Other than being in existence longer than pretty much any other game review platform, ign still isn’t that great, or accurate. Reviews have been meh for the last decade or more.
I still have most of my old next Gen issues, with the demo CD roms. I think I have the entire run of PC Accel, which unfortunately was just way too ahead of it’s time. Look up the story if your can find it, it was pulling in more and more subscribers every month but the publisher scrapped it because basically, it was subversive, it was 18+, it was viciously critical of games and the industry when warranted but also gave the best praise to those that earned it. It was the non-douche precursor to Maxim(if you can believe such a thing exists).
It’s a sad story, after they got shuttered, the lead editor and several others put most of their own money on the line to try and restart the company publish new issues, but this was long before the Internet had any social immediacy. Subscribers mostly didn’t hear about them trying to restart, there was no real forum or community where people could keep up on the topic and join the cause. I found out like 4 months after they tried to restart and was devastated, I had no idea and would have resubscribed in a heart beat.
It’s also really shady how the publisher discontinued it. I had already subscribed for the next two years and I think they canceled it with like a year and a few months left and so then I just started to get PC gamer, not even a refund.
I’m not going to pretend that I read many of the zombie outlets.
But understand that games media (and most other news media) has been getting gutted for closer to 20 years than not. The only reason so many outlets are even SLIGHTLY good is because of people like John Davison working their ass off to fight for every single inch.
So maybe, just maybe, we could avoid “Whatever, they suck so fuck 'em” levels of posts? Focus more on what got games media to this state rather than self-righteous apathy.
Takes it all back because A. There was no review bombing, people who left mixed reviews had reasonable and valid complaints, and B. He reversed course as soon as people started pointing out how he was protesting quite a lot about exactly nobody calling him a Nazi.
I think the OW team was already pretty good in that regard, and Jeff Kaplan tried to “protect” them, even if that didn’t always result in the best decisions for the game.
I’m currently playing UFO 50, which is a game by Derek Yu and friends. The games are “fake” 1980s NES games. You pick a random game out of the list of 50 and there’s little to no instructions on how to play any of the games.
You just press start and see where it takes you, just like classic games.
It also has a whole fake narrative tied to it. The collection is 50 games released by the company “UFO Soft,” a fake game company. Each game has little blurbs on its history. Some games have multiple entries to their series, some are one off. Others are “spiritual successors” to others. It’s a whole little universe in the game. And even though not every game so far has been for me, they are all at the least creative and interesting. And some games I absolutely adore and want to play through to the end asap. I’ve only just touched the 25th game and have ~ 15 hours. And I know some will take me a long time. There are also secrets to find outside of the 50 games. The menu has a terminal and you can find hidden codes that give God modes to games, and some provide hidden lore of the universe this game company exists in
When Xcloud eventually (promises, promises, Phil) gets purchased games access, there’ll be no need for the console anymore. Hell, PC gamers could (in theory, anyway) play GTA VI by buying the Xbox version and playing it on Xcloud (again, if purchased games comes to it, it’s been promised for years).
I have no interest in my gaming experience being at the mercy of network latency. It’s bad enough for online games, but there’s no getting around that other than physically going to the same location as everyone else you are playing with. Big no for single player games. If cloud gaming does replace locally computed gaming, it will be another case of enshitification.
I have a buddy with a catering gig who works on film sets all over, an RV trailer with kitchen and a tv and Xbox in the back that we’d fire up in between meal times. No wifi when you’re filming a snowboarding video in the mountains …if they force that into every game then him and people like him will just stop buying new games altogether.
They already fucked me on this years ago. One day I logged into Uplay and Battlefield 3 and my 2 other games were just fucking gone. Haven’t touched them with a 10 foot pole since.
I’m pretty confident it’s following closely in the shoes of The Avengers game that came out not long ago, and not in the shoes of any popular co-op game.
I would LOVE to be proven wrong. Rocksteady has (had?) a lot of talent that shouldn’t go to waste.
I remember when Gotham Knights(game, not the show) and Suicide Squad (game, not the movie) were announced almost back to back. I was more excited about the setting of Gotham Knights, then immediately irked when they made it clear it did not line up with the Arkham story, then immediately completely turned off when they announced it would include a leveling system for the player and enemies since it clearly would not have the feeling of the Arkham series’ combat and was likely to have leveled weapons that have artificially weak feeling impact. Suicide Squad seemed more exciting at the time simply because it sounded more narrative-driven like the Arkham games even though the jump from playing as Batman against the more grounded Batman rogues gallery to literally “Kill the Justice League” sounded extremely jarring and made it seem like the games could not possibly feel like they were from the same development team or storyline. Here we are, years later and I feel very proven right. Neither game so far has sounded even remotely interesting. EXCEPT for the co-op. If Arkham Knight had co-op baked into the game that would have been incredible. That’s all that I wanted from either Suicide Squad or Gotham Knights. Sadly, that’s not what we get.
Good old fee-2-play. Not sure how much microtransactiin crap is going to be shoehorned in but they’ve already announced a season pass scheme. They’ve tried to cash in on the Arkham brand history and are promoting it on Steam. The comments are less than happy, let’s just say
Yeah, I also paid for Destiny 2 on launch, and then like a year later they went f2p and archived all the original content I paid for. Really, really shitty.
Yes. When Destiny 1 came out, it was famously… an acquired taste. It took many updates to get it to a point where it lived up to its potential. And by the time Destiny 2 was near, Destiny 1 had grown into one of the best games I’d ever played. Then Destiny 2 came out and it was like they completely threw out everything they learned fixing and growing Destiny 1. It was a HUGE step back in almost every respect. A massive waste of money.
And then just to rub it in, they went F2P pretty quickly because that’s what you do when you charge for a live service game and nobody wants to pay for it because it’s crap.
I went back to it a few years later to see how it was because it had seemed to find a following eventually. They completely reworked the beginning off the game to make it almost exactly the same as the beginning of Destiny 1. That’s how they fixed it. They changed it back to what worked in the first place. Pathetic. Insulting. Infuriating.
Destiny 2 killed one of the best games I’d ever played. Then replaced it with a poor imitation whose main advantage was that it was optimized for predatory MTX. Fuck Bungie.
And by the time Destiny 2 was near, Destiny 1 had grown into one of the best games I’d ever played. Then Destiny 2 came out and it was like they completely threw out everything they learned fixing and growing Destiny 1.
Thanks for the reply! I remember reading some stuff from D1 players who were bemoaning the power creep and ridiculous level cap increases with each new installment. They talked about how it felt like a real achievement to max out a character in D1, whereas in D2, you could get to max level in a week.
I never played D1, but I gave D2 a try a few times, and it just never felt like a full game to me. It felt like a demo for a game engine, and I spent a good part of the time going, “Why am I doing this? This doesn’t feel like it matters.” I was never enticed to spend $30+ for the DLCs, so they even failed to create a free experience that drew me in.
Yeah, the biggest issue I had with D2 when it first came out was how disconnected it felt. It never felt like a full world, it felt like you warped into a map and killed some things with no larger goal, just some “kill x things” or “pickup x drops” mini quests. Then you warped back to base and then picked a new zone to warp to for no particular reason.
D1 at least had a story that propelled you forward, including tons of lore (admittedly poorly implemented lore, but it was there!) and secrets and easter eggs. The story and voice acting was one of the big criticisms at the start so it’s one of the things they worked hard on fixing over the life of the game. So it was REALLY off-putting when D2 went back to no story and lore. (And as I said, they decided to fix it by just putting in the story from D1.)
Thinking on it now, Avengers had that same disconnected feel as D2 once you got thru the campaign. I quite enjoyed the campaign but the game stopped being fun after that. Coincidentally right when it started being like D2.
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