As a teen, I used to fall asleep listening to Might and Magic VI. You could literally put the disc in a player because the soundtrack was saved as wav files.
My biggest, biggest pet peeve of the PS4/PS5 era, is this. I’m in my 40s, I’m a senior management level professional, I’m on some boards, I’ve got very young kids. The amount of times I get to sit down and just go ahhhhh and fire up the PlayStation, number in the very low single digits each quarter. This means my PlayStation has to update what feels like two hundred thousand things, and I just want to play a god damn game. Nope, I have to update the new system software, have to update the games update, something for the sound, it literally feels like it never ends. So my three free hours turns into me throwing the controller and just moving on to something else more often than not, only for the cycle to repeat. It’s infuriating.
I think that one issue is that – at least with Steam, and I think on consoles, though I haven’t checked the current gen – if there’s an outstanding update for a game, one is required to wait until an update is applied before playing the game.
That often really doesn’t need to happen. One could have a console just let one play what’s already download, and when an update can be done, do it.
This doesn’t solve things for multiplayer games – or, more-generally, games with some level of online functionality. There, updates may require everyone to be running the latest version, or Twitter support may be broken on an older version (come to think of it, I bet that all that Twitter removal of third-party API access probably broke a bunch of games with social media integration).
And sometimes, like with actively-exploited security holes, a developer may really, really not want people to use existing versions.
Maybe let the developer flag an update as “mandatory” and only force updates if the “mandatory” flag is set.
One other thing that might solve your problem – I haven’t looked at current-gen consoles, but at least the last time I looked at an XBox, I believe that there was an option for it to turn itself on nightly, check for updates, and for installed games, download and install any updates. That might address your “I turn on my console about once a year and then it has a huge backlog” issue, if your console has that and you toggle on that nightly update setting.
They’ve had that standby mode for a few years for sure (I mostly use PS, but Xbox will have the same). I don’t know why though, for whatever reason after a while it just stops working. Might be the routers cycling or whatever, but it’ll stay on standby forever, but when you login there’s still a sea of updates and most stuff is unable to be played. I hear you on the multiplayer requirements and whatever too, personally I’m never a multiplayer. I’d accept the risks of a game being out of date if it just allowed me to skip updating.
I can’t believe nobody has said Furi! That game lives through its soundtrack. The game is a series of intense boss fights, but during production they sent concept art and fight details to the artists so the music better matched the scenario, and it all came together beautifully.
I really dug the music in CP2077 (and, especially, Phantom Liberty). The use of leitmotifs lifted the score. More so than in a similar game (GTA5), I really enjoyed the radio stations, too.
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