If I’m not mistaken, there is a theory that his cowriter on the MGS games is the one who made it great. Unfortunately it is hard to get information on the topic
And while MGS is the best series I’ve played on console, the story has still always been a convoluted mess. Try explaining that plot to a layman, and you’ll sound like a homeless meth head in the throes of a binge.
Death Stranding wasn’t any more coherent either, and that’s why I think the next game is going to be highly entertaining.
Because Kojima had such a little role in his titles, the next game created without him, “Metal Gear Survive”, was a full success.
Metal Gear Survive received a generally negative response … selling 85% fewer copies than Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and 95% fewer copies than Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
I’m not sure I can fully agree with this, but he does seem like somebody who is at his best when he has people who can rein in his excesses a bit. He reminds me of George Lucas in that way. He badly needs a good editor.
That’s bit harsh to say that all his great works are not his.
I do share the sentiment that Kojima’s writing has been in downhill for quite sometime and he really in need of a good editor. I actually think that his stories are more coherent or at least entertaining in his earlier works, e.g.
Snatcher
Policenauts
MGS 1
Some like MGS 2, but I think the boring oil rig setting broke me, and the constant chatter with ‘Colonel’ didn’t help
MGS 3
Peacewalker
MGS Rising
What I actually like is his obsessive attention to details that barely matters when it comes to gameplay, e.g. melting ice cubes, aiming at enemy’s crotch to get dog tags, etc.
Kojima games started clicking for me when he introduced the ‘R&D system’ in Peacewalker, where it’s actually a RPG progression system but the rewards are absurd equipments. As the matter of fact, I like the ‘walking and R&D’ parts of Death Stranding a lot, but really dislike the enemy encounters and the story in that game.
And it’s okay, not every games are for everyone, I’m glad that someone is giving him blank cheques for his absurd ideas that are not the norms.
He definitely wants his games to be movies without having much of an idea how to direct a movie, but they still have more of an unique identity than a lot of games out there.
Who wants to bet how long it takes for someone to post a victim-blaming comment that claims this is an exaggeration to detract from some other anti-consumer behavior of theirs?
This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.
GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.
In my eyes, part of the reason for this is that they forgot a key element of penetrating a market... you need a potential customer base that is actually displeased with the current available solutions and is actually looking for an alternative. And, by and large, the current storefronts had done a good enough work of pleasing their customer base that, when the Epic Store rolled out, few people were actively looking for a switch, to the point that no bonuses or goodies or exclusives that Epic offered could outweight the friction of moving from a platform that was perfectly serviceable, please and thank you.
The whole thing was just mistimed. They should have waited to see if Steam committed some sort of fuck up. They should have waited for some type of negative sentiment. I don't know. I know that developers did feel displeased with some of the conditions on Steam, but Epic could only do so much to win them over with 88%'s and paid guarantees and what have you, when they couldn't offer them the most important thing: a paying customer base.
I was never happy with Steam. It always seemed bloated with unwanted features that had nothing to do with playing a game, constantly wanted to run in the background and update, launched at a snail’s pace.
I’ve found myself liking EGS a lot more because it’s clean and simple.
Both are owned by big gross corporations, so really I’d prefer no launcher at all.
If speed is a problem, The EGS is painfully slow. I don't use is because it needs like 15 seconds to load the library (and it's just the part that is on screen if you scroll, it needs more time to load the games), in the rest of the launchers is practically instant
There are problems with Steam that a competitor could win customers from by solving those problems, but they didn't bother. They only went after the people producing games, not buying games.
As much as I like GoG, it doesn't really solve any problems that Steam has that I can think of. In fact, in several ways it seems like they've gone backwards in the last several years, imo (as a launcher/storefront alternative)
My understanding is that GoG does some work to make sure that old games they sell will work on new PCs. I have at least one game that is bugged on Steam, but works fine from GoG.
When I bought Vampire the Masquerade from GoG it came pre-bundled with the primary community bugfix patch, I thought that was pretty neat. It didn't come baked in, so they still give you the base version of the game, but I pretty much just checked a box on install and it added it on.
Yep. I have not and will not give epic store money because they didn’t try to make a better product.
In fact they attacked me as a customer, in essence, by offering a worse product but then paying for exclusivity on various games. And in exchange they try to bribe me with free games.
Well, I’ll take the bribes, as I try to remember to collect my free games each week, but I’m not giving them money.
It does take time, but when you launch a product that's missing basic features (like a shopping cart, something almost every online store in existence has) you tell on yourself to your customers, and let them know they're not a priority.
I don't disagree that Steam's feature rich platform makes it hard to compete with on that level... but for fuck's sake, at least try a little bit. Especially if your first move is to say they're unfairly gaming the market by... providing something people want.
Agreed. I'm putting 2023 in my pantheon alongside 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. A great year for RPGs and fighting games, with the latter bumping up two of my favorites from previous years, Skullgirls and Guilty Gear Strive, a few notches via updates. Hi-Fi Rush is the first game in the character-action genre that clicked for me, and I've tried to make it click so many times before.
Hi-Fi Rush just consistently reminds me how comically bad I am at rhythm games. I love the game, but man I got burnt out because even though they made it “easier” for folks with no rhythm like myself, it’s still tough if you just can’t match the beat.
I am some kind of masochist though, because in the past I beat both Parappa the Rapper and UmJammer Lammy.
It hasn’t exactly been banger after banger for me personally this year, but I can still recognize how big 2023 has been and how much excitement there has been year-round, from Hi-Fi Rush’s shadow drop to Alan Wake 2 right now.
It’s also been a great mix of new properties and long-running franchises. Zelda, Resident Evil, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Baldur’s Gate, Mario, and even Armored Core all had well-reviewed, major releases this year.
I’m nowhere near calling 2023 the best ever–I think it’ll take a complete paradigm shift in the industry to ever top 1998–but a lot of people have been eating very good this year.
Wanna know which game I last broke my “no pre-orders” rule for?
No Man’s Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It’s become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven’t bought a game since then.
It’s kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you’ll develop and when (if ever) you’ll release it
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