I guess I’m the odd one out then. I’m a huge Sci-Fi fan. Ender’s Game still stands as my favorite book after all these years. But I’m not too crazy about fantasy. I’ve bounced off of books, shows, and movies that my friends and family loved. They just seemed to be mediocre stories with fantasy paint on it and people who like Wizards were able to gloss over the holes.
It’s not unheard of for people to not be interested in the other genre. But those people are outnumbered by consumers who just want the new thing.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I tend to lean more to sci-fi myself. But the premise argues that it and fantasy are somehow different, when they’re not. It’s a criticizes generative AI, which is valid, but doesn’t question why the two genres have to be at odds when it obviously has a blend of both.
Tell that to everything I like, star trek is fantasy adjacent, star wars too, all of chinese fantasy (especially the movies) are technically fantasy but have so much stuff that works like scifi just using magic engines and shit, low magic matches epic scifi, its literally just is science driving the cool thing or is magic, its set dressing, it can be swapped. Harry potter can be the same story but with a scifi setting, idk what im even saying im rambling at this point.
Yeah, stuff like venture bros, tom strong, etc. with science heroes, next to fantasy stuff, shows how its pretty much the same stuff just different devices, science fiction explanations are as realistic as fantasy explanations for how things function, its all bs and not real science typically either way, I love hard magic where they explain it like its science and theres a deep logic to the world and how everything works. Like brandon sanderson stuff
People might have a preference, sure, but that’s not what’s happening in Split Fiction; the game makes it seem like sci-fi writers think fantasy isn’t a form of legitimate artistic expression, and vice versa. It’s hard to imagine any fan of either genre today being that hardline about the other.
Check out Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.
Ender’s Game was my favorite book for many years but I can’t recommend Card’s books any more.
Luckily, Some Desperate Glory ticks all the boxes and then some.
About the level of writing I’ve come to expect from a listicle, but I take particular issue with the fact that they list Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 as separate items but clump the three Dragon Age games together into one, when the Dragon Age games have much more variation between each game than the POE games do.
Which means that the game disappearing from storefronts is one of the better case scenarios. It’s entirely possible that they’ll patch out the licenced songs from the soundtrack from every digital copy of the game.
Infinite came out 3 years ago and though they’ve done updates and general live service garbage there haven’t been any major releases since. Halo isn’t a yearly release schedule, charging full price for the same game every year like sports games, so i’m not seeing the slop…
Ever since 545 take over from Bungie, halo fans hasn’t been eating good. 4 is really bad, 5 is subpar, infinite is just ok. Not to mention the spinoff and tv series.
Halo 4 was mostly good, especially the story, but they listened too closely to the complainers and scrapped the story line. They haven’t been able to commit to villain. Didact? Killed off at the end of 4, and then resurrected and killed off in a comic. Jul 'Mdama? Introduced and explored in Spartan Ops and books/comics. Killed off in the beginning of Halo 5. Cortana? Resurrected/Introduced as a villain in Halo 5 and killed off between 5 and 6(Infinite). Atriox? Introduced in Halo Wars 2 “killed off” between the opening cutscene of Halo 6 and the first level. Escharum(Atriox lite), Introduced in 6 and killed off in 6. Harbinger? Introduced in 6 and killed off in 6. But wait, Atriox isn’t really dead and he’s totally going to come back in Halo 7 and be a long term villain. For real this time.
Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.
The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.
Well, the Gravemind is definitely not dead as it’s mind resides in either the Domain or an adjacent dimension. Hell, the Flood aren’t even sterilized from known infection locations. But like you said, the factions all have a clear purpose. Even the Flood in Halo 1, before the Gravemind was even introduced, were working towards a goal though consuming the minds of the species it encountered and fixing the Covenant ship. Hearing Cortana say that the Flood were fixing that ship was chilling. Zombies repairing an FLT capable spacecraft?!
A lot of my disappointment in 5 was how irrelevant and misleading the advertisement was. Nothing even remotely similar to this happens in the game. Hunt the Truth had so much better writing then 5 did. Let those people write a spinoff game.
For the longest time I refused to watch the Halo show because I heard that Master Chief takes off his helmet. But then I gave it a shot and it’s a really really good show, and they did the adaptation solid justice.
They made changes where it (mostly) made sense and were truthful to everything else.
They set up a back story that explains how we got a John-117 in the games. Someone who is socially reserved, doesn’t talk much, never takes off his helmet, and prefers to work alone. The ending of the second season was a setup for season 3 to start exactly where Halo 1 started.
The music was phenomenal, cinematography was on point, acting was great, story line was compelling.
I’m normally the person who’s a stickler for not changing a story at all, but the Halo universe was originally told through a game that was more about story beats than actual literary writing. So there’s a ton of room for the in-between conversations and events.
I think the show got an undeserved bad rap. If more people gave it a chance they may have actually liked it.
Halo fans got an actually decent show. Whereas Wheel of Time and Tolkien fans got the abominations of a show we got.
The first few were really good on console. I played the first one on PC as well and there was definitely something missing with mouse and keyboard controls. The vehicles especially.
You have to remember that most FPS on consoles were pretty terrible back then (e.g. Medal of Honor series), and there was a lot of experimentation to try and find a control scheme that didn’t completely suck, along with just the right amount of aim assist. Other devs were still wrestling with that into the Xbox 360 era. Sony put so much effort and money into Killzone, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Halo.
Plus, split screen co-op made it very popular. It’s one of the few games to keep that into the modern era as well.
Oh, then Battlefield 1942 then. People here were saying 2005 so I went with the one I knew from 2005. Also, first isn’t always best, the BF games made Halo look like a school project imo
I did miss the “on consoles” part of your quote though as I was referring to playing on PC so my bad.
Even Halo 5 had redeeming qualities. I legit wish Infinite would be treated like a fan made game and ignored so they can make a Halo 6 that concludes the Promethean saga.
I thought all xboxes were x86 hardware running some variant of windows under the hood?
Edit:
“The Xbox system software is the operating system developed exclusively for Microsoft’s Xbox home video game consoles.[1] Across the four generations of Xbox consoles, the software has been based on a version of Microsoft Windows”
"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft’s desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line. "
I'm pretty sure the shared applications it's referring to there are UWP apps, which use a different set of APIs to traditional Win32 apps that are only available on full Windows versions. I looked into how Edge works a bit more, and it sounds like Microsoft made a special translation layer to take Edge's Win32 API calls and turn them into UWP ones. I guess games would be possible to run like this too?
On one hand, I applaud EA for at least attempting a new IP this time around instead of churning out yet another sequel, but on the other hand, damned if Immortals of Aveum didn’t look like the most generic thing out there.
News of Everwild’s cancellation arrives amid more layoffs at Microsoft; the company is reportedly slashing nearly 9,000 jobs as part of new cuts at Microsoft.
Wow. It was rumored to be a big layoff, but 9,000 is way over any forecast. And this is what? The third so far since Covid? Is there anyone left working for them, at this point? Or is it all seasonal contractors?
EDIT: turns out that they gutted The Initiative (the supposedly AAAA studio that never released anything), cancelled Everwild, cut 50% of Turn10, 10% of King, and cancelled an unknown number of unannounced games, including one MMO title developed by the TES Online devs.
What a bloodbath. But hey, at least Phil is safe.
Contractors never count in layoff numbers, so this number would be much, much worse if you included them. The actual job losses could easily be more than doubled.
Considering that it skipped the last showcase despite reportedly releasing next year, I don’t have high hopes for that one.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it was built on the backs of seasonal contractors. Seems like that’s the strategy they have chosen for their other big IPs as well (Forza Motorsport 8 and Halo Infinite).
It’s incredible that the clowns in charge of the gaming division and responsible for dragging it through the mud for all these years get to keep their job and will probably see an increase in their salaries as well, while the people that lost their jobs because of their incompetence will get nothing but a sad press release from Uncle Phil the HR department.
I don’t think we get granular info on this stuff, all we know is this latest round of cuts involves sales too as they are moving to outsource some of that work. And that Microsoft’s total head count has been mostly level since they added a ton of people with acquisitions and hires in 2022.
They’re surprisingly fun and I wonder why more team deathmatch games don’t include them.
I used to play Tremulous and it was super addictive to live and die by your base elements. Gives the game a whole new dimension about strategy and teamwork.
Apparently both Natural Selection and Tremulous were inspired by the Gloom mod for Quake 2, according to the Tremulous FAQ:
Development on Tremulous began long before NS was in the public domain. If Tremulous is inspired by anything, it is inspired by Gloom for Quake 2. NS has a similar ancestry (please see Game Developer Magazine February 2001 issue); this is probably where the confusion arises.
polygon.com
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