crossbit

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."

@OmegaStriver Well, it's a free-to-play title, and as noted in the article they're offering full refunds for every penny spent on the game. If they're willing to give back everything that players have put in to it, I can't imagine that it even came close to breaking even, never mind making a profit.

No option to repeatedly bludgeon MetaGeoff with a 'Please Wrap It Up' sign; no interest.

Please, let us have LESS of this clown, not more of him.

I might have tried it if not for (a) it being dropped into a month with so, so much competition, and (b) the whole "part of an expanded media universe" part. I'm sure someone thought that would function as a selling point, but...no. No.

The price point was/is pretty reasonable though, and almost made me reconsider at one point.

@ShogunRok I'd argue also that an issue with their use of some North American accents/actors is that they've handled it inconsistently here with regards to franchise at large.

Previously, they followed established rules for the accents based on culture and origin. The American accent belonged to the City Elves and the Dwarves, particularly from the underground (and later the Qunari?), English to Ferelden and the Free Marches, Welsh to the Dalish Elves, French/Spanish/German to Orlais/Antiva/Nevarra, etc. I'm sure there were slips here and there, but it mostly stuck.

For Veilguard, they've thrown the American accent in particular all over, and if you've come from the older games it feels quite jarring for it.

@ThomasHL As others have been saying, yeah, the game can definitely start off with enemies feeling spongey (for reference I've been playing on the second-highest difficulty) but this gets heavily offset over time. Between the skill tree, upgrades to your gear and their passive effects, and companion synergies, by the time you hit the mid-game (and with a clear-ish vision for your build) you can pretty easily melt anything outside of intentionally challenging side-bosses.

In other words, Hermen doesn't acknowledge or recognise that said mindset played heavily into the Concord disaster - that mistake of him and the studio thinking that they had the perfect product for their audience behind the scenes, when being more outward with it much earlier could have shown them what was wrong and given time to fix it.

Sony really, really needs to bench him, pronto.

@Deityjester But... the only limit to how many super credits you can get is how many drop-pods/shipping containers/etc you're willing to crack open.

I'm not that far ahead at 250 hours or so, and I've picked up every warbond and new armour set within a day of release, just by merit of an hour here-and-there running around low-difficulty maps farming them. It's not exciting by any measure, but I've done much more for much, much less on any MMO Rep grind.

I was always going to play Wilds with peace of mind, though.

This, meanwhile, I still won't play at all.

With the bizarre fact that to even be able to purchase it on the UK PSN store, unless it changed in the last day, you need to;

• search for it by name (it's nowhere to be seen in the New Releases, even if you sort by New>Old)
• go into a redundant listing which still marks it as only for Wishlist and makes it appear that is hasn't launched
• from there, switch to the 'bundle' that actually allows you to buy the game, which additionally offers nothing in the description as to what said bundle contains

.....yeah, no, maybe a bit down the line, but they'll need to re-inspire some confidence first, a messy first impression before they've even sold the product is a bit much. Especially with Helldivers there to scratch that itch and a very busy month filled to the brim with very polished games.

EDIT: Well as a quick test, no, it has not changed since launch. Nothing in the release listings, and a search on either the console or app will still display "Starship Troopers: Extermination - Announced" as the only result. It really is baffling that they managed to release a game that you would be almost certain hasn't released if you hadn't read/heard about it elsewhere.

I think one of the best selling points from the demo was just the sheer confidence of it. With this sort of prologue approach, you'd usually expect maybe the opening hour as a gentle tease of the story, and then to maybe be given the option to catapult into a short segment later in the game to see the battle system in full swing.

But the mad ***** just straight up handed over the first 5-10 hours of the game, depending on your playstyle (I spent 12, with a lot of meandering around to see, talk to and loot everything). Plenty of time for people to really get stuck in and decide that it's definitely up their alley, or to find that the formula doesn't quite work for them in one way or another.

After almost 12 hours with my demo save, no further assurance of Metaphor's quality is required.

Currently a split between Darkest Dungeon 2 and the endless torture of a good run being scuppered by an encounter from hell, and the Metaphor demo. The goalposts of "okay, time's almost up" are finally there, but I've been genuinely impressed by the scope of it; the runtime is easily two or three times what I'd expected, and each time I thought it surely had to be coming to an end... nope, it just kept going.

Still not for me personally - I've played it twice in full, and with the time investment involved in that I am not likely to go a third round even with a glow-up - but the pricing certainly saved it.

Let's be frank; any game that released prior to the Pro shouldn't need to be 'fixed' by it. They launched on the base PS5, when it was the only option, and they should damn well be optimised for it.

Sharper graphics in combination with frame rate, sure, the Pro deserves that, but there's really little excuse for games in the last year not successfully targetting a 60FPS performance mode and these statements really do beg the question; "Did you even try, or were you encouraged to hold back to help shift more hardware sales?"

@ATaco To be fair, at least it's now coming before something, instead of shortly after Metaphor, CoD and Dragon Age. Whether they're the general gaming crowd or more specific audiences, there was lots of hard competition lined up for the original date.

Interesting, for changing the first expac to be a preorder bonus and ditching the "early access" as much as anything. Evidently they must be seeing that their years-running approach of making their "Gold/Ultimate" editions more and more expensive with the hope that people will fork out predominantly for those 72 hours just isn't - for various reasons - doing them any favours. It'll be interesting to see how the price of the deluxe editions changes respectively with these things cut out.

No love for Shadow of Doubt on the 26th? When you list an advent calendar as a release, that, sir, is criminal.