Now let’s all pretend that MS and Phil aren’t buying up publishers to have another monopoly full of Xbox/PC exclusives. Tbf though, I think Sony started this whole exclusives thing and really pushed hard for it. They do, however, seem to be relenting now by publishing their games to steam.
Sony buys up studios for their talent not their IP. Bungie/Destiny is the only exception. They have a strong history of empowering their developers to release better games than they did before.
Microsoft is the opposite. They buy up studios / IPs and run them into the ground.
Sony makes them. Microsoft buys them. Two very different things. Quality is a separate issue, but related In that Microsoft apparently has a hundred billion dollars to spend but can’t make a great game by themselves in the last two decades. They have no taste for it. I hope they prove me wrong. I don’t want to see them become a monopoly of mediocre games that we have to subscribe for. I also don’t want to see Sony without competition.
Can’t agree more. I don’t think there’s a studio under MS that’s done better under their leadership/portfolio than they’d done prior to their acquisition. The studios created to shepherd Xbox franchises that original studios move on from generally have never matched the highs previously seen either.
I also don’t appreciate them hoovering up franchises, via acquisitions whilst failing to develop much new that’s if any note. All it does is condemn a growing back catalogue to mediocrity or have them disappear into the vault.
Sony aren’t perfect but their studios tend to produce top tier games that look and feel like they’re a tier above most, making the most of their “exclusivity”. Most (all?) their major releases are their own franchises developed in house too, and it feels like there’s a steadier turn out of new, quality IP to boot.
You don’t get it, though. Microsoft will put everything on Gamepass. Sony fanboys can suck on that!
Ignore the fact that them buying-up all these studios is objectively bad for our hobby and the industry, and that Gamepass has been touted as being objectively bad by everyone in the industry because studios receive a minuscule amount of revenue from it and that it disadvantages indie devs.
The only thing that matters here is that my metaphorical sports team beats your metaphorical sports team.
I mean Sonys last purchase was Firewalk Studios, who was working on a game that hasnt been publically shown(however, sony was given a preview of it privately) and they havent released a game yet, so they technically bought out an IP unless you claim they already hit the reset on whatever project they kept under the sheets.
Borderline I’d say, but if it’s not public Sony is buying based on devs / potential, not existing sales or hype, and at that point they are bankrolling a new IP and assuming all those associated risks.
It does if they decide to remove the windows conpatibility that was announced beforehand. So far they havent, but if they did, it would be treated the same.
As a Switch owner, fuck this. This is reason enough for me to stop buying games on the Switch and go full piracy/emulation mode. I don’t have any Denuvo games on my PC and I am not having any on my Switch.
Same bro. Just completed the first gow a couple days ago. Ready for the second one now. Will definitely be picking up the new gow and horizon forbidden West!
Same here. I bought a PS4 late in its lifecycle to catch up and then was amazed when they started bringing stuff to PC. I’ve really been missing out on some PS5 titles but I’d be much happier to play them on PC. I think I’ll probably be waiting a while for Spider-Man 2 as well.
personally I think that theres loads of people with the skillset to do it, but they all have nice jobs in cybersecurity instead of cracking video games.
It’s weird to claim that only Japanese creators can make JRPGs. That’s not true at all, it just implies a specific style of gameplay, not the country of origin.
I disagree with both article and your point. The J is unhelpful when we can just label them turned-based action. This is just an issue of grandfathering a genre which means very little, is incredibly decisive and even unhelpful. It’s easy to imagine someone who like Final Fantasy may like a game like LISA. But harder to suggest someone who like ~~Final Fantasy ~~ Dragon Quest will like Kingdom Hearts, Demon Gaze or Disgaea. Just split JRPGs into mechanical genres. Turn-Based Action, Action RPG, Turn/Tile-based Strategy.
This issue extends to more genres (Generally RPG and Action) but I think it’s probably the easiest one to start moving away from
I’d say there is a general vibe to JRPGs that you can’t really get at by just describing the combat system.
It’s easy to imagine someone who like Final Fantasy may like a game like LISA. But harder to suggest someone who like Final Fantasy will like Kingdom Hearts
If anything, I’d say the opposite. Even setting aside the developer and series overlap, I would expect a Final Fantasy fan to be much more receptive to Kingdom Hearts than to LISA. While classic Final Fantasy may be closer to LISA mechanically, FF and KH are working in a related tradition that LISA is a bit farther from. There’s connective tissue between JRPGs that go beyond their mechanics, and this is part of why FF as a series has gone between so many radically different systems while still feeling united in some way. JRPG may not be a perfect term, but it carries historical reality, not just bland mechanical descriptions. If you look at music for example, genre titles are just as often describing the scene something came up in (or is emulating) as they are describing the sound itself. If genres are to give us helpful groupings of games that are related to one another, just describing their bare mechanics isn’t enough on its own.
Ah that’s my bad, when I think about FF I still think of the earlier games but the newer games aren’t in that bandcamp. Should have suggested dragon quest
Yah, you’re right, if you sub categorize it’s much clearer. For me JRPG is the format of classic final fantasy games where you can run around in an over world and then trigger battles that go into a turn based back and forth sequence. I suppose you would need to also say it has to come from Japan otherwise you would say Southpark stick or truth and fractured but whole are JRPGs and I don’t know if one would classify it as such.
There are plenty of turn based western RPGs that aren't JRPGs, like the brand new Baldur's Gate 3. If a game is a JRPG, I'm expecting an ensemble cast who each have their own special abilities and weapon type, and they each level up in more or less exactly one way, which I can't control. Instead, I customize them through equipment, if at all. Dialogue may have choices, but it's usually between choice A and choice B.
In a western RPG, I may have a party of characters or only control one, and when I level up, I get points to spend in whichever attributes I think I'll get the most value out of for the build I'm going for. These skills may result in skill checks that open up different avenues for solving problems in the game than if I had invested in other skills, and these skill checks may come up in dialogue.
Of course, J or not, the reality of the world is not so binary, and many games have some but not all of these traits or make them more difficult to define, but the J does tell me something.
I know what you mean but what you’ve done is just define two sets of games with varying differences in mechanics. So only WRPGs can assign attributes and JRPGs must have ensemble casts? There are many components of games that can transcend genres. A racing game like Mario Party can have an ensemble cast with unique abilities, A game like Sims can have attribute spending to create a player build. Locking these to genres doesn’t help understand as you suggest but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.
It’s much easier to used these parts as extra descriptors and even better when you also add perspectives
BG3: An turn based strategy [with complex choice]
Valkyria Chronicles: A turn based strategy [with player recruitment]
Disgaea: An turn based strategy [with unlockable job systems]
Wargroove: A turn based strategy [with resource management systems]
I’d even prefer “Earthbound-inspired RPG” as thats more clear on what I’m going to be playing
I shortened the definition for the sake of not writing a book, but the point is that no one game will satisfy all of the criteria of a genre, but they evoke a common set of responses and scratch a similar itch. The genre would be more anchored to early Final Fantasy titles than Earthbound.
I wasn’t suggesting all games should be labeled “earthbound-inspired”, the term JRPG is so broad that just suggesting it’s inspiration is more informative.
But then it's only informative to people who've played that game, as opposed to people who've played that genre. Far more people have played a JRPG than people have played Earthbound.
This just goes back to JRPG being vague and not giving any real info anyway.
If I told you I like Dark Souls which is arguably a JRPG or a more obvious Earthbound, why would it be better to say ah, “Disgaea or Kingdom Hearts are JRPG, you’ll like them”.
But see, Dark Souls is very much an RPG but uses more western RPG design axioms than those of a JRPG, which is why this genre is not at all about being made in Japan. Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Fire Emblem often get linked together as a strategy RPG or a tactics RPG. Kingdom Hearts is a real-time or action JRPG, Persona is a turn-based JRPG, and the "active time battles" of the late SNES and PlayStation era from Square sort of straddle a few of those lines, but there are commonalities among all of them that a fan of Earthbound could reasonably be into. Likewise, there are commonalities between western RPGs and JRPGs where someone who's just into "RPGs" would be into. These are just genres and subgenres.
The other thing too is that the definitions of these genres will change over time as more games come out that can be grouped together. When games inspired by DotA started getting released commercially, some tried to call them "Action RTS" games, but then you'd have games like Smite and Super Monday Night Combat that no longer have anything to do with the RTS genre, so Riot's coined "MOBA" stuck because, even though it's kind of a lousy name for that genre, it doesn't contradict itself by calling them a derivative of RTS games.
I’m a bit confused by this message since I was suggesting JRPG as a genre wasn’t clear, and the argument(?) Is that Dark Souls isn’t a JRPG and you’ve sub-classified a bunch of different JRPGs how I agree.
If the argument is that we can still use JRPG in conjunction, I think this is valid but I still feel that coining things based on country of origin isa bit off, almost like insinuating a stereotype when we also agree they don’t have to follow it.
So. You’re saying the developer and everyone that worked on the game are part of a crusade against a minority group?
Or is it just that you’re delusional enough to think that because the creator or the IP is a blowhard hag of a human being, everyone associated with her IP should be thoroughly punished?
Nah thats not what im saying. But the millions raked in by harry potter enterprises goes in to Rowlings pockets. Also, i dont weep for the devs, they were paid already…
The game allowed you to create a trans protagonist (male voice/female body, pronouns, …). It isn’t a crusade against them at all, it is empowering them. No matter what the author said.
I buy physical because I don't trust Nintendo's online services, but I'm not even going to get physical if it comes with DRM. I'm buying it expressly to dump it and run in an emulator eventually.
Not to mention that the Switch is already showing its age, so any added burden is going to come with noticeably performance loss.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it’ll decode it properly.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
Longer answer, no. This was a GameCube game. It only supports stereo output. It would have needed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II libraries to do surround sound encoding within the stereo signal. The use would have also needed a receiver with Pro Logic II support and surround speakers.
Honestly I’m glad we’ve moved from “Censor out anything that might be slightly objectionable” (Like they did with Sam & Max for example, and I believe the GTA Trilogy got hit with a bit of this), to “Look the game is old and from a different time, what society deems acceptable is always changing, deal with it or move on.”
I’m so beyond tired of being told I can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it. I actually bought this three pack solely because it didn’t censor Tomb Raider, a game I was very sure they were going to censor
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