I've been absolutely hooked on this for the last few days - it has been an absolute gem. It's an adventure that rewards exploration at every turn, with so many hidden rewards and shortcuts and back-routes... some of which, if you pick up on the clues leading to them, will quite happily give you a one-way ticket from the starter area to late game 'run for your life' territory.

And never did I expect to find the sort of equipment that starts appearing in the fourth (intended) named area. There are weapons that I never for my life would have seen coming in a fantasy game, but damn.

Nah, for the most part it absolutely was. Regular enemies were nowhere near aggressive enough, for the most part, taking extremely telegraphed turns, and only start to feel like they act enough against you after the halfway point of the game (when they unlock their unblockable attacks). The aggression levels of Savage should have been the default tuning, as they telegraph in sequence rather than act-pause-act-pause-repeat.

And then you had some of the later bosses who, by contrast, were absolutely too hard, and expected players to master systems that the rest of the game really doesn't bother to challenge them on.

Let it rest.

In a world where movie and videogame executives would sooner make a sequel twenty years after a name was at its prime, or reboot a franchise for the umpteenth time, we shouldn't be so reluctant to let them go when they've already had a good run.

Mass Effect ended with the end of the Reaper trilogy. Let the spiritual successors carry the torch.

Not a surprise, sadly.

There are many examples of studios undergoing major shifts in leadership, staffing or structure and keeping things going strong. The Bioware of the last decade was not one of them.

Each release made it clearer and clearer that Bioware as we knew it was already dead. And now it's finally being laid to rest.

Best wishes to the individual developers affected and I hope they find their feet.

It's hard to say how much of the control (if any) was adjusted by the day one patch vs. review code, but for the most part I can't really feel the lack of responsiveness or slowness that you bring up in the review.

The only situation in which I really feel anything like that is while using the whip to reach grapple points sometimes - it seems to be quite finicky while targetting with the analogue stick, as though it's translating the input into one of the eight D-pad directions and if you're even a few degrees out of that it'll whiff.

The whip attacks themselves feel nice and weighty, intentionally slow, as they're (mostly) not there to dodge but to gap close and exploit openings.

It's hard to pick a favourite weapon so far, but I'm probably having the most fun with Cestus, Spear and Greatsword so far - three very different but cool playstyles.

Ah, good ol' Sweeney. So often pretending to be the hero of gamerkind. Putting players first and standing up to the entrenched titans of the tech and software industry.

But in reality, unerringly one of the most shameless scumbags in gaming who just wants to take their place.

@KundaliniRising333 I'm not convinced that it was unfinished, personally, but rather on reaching the end of the base story (I got distracted with other games at the time, so I only got there over the weekend) it feels like it's flaws were all by design - or maybe more that the design was blind to them. It feels like it was what Itsuno wanted, and when it works it works but when it doesn't it really doesn't.

The ending in particular, in a game released only a few months before he left his 30-year career at Capcom, seems almost written more to foreshadow that than actually conclude the game. The antagonist's final words lament that the world will go on without him being able to see it. The post-credits scene is of a minor, eccentric character (who breaks the fourth wall in optional dialogue by talking about the world being fake) sailing into the sunset. I can imagine at launch it all felt weird, but with the benefit of hindsight it feels so on the nose. It is not a good ending, it is an incoherent mess that wastes so much potential and actively disregards parts of DD1's ending, but it feels weirdly intentional - and in that way, seems to reflect so many of the base game's flaws; ideas with potential, steered the wrong way.

(On Norgan; I'm loving what I've played of it so far. Dragonforged gear from the early Lost Rites gave me a bit of a headstart statswise over Level 1 drops, but the relics are starting to come into their own with L2/3 gear. I've gone in with Magick Archer thus far, with my pawn in their usual Fighter, and its felt great. The shield/counter arrow is so potent as it scales on incoming damage, the updated AI from recent patches has my pawn pulling deflects and counters so much more frequently than I expected, and the upgraded skills are stupidly fun. My current favourite is the hail arrow, the upgrade from a slow, single-target attack to a faster-charging piercing one is immense, it turns corridors into bowling alleys.)

@ShogunRok Yeah, definitely feeling that with the Lost Rites. I like how they're implemented, with the ones that you can just walk straight into with no conditions being pretty well balanced for the middle-to-end of the first base-game playthrough, sometimes with some bonus areas that you can only reach after certain points in the story, but the others ramp up fast. After clearing four of them, the fifth one I tried has a lot of areas that I can't get to without being in UW, had a lot of challenging enemies throughout, and a boss that shrugs off pretty much everything I can currently throw it at, so yeah.

I like that the loot you get from the locked ones ends up being more unique, too. I absolutely love the armour pieces from the archers-only dungeon, which was just within my ability to clear with base lategame gear pre-Norgan.

It's okay. The selection's either not to my taste (not too interested in modern F1 games, not going to invest in a PvP extraction shooter) or a watered-down take on a fun franchise (I played World Brothers 1. It wasn't a patch on EDF proper, but was fine on a substantial sale, so this one is fine as a freebie), but it's at least trying for variety and universal playability.

A selection of titles like this is infinitely better than the frequent fare of widely-owned games (or multiplayer focused ones that anyone would have bought it at launch if they genuinely wanted it), the dreaded sportsball games, or friendslop. The last three months have been absolute stinkers where I've left most of them unclaimed to keep them out of my library, this one is at least a small step up.

Ace Combat 8. I'm filling out and levelling my aircraft roster for Online and chasing the high of the occasional mission where I can pull anti-fleet duty. Dogfights are nice and all, but nothing beats skimming the sea at full throttle with the Pull Up warning blaring, ships sinking in your wake.

Outside of that, I might dip into NG+ for Control Resonant to wrap up the trophy list, pick up the Ghost of Yotei DLC (Most Wanted does sound rather fun, and I was itching for Sekigahara content in the base game), or get my Dragon's Dogma 2 savefile ready to go for Dark Arisen.

I finished the campaign in the early hours this morning after chipping away at it through the EA period.

What a banger, it got in to the thick of it nice and quick and the backend of the game was chock full of fantastic set pieces - Missions 27 and 28 might go down as some of my favourite sorties in the franchise.

Archers are still a nightmare

...Sudden flashbacks to my first time playing one of the later missions in the original, where enemy health and attack power suddenly spiked dramatically, the map was littered with archer towers, and getting killed by them within a minute as each arrow would delete 20% of my health.

@TechaNinja It never had any trophies requiring multiplayer interactions anyway, so shouldn't affect them at all I imagine.

So, wait. The project had been announced nearly two and a half years earlier, had been slated as in development for roughly a year, and yet Kojima still hadn't settled on an engine? Y'know, the core foundation of a videogame?

Crikey, it's about what I expected but it's no wonder Sony cut him loose. Good luck, Microsoft, you'll need it.

@TDHorizon You can turn off autocomplete QTEs (or rather, you can turn it on) but much like Spiderman's cutscene QTEs, they will still autocomplete anyway when the timer runs out. There are no QTE fail states, and so the QTEs are kind of... pointless. They're just 'press to resume cutscene' prompts without any risk or reward.

Similarly, you can't currently turn off the scent trails. You can only add even more UI assists on top of it, just in case the glowing blue line wasn't enough.

About what I expected on issues of missed deadlines and an ever-inflating budget. With some of the absurd excess and ego on display in the Death Stranding franchise - convincing me, personally, that while Kojima has a sharp eye for gameplay design, he's an abysmal writer and director without editorial oversight - it isn't surprising that it'd ultimately end the same way as his time with Konami.

Konami were an awful publisher around the time of MGSV, and only now seem to be righting the ship, but axing him back then was absolutely the right call in retrospect. So is this, marking a rare good decision by Sony of late. And no doubt Microsoft will find themselves in the same boat eventually in partnering with him, too.

Hmm, I was holding out my preorder until the end of the week... and reading and listening to various outlets and reviewers that I trust, yeah, it's a pass. If not for the egregious handholding I might've stuck with it, but I've gotten so tired of this generation of AAA games assuming that the player has the attention span and problem-solving capacity of a goldfish.

I'll do as I did with Spiderman 2 and play it when it lands in the Game Catalogue in a couple of years, the next month or so is so busy with releases that this just doesn't make the cut.

I finished up my first playthrough tonight... very much enjoyed it, mostly, and am going to try at Carnage over next weekend. It definitely does start off a little sluggish on combat (moreso for the enemies than the player) but once all of the pieces are in place it's both satisfying and can punish you pretty heavily for lapses in attention.

The bosses in the latter half of the game really made for fun and tense fights for the most part, although their habit of draining your soul gauges whenever they land grabs or unblockables could get tiresome while learning them - not only deleting half or more of your health, but also stealing your ability to fight back. The final boss ended up being a three-hour wall for me on that front, and I ended up wishing for a quick restart button on the pause menu with how much a single mistake could set me back.

@Reeneman Oh, it's almost certainly not. South Korea's gaming industry is pretty notorious for not exactly promoting work-life balance. You can be sure that's why their studios sometimes give out big paydays to their staff when a game hits as an overwhelming commercial success - with Crimson Desert most recently, Stellar Blade before that - because those employees will have sacrificed a lot both professionally and personally to get that product out to market.

In much the same way as Chinese developers such as Hoyoverse hit a release cadence that other studios could never aspire to, what Pearl Abyss have managed to achieve with Crimson Desert post-launch probably wouldn't be possible in other countries without breaking labour laws left right and centre.

I wonder how miffed Keighley is that he only got a trailer for his show, hyped it up as the runner-up highlight of Gamescom opening night... aaaaand a week later Sony steals his thunder and then some.

(I had to laugh at them 2x speeding the dialogue towards the end. I'm sure it's not the message they were going for, but 'better if you skip it' is Threemakes side chatter in a nutshell.)

@CosmicJester Performance is pretty solid on base after this update, set the framerate to variable and it holds a pretty steady 60 fps (or near enough to it) almost universally now. It feels a bit of a cleaner image overall now too, though that's more allegorical.

The Prefer Quality mode or whatever isn't bad either, and is also far more consistent than it used to be, but whether or not that gels with you'll depend on your FPS tolerance. Feels like a steady mid-30s-to-40 now with a quick test in a few different areas, but after getting so used to 60~ I struggle to play games at those framerates anymore without feeling a bit disoriented. You can turn off Ray-Tracing which knocks it a bit higher too while keeping the resolution.

Tbh Chadley is a symptom, not a cause. Rebirth was chock full of grating NPCs, he just catches the most attention as a returning grating NPC... who also follows you everywhere.

Looking forward to giving it a spin again over the next few evenings - tried to dip back into it after the July patch, but with the list of improvements for this one already public at that point I just couldn't shake the malaise of '...I'd rather play with those'.

Having six abilities on hand instead of four will make such a difference by itself, as I always felt like the advanced vocations in particular just couldn't make the most out of their kits. Being able to make new savefiles without an overwrite, the huge list of pawn improvements, and the solid sounding balance sweep across the vocations (RIP Mystic Spearhand's 'the party is now invulnerable' button, I still don't know how something that insanely imbalanced got greenlit), almost all of it sounds like a marked step up.

It's still a shame that Itsuno parted ways with Capcom, but I reckon the franchise is in good hands. It'll be interesting to see next month what Kinoshita's been able to do with Dark Arisen 2.

It's a bit of a choice to name both a competitive PvE mode and a direct PvP one as 'Co-Op'... while having the limited modes that are actually, y'know, genuine Co-Op.

Hopefully the success of the game will allow them to rapidly secure their next project and get things back up and running. ZC has a few bugs here and there, but nothing too major (I have to reboot to stabilise performance every now and then, it starts to chug after too many missions in a row - I've only seen one total freeze in 30~ hours after punching someone into a wall) and has genuinely been really fun to play on both a mechanical and narrative level. I see the final mission looming on my playthrough and I don't want it to end.

Anthem with less exosuits, and more dinosaurs.

I'll pass.

Not sure how/why anyone would've expected anything different tbh - it already got a fresh trophy sheet for the PS5 upgrade... and this was pretty clearly presented as an update to that, at no point as a separate product. I can't think of any examples where an updated release/patch of a game that already exists on a platform has come with a completely new trophy list. Some extra bonus ones, maybe.

I've been playing through Zero Company myself. It really makes no attempt to shy away from the label of XCOM-but-Star Wars, though I'm quite liking their twists on the formula.

I thought I'd settled on my main team... and then I unlocked Cly. Cly may be slightly (extremely) overpowered.

*in its launch state

After 13 years of milking Shark Cards in V, and trying and failing to go the same route with Gold in RDR2, I don't believe for a second that VI's eventual Online won't be just as shameless.

A few moments that were okay/good, padded out by a lot of filler and clone games. Chinese and South Korean churn-and-burn studios were definitely the financial backbone behind this one, but they don't make for interesting viewing.

On the whole, really quite dull.

I'm still not 100% decided on the gameplay shift from a shooter to action/hack-and-slash...

...but as a £50 game in a sea of £65-80 competition, it - along with Zero Company - will be a likely purchase if it reviews well from outlets that I trust.

Agreed. Similarly, I can't quite put a finger on why, but while Yotei was great it didn't quite leave as strong on imprint as Tsushima. 'Disappointing' is too strong a word, though - Yotei just didn't hit the same way.

I'm not sure whether it's down to Atsu's journey feeling more predictable/safe, with a story with an intensely emotional background but without the intense emotion in the present that drove Jin's story forward throughout. I have to squint to remember the story beat that unlocked her Ghost Mode ability, while the the before, during and after of Jin's Ghost unlock is a much more pivotal, impactful and memorable sequence. Atsu's was just a step on her revenge quest; Jin's was a defining moment for his character that set him firmly on his path.

It could also be gameplay; while Yotei is mechanically more in-depth and engaging, I wonder if Atsu came out with too many options right out of the gate. Understandable for a sequel, but as a sequel with a new lead character it might have been a bit too front-loaded. Obviously she had the new weapon unlocks and skill trees etc to work towards, but it was a bit jarring to have things like the climbing hook and Wolf's Howl from the very beginning.

...Or it could be something else entirely, general sequel fatigue, etc.

Neat.

Can't see myself ever using it if/when I replay, though. They look great in their movies, but with the wealth of interesting and uniquely styled suits in the games the movie skins are just so boring by comparison.

As much as I take anything from Alinea with a hefty chunk of salt, it wouldn't surprise me. Or anyone, I feel. Look st Steam figures and sales estimates and it's faired even worse there.

A Halo remake without multiplayer was always a baffling choice, was always going to backfire, and it has. Maybe for a later game like ODST or Reach, where the campaigns (and customisation, in the latter case) were at their peak, it would have faired better... but even they would have struggled with multiplayer being so central to the franchise identity.

@Neuromancer It has little to do with any of those and almost everything to do with the AI bubble spiking component prices.

Note that consumer electronics that don't depend on resources and components linked to data centres and co. are still doing what they've always done - getting cheaper as they get older.

@ElPenitente Ah, yes, the Chinese government. Famous for censoring things after they've released, and definitely not for having an extremely rigid approval and licensing system that prevents any game that they disapprove of for any reason from ever reaching the market.

Bittersweet news. As much as New Vegas still shines as one of the best (if least stable) games in the modern franchise, I can't imagine that Obsidian are all too thrilled that a project from their own IP was axed to bring them back to Fallout.

I was quite looking forward to the game ever since the first leak about it. Playing as Faye sounded like an interesting change. It still would be.

The problem for many wasn't, and still isn't, having a female character take the lead. The problems in that 20 minute preview were what they built around the lead.

Charging $40 for the barest of barebones ports of a game and then having the audacity to charge for the original DLC all over again instead of rolling into the relaunch... setting the full, low effort package of a 16-year old game at $70, pricier than many actual remasters and remakes...

Yup, it's Activision Blizzard alright. Apalling stuff.

Ahahahahahahahahaha.

Yeah, sure, XBox of all companies are going to get 12% of the entire global population playing their games.

Sony and Nintendo at their respective primes have never even come close to that, Sharma, you don't stand a chance in hell. Even the most ubiquitous multiplatform publishers can't even dream of those kind of numbers.

@RomanRiz The story of every financial and business crash, ever. It wouldn't be much of a crash if it happened from a crawl.

If Microsoft really do try to trim their catalogue down to their 'core IPs', they're finished. Or, rather, even more finished.

It won't work for Embracer with their shifted focus on Lord of the Rings.

It hasn't and isn't working for WB Games with their focus on Harry Potter and DC.

It will not work for Microsoft if, after so much money spent expanding their empire, they trim their focus back to a handful of flagship names.

They will be finished as a gaming publisher within a few years, just in time for their AI push to kill off their dear Helix because it'll be too expensive to make.

I don't know, I feel like if this is true, it would probably leave Undead Labs in the worst place to find a publisher out of those listed, not the best. UL have State of Decay, but they only have State of Decay. That's all they're known for, all the way back to their initial days on XBLA. The one time they tried anything else, it ended up cancelled within a year of early access.

They only have (somewhat) successful experience making one genre of games. Only have one IP to their name. One. In nearly twenty years as a studio. That is not going to put them in a good spot if they have to find a buyer. Certainly not next to much more storied studios like Double Fine and Ninja Theory.

I'm not surprised. I just remain disappointed.

I'm sure we all remember when PS5 was flaunted as a generational leap to consistently high-fidelity, 1080p, 60FPS gaming, with lower frame rates at resolutions beyond that.

Now, increasingly, developers don't even try to target that on the bloody Pro.

@UltimateOtaku91 I think here with NTE as well, my favourite things they've done with are going without a 50/50 pity and being able to buy 70-or so of the weapon keys with regular ingame currency each update.

It makes it so much easier to get at least one of the featured characters and kit them out decently without relying on chance or being pushed to spend on rolls, which is a nice change. All in all the roll-by-roll odds are lower with the whole diceboard system, but the system as a whole feels a bit fairer.

@WCB Shudders at the 5 maxed friendships trophy.

Maybe by the end of the next update I will finally max one... unless they have another resource sink draining all my gift Fons like the damned Porsche roulette.

To the trailer itself, I was hoping for another healer (or better yet, a shield character) for more options, but... eh, Iroi ain't it. Probably doesn't help that all the weird in-character blather of these showcases doesn't give anywhere near enough clear information. Might try to triple down on Shinku though and add another DPS, just for style's sake.

@4fold Typically, that does happen with these sorts of games, but usually only on the X.0 updates that start off new regions and such. So probably no additional trophies until they move on to the 2.0 city, which will be quite a while off yet.

@SMJ I mean

yeah.

This is a Japanese executive talking to a Japanese publication after all, and portability has been the name of the game in that market for a long time now.

That, presumably, is the changing lifestyles they're referring to; the fact that in Japan, since the days of the PSP and the DS, consumer preference has shifted massively away from home consoles towards portable ones.

The Switch (2) is king there now, the PS5 has struggled compared to other markets, so trying to satisfy both the portable market at home and the home console market overseas is a solid call if they can make it work. If.

They've always looked far too clean for an actual screenshot of the game running, so I was always working with that assumption personally. That said, for all of their other questionable qualities nowadays, Rockstar have always been at the top of their game in really showing off what consoles can do graphically.

So I do expect the end product will look great, and probably run well too... just not to this exaggerated standard.

Is there even much of a ship left to steer if they've axed most of the Destiny team and 'some' of the Marathon team?

In a best case scenario, the Bungie that may be rebuilt from the ashes will hardly resemble the company that Sony forked out all that money for... so the question of 'what was the point?' will only get louder.