ThomasHL

Quidditch flopping doesn't get talked about enough. Warner Bros were talking about needing to focus more on the core-st of core IPs, and focusing on live service over single player.

But their live service game with their most valuable IP still flopped.

People want very specific things from franchises. People want to go to Hogwarts, not play a sport game that was never meant to be a workable sport. You can't just slap an IP on something, and force a particular type of games and expect it to work.

I've really enjoyed Veilguard. I can see it's faults, but it's so far away from the trainwreck that it's made out to be. There is some cheesy and middle of the road writing, but there are also some great moments. Emmerich in particular is a top notch Bioware companion.

Tips for anyone playing it: the start is slow and the weakest part, once you recruit the Warden companion it picks up. If I played it again I wouldn't do as many side missions before I'd got everyone unlocked

I didn't realise they had Gail Simone on it. I'm doubly disappointed now

@ShogunRok thanks for the answer. Sadly that rules it out for me. It's what killed off my worlds play through. At least you've saved me some money!

@ShogunRok do you need a certain level of story progress to play co-op with someone? Can you play a level later in the game that your friend is at but you haven't reached yet?

Is it possible to play the game co-op only? Are you going to have to do single player at some point?

@Batesy125s I feel 3 and 4 had better stories than 5. 5 nailed the UI design and battle system (also I appreciated that it was a bit more forgiving with calendar management)

@MrPeanutbutterz resolution only makes a difference if your TV had the pixels and is big enough for you to see them. You can already get a stable refresh rate on a base PS5

The diminishing returns are hitting hard. You really have to have an expensive TV to make the PS5 pro worth it. And even then, I couldn't tell you at a glance that the game is being played on a pro.

With the PS4 pro you might get it for the 60 FPS alone

I give zero ***** about whether Assassin's Creed has a canon either way.

I don't make choices in RPGs because I believe I'm scripting the games official events or anything. I make choices because the act of deciding is interesting.

Even with games with bigger consequences, I don't mind if the developer wants to make some route canon in the sequel. I'd rather they tell a good story in the new game than hamstring themselves by only being vague about the past.

This always the trick to when a publishers says they're "hands off" "leaving them their independence" etc. There are more subtle ways to change a company than laying down the law. You can let your desires be known and people will try to match them. You can make sure the hiring choices for the top posts are people who want to do what you want.

Small correction to the article: 'Apparently, each deck of 100 cards "will be a fully draftable, Standard-legal set"'

Should be: 'As well as each deck of 100 cards there will be a fully draftable Standard-legal set'.

Magic has a number of sets a year. These have about 260 cards, and are a bit like "Seasons" in game. One of the main game modes revolves around a group of people taking it in turns to draft cards from a pack, and then use those to make a deck and play against each other. That's the draftable part.

The cards in a set then go into a bigger card pool where people can make decks out of any of the main draftable sets released in the last three years. This is the "Standard-legal" part.

These 4 100 cards decks, are just an accompaniment to the main set. They're a fixed set of 100 cards that you don't need to open packs for, designed to be played in the most popular multiplayer format of the game (Commander)

@nessisonett there's a standard set as well as these decks, so the other games will probably get references there.

@DrVenture69 We're definitely in an indie golden age now. Sometimes I'll stumble on on an indie game, and it's got an art style and gameplay ideas so unique it would have been a game of the year if it released 10 years ago - and I've never even heard of it. Because there are so many interesting things happen in the indie space.

Games have gotten so good looking!

I would never have guessed the VA was British, she was Dick Van Dykeing so hard.

I'm also not convinced it's possible for someone to know what a car is, and think a pram might be one.

The platforming and 'puzzles' look clumsy too, and I'm sad that washed out grey is making a comeback in games.

But I enjoy seeing how other countries depict Britain, so I'd probably play it for that alone. Mordred? Sign me up.

@DrVenture69 plenty of Indie and AA devs have chucked ideas that never came together, you just don't hear about them as much because they don't have big E3 trailers.

And for small indie devs whose games never came together you might never have known they existed in the first place - because they never released a game or released a terrible game and closed down.

An indie developer recently described the game development process as about learning how to scrap ideas that don't work as efficiently as possible.

That's really good. Survivor, Lost Records, Mordhau, all things I'm interested in playing

I'm still gutted 2 player co-op isn't in it. Surely more people want 2 player than 3?

Developers wouldn't implement it. We've known for a while now that gyro aiming is better than straight analogue stick aiming, but only a handful of games on PS5 support it.

Plus a mouse on a sofa is really awkward, and I'm not convinced the Switch will solve it.

I'd love to see someone invent some kind of mouse-like substitute - like the Steam Controller - that takes off on console, but an actual mouse isn't it.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare it was a reset of the industry in one country (admittedly the richest one). Videogame sales continued to grow uninterrupted elsewhere. It was fatal for Atari, but Nintendo existed before the crash and existed afterwards.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare The future of gaming is safe. Tools exist for almost anyone to make a game now at any budget.

There will always be people who want to play videogames, and there will always be people who want to make videogames. Even if all the money got drained out of the industry games would still get made and played.

The videogame crash itself wasn't as big as it is made out to be. It was 2 years, and it only happened in the US. Games kept selling fine in Canada, Japan and Europe. Mostly it was about US retailers being reluctant to stock games and consoles after some high profile flops. We're not reliant on retailers like that any more (or consoles)

But whilst gaming is safe, the people who work in it aren't. Videogames will keep getting made, but the less people might make them, or they might make less profit. It's always tough in creative industries because so many people want these jobs, and the finances don't necessarily support that.

A Wonder Woman game seems so straightforward. She's got a sword, a shield and a whip, she's hot and she's known for fighting, that's videogame bread and butter.

The Mordor games even had interrogation as a mechanic!

I'm sure it will be one of the best selling things ever, but I kind of feel like they've already done the thing with the most appeal: make the full Hogwarts region that you can explore.

People wouldn't be nearly as interested in a game set somewhere else (see response to Fantastic Beast films). And yes, they can make the mechanics better, but the mechanics aren't why people checked it out in the first place.

Maybe more customisation options? I could see that

@Bionic-Spencer Busy coding in the Stay Humble curse

@EfYI Polygon were just being polite not outright stating it. It's a bit of a petty reason to hold back review copies, and picking and choosing your reviewers is not a good thing even if you have an excellent game.

People are making way too big a deal of this. The developers don't want to be involved either way. They just want to make games. And i got to read up on some legitimately interesting history pieces at the time because of the discussion

I loved the first game, and thought they'd be in a position to break out with their second.

Valve took the right approach and put in the effort, and it's paid off for them.

The solution isn't curation, but really good tools for discovery. Steam used to be overwhelmed by junk, but now it's good enough that indie devs say they don't even need to market games for Steam. If you're game is good, people on Steam will discover it. If the game isn't good, it quickly vanishes.

That's why every new indie trend starts on PC these days, and eventually gets ported to consoles.

It's never just about what the game sold, but also how much it cost to produce. You can bet Ubisoft had a lot more people on the project than Hollowknight did

Why are servers getting pulled so fast for multiplayer games, and why aren't we more outraged about it?

People spent money on this game. They deserve it to hang around in zombie mode for a while. Servers used to last for years and years before getting pulled

They better make it co-op friendly then, unlike every other Monster Hunter game released.

If I want to play with a friend I want to be able to jump in and start playing with a friend. Don't tell me "One of you hadn't played X amount of hours of single player story missions so you can't do the fun stuff together"

The worst Quantic Dream game. The story was a mess all the way through, David Cage was being peak David Cage, and I found the control scheme to lack the magic where Heavy Rain managed to find the exact button prompts that "feel" like bending under barbed wire.

This is the game with the wacky child soldier sidekick level.

Hulst is picking up a lot of the blame for the live service strategy but all these cancellations suggest whoever is making the decisions is not convinced by live service anymore either.

@Bionic-Spencer I think this generation is proof that the One / PS4 generation wasn't "the one Microsoft can't afford to lose". The Xbox Series S / X is trailing well behind its previous generation. Lots of people who did have an Xbox last generation with their built up Xbox libraries who should be 'locked in' according to Spencer, have switched away from Xbox.

People care more about what they can play that's new, and what their friends are playing, than they do about preserving their digital libraries.

@wiiware their media is as violent and gory as any. Compare Battle Royale to The Hunger Games. The western version is much more censored and less bloody.

It does seem like this level of censorship is true of videogames in Japan though - not just an Assassin's Creed thing.

@graymamba for Microsoft though, it was Gamepass or get out of the games industry altogether.

Nadella had no interest in spending a huge amount of capital and resource just to stay in an industry with a lot of competition and limited growth potential.

Now they've spend over a hundred billion, they'll probably stay in gaming if just to recover their investment, but if Nadella knew Gamepass wouldn't go anywhere, he'd have just axed the whole division

Give us Avowed!

Still going through Dragon Age: Veilguard. I'm in to photo modes now, so I keep stumbling on random NPCs who look great and spend half an hour snapping them

The line between ordinary game development and 'AI' is already pretty blurry. Making a tool that makes things that go in your game.

Assassin's Creed games where you spend more time on your horse than climbing don't feel like Assassin's Creed to me.

I'm not particularly hopeful about this one, but I'm ready to be surprised

Shame about no new game+. I'm quite interested in trying a different class and background

@Andee my tip is to not get too bogged down at the start. The story really begins to open up when you get all of the companions.

It'll be interesting to see what the PS6 can do that will even need exclusivity.

Unless they way up the RAM or do something very tricky with AI, I can't see many games requiring the extra power (even if the PS5 has to settle for 30 FPS 1080p)

I could tell you nothing of what this game is about. I don't know the hook, I don't know the genre, I don't know the story, I don't know the setting

I'm enjoying Veilguard a lot. The biggest problem is the beginning is very very slow, and low stakes. Once your recruit the Warden and start unlocking the major party member side missions the game really gets on a roll. The Dragon Age lore, and everything Solas does in particular is fantastic.

If you can find half a million words in a week, you weren't counting properly in the first place.

I've never really enjoyed the "Batman planned everything from the beginning" stories. Especially as it's usually something super high tech.

I prefer the idea that he's an incredibly smart man on the street level, picking up clues, reacting to the situation and planning on the fly - like a detective not a super scientist.

I always figured the story about Batman being prepared for the Justice League turning evil should have been about understanding their characters and planning based on that instead of supersonic bullets and magic neurotoxins

In the demo, I realised the most optimal thing (resource / calendar conservation) wise when you run out of SP, is do switch to mage and mindlessly grind out lower level enemies for a bit until it's recovered.

Does the game ever give you a better solution? SP was always unrecoverable in Persona.

This is the kind of thing companies shouldn't be able to patent. It's too broad and Sony probably haven't done the work to make this an actual reality.

The demo was great. Really living up to the idea of affecting the flow of a whole battlefield

47th for as Star Wars game is terrible.

I intend to play it one day, but I've got no urgency about it. The longer I wait the better the sale

Anyone able to confirm if the mobile gacha game Path To Nowhere took some inspiration from Freedom Wars setting?

Calling the characters "sinners" in a post-apocalyptic setting is making me wonder

Still going through Dragon Age: Veilguard, the story started slow but I'm into the good bits now.

I love how these games sway me into opinions I didn't start out with. I was very sympathetic to Solas in Inquisition, yet as I've played through, I've come to realise my Rook feels totally different