wildcat_kickz

@Balaam_ Your condescension is noted 👍

Even with it's unacceptable lack of stability, I gotta go with Starfield. NASApunk for the win.

Ultimately, Bungie is going to need to do some work to grow this game. The gameplay is amazing, but I am getting a little tired of the extraction loop, which is more a knock on the genre in general, rather than Marathon in particular.

@StitchJones I actually love The Order and would be thrilled for a sequel. But there ain't no way we're getting one, unfortunately.

It's next up on the to-do list. Right after making a sequel to The Order 1886.

@get2sammyb Love the presentation, Sammy! No offense, but I won't be reading it 😂. I'm such a Bond mark that I know I'm getting this game anyway and don't want the spoilers.

PSA to everyone: Read the damn Fleming novels! Start with Casino Royale and enjoy the ride!

@evan23 fingers crossed they stick to it

@evan23 @Veritas7Ax Re: RPG fans vs. "classic" fans, I just hope they don't try to make each game for everyone and thereby making them for noone. My hope is they do a "1 for you guys, then 1 for you guys" approach, but that's probably a naive thing to hope for.

@LowDefAl I don't think that's strictly speaking true. From my understanding, you don't play as someone outside of the Animus anymore, but you'll do little rifts within the game world that fill in the modern meta narrative, similar to maybe Unity or Shadows? I'm honestly not sure, but I'm pretty sure there will at least be something related to the modern storyline.

@Korgon @evan23 I think a lot of people find that the setting can do a lot of the heavy lifting. I'm a big fan of AC in general, but I personally found Valhalla the least enjoyable game of the RPG bunch with Origins being my favorite by a wide margin. The combat, story, and setting were way more to my tastes than Odyssey or Valhalla. It may seem like a small thing, but it also really irritated me that they got rid of all clothing physics in Valhalla. It made the game feel dated and cheap right out of the gate.

I'm still curious about The Mound, so I'll check any trailers for that out after the showcase.

Folks may not be happy that Spiders is closing, but if you value the jobs of all the other studios' devs, then you should be rooting for Nacon's success.

This game looks so damn cool. May the torque be with you!

@PerpetualBoredom Well, if you're not dying on the hill, then my comment was obviously not directed towards you. There's literally a boycott campaign that this article referenced. That's who I'm talking about.

My whole issue with this is not whether people buy a game or don't guy a game. You do you. My confusion is when a person says "I wanted this game, but then they said the full game was not on the disc. Now, the game is dead to me."

You're cutting your nose off to spite your face in a situation like that. That position is basically saying that if there's a 10% chance the game will not be playable at some point in the future, you'd rather have a 0% chance to play it ever. Another flaw to that argument is that discs are not permanent. They degrade over time, so having the code on the disc is not a permanent solution, either.

If you don't want to play the game, or you think the original is sufficient, that's a perfectly reasonable position to have. I'm not saying that people are compelled to play the remake. What I'm saying is the whole "no code, no play" argument sounds effing stupid from the outside.

I've gotten pretty burnt out on the superhero stuff, so Blood of th... sorry... The Blood of Dawnwalker is my easy answer, but I'm actually pretty interested in Phantom Blade as well.

This isn't a dig at Wolverine. I'm sure it'll be great and I'll play it eventually - I like Wolverine much more than most other superheroes, but superheroes just don't really do it for me anymore. I even booted up Spider-Man 2 after it came to PS+, but something about it just hasn't grabbed me.

@Northern_munkey Silly is a great descriptor. The funny thing is I don't think it's fake rage for a lot of these folks. They're genuinely worked up about it, which makes it almost sillier.

@user0 @PerpetualBoredom I don't mean any disrespect, but this doesn't hold up when you go a little deeper. This game will probably be over 100GB and, like many games nowadays, will not be "done" in time for going gold and printing the code on disc. Now, I get being frustrated with that. I certainly am. But companies don't want to pay to either have multiple discs, higher storage cap discs, or delay the game to accommodate more stable 1.0 builds when 99.99% of people will have access to stable internet in order to finish the download or download a patch.

Again, I can understand being frustrated by the state of the industry, but it's never going back to the way it was. Games are just too big and too complicated to have every game have a perfect 1.0 build on disc. It just ain't gonna happen.

Boycotting a game because it doesn't have a full build on disc that would need to get patched anyway is just a freaking bizarre hill to die on.

I understand being a little irritated by this, but unless you're still using dialup, y'all are wild saying you won't buy games that need a download. That's some crazy OCD-type stuff 😂

Hard to imagine it would be anything other than $69.99.

Good lord, I don't see this happening, but I would be absolutely over the moon for a sequel. It's too bad the director had to be as toxic as he was. That team made a really special game. There aren't too many games that come out of Australia, either.

Sad to see, but the studio never really found its stride. I played a bit of Greedfall and thought it was a cool premise, but incredibly flawed in execution. When Steelrising was a PS+ offering, I tried it too, but bounced off of it within an hour. Didn't play well and I didn't find it fun.

I hope all the devs find their feet and wish them all the best of luck, but this studio just didn't have that special something, in my opinion.

Cyanide is another story and really hope they stick around. The Call of Cthulhu game is fanfreakingtastic. Janky, but oozes atmosphere and is really fun as a investigative horror game.

Can't wait. Name is not great, though. Probably should have called it Blood of the Dawnwalker. Rolls off the tongue a lot better and everyone calls it that anyway.

@Propaperpusher Did you read this article at all? They've made it clear that the reviewer didn't really experience a ton of large bugs during the review, but started encountering them afterwards. I've encountered a lot of bugs, but that doesn't mean that everyone encounters the same ones or at the same frequency.

Not everything is a grand conspiracy that you need to uncover.

@themightyant Yeah, I've noticed instability increasing as your character progresses. I've actually never had this amount of bugs in a BGS game before, so it's been incredibly frustrating, especially since the game has already been out for 2 years. Anecdotally, it seems that audience patience for this lack of polish has just completely run dry.

I'm still getting oodles of crashes, unfortunately. It shows how much I enjoy the game that I keep coming back, but this shouldn't be acceptable.

My original save started getting so buggy, I ended up creating a whole new character. I was thinking about doing that anyway, as I typically will with RPGs once I've gotten my bearings, but still. Not cool.

For context, I'm using a Pro with the Enhanced graphical settings and a 40fps target.

@MidnightDragonDX Yeah, I kinda treat the DLCs differently. AC Origins and Odyssey went really hard with fantasy in their DLCs, too.

@Dalamar Fair enough. It's all a matter of taste I suppose. I personally haven't had an issue with ND gameplay since the first Uncharted, which I thought played well, but not great. I think pretty much every game plays excellently from then on. Even TLOU2, which I found exhausting from a narrative standpoint, I thought had top-tier gameplay.

This sounds like a continued shakeup following Jean Guesdon's installment as franchise lead. Hopefully, they're just getting all their projects back on track and getting rid of the people that went in the wrong direction.

Personally, I'm glad they're getting rid of magic. While AC has its sci-fi meta-narrative, the historical periods always had some kind of grounding in the real world. The less fantasy, the better, in my opinion.

A setting in the Holy Roman Empire during the Witch Trials sounds way more interesting when it's portrayed more historically (with the Templar/Assassin overlay, of course).

@Dalamar Certainly, but I'm not talking about budget, per se. Budget definitely allows more time and resources to refine something, but there are plenty of examples of big budget games that aren't at the same quality as Naughty Dog games.

I may be wrong, but something tells me that the stories of Naughty Dog games don't work for you, rather than the mechanics of the games, right?

@Dalamar Broken, of poor quality, bad mechanics, Lord of Ring Gollum, etc.

I'm basically trying to get at the fact that Naughty Dog games are objectively of incredibly high quality. I can understand how a narrative doesn't land for you, but that in and of itself, does not make a bad game.

@Dalamar Name a Naughty Dog game that has come out in the last 25 years that sucks. I dare you.

You not liking a game does not count.

A lot of people think that Uncharted or similar blockbuster games are "plug and play." The reality is that creating a narrative that is emotional, exhilarating, entertaining, and fun from front to back is pretty damn hard. This is not something that just anyone can do... clearly. If Amy Hennig couldn't figure it out, why would anyone think this was easy.

@Reeneman I don't know what the specifics are, but yes, ARC has been listed as "Pro supported" since it was launched.

@Northern_munkey I foresee a squad-up in our future 😉

I haven't really touched ARC since Marathon came out, but I might need to boot it back up to try the new map!

Why not resurrect the project? Staff up a multiplayer division. I seriously doubt they deleted the code...

@Dogbreath You're comparing the accessibility of a utility device (a car) with recreational media. I can't really think of a better "apples to oranges" example.

@DennisReynolds 2.0 does seem to be real deal. I'm going to really enjoy those Caribbean sunsets.

Man, I was actually really interested in this game. I have no history with Yakuza, but the more serious tone of this really spoke to me.

I can't wait to play Halo on my PS5, but I'd rather have healthy competition to keep PlayStation future-focused than have all of Xbox's games on PlayStation.

It's highly doubtful that Xbox will ever be as competitive as they were during the 360 generation, but I like that they're at least posturing to put up a fight.

@THEBrew Why would it matter if they race-swapped Bond? Yeah, he's white in the books, but that's not core to his character at all.

@Krlozgod Fair enough, I didn't know that, so thanks for clarifying! Still, I hold firm that I don't really find optional microtransactions all that egregious.

No doubt, it's a beautiful game, but I think my (and other folks) issue is that the character designs feel discordant with the universe of Horizon. If this was the first Horizon game, I think it would be different, but introducing player characters that are designed to evoke modern or slightly retro aesthetics (hipster girl, 70s dude with afro/bell bottoms, etc.) creates a weird juxtaposition between the vibes of this game and what had already been established. To be clear, I don't think this makes for a bad game, but I do think it goes a long way to explain why people are offput by what they've seen.

I don't think this looks like a game for me, but I hope it finds its audience and those that do play have a great time!

@Krlozgod Respectfully, I don't agree. You may find microtransactions intrusive, but they're completely optional, especially in Ubisoft games. I play every AC game and never buy the silly outfits and whatnot.

Conversely, if you have more than one person in a house that wants to play Animal Crossing, Nintendo makes it so you need to buy a completely separate console to make a different save.

I don't know about you, but having optional microtransactions is way better than being forced to buy a whole new console just to have two save files.

@StitchJones Yeah, we're on the same page for sure.

Confidence with a dash of modesty can go a long way.

@Krlozgod I'm pointing out that having predatory monetization policies isn't unique to Ubisoft. Nintendo is quite adept at bleeding their customers dry, too.

@user0 You're right, it's not! Good thing they also have Far Cry, Rainbow Six Seige, The Division, For Honor, Just Dance, Monopoly, Rayman, Prince of Persia, The Crew, etc., etc.

@Krlozgod Right, because limiting one save per Switch isn't predatory either...

@StitchJones Haha, I don't know if I'd go that far. I don't think he's insincere in his praise, his generosity, or his desire to do something positive, but I do also think he has a very high opinion of himself.

@StitchJones Yeah, he does strike me as a pretty highfalutin type dude. He has the chops, but I can only handle someone going off on the importance of "their art" so many times before it becomes groan-inducing. That said, he does go out of his way to give praise to everyone on the dev teams he works with, so I do appreciate that.

This is legitimately one of the games I'm most looking forward to. Witcher 3 is the GOAT, so my expectations are high.

Who else has these on their hype list?

007
AC4 Resynced
The Sinking City 2
Dawnwalker

@StitchJones Plenty of eager, unemployed game devs to choose from.