate the publicity, bad games, or targeting the crowded mobile market.

Sony won't have that problem. They have a built in target market, a huge amount of talent at making games, and the ability to generate massive marketing pushes.

I'm sure there's going to be some flops, I'm sure there's going to be some bad games, and I would rather they didn't focus on live service games, but one or two successes won't be a bad thing. Playstation should serve a lot of users, and Sony should dip their toes in a lot of pools.

I'm not optimistic for a God of War show. So much of the game leans into the violence and adrenaline of the action to create it's feel. It would already be difficult to get the balance of that right for a TV show, and my suspicion is they're not even going to try.
The Last of Us, as a story, was a good story wherever it was told (even if the game will always tell it best). You remove the game from God of War, and I'm not convinced the story will hold up in the same way.

Very happy for them to change the combat up to be more action oriented. Combat in DA2 and DA:I was on the of the worse aspects of both.

Origins had good combat, but not so good that I'd ever replay it for the combat. If anything it's a bit of a barrier for a replay because some of the micromanagement gets tedious.

@The_Moose if you remember that the game development has been effectively rebooted three times now, that fits with the development of the Mass Effect timeline.

Apart from anything else, Switch physical games are much smaller than PS5 physical games. That's genuinely why I'm much more cautious about buying a physical PS5 game over a Switch one.

Also Switch games rarely get good sales (and as a result keep their resell value better). It makes more sense to buy it physically and potentially sell it on. I don't see the PS5 ever seriously challenging the software chart, even when it's install base gets much higher.

I picked up OW2 and I've been loving it. It's the first competitive multiplayer game to grip me since Rocket League.

Ranked is a lot less fun than QuickPlay however, and the experience of a newcomer getting ranked is utterly miserable. We started off with something like 7 defeats in a row with no idea of the level of our opponents and if the matchmaking was adapting. And you have to play a lot of QuickPlay games to even unlock it.

If the core game hadn't gripped me so much, my friend and I would have noped out of rank before we got our first win - weeks before we could see our actual rank.

I tried the game recently but ended up dropping it very shortly, it didn't click with me.

I will say I expected very little of the different backgrounds and the Corpo intro provided less than little.

The lack of people in the demo was a major turn off. It felt very artificial, like a world map which a collection of very video-gamey challenges in discrete points. That's not what I come to games for.

Put this down in the 'demos might hurt sales' camp, because I was relatively curious about the game before.

Mines been horizontal for 2 years, no issues. On the other hand the vibration and resistive triggers in the controllers sometimes feel like somethings gone wrong.

@Jmerbaugh I was genuinely disappointed when I learned Persona Strikers wasn't a football game

@Sam_ATLUS For me Arise it did everything well and nothing brilliantly. Combat is pretty fun, world is pretty beautiful, story is pretty straightforward but with something to work with.

I'd say it's easy to have fun with, but also not worth prioritising if you've got something interesting in your backlog.

Thanks for allowing me to not only not vote 5, but to put none of them at the top. I've only played 3 games on the list this year, and none of them felt worthy of Game of the Year

@Party_Cannon I love how everyone who uses the word snowflake is using it because they're annoyed that someone is getting criticised by others. The guy posted something on twitter, its totally valid for people to respond to it. If he doesn't want to hear the response, don't post on Twitter.

The game dev was thin skinned and has taken mild criticism of his game badly (Days Gone wasn't getting slated, it was getting called middle of the road at a time when we were tired of zombie games), other people called this dumb. Nothing about this warrants a lot of attention

Cal's fashion sense has improved

I hope this DLC has a stronger narrative hook than the main game. Forbidden West was quite a step back from Zero Dawn in writing quality IMO

Even more absurd, there are only 55 million households in Japan. So nearly 1 in 2 houses have a Switch (well, a bit less as some houses definitely have 2)

~25 million Switches being sold in a country with 125 million people is bonkers. 1 in 6 people have a Switch (or slightly less than that but some people have 2)

Sounds neat, but are they going to get enough attention on activity cards? I never look at those

@np70604 the captain's name is part Quarian too. Suggesting the stranded aliens on earth have integrated into Alliance culture perhaps

Season 2 of The Witcher told the same story as the Guardians of the Galaxy game but much worse. If season 3 is the same level of writing, I'm not sticking around

I feel for Hemsworth, however well he does it's going to pretty much impossible to step out of Cavill's shadow here.

I thought the PS5 would be when I finally learned to appreciate 60 FPS, but it turns out I couldn't tell you the difference. I don't know which games run at 60 and which don't

Sony are getting very greedy, so I wouldn't trust them to release a free upgrade. The PS5 has almost been too successful - Sony were at their most generous end of PS3/start of PS4 when they had to regain ground against Microsoft.

It's a shame about the story. I'm actively looking for a 'Fire Emblem Three Houses' level story but with better combat.

Thats a pass from me. I'll stick a games difficulty up and see if it changes the gameplay in an interesting way, but if it doesn't or the games getting boring, that difficulty slider goes down.

I think these PC ports will turn out to be a mistake for Sony in the long run, but this one is pretty harmless.

It will be fine and after a few games totally normal. But 'Yakuza' is more emotive in the West than 'Like a Dragon' because we don't have some of the mythology (carp to dragon) that the phrase draws on.

It was honestly fine having a game called 'Yakuza' not be about Yakuza. It's still about the criminal underworld. Games are often not named particularly literally. Heavy Rain has rain, but it's not about rain. Legend of Zelda is about Link. Halo is mostly not set on Halo rings. 'Mass Effect' basically only appears in the codex of Mass Effect

The screenshots look pretty muddy - like there's an oldschool PS3 brown filter on. Is that representative of the rest of the demo?

EDIT: I don't know how I feel about those thick black outlines on the realistically textured boulders either. Does that represent a particular effect?

Because it seems to only apply to one layer of the background, not the foreground or the skybox.

People are calling this part of the feudal Japan fad, when the most interesting thing about this is it's not feudal Japan.

Feudal Japan ended 200 years before this, this is the end of early-modern Japan and the rise of modern Japan. That's a way more interesting setting and gives it a really different flavour than Ghosts of Tsushima

30 hours is my perfect length, so if it's on that side perfect

I like being able to compare the 3D audio.

Honestly, I love everything about this except the empty worlds - but the empty worlds could be a killer for me.

Without friendly NPCs and dynamic interactions, everything begins to feel like a videogame level instead of a world.

I like turn-based combat, I like action combat, but ATB combat has always been an awful comprise between the two. I'll take FFX (full-turn based) or FFVII Remake over ATB any day.

This still feels unique and exciting...I wish their colour design had been a bit more careful though. The muddy brown units on a brown battlefield are hard to make out

@ShogunRok Thank you, that's really useful to know.

@ShogunRok how does the structure of the game compare to something like Tales of Arise?