ThomasHL

Definitely Cairn, great start to the year. 2XKO dashed my hopes very quickly

I'm surprised and impressed. I guess it's one of those games that sells well but doesn't enter the online discussion much

They've done well to outlast a major rival, but in that context, these sales figures aren't amazing.

Xbox sales have been almost non-existent this generation but Sony haven't managed to expand their install base much beyond what it was when they were a competitor.

@themightyant the secret of those games is they all already had large player bases who wanted the game to succeed too.

We like the idea of the redemption arc being "the game fixed its flaws, and then it became successful" but it's more like "the game was successful, it fixed its flaws and then it got praised for its success (and had further success)"

This game already feels like a forever game for me.

There's something so zen about carefully making your way up a cliff face handhold by handhold. It takes up my whole attention.

A single route takes up a perfect chunk of time, to feel like you accomplished something.

I was surprised how many things there are to explore and see too. I could spend hours on a single section, trying out all the routes looking for different secrets.

And in terms of simulating the experience of climbing, this is no contest, the best game to ever do it. Real life bouldering knowledge is directly applicable.

It's a bit grim that only one point separates this and Cairn. Cairn has soul, unique mechanics, and achieves what it tries to do.

Highguard has some parts which are good if you squint, and entire chunks of the round set-up that feel superfluous.

@Sakai the gap between the number of games released on PC versus console is massive these days.

It's almost standard practice for a smaller dev to release on PC first and only think about porting much later.

Ready or Not had sold millions on PC, and it still took 2 years to come to console

I dislike it when something you bought hassles you to buy something else. Unfortunately it's crept into absolutely everything these days.

Apparently they didn't pay for their slot. The Game Awards people gave it to them for free.

I believe the speculation that they were intending to shadow drop the game at the Game Awards, and a delay forced them back. That would explain why Geoff was so high on it

@PuppetMaster I loved how your worked in part of the message of LiS1 there

Not everything needs a sequel. Life is Strange, and Beyond the Storm were great. Now let it end, these aren't stories that need revisiting.

New Vegas is one of the greatest games ever made

Cairn is the game I'm most excited for.

I'm sure some of these AAA games will prove to be great, but I'm in a wait and see mode for pretty much all of them.

Whilst I enjoyed E33, I think this is also perhaps a sign that Sony's open-world-cinematic-story formula is getting a little stale.

If Ghosts of Yotei was released a few years ago, it would have cleared house in this vote.

I might try core keeper. I'm surprised they don't have bigger names for the first PS+ for people who got it as a Christmas gift though

@somnambulance it was a very niche year. Some people got served very well, but I don't think it was the kind of year where Game of the Year lists struggled for choice for #1

I was interested in a co-op fighter, but I hadn't realised the other player is just sitting around waiting to be tagged in

Persona 5 revolutionised turn-based menus and button presses. Any game which doesn't copy it (coughpokemoncough) is badly out of date

I definitely don't feel the same about E33's art direction. It's got a strong asset flip quality, where most of the scenes aren't arranged in a meaningful way and there is almost no environmental storytelling. They took their handful of assets and just ctrl+z'd them everywhere.

There is also a lot of massive jank, particularly in some of the side games which often don't even have working animations. And the direction even works against the gameplay - there's lots of insivible walls, but also environmental exploration jumping puzzles and it can be very unclear when you're meant to explore and when you're meant to stay on track.

It uses some very strong lighting effects, that look good in some places, but you visibly watch the game transition between lighting effects in a very abrupt way that pulls you out. It's particularly funny if you backtrack and the lighting switches back to "sombre" after the mood is meant to have passed.

It's got so little chance next year. Game awards have strong recency bias

Positions 2 to 4 are the most indie aesthetic indie games I've ever seen on a list like this

@Metonymy possibly thinking of The Finals?

Are they going to hit the live service problem where they've added in so much over time that GT8 will inevitably feel like a letdown?

@Max_the_German This isn't the kind of question where ChatGPT will give you a reliable answer. Its not doing advanced calculations for you. When you ask it a question like that it's literally googling Reddit and summarising the results (site search analytics are now full of ChatGPT search requests).

I asked ChatGPT whether a particular building counted as a type of castle. It said yes and gave me a link. The first line of the link was "This building is not a castle"

Does the Switch 2 have supply issues? I predicted it wouldn't sell as well as the Switch 1, but I didn't expect it to be dropping off this soon

I know there's been some revisionist history about the Luddites, but the one factual truth is that they did not prevent the spread of the cotton mill.

This is a pointless issue to take sides on. If AI is useful, it will inevitably get used, and if it's not useful it'll die off.

The idea that holding and promoting an opinion on that will in some way change things, is just an expression of the human wish for control over the bigger forces that impact our lives.

I've only played E33 on this list

Not particularly hopefully from the trailer. I don't like the art style of the faces, and the dialogue / plot seems perfectly generic, complete with glowy hand thing.

I want to be wrong though

I don't think E33 should have won art design either. It was mostly pretty nonsensical landscapes, with random strewn assets + nice use of strong lighting effects.

The score is an all-time great though.

@ECharles the great thing about past performance doesn't predict future returns is it means people don't have to learn.

Does Goonswarm Games have anything to do with the EVE online faction / SomethingAwful group?

Consolidation is never good. In the long-term Netflix are going to look at their revenue, and decide that they don't need to fund this many TV shows and films to keep their subscribers, especially with one less competitor around.

I would be blown away if they didn't shut down some of the game studios.

@Americansamurai1 apparently WB looked at spinning off their studios and couldn't find a buyer. People don't play Hogwarts Legacy because of the gameplay, and Netflix are unlikely to sell of their IP. Maybe they might be willing to sell off Mortal Kombat.

This is a day 1 buy for me

It was $50 off on Black Friday, which was a hefty chunk of the price, but it wasn't something craxy like 90% which is what I was expecting with this sales data.

I tried to get into Destiny but the new player experience is comically miserable. I hope they structure Destiny 3 in a way that allows you to rerun campaigns.

Shadow dropping works if people don't need to see the game before buying it. They shadow dropped a game people have literally already played and loved. It might work for sequels from good studios too.

My guess is it works best for cases where the developer doesn't want people looking too hard at their game first.

The visual of fighting the boss under the reflection of the world beneath your feet is fantastic

Those faces are uncanny valley, I don't love it.

@dark_knightmare2 I agree with you. I love Expedition 33, it deserves to win best soundtrack three times over, but it's visual design is essentially "store bought asset flip" - random props scattered everywhere, with little attention paid to their meaning.

For a while I tried to make sense out of the environmental storytelling, why is this here, what does this corpse mean - and then I realised the environmental storytelling doesn't exist.

I think they made some smart choices in setting their game in a world where things didn't have to make sense, and they do some fun tricks with the tools they have (the sequence of lamps lighting themselves). They also make smart use of cranking up the lighting effects to 11 in interesting ways.

But it's not the best visual design. It's far from being the best visual design in an indie game from this year even.

If it was £200 more, I'd probably make that back in a few years on how much better Steam sales / PC prices tend to be.

I'm not downgrading from a PS5 to a weaker PS5 though. Particularly if it doesn't have proper streaming apps.

Netflix get to say they're competing with TikTok. Nintendo could say they're competing with TikTok.

You don't get to say you're competing with TikTok, when you're already struggling to compete within your own industry. Microsoft would love to be in the world where Gamepass growth hadn't flatlined despite spending $70 billion dollars and they could have honestly said they're competing with TikTok, instead of EA and Steam.

It doesn't mean much. PS cycles through sales every month or 2 months or so. And whilst it's on sale, it will usually be on sale for the lowest price

That cloak is amazing

I'll always play the third person mode, even if the third person animations look terrible. Third Person cameras are the first mods I install on a PC game.

Something about my mind makes me feel disembodied in the game world, or like a floating TV in first person.

The PS4 is going to get releases when the PS6 is out. I guess this is the PC world now, if your game isn't AAA graphic pushing, why not support the old hardware?

@J2theEzzo they don't commit hard aesthetically. Look at this character. She's got a flower bikini, okay on theme, she's got a manacle on her hand (?), plus gloves, she's got ogres powers, and she's got pole dancing moves.

She doesn't even have consistent colours. Her powers are blue, her outfit is mostly yellow (if you can say it's mostly anything).

If you showed me this character, I would guess it was made in a character creator. I don't think I'd be able to guess she was meant to be Madagascan or even African. If you told me she was a dancer from Hawaii, that'd make about as much sense.

Modern Tekken character designs look really ugly to my eyes. There's no consistent themes or distinct silhouettes, or any kind of stylisation.

They don't look like real life fighters, but they also don't look like videogame characters.

They look like a random guys Sims character

I bought Expedition 33 in August. I'm still in Act 2. Time just disappears so quickly. A handful of games will easily keep me busy in a year.

It's why Day 1 Gamepass was doomed. Games aren't films, I can't consume one in an evening and then look for my next fix. Why rent 100 AAA games when I can't play them anyway? I might as well buy the one AAA game I'm going to love rather than the one Microsoft happened to make.

@get2sammyb I've got friends who've got their film onto Amazon Prime. Getting onto a streaming service isn't the same thing as Netflix giving your show a push