crossbit

I'm completely indifferent to it. The only thing I remember about that announcement trailer was that it felt much longer than it needed to be and reaaaally dragged on.

@AdamNovice They'll probably release a standalone version of it later down the line, if they follow their approach to Tsushima Legends.

I was going to pass on it at first.

Then I made the error/great choice of downloading the demo, and spent 20-ish hours seeing how high I could punch with the level cap.

It took me the better part of an hour at 2x Battle Speed to kill the third Feral. Then about the same to take down one of the Anjanaths by the skin of my teeth. The people who managed to beat things even stronger than that scare me.

...But now, yeah, sold.

A very solid 9 (ha). I can't compare it to 7 or 8 as I skipped those, but Grace's segments did a great job of replicating that early-game tension of the old games and RE2make's RPD, while Leon felt like a nicely evolved take on RE4/4make's gameplay.

While the review here made it to be much more weighted towards Leon - and strictly speaking, in terms of game area and enemy count it definitely is - I feel like they struck the balance pretty well. Certainly on the first playthrough, which I played on Classic, fully exploring everything that Grace's time had to offer and clearing a path wherever possible (not knowing at the time what the game had in store for over-zealous zombie killers) I spent a lot more time with her than Leon by the end. And even more time beyond that lost to clumsy 'saving that ink ribbon/Requiem ammo for later' deaths and reloads.

Now, to start the Insanity run... oh boy.

It's a bad request for Bungie to make of reviewers, and a bad editorial decision by this site to not only acquiesce to it but expand the request to simply not score reviews to holding off on one entirely. There are countless other games that Pushsquare have reviewed that have added their endgame/postgame content weeks after launch or started off in a 'pre-season' state, for both better and worse.

Marathon should not be an exception. The state of the game right now is what prospective buyers would be paying for, right now. What the many people who bought the game are playing, right now, and will be playing until said update. It should be reviewed, even if you still comply with Bungie's request to leave it unscored as a Review In Progress.

@dardel It's a solid start, but as with any live service game it's less about their player count on day one and more about how long and how many of those players stick around. Comparing the player count after a week is a better metric of how well the launch landed - for example Highguard did pretty well day one, but was in the gutter after only a few days, although granted it was F2P - and if it passes that test, the player count after a month is probably going to be roughly representative of their longer-term playerbase. Both are crucial tests for a live service title with such a high budget.

My stance is still the same - I loved Black Flag and might play a fairly faithful revision, but if the previous rumour of them remaking it with post-Origins RPG loot/level bloat has any truth to it I will not even be remotely interested.

"Cover-up claims" is a bit of a stretch. A cover-up after all is, y'know, trying to hide the fact that you've done something, not trying to distract from it after the fact.

Whitewashing.

No, Wolfwashing.

"They brought me in to do a job. I don't know how to do that job, but hey, they're paying me millions of dollars so I'll... probably figure it out?"

The executive world is such a dumpster fire of 'wrong person, wrong role'.

That was the one that spent half of its reveal trailer shamelessly stroking Geoff Keighley's ego, right?

Good.

@Weez Oh, I know, I actually use it the most out of the Ninja weapons for those reasons, a lot of the fixed tools it does have are amazing for dancing around enemies or easily getting into backstab position - especially late on with the afterimage Mystic Art and the skill that doubles the time they distract enemies for. But man, I wish more than three inputs had multiple attack options.

I personally hope this article ages like month-old milk, like your 'Concord is actually great, guys' piece.

I only have two minor gripes with it, from a returning player standpoint;

The ninja movesets don't always hit the right spot. Some feel too simple and barebones - like the Sword, which is a very slim skill tree compared to the rest and only has three inputs with alternative moves - while others just can't comfortably condense the versatility from their former 3 stances into one toolkit.

And while they definitely did a better job of making all Guardian Spirits useful for one playstyle or another this time... they end up feeling REALLY sparce in having a smaller base roster than 1 or 2 split between two playstyles. I really looked forward to seeing what a new spirit would do after beating a human boss in the previous games, but... you really don't get that much at all in Nioh 3.

Beyond those gripes, though, I've really enjoyed it and would give it a solid 9 going into NG+

Not much to my interest, personally, but pretty decent overall. The new Castlevania is the one that caught my interest the most out of the new announcements.

It looks and sounds like a Monster Hunter clone, with some roguelite strapped on.

...And yet instead of making it look like a Horizon take on the formula, they decided to make it look like Dauntless, the now-deceased catastrophy of MH clones. They could have given it a striking art style that felt inspired by the neo-tribal state of Horizon's world, instead of... this.

And how, exactly, can these hunters be part of the series' canon as they claim, when the archer is zipping around side to side in midair firing off a volley of arrows? That's absolute nonsense. Unless they're making this a whole 'Erend telling tall tales' thing...

...in which case, again, a more distinguished and appropriate artstyle might sell that. This one doesn't.

I'm only a short while in, having just finished up the story and optional stuff in the introductory region, but so far it feels very much 'if you enjoyed the first, you'll probably enjoy this'.

Without that comparison, I'd say it could be summed up so far in terms of the gameplay feel as 'easier/more streamlined Elden Ring'. It feels immediately clear that the team behind the game saw what Fromsoft did with the open world there and went "okay let's do that", although I haven't yet run into any enemies or groups anywhere near as threatening as in ER's early hours.

The changes from the original's systems feel like a big improvement so far. Takes a bit of time to process it all, but fits together nicely if you take the time to do so.

The approach to the classic quick dodge/fat roll situation is one of the things that I find really interesting on the design front, breaking away from the usual equipment weight factor and basing it on how well or poorly your equipment fits your stats instead. If all of your gear is optimised and doesn't demand more than half of any stat, you get the quick dodge. Meanwhile if your gears' requirements exceed at least three of your stats, you fat roll. The space in the middle is... a whole other beast. When stats go over, rather than the norm of punishing you by making your weapon practically useless, in this you pick up an intertwined benefit and downside - for example magic getting stronger but accidentally casting without enough resources debuffing you, gaining stamina on a perfect dodge but running out of stamina reduces your attack for a while, etc. But then on top of that you have other gear and equippable passives that will give you additional benefits either from having none of those monkey paw effects active, or only if you do. It feels like a really unique system and a refreshing change from the usual. And making it the first ever soulslike where I'm actually considering deliberately building around a regular roll rather than just settling for one.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone at this point, sadly. Ubisoft has been increasingly spiralling the drain in recent years, and it's no longer a question of if they collapse but when.

@MrPeanutbutterz It's pretty solid. The ups and downs with the game these days are more centered around performance isdues or bugs that inevitably sneak in with the updates, but the weapon balancing is much less aggressive than the first year - where they tended to nerf the meta weapons hard before, they focus entirely on improving underperforming weapons now to bring them up to par. As such the changes end up feeling much less... aggressive? than before, and generally make the game more fun to drop back into to test out new things that you might have overlooked before. The weapon customisation that they added a year ago is also pretty fun to play around with, even though some weapons benefit from it much more than others in the current state.

There's also a lot of variety now in the Warbonds to accommodate for all sorts of different playstyles (although I do wish they'd offer more free stratagems outside of them, those seem to have dropped off entirely at this point.)

The Censor sounds pretty interesting (and probably a bit more viable as a suppressed with how detection works in the game - one shot one kill should be much more effective than automatics) and the pistol offering a single target gas effect could have an interesting niche in open-sidearm loadouts - at least if it can reliably prick medium enemies, fleshmobs etc at a reasonable range. Will be interesting to see where the damage and Armor Pen falls on the C4 pack - if it can deal with most heavies with a single satchel (and only takes up the backpack slot) it could make for an interesting swap for Thermites, Dynamite or even the Ultimatum as a close-range Anti-Tank option.

A bit of a novelty/aesthetic warbond for most people, definitely (and even for stealth players, arguably the plasma weapons are still the best option as they're naturally silent to fire with loud impact explosions that can distract) but hey - I like novelty warbonds if the kit looks nice or offers something different.

The game, if it had existed in a vacuum, absolutely didn't deserve the hate.

The game as it did exist, surrounded by fabricated hype and false promises, absolutely did.

It's a shame - if not for the executive misteps by EA that led to a lot of the issues around the game, or the promises to improve it that were ultimately abandoned, the game may have been remembered much more fondly. For its flaws, and even as a stark warning that the Bioware of old had ceased to be, the core movement and gunplay was so fun and fluid - and could have been the centre of something so much better if clearer heads had prevailed either before or after launch.

The delisting of the original is honestly the part that doesn't sit right with me.

For one, the Director's Cut is PS5 only, so the only way to play the game on the console that it launched on - PS4 - or in its original composition from this point forward is to buy a physical copy. That's far from ideal.

Second... a game that would quite regularly be on sale for less than a tenner will now only be available at a significantly higher price for the foreseeable future, with that base price at 'new' of £45 - and no doubt with far less generous discounts once it starts hitting the sales in a few months.

It was known seven months ago that the game had some GenAI placeholder textures in the game at launch, which Sandfall subsequently patched out.

A Sandfall rep either lied or made an unintentionally inaccurate statement, sure. But where was the due diligence of the award organisers themselves in all of this in monitoring their own rules? The game's development using GenAI in some capacity is far from the shocking revelation they're making it out to be.

Once again. Known seven months ago.

Feels like a waste of time, frankly. The vocal minority that are so up in arms about it are also so fervent in their anti-AI mindset that they won't be swayed by anything he has to say. Or they'll be the sort to stubbornly grandstand now, but still buy the game down the line if and when it's a critical success.

Either way, Larian are better off just getting on with things, and Swen being more mindful of what (and how) he says in future interviews.

@Korgon (#30) Your points here lean into my personal issues with it being nominated as an indie title, personally.

If it were nothing more than a budgetary partnership, if Kepler had only provided Sandfall with money and resources to make the most out if their team... yeah, honestly, I think I would consider it indie, if tentatively. There'd be financial help there, but no direct publisher involvement beyond the usual standard of these partnerships.

My issues with the 'indie' classification with E33 is that the assistance went far beyond budgetary. Kepler helped them with finances and marketing as you'd generally expect from a indie-publisher partnership. The industry connections for high-profile VA talent bring it close to the edge. But what undoubtedly pushes it over for me is the amount of support studios that Kepler drafted in to help with the project. Money is money, but Kepler went beyond that and applied considerable influence and manpower from their own reserves. A small team at Sandfall itself, supplemented by hundreds of additional, publisher-drafted development staff over the course of the project after they took on the role as publisher.

That is hands-down the biggest sticking point for me in why I accept Sandfall as an indie studio, but simply can't consider E33 to be an indie game - because, from my perspective, it was by no means an independent project by the time it had concluded development.

@Acquiescence Quite.

I was half-watching TGAs at the time as I was talking with someone alongside it, but caught the 'demo out now' with an 'ooooh, nice' - I'd been hoping we'd get to try it as it sounds interesting but I want to know how it feels in practice.

Then I spent a confused while the next morning trying to find the demo on PSN, for a multiplatform title that Sony have been pretty proudly advertising since its reveal. Thinking that it if it's not in the demos section, surely it must be one of the awkward 'technically beta' ones that you find in the submenu for a game's store page, because they DEFINITELY just announced a demo on stage.

...Then the disappointing google search of, 'Oh, we don't get to try it until an unspecified point in the near future... awesome. That's swell.' I get it, Capcom are hyper-conscious of PC users post-Wilds and want to head off any performance concerns as early as possible, but, still - bummer.

@Hi569 By the end that's the crux of it yeah, 4-character boss fights in either solo or with other players, along with wave battles and other mission types. Small arena stuff.

That's led up to by the campaign, which is presented as a light single-player Action RPG that has you following the story through a bunch of levels and hub areas with the standard faire of collectibles, side quest and high-threat 'you'll probably have to come back to fight this later' challenge bosses. You can do a few coop missions on the side between missions in the campaign, iirc, but the bulk of it doesn't open up until the story (mostly) wraps up.

It's definitely worth a try if you want some light ARPG-meets-hack-and-slash action that can challenge you pretty well when it wants to but doesn't keep the heat on constantly. Cut through basic enemies, need more thought for bosses, etc.

@RBMango Also that.

With all the will and motivation in the world, there's still no guarantee that the Disney or EA overlords won't drop it in an instant if it doesn't come together exactly as they want it and/or they find something else that feels like a better cash cow.

If it ends up being developed pretty efficiently, I could see maybe mid/late 2028 as an optimistic outlook. The studio being a year old isn't that much of a factor if they've been working on the game for the bulk of that and are on the ball, and a four-year development cycle is a reasonable window. Though, again, with smooth development.

Most likely, I expect mid 2029.

If it starts pushing to 2030 or beyond... things will have probably gone less smoothly than they'd like along the way. With a high profile project and presumably a budget to match, 6+ years would be heading into development hell territory.

(Stares and smiles at Beyond Good & Evil 2, the game that is definitely still coming out eventually in a good state and not at all lost to the void)

It reminds me a lot of the approach they tried to take with RE6 of a trying to give a different experience with each set of characters - trying to give a slightly more classic feel with Leon/Helena, trying to make something between RE4/5 with Jake/Sherry, and 'let's try to make it a military shooter I guess' with Chris/Piers.

Of course it trying and failing on each count, because it didn't really change much apart from how many things you had to shoot at any given time and for how long, and whether or not you'd have any simple puzzles along the way. The core running through all of it set it up to fail - it all functionally being RE5 again with three (four with Ada) different coats of paint - and the closest any part came to hitting the mission statement was the first hour or so of the Leon campaign. It just couldn't carry those three distinct concepts on the same back. And there being so much of that re-painted sameness to play through didn't help, for three routes the campaign felt twice the length that it should have been and retrod waaaay too many events from different perspectives.

I'm actually cautiously optimistic that they've learned their lessons from that this time. They've kept saying it - Grace is scared, she's not a fighter, she's out of her depth. And with the glimpses of Leon in the trailer, they've kept him the opposite. The (now thoroughly grizzled, or at least stubbled) veteran who's not phased by a zombie anymore and shoots and cuts and kicks them just as we expect from him.

If they've actually kept a distinctive character to how the characters play and feel this time, instead of just expected the atmosphere and backdrop to do the work when every single member of the cast still plays like a one-man/woman army?

If they've actually tried it again and made it work? Hell, I'm in.

(But I'll wait for the reviews, just to be sure.)

@Darylb88 I loved E33, and would argue on my side that it earned the RPG win - though KCD2 was also a fantastic experience. I wish we could see numbers for how close it was, choosing between them on the ballot wasn't easy.

I absolutely agree on the Indie/Debut Indie award, though - placing E33 into either bracket really didn't and doesn't sit right with me. They're an independent studio, yes - but is it an independent project if it's bankrolled by a publisher and other sources? I would say no, personally, with absolute certainty. With the money and support brought to the project by Kepler - the support studios, the popular VAs, Charlie freaking Cox, the high profile publicity campaign - it is a published title in practical terms.

They accomplished a lot with the game, and it's been one of my favourites for this year deserving of so many of its other wins, but it shouldn't have been placed shoulder-to-shoulder with other independent projects that were produced in a genuinely independent environment. I was on the fence with Dave the Diver's nomination previously, but... yeah.

@MFTWrecks It's not hate. It's opinion.

I am at no point saying that you should dislike the things that I did. A dud to me doesn't need to be a dud to you. It can be great, fantastic, even phenomenal.

We are humans. We discuss opinions. And opinions will always exist on both sides of the divide. Not to open Pandora's Box of the outside world, but in so many matters out there, we're falling into 'us versus them' mentalities, failing to bridge the gap and just... communicate. Connected so closely by technology, yet frighteningly and increasingly divided.

So, personally, I'm going to express my opinions on my hobby as openly as I wish, positive or negative. I'm going to read and engage with and discuss the opinions of others. And of course I'll sometimes inevitably get irritated because their opinion is so, so far from my own that I can't process it, which happens to us all. All of it because that point of connection between differing perspectives is a blessing, not a curse. We're all better off when we meet in the middle, and talk over the fence.

Gaming is still great for that.

@MFTWrecks It was a fantastic show overall, I don't see anyone contesting that.

Doesn't mean that we can't call out the duds - a lackluster 'grand reveal' for the finale, the occasional awkward joke that fell flat ("And you're not too bad yourself, dad!" total silence "So, anyway."), the bizarre '...are they... really just advertising with toilet humour?' spot for BF:REDSEC.

Showstoppers are great. The fumbles are great too, in their own form of entertainment value.

I couldn't help but laugh at the 'new breed of shooter' statement both from Geoff in his build-up and in the anticlimactic trailer itself.

A hero shooter is already a very, very defined breed. Though I suppose they did briefly put the heroes on a horse. Maybe they meant to say a new breed of horse.

I'd play a pure, faithful remake of Black Flag. It still stands as one of the best entries in AC, if mostly because it's the best version of the original combat systems before they shifted increasingly to RPG-esque bloat.

If any of the rumours of it shifting towards that new-style AC are true... nah, hard pass. I don't want to play Black Flag looking for a higher level pistol because my old one can no longer manage a successful headshot.

Much like high-budget movies, the entire AAA games industry has a severe sequel problem, not just Sony.

To the PS5? Not by any reasonable estimation - at this point in the console's life cycle, most people who want one will already have one, and it either will or won't be their preferred platform.

To PlayStation's future consoles? Possibly. For now, there's really not enough information to decide on, but the draw of being able to play from one's Steam library will very much depend on how much someone has invested in theirs - for my part, I have a large catalogue of older games from when I had a gaming rig and high-end laptop years ago, but haven't spent a penny on Steam in the years since, so there's really nothing to tempt me. The target audience seems definitely more 'PC players who already preferred Big Picture mode on the sofa, Steamdeck, etc' than anything else -and to make much of a break beyond that, price would be the defining factor.

"Nope, don't care" has always seemed to be the standard response from any UK government to petitions. If it's not an issue that results in mass media coverage and/or a national scandal, they have no interest in listening.

"Hello human, here is an anatomically accurate image of your kind with six fingers, seven toes and a third lip."

Yes, this is technology that we should entrust QA to.

They're coming out that quickly? I assumed that they'd gone for an actual episodic release for the sake or spreading things out and finishing things off, as they'd done in their time as Telltale, not... just splitting up a very clearly completed game over the course of a month, purely so they can call it episodic to evoke the comparison.

If I had interest remaining in it, I'd be happy with that news even without any particular graphics or performance upgrades; the biggest point of torture for me in it not being PS5-native was it needing to double down on storage space every time it needed to download a patch.

Needing to clear out up to 90GB of my storage in order for the game to install even the smallest hotfix got old very, very quickly; PS4 back-compat is very much not live-service compatible on PS5, and it's honestly a bit of a shambles that it took them this long to address that.

Eh.

I genuinely loved Remake, and was excited for the second, but outside of the combat Rebirth lowered my expectations for the final part into the gutter. It became clear pretty quickly, and excruciatingly so in the final chapters, that they set up the 'what you know, but not quite' premise of Remake with NO clear plan of how to continue it.

@Fakeplastictree I don't usually get motion sick with games, but this is one that made me feel a little nauseous from time to time. I feel like a lot of it came from weather and lighting effects - the heavy bloom in fog, the very sudden and intense colouration from sunset, etc. And god forbid Atsu drinking some sake without my stomach churning. Given the suite of accessibility options for other things, hopefully at some point they add options to tone down those effects, the fact that the game would sometimes make me feel sick in pursuit of its artistic vision is one of the things I personally mark it down for.

8.5

It's fun, pretty, and very cinematic. But having finally finished my Lethal run to 100% an hour ago and wrapping up the plat, it's a great game that nonetheless carries a few flaws - largely little frustrations where that cinematic aim has clashed with the feel of the gameplay, and for the most part inherited directly from GoT.

@captainsandman Part of the issue with it is that it seems many of the performance problems are coming from a memory leak. If you play for shorter sessions, you really won't notice many FPS drops unless there's a lot going on and/or you're playing in co-op. If you play for more than a few hours in one sitting, though, things start to degrade pretty quickly from that point with Performance mode eventually dropping from a fairly steady 60 to 30 FPS or lower.

(Base PS5 here, for reference.)

@SodaPop6548 Eh, one of my friends is putting off playing it because the low FOV sets off her motion sickness. It may seem like a silly focal point from your perspective (and, honestly, I wouldn't have thought about that either) but it can be a legitimate make or break issue for some.

Hmm, in Genshin and the many clone-ish gachas that it spawned, the last 10 levels were always much less impactful an investment than an optimised weapon/relic set (or whaling a character to C6) so I can only really see this as making the final tiers of the rotating challenge battles marginally easier for those with more money than sense, but still

Oof, not a great look.

Paradox, walk back on DLC? Only if the sun refuses to rise in the morning.

I don't personally see a brand revived after 20 years by people with no connection whatsoever to the origin beyond the rights and unwanted IPs that they bought as an 'it's back' scenario, but whatever.

We'll see quite quickly if the new "Acclaim" actually have anything to offer, or if they're banking almost purely on nostalgia (bought dirt-cheap).

Fantastic news. Star Trucker scratched the itch to an extent, but also left me thinking anew 'man, I just want console Truck Sim'.