ThomasHL

As soon as I saw that restoring health in Stellar Blade respawned enemies, I switched the demo off and never came back.

I've never liked them, and I'm frustrated that all these action games with interesting (but far too gloomy) characters and worlds go down the same path again and again.

@Ravix also Ezio (an Italian) was the protagonist for the AC game set in Turkey.

Far from the first time, Ubisoft did this decades ago.

The people complaining about historical inaccuracies have never played an Assassin's Creed game in their life.

If this is bad, they should see what Ubisoft did to Greek, Italian, Egyptian, British and American history!

If you can go from top 40 to number 9 without any big event, it tells you that even the lower end of the top represents a tiny number of sales.

What happened to COD?

Looks like what I wanted from Zenless Zone

It's a very lacking game, even without thinking about the monetisation.

The lack of a proper world map to explore, the repetitive environments - there's just not a lot of things to do.

The things that are there are copying Persona without copying any of the things that make Persona work - choosing to interact with particular characters, managing time because you have a strict deadline etc.

The combat is fun, but compare it to any other action game - God of War, Devil May Cry, Warframe, even Dynasty Warriors - it's like they've preserved the combat and stripped out every other element of that game.

Yes it's free. But it's bogs down the action with all this F2P stats and grinding that don't make sense, and at the end of the day there are better things to do with your time. I kept waiting for it to click, and it didn't.

If you ignore monetisation, Genshin has 10x more to it than ZZZ, as does Honkai Star Rail

Someone posted to Reddit about how they'd tried Days Gone after hearing the hype, and found it only to be decent.

The top response by far was "What hype?"

The game found a niche, and its been really loved and appreciated by they people in that niche. But that doesn't mean Days Gone 2 would have sold like gangbusters.

I mean it would be truly outrageous if they didn't, as other games are free and only do that.

Not a great month for me, I wouldn't try any of these.

@Matthewnh what I'm saying is, I was excited for the game because I wanted a game focused on Solas, and this is them saying they changed the name because they felt Solas wasn't the focus of the game.

Hopefully they've still done it well, but it does give me reason to hesitate

I'm a bit cautious because I thought the Solas hook was amazing, but I can understand the decision

Twitch aren't allowed to kick someone out if they don't have something on them. But it's probably not full law breaking otherwise they'd have escalated it to the police.

I tried to pick up Destiny 2 this year, and unfortunately the new player experience is a total mess. Every time I logged in it would show me a new cutscene of characters and events I'd never heard of, and even dump me straight into missions on planets I'd never been to.

Dragon Age has a history of trailers whose tones don't match the actual game - including the original DA: O trailer - so I'll wait to see the actual game

Better than DA:I's worst-of-both-worlds system

This is the comedown from the superb 2023

Coffee talk was fun, so I'll check this out

@AK4tywill Directors cut has always been a meaningless term. Very few things released as a director's cut were actually the original vision of the director. It was a marketing gimmick to double dip on DVD sales for die hard fans.

The director is the person who cuts the original version of the film too (usually). And there's zero guarantee that the director has more freedom in the "directors cut" than the original. Often execs just want extra scenes included that they can market on the back of the box. Sometimes directors cuts even involved filming extra scenes - they aren't even cuts!

When Villeneuve was asked about directors cuts he replied "Arrival is the directors cut".

There are directors cuts which are genuinely the director getting the chance to undo some meddling that prevented them from presenting their original vision. But that's not what studios are considering when they stick the directors cut label on something.

Rebel Moon is a perfect example of how stupid the term is and has always been. Zack Snyder was in total control of the original cut for Rebel Moon. The "director's cut" was planned by the Netflix executives before the original cut had even been released.

@ChrisDeku That's review bombing though. It's player count on steam is healthy and has actually been growing the last couple of months

As an Overwatch player, I was thinking about at least giving it a go, even if I had doubts it would be worth playing over OW.

$40 kills that completely for me. Why risk all that money for something I've already got and enjoy?

Was the gameplay captured from mobile? Why is everyone moving so stiffly?

The fact it still beats out the old name by a mile tells you a lot about the old name

I tried to get into The Finals, but to me it lacked some of the sheer complexity of other live service games. In Overwatch there's always a new character to learn, a new way of holding off an ability until another ability has been used.

The gap between where you are and the top is full of obvious steps, and some of them are just chunks of knowledge, not 'reflexes' or 'aim'.

The finals felt too short, too ephemeral. One round plays a lot like another round, any one moment is a lot like another moment.

I can see cards not having the same visceral appeal, but it played well.

Mechanically the games biggest problem IMO was the wider game loop was built around all these finite resources - do you do a mission to get currency, get ability points or get upgrade materials? Yet there was no limit to the number of missions you can do, so it was all faff.

I think they built an iteration of the game that had more of a hardcore Xcom feel, but late in the day tore that bit out.

It's not caused any harm to me as a PS owner, but I have started to think I might get a steam deck or similar instead of the PS6.

This is exactly why, during the Bethesda merger, I said I was afraid of MS shutting studios down.

Because MS isn't primarily a gaming company, they have constant shifts in the direction and targets of their executive. When the wind blows a different way, studios get closed.

It's been that way right from the start. Ensemble studios made great PC games, but the executive direction shifted to console and they were shuttered

It takes a long time to make a great studio. Games are too difficult for it all to come together the first time. BG3 was a result of a decade of foundations laid by Larian.

My worry is execs don't understand this, and the money and patience it will take.

This is a poisoned chalice for any developer. They need some kind of small / different genre game to reset expectations before someone else tries a full Baldurs Gate RPG.

Fallout 3 reckons that a hundred years after Fallout 1 people still haven't even picked up all the pre-war Nuka Cola bottles lying around the floor.

This was never a series for people who took timelines seriously.

So the Bene Gesserit don't exist in their version of the universe?

I heavily dislike the type of murder mystery structure Pentiment uses, similar to LA Noire, where you spend most of the game 'solving' crimes knowing that the real perpetrator has got away.

The real perpetrator was guessable by the start of act two but the games makes you play on for hours before letting you do anything about it.

The stuff Japan did to Korea is horrific. It's understandable they'd be sensitive to something like this.

And a section of Korean gamers have the twitchiest trigger fingers in the world at any controversy. There have been much much much less real issues than this which have got people fired and games censored

Looking through the list, there's nothing I would actually buy ahead of games already on my wishlist.

Microsoft started strong, but they've only gone backwards with time.

The production pipeline of Square Enix has been dodgy for a decade now, and badly needs fixing.

Even in their good games, there's a strong sense of asset outsourcing where games don't have a consistent art style and objects don't fit the tone/environment.

We need Valve to take the next step with Steam decks now. They don't need to replace Xbox, but we need lounge friendly PCs to keep Sony honest

I have never seen this game before, I haven't played Pokémon in a decade, but these are just Pokémon. Not Pokémon inspired, straight off Pokémon.

I can name specific names and I'm far away from a Pokémon super fan

The whole way Overwatch 1 was shut down to force the switch to Overwatch 2 was a self-inflicted handicap from the start. When you start on such a negative note, fans aren't going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

No-one really knows how this will play out, and speculation could be wildly out of step.

What we know is it will be a weaker version of the support passive. The support passive doesn't really effect combat - it only kicks in after not being shot for a few seconds. It's also not very fast. Supports don't rely on their passive for healing - they use their abilities and the other support to heal them up.

But this could theoretically effect lone wolf DPS' and potentially encourage DPS' to duck out of combat for a few seconds to get some regen. Will it be powerful enough to bother doing that? Depends on the numbers

@RicebinBernacky it's the games that people play more that win. People aren't going to not vote just because they've only played half the games on the list. So they vote the game they've played as game of the year.

There's only one indie game on the list even though there were probably 5+ indie games this year that deserved it more than any of the games in 6 to 10

It's a good setting for a MMO, but when it comes to Horizon, the believability of the ecosystem is much more important to me than single player / multiplayer.

I want the robots to move around more naturally, and interact with each more naturally. Add more Monster Hunter.

Do that, and I'll love the game, MMO or no

It's one of the greats, but not the greatest simply because a lot of the best AAAs were sequels and don't feel like they'll forever alter how games are made.

If this kicks off a lot of new trends in future years then its true greatest contention.

@Korgon I find BG3 very intimidating - I enjoy it whenever I get going, but starting a session is hard. It's almost too interactive - I'm afraid I'm going to mess up and get an outcome I don't like for playing non-perfectly.

If I had to guess whether a random character was in Star Rail or Genshin, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference

If you're going to level scale in an RPG, just don't have levelling at all. Do ability trees and cut out the stat scaling for everyone.

Level scaling is junk gaming. It's just a way to abuse people's desire to see numbers go up without doing anything meaningful.

I'm playing Honkai Star Rail. I'm still unsure if I like it - the combat is excellent, but everything else is a bit bland.

I really thought Starfield would turn things around for them. I've never seen a Bethesda game leave the public discourse so quickly

Honkai hasn't really been clicking with me yet. Is there a point in the story I should stick it out to?

If they really didn't see a Starfield boost, they're in big trouble. Microsoft looking for a way out of that CoD multiplatform requirement now.

I'm going to speculate slightly below the PS4, perhaps 110 million.

Reasons 1) Xbox acquisitions are going to kick in in a big way, slowing current growth. It's hard to underestimate how big Elder Scrolls games are to people. If Starfield is close to as big, it's the kind of game that will attract people who only buy consoles for one or two games

2) The Switch 2 will come out in a few years, and put more pressure on PS5 sales, especially if it can achieve PS4 level graphics on a handheld.

3) The PS5 is only a small step up over the PS4. I don't regret getting one, but it's been a less satisfying purchase than the PS4 was

4) With the steam deck, PC games are slowly becoming more accessible to a wide audience

All of that only adds up to a small dip, but I still think it will be a dip. A lot depends on Bethesda actually getting things right and Microsoft sticking to a strategy - two things which are always a risk