crossbit

@johncalmc I wouldn't necessarily say it was poorer for Keither's casting, his voice acting in the role was pretty good.

...Though it certainly would've been nice if he'd had more than what felt like a few minutes of voice acting across the entire length of the game. Compared to every other iteration - and even forwards to Sam Stranding - Venom may as well have been a silent protagonist for how little he actually spoke.

Sounds like unfounded speculation on his part, but frankly I wouldn't at all be surprised if it was penned for cancellation at this point. The writing was on the wall in many ways the moment Raymond jumped ship; the reports were that she left in the wake of/response to negative feedback from playtesting... but as the founder of the studio and the project, the fact that she would respond like that rather than stick around and try to address and improve on the criticism was a huge red flag. It would appear that she had very little investment and/or faith in the game and its prospects, which is never a good sign from the person who had spearheaded it in the first place.

At last, a button (presumably) to quick-retry that boss' second phase without burning through the first - maybe I can go back and try it with a non-OHKO build and actually have a chance to learn the parry timings now. xD

I wish they'd stop messing with the weapons every update, personally. Pull up what's underperforming once in a blue moon, sure, but the see-saw of buffs and debuffs is getting excessive. It reminds me of the fiasco with Helldivers 2 a few months after release - it's a PvE game, not a competitive one, it doesn't need such heavy-handed balancing. Hell, it doesn't need to be 'balanced' at all; every game before World had weapons that came out as the firm meta, but most people still just played the weapons that they liked.

Just let people have fun with your game instead of trying to convince them to use less of this attack or mode and more of that one, etc.

As I've said before, I'm all for it - I stick to PS for a mix of the console aesthetics, interface, mutual friends on the platform and attachment to my trophy list and back catalogue.

Hell, the only reason I moved to PS4 after the 360 was that I didn't like where XBox went with the first two... well, that and having had to replace said 360 several times due to RRoD, if there's one way to make sure that noone ever buys your products again it's releasing one with a major flaw that can brick it on a whim.

I'm not going to up and change console just because there are fewer permanent exclusives; if Sony want to expand into the other console markets as they've been doing with PC, even if on their end it's just for the pursuit of more profit, I'm down for it. As long as they have a sustainable business plan for it that isn't going to damage the company in the long run, for us as gamers it's a win-win. I can't see Nintendo ever fully jumping on the ship, I expect they'll stick to the occasional mobile spinoff or such, but more games exchanged between Sony and MS isn't a bad thing.

Oof.

Our daily reminder that, as much as execs like Spencer would like to tell us that they're in the business for the people, these businesses will only ever truly care about one thing - keeping shareholders happy with ever-increasing profit and dividends, whatever the human cost, and marching onwards to their inevitable, eventual collapse from seeking infinite growth in a finite market.

Look, I enjoy Sony's narrative single player output - and am firmly of the "ditch the live service push and stick to what you're good at" camp - but I can still chuckle at those memes. They're not 'bad takes', they're JOKES. If you genuinely find them 'irritating' (though let's be real, you don't, you're just trying to play up drama for kicks/clicks) you need to touch grass.

Yes - though I certainly hope that Lethal Mode is in the game at launch this time. It's a great example of a risk/reward difficulty, and I wish more games would play around with settings that buff both the player and their enemies rather than simply turning the opposition into hard-hitting health sponges. I picked it up halfway through the game after coming back to it a year or so after launch and it was such a fun way to play.

Push "mistakes aren't meant to be learnt from" Square

8.5/10, for me. The gameplay is what keeps me hooked, I like the courier-sim side of it, building infrastructure and the improved combat mechanics... but holy hell, the story and writing is a pile of hot garbage, though I went in expecting that and at least the cutscenes look great and are well delivered by the cast.

Between the movement changes and frontloading of vehicles and formerly mid/late-game options from before it also loses a lot of the challenge in navigating terrain - I lived on ladders and anchors in DS1, here I can count the number I've used combined on one hand - but I won't dock it points there.

Like some others I assumed they'd shut it down a looong time ago given that they killed off post-launch updates so quickly. It's a shame, honestly, that they left it in that state. Beyond the story, extremely barebones endgame, and the false-promised features from the infamous "gameplay" reveal, the game could be really fun when the combat and traversal were allowed to shine.

In an ideal world, it would have been developed properly from the outset, but if they'd actually gone ahead with their promised revamp and put the time and resources into fixing it ala NMS and Cyberpunk, it had the same potential to actually turn into something good. But instead, it's just ended up as one of the countless mass of 'nah, cut and run' games... and hey, at least EA didn't end support for it early and then rerelease it on a new platform in its unfinished, never-to-be-finished state, looking at you Wild Hearts.

You can certainly see the logic - as a runaway success that's already made orders of magnitude more for Sony/Arrowhead than they ever could have expected before launch, there's not a lot of risk in throwing it at the wall next to Gamepass and seeing if it sticks. If there's a game that they can sell well on Xbox, this is it... but if they can't, it can rest as a fairly safe test of the water.

And I'm all for Sony porting more games over there as Microsoft port more over here - exclusivity is overrated, whatever the platform. Both sides are still going to keep their headliners to themselves, or at least for with timed exclusivity, but sharing the rest and letting people access more games without needing to think about buying a second or third console... yeah. Positive.

At last, we approach the bottom of that long, slippery slope from goofy 'hey, you want bacon on your gun? go for it' weapon skins. I don't think any of us would have predicted the end result being... this, though. I haven't touched a CoD in years as it hit my personal tackiness threshold looong ago, but man, the thought of having to play with or against people in a Beavis or Butthead skin in a what was once a fairly straight-laced shooter is just... oof.

I can still quiet safely say that, despite the Welcome Hub reminding me each time I boot up that I can download it as part of PS+... I just have no impulse to. The charm of control for me was both the exploration of the Oldest House - the atmosphere and that dark satire in all the notes, letters and videos scattered around - and in the light power fantasy of the gameplay; having pseudo-superpowers but not being super enough that enemies weren't a threat. Alan Wake 2 had... serviceable gunplay at best, but really went hard on the atmosphere and character.

Firebreak doesn't really seem to tick any of those boxes, or really play to any of Remedy's strengths, it doesn't promise anything that I can really immerse myself in, so... nah.

From my memories at university of everyone on the Games Arts track complaining if they got stuck on Tree Modelling/Texturing Duty for a group project... yeah, no, I get it. It's long been the realm of 'oh please god not this' shortcuts and plugins, so of all the uses of AI in game development, this is one that is a very logical fit. Especially if your trees are simple background fillers rather than a core part of a scene.

What baffles me is how some of them are ending up front of house on the deals banner. When I glanced at the storefront last week (passing through to buy Wizard of Legend 2 and Star Trucker) I saw no less than 3 or 4 'Hentai <insert genre>' games on the front page . It should be embarrassing enough that such minimal effort slop is in the back somewhere, or when it floods the New Releases page (along with preorders which don't belong there either) why on earth are they letting it show up front and center?

"More time to reflect player passion."

Translation; there isn't any. Concord was DoA, but with everything going on with Marathon and Fairgames, lord alive, they're dying long before arrival.

Honestly, beyond the hit-or-miss writing of the main story, it would've been nice if a number of the sidestory threads actually had a conclusion instead of implying that they're building up to something over the course of the game and then just... fizzling out. Playing through it again at the moment, I had to laugh a bit at several bits of post quest dialogue of "we'll get to the bottom of this" or "you'll know when the time is right", and remembering very clearly from that first 100% run that those points were NEVER resolved (even if the actual answer for them was quite predictable).

Pitchford alone is my main reason for having decided years ago to never buy another Gearbox-developed game unless it's HEAVILY discounted. The guy is just a total, unapologetic *****.

@UltimateOtaku91 Plenty of them do depend on player impact, but... well, ultimately they can't really push the story in too many interesting directions if the players always win. This one was probably the most veeery clearly telegraphed one yet - there was no way to take back the planets as they fell, the enemy fleet effectively acted as a 'hp bar' that blocked defensive progress and was barely dented in the first day or two, so it was a pretty clear case of 'here are the new enemy types and some time to get used to them while we play out the opening act'.

I do have the occasional gripes with the Major Orders they set out that are achievable but only barely, to the point that if the community at large doesn't focus on the right planets from the very beginning they quickly become impossible, but these ones... these I'm fine with.

I am happy to help, then; it certainly doesn't appeal to me. I loved the PS2 Metal Gear Solids, but for the solid gameplay of his 'independent' work, I just can't stand the suffocating, self-indulgent, egotist theatre of the presentation.

Sounds like the execs have completely lost the plot. Their problem lately, as with so many other publishers, is that they're spending so much on their flashy AAA titles that they need chart-topping sales (and then some) to turn a profit. Or, rather, enough profit and dividends to satisfy their shareholders. They'll be quick to find that trying to mill those games out faster and make them even bigger and flashier isn't going to fix that issue, at all.

I'm pretty excited to jump back in and try out the weapon modification system, I was really hoping they were teasing something like that when the last Warbond's splash art showed the included weapons without their attachments. Having the Superstore just have everything available at all times same as the Warbonds is a welcome change too, no more pressure to farm Super Credits to buy everything up when they launch a new item set. Sounds good all round, with the new enemies as a cherry on top.

I shamelessly finished my one-shot kill build for the ultimate boss before patching, I got so fed up of fighting his first phase for a few minutes before getting wiped by attacks that I just wasn't seeing enough to learn the parry timing... so I gave in. Still, she could hit with it for over 100 million, so even reducing the damage by 40% and fixing the sword that unintentionally doubled it... it should in theory still be able to hit for over 30 million with even a slightly-optimised engame build, so it can still kill almost anything in one hit. Just not that git.

9, albeit from a 'nothing is a 10, there's always room for improvement' standpoint. Currently sweeping through the optional endgame areas and bosses one at a time before finishing up the story, and the experience at large has been phenomenal - they've done a great job of taking inspiration from other games on the gameplay front (a bit of FF10 and 9 mixed with Sekiro-esque rhythm parrying) while making it their own, and storytelling that has a raw emotional weight to it - both from the writing, and the solid casting and voice direction - even when a story beat itself is predictable. It blows a lot of recent heavyweight AAA games out of the water, and for a project by a relatively small team and a 4-ish year dev cycle... that's incredibly impressive.

Thank goodness, with that we can expect a brief reprieve of "Everything we know about GTA6" filler articles. For a few months, if nothing more, right?

...Right?

Disbands the dev team despite critical success. Rubs a sales milestone in their faces months later. Reaaaal classy.

Damn, that many in one fell swoop? I guess EA has been feeling salty at other publishers snatching away its 'Industry's Worst' crown in recent years and wants to get back in on the action.

I was reading the post on the Star Wars official site earlier going on about the famous Hondo this, legendary Hondo that, and as someone who was really into the old Star Wars ("Legends") fiction but rarely found any appeal in Clone Wars or the sometimes-good-but-often-awful Disneyverse canon that followed, it just kept leaving me asking... who?

I own Outlaws - and enjoyed it and Wild Card despite their flaws - but this expansion is clearly not going to be as much up my alley

Not for me, I enjoy single player extraction games (Zero Sievert and Witchfire on console when) but I loathe the idea of playing them with other people even more than run-of-the-mill competitive multiplayer. As to its success... eh, hard to say, the Bungie name and slim competition in the genre should serve it well on console, but it may be a harder sell on PC with some well-established IPs there, and with that slim character/map count to open with their longevity is going to depend very heavily on how well the inter-run experience is designed and on post-launch support.

"rivals ultra-high-end PC gaming"

"40fps Balanced Mode"

Look, I vastly prefer playing on a console to building and maintaining an expensive gaming rig, but that is some laughably innacurate PR bullcrap.

It still baffles me that they went for a leaderboard reward instead of just giving out pendants for C/B/A ranks, honestly. Monster Hunter has always had some issues on the online side of the occasional idiots ruining the experience with a save editor, why they didn't anticipate this going completely tits-up is beyond me.

And now the majority of people who 'earn' the reward, if not all of them, are people who would've just edited it in to their inventory anyway.

Hopefully, Capcom either ban the offending accounts as they've said they will and issue a complete reset of the leaderboards, remove the top 10k requirement, or in the best of worlds do both.

Eh, unless/until they release a native PS5 version, I can't see myself ever returning to 76. The game demanding nearly 100GB of free space whenever it needs to download even a small patch, that fun little wrinkle of PS4 versions, is just profoundly irritating for a live product.

People comparing it to The Mandalorian.

Me, seeing it tickle my Fettish.

(I'm personally quite curious about the weapons both having sights/scopes, but appearing without them in the splash art - fingers crossed hoping that this means we might have weapon (module) customisation rolled out in the near future)

Simple answer, no.

Slightly longer answer, the early game is definitely substantially easier in every regard, from monster damage to crafting requirements, but the meat of the game in high rank - where they expect people to really get into things - is right as it should be. The (currently) highest-threat version of monsters are certainly no pushover, with the highest-threat Tempered versions often requiring you to really lock in as one major mistake can cart you.

No surprise, on countless fronts. More recent developments may have been the final nail in the coffin, but having dipped in and out of it since the Closed Beta on PC, it's a game that never really overcame its "oh crap, Capcom announced Monster Hunter World" panic from way back then, and just seemed to make (mostly) bad decisions to try and re-invent itself.

Please, even his own wording bookmarking that statement makes it rather clear that the AA market didn't disappear, Sony execs just made the conscious choice to sideline it. They were looking for AAA, big-expense-big-profit titles and refused to give anything less the time of day, it's right there.

Sigh, 10 years of hoping in vain that they'll give us a single-player/co-op focused R6 again; as someone who does not generally enjoy competitive multiplayer, Seige can never scratch the itch of what I loved about Lockdown and the Vegas series. I spent so much time across both the campaign modes and Terrorist Hunt and would love to again (unless they flooded it with microtransactions, which modern Ubisoft would be almost guaranteed to do).

Between the current state of WB, and Rocksteady's output from Knight onwards, it won't see the light of day.

A person with no information on the matter yells at other people to remind them that they have no information on the matter.

....Yep, sure, this is newsworthy, right?

I will simply say that after the story of Rebirth, Kitase having confidence in what they've written doesn't give me any. I may pick it up for other reasons still, but for all of the extra plot macguffins, rugpulls, and attempts at plot-twists, the changes to the plot in Rebirth were a hot mess of wasted potential.

@naruball The human cost of committing entire studios to such projects and then rapidly shuttering them in response, however...

@ATaco Yeah, respectfully, this was very much a case of "knowing exactly who wrote this 'hot take' from the headline alone". Other writers fall prey to it too, but... yes.

And in one final flourish, the illusion that they'd for once resisted the urge to mention GTA was shattered.

Honestly, I'd love to still be a physical-copy gamer. If only GAME hadn't wiped out or bought out most of their competition bar CEX and then worsened the instore experience year on year, maybe I still would be.

Once buying games on Amazon ended up being the more reliable and enjoyable option, and with the physical options themselves losing all of the extras (...I miss being able to thumb through a physical instruction manual, and by the time I finished buying physical you'd be lucky to get a single sheet), there just wasn't much of a point anymore to avoiding digital versions. I loved physical games for browsing a wide selection of them and the, well, physicality of it all, and both publishers and vendors completely lost touch with that; a boxed game nowadays is like a good book printed on bog roll, sadly.

@Dalamar ....Would you rather they wasted time updating the demo build instead of putting all possible resources into the current one, or?

I get the scepticism, but if in doubt just wait for reviews. If they have done what they said they have - and lets just say that the developers didn't get so popular with their audience over the years by lying to them - then they used their time exactly as they should have.

I generally prefer ZZZ for the more condensed nature, still - outside of a few hours each weekend clearing out the weeklies, and maybe a few side missions or event things, its nice having the 'daily checklist' being a short, 5 minute stop-in. As much as I enjoyed Genshin and later Star Rail, the more drawn-out daily tasks become tiresome pretty quickly if I just wanted to do them as an aside between life tasks or playing something else.

That said, while WuWa shamelessly borrows a lot from Genshin, the changes that they have made definitely make it feel like more than a simple clone, at least. The additional movement options and tools (particularly wall-running to more quickly navigate surfaces) work nicely, swapping out the usual accessory-hunt for a monster-hunt is an interesting twist on the tried-and-tested formula, etc.

Helldivers 2 attracted many players by being an attractive product, with a clear vision and - a few post-launch misteps aside - a focus on being fun before anything else. A game that works as a live service, but avoided being defined by it.

Unless Hulst gives up on championing 'service first' products, Sony's push on them is going to go as well as it already has - in broad terms, very, very poorly. All it takes is a glance in any direction - Warner and Suicide Squad, Ubisoft and xDefiant/Skull and Bones, Square with Foamstars, and so many more examples in the last few years alone - to realise that this is not the golden goose that the industry wants to believe it is, but one of the most risk-laden design choices available.

(And Hulst should still have been promptly removed from his post for championing Concord so heavily for years, only for it to finally be revealed to a resounding "...eh.")

@Nalodart The vast majority of the ingame community contribute to genuinely one of the best, relaxed and good-natured social experiences that I've found in a game.

Meanwhile the vocal minority that consider themselves to be the "community" on social media, Reddit, etc - and are broadly referred to as such - have been utterly intolerable ever since they "beat Sony" by shouting down the PSN login requirement.

@Thumper Rubin testing lines with the PR department; "Well, you see, we shut down after Season 3 instead, and our discussions about Year 2 may or may not have been 'do we really want one' so technically, technically, I wasn't lying."