starnivore

definitely no chance of seeing another Mirror's Edge again, then (chances were already very slim but, y'know)

I do wonder if bioware might hang on by the skin of its teeth though.

obviously more than anything, it's rubbish for people who now have to worry about their jobs and start looking for other work. The industry has been absolutely hemorrhaging talent for years which is mad to me, because some of the best games of all time have been released in the past decade, and if the people making those games aren't rewarded with stable jobs then what's the point in any of it?

Skyrim is one of my most played games of all time, same as lots of people, but I don't even know if I care about TES6 anymore.

I know it's been said a lot and it's kind of a circlejerk at this point but I really did find Starfield borderline unplayable and joyless.

I don't doubt that they're working hard on TES6 and they have big plans but I also dunno if they have the talent or the will to innovate and make a genuinely stand out game in a genre that has come a long long way since Skyrim came out.

This is where I think smaller devs are at a disadvantage compared to big devs when it comes to anti-AI rhetoric.
I would say I'm more anti- than pro-AI, but it's happening and I'm not of the view that there's much stopping it - although i also generally believe from what I've seen that the output of AI really isn't worth writing home about on its own and it makes as much effort from a human artist to turn into something noteworthy and of the same quality, no matter how skilled the 'prompter'.

Making a show of rejecting AI can give you clout and goodwill from your audience, but for a small dev with limited funds (lies of P was successful but I doubt the dev is rolling in funds along with the likes of CDPR) it's almost too good to pass up in terms of what they're being told it can give them, and how much money it can save them. Those guys then get scorn from (western) audiences who think they're selling out the human beings that made them so successful.

it's interesting, but at the same time I do kinda miss when the idea of a computer creating a photo of a duck that actually looked like a duck was a wacky concept, let alone the mess we have to deal with now.

they used AI to design at least some of the characters including the 'poster girl' and the first banner char, and I would be surprised if it wasn't used for all of them given how bland they are. It's another way to increase the unending churn of gacha slop so they're gonna use it to its full potential, idk.

I found this game super dull. it might be a decent gta-alike for people who like watching paint dry but that was it.

goonerbait isn't for me but I don't really care that it exists.

these designs are so incredibly bland I wouldn't be surprised if they were just AI, though.

@AnginaPectoris it kind of is, and that's not a bad thing! gaming as a whole is a hobby for people who never 'outgrew' things they were expected to, let's be honest

The genshin anime still isn't out so I wouldn't hold my breath for this materialising into anything within this decade

I started it yesterday and found it very dry and hard to care about. Space operas really aren't my thing, so I would say it's already at a disadvantage as far as my tastes tend to go, but I love bethesda games and I wanted to give it a chance at least.

I'm far from done with it but because I have kinda limited free time atm I decided to spend my evening playing Elden Ring instead

this actually has me a little bit excited, NGL

Dark Souls 3 for me, I'm starting the Ashes of Ariandel DLC (which I've never actually done) and fighting for my life against Sister Friede. She's cool as hell but she's also absolute ***** when she teleports and it's filling me with pure unfiltered rage.

Even if it hadn't caused the most devastating creative breakup since One Direction, I don't believe Disco Elysium could ever have a proper successor. It's just one of those games, to me.

oh dang that's...actually a good month

I'd never heard of this game before this article, but 'skyrim-like' was enough to tempt me and then the price being less than £30 sealed the deal.

Loving what I've played so far! more Oblivion than Skyrim imo but that might be mostly the setting, with a bit of an elden ring vibe too.

@Deadlyblack that's my thinking too, an adventure to bridge between where we leave her in TW3 and where we pick up in TW4 would be sick.

as others said, the trade-off for content churn is quality. I'm not saying churn doesn't print money - it obviously does - but I would never trade a good game with a 3+ year dev cycle for a game with a 1.5-month patch cycle but where 80% of the new playable content is mashing X through unskippable dialogue.

And I'm not saying this as a 'gacha games bad' naysayer - I've played Genshin, I've played HSR, I've played ZZZ, I've played WuWa, I've played P5X, and I played the ***** out of Infinity Nikki. It's like, eat fast food once in a while and it's a treat, eat fast food every single day for months and you really start to get sick of the taste of chicken nuggets.

I'll play it at some point, cos bethesda, but not on release for sure. Even if it was a 10/10 I'm kinda meh about space sci-fi, but given its reception was more lukewarm than even Fo4 (which I've played a lot and think is overall a solid fun game) I'm not exactly chomping at the bit

they reeeeally shat the bed with the last update - a rare triple whammy of completely broken, increasingly predatory monetisation and implementing controversial story retcons/re-writes. I mean games have done one or two of those things but I dunno if I've ever seen a game do them all at once.

I'll be impressed if they manage to claw back the good will they lost

the wallet funds for points were the only aspect I used but I will miss it tbh. It's nice to feel like you're getting cash back, even if it's fairly negligible amounts. I think that's what most people were using it for tbh, and the bulk of it was going neglected (especially the collectibles lmao)

@Nepp67 nah I'm not saying that they're sexist but it's a deliberate choice at this point and I think I'm allowed to be sad about it

the funniest thing abt the answer DLC was people clamoring for it to be included but back when FES was new(ish) most people agreed the answer was pretty bad, gameplay wise, since it was just the dungeon crawling which was kind of p3's most generic and boring aspect compared to the other very innovative gameplay (again, for its time.) It also painted certain characters in kind of a ***** way which left a bad taste in people's mouths.

anyway I'm still mad they managed to tack this DLC on, but never bothered to add FeMc and we'll probably never get a female PC in a persona game eeeever because to the dudes who write these games the concept of playing a story from the perspective of a teenage girl, with a whole personality and goals, is entirely foreign and mystifying to them, even moreso than a group of teenagers banding together and killing god. Shame Shame.

I bounced off of this one quite fast. Something about the character designs are really off-putting to me, and the story was very generic. The gameplay seemed fun enough though I just lacked the patience to sit through so many cutscenes of nonsense to get to it.

@gollumb82 100% yes, the gameplay is fun but fairly simple and the story has some serious bits but nothing darker in tone than the average Disney movie.

I would say, make sure the permissions on your account (or your daughter's) are locked so she can't make any purchases while playing, cos obviously these games want to take your money so they make the store very obvious and shiny.

I'm so glad this game exists. I don't think it's perfect, and it's kinda woefully simple in places (like the combat system...I hope they do an overhaul to make it more in depth but I won't be holding my breath).

That being said, it's got so much charm. It feels like a love letter to the Barbie PC games that started my interest in gaming when I was little. Also, compared with certain other gacha games on PS5, there's nowhere near as much bloat - in terms of dialogue, lore, or busywork. I'm looking forward to what they add to the game in future updates.

I don't hate it, but it's a bummer that it was once my most anticipated game. I used to be genuinely giddy about dragon age, and granted I'm 10 years older now but I miss being giddy about games. It's gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but it's missing the depth and the edge too, I think. I mean, the veil jumpers are Dalish elves that welcome everyone to join them - when we've only ever been told that the Dalish elves are hostile isolationists who actively dislike most other people.

The Antivan Crows are...a friendly local militia I guess? they hang out on rooftops in leather and sip wine in a sexy manner? They oppose tyrannical occupation for the good of the people, not because they're being hired to by the ruling classes? I thought these dudes were assassins. That one house of repose guy you meet in inquisition is more sinister, and he's got a french accent.

There's never been a DA game everyone universally loved, not since Origins anyway, so maybe Veilguard is just maintaining the tradition. I do think the fans deserved far far more, though.

Anyway, it's not the end of the world. There'll be other games, maybe even other Dragon Age games if we're lucky, and maybe they'll be good.

I'll be picking this up at some point but I'm not sure if it'll be a day one buy or if veilguard will beat it out. The demo will be the decider I guess!

the sentiments in this review are really similar to the reception for the original 'the answer' epilogue back in the 2010s. It was always controversial, which made me wonder if the people calling for it to be added to reload back when it was first announced even knew what they were asking for. The general consensus was always that if the tartarus grind was your favourite part of persona 3, then you'll love the answer. Everyone else is better off watching a cutscene synopsis on YT for the plot.

I finally burned out on HYV games. They were fun time sinks for a while but eventually I started to wish they'd stop the churn and put their huge amounts of money and talent towards spending time making a game and a story with more depth. Issue is, they're like the fast food of gaming. Churn is what they excel at and it's the only reason they can make as much money as they do, as quickly as they do.

bummer I loved Game as a kid. It's probably about time for it to shuffle off this mortal coil though. I can't imagine one good reason to go there over somewhere like CEX, or even just buying a game off amazon if it's a new release.

I was able to do my roulettes yesterday, just about. my favourite moment was definitely during the world of darkness 24-man raid where I DCed, the game rubber-banded and I discovered I was now main tank for the 5-headed serpent boss. I'm fairly new to tanking so it was pretty exciting lol

@breakneck Tifa never looks like she's dressed herself, except for her outfit in advent children imo. I mean I think her original outfit is perfect design-wise but even that, like (speaking as a girl) nobody would choose to wear that outfit if they wanted to be comfy especially not someone who kicks and punches for a living. Don't even get me started on the Don Corneo outfits which, even though it's meant to be a goofy/cringey part of the game, dang who dressed this girl

Compare and contrast Aerith who also gets a variety of outfit changes but they all suit her and you can imagine her picking them. The designers never know if they want to make Tifa cute and feminine or sporty and punky, and they end up with this awful in between (and, like, you can do both! it just helps if you care or know anything about women's fashion at all, is the thing.) I'm thinking far too much about swimwear in a JRPG so I am going to stop now lmao

odd cos my experience is the same but it's more that people are mad about her ugly bikini (and they're right, what the ***** is going on there)

I adore Penacony so far, it's basically everything I was hoping for. Very reminiscent of Rapture before the collapse, glitzy and glamorous but with the underlying feeling that something is badly wrong here.

While I'm not too far into the new story quests yet, I've really enjoyed what I have played through (though the bar isn't too high as in general I think hoyoverse's writing tends to be a bit dull and uncreative)

@ErrantRob it's actually not too bad, I mean it's definitely designed around logging in once a day but in terms of actually doing stuff in it I'd say unless it's events or story quests I don't play for more than 30 minutes a day. I do play on my phone though, since I never could get used to the transition to ps5, so YMMV.

Targeting impressionable young kids via their favourite video game strikes me as really ghoulish. Nothing new, but still.

moot point as we all know cloud/zack is canon
(jk)

(but sort of not jk)

This doesn't surprise me. It wasn't a game of the year but IMO it was vibrant and charming - if a little bit shallow overall. Hopefully the inevitable sequel builds and improves on the experience

I don't love the aesthetic but I'm a BLM til I die, anyway. Can't beat the satisfaction of making thing go boom

It could never be anything other than burn my dread, for me. Back in 2009, when I was 13, Persona 3 was the coolest thing I'd ever laid eyes on. Video games at the time (that I'd played) just didn't look like that. It was a bitch to get a hold of a copy back then though so I had to rely on youtube lets plays. simpler times!

I really dislike the teal/fuchsia clash they have going on with the menus, personally. I think it makes them confusing and muddled to look at.

The game itself looks extremely pretty, though. hopefully the gameplay and story hold up too.

I remember playing the very first detective grimoire on newgrounds or some flash game website like that, when I was a kid. It was so good especially for a free point and click game in 2008. I heard they made a sequel but it's cool they're still going! Might need to give this one a try

@mariomaster96 I kinda feel this way too, we're approaching 2 years since elden ring launched and I would swear that game is like a week old. where did that time go!

This looks like it's gonna be so fun. It's gonna be a long wait til 2025.

I really don't love that we have a 'trailer for a trailer', what's the point. Absolutely useless thing to get annoyed about but I'd rather they have said nothing and let the announcement in summer come out of nowhere, like surprise announcements...pretty regularly do? Again, this is the unjustified crankiness of someone whose enthusiasm for this game withers a bit more with each passing year. bah humbug etc.

Eh. Anime and video games are full of cartoon tits. It's not like there's a draught. People genuinely upset about this can...go play something else?

I probably won't be playing it. I didn't really enjoy the bits of strikers I played, either. I'm not keen on Persona game spinoffs, though I appreciate why they exist and they should be made for as long as people want to play them.

At the end of the day P6 will come eventually, and its progress really isn't influenced by these spinoffs as I doubt much resource is being funnelled away from it at this point. If anything p3remake is the one funneling the resource and I'm not about to complain about that because p3 is my forever game, I adore it and I really hope the remake does it justice.

Like my approach to all Assasin's Creed games at this point, if I see it on sale for £15 in CEX a few years from now I'll probably pick it up.

half-drow warlock, never thought to experiment with multiclasses lmao I must have missed the tutorial message cos it was ages before I realised they were a thing (I do not D&D, and this was my first BG game...Also took me ages to realise wizards could learn spells from scrolls..........oopsie)

@Loamy me too! I can't fathom how people are finishing it and jumping right back in for another playthrough, though. It's a marathon of a game.

I'm still deep in baldur's gate (who knew acts 1 and 2 are basically prologues for the behemoth of content that is act 3??? mental game) but I cannot wait for phantom liberty, and then lies of p. I dropped Genshin at last after realising I have become well and truly fatigued with the whole thing, and it's freed up so much of my time I literally cannot figure out why I didn't drop it before. Sunk cost fallacy, I think.

@CWill97 It's a great game but I would encourage you to wait if you want a physical release. There's virtually no downside to waiting, even if they don't roll out a physical release then at least you'd be getting it cheaper with (hopefully) most of the bugs worked out. As it is, the game is slightly tarnished by some performance wrinkles in the 2nd and 3rd acts. Still one of the best games I've ever played though