How can you say that when they haven’t made a game in a decade? Its like saying the beetles are culturally irrelevant. GTA continues to influence other games and is relevant to society even if they never made another game. I think fortnite is a dumb capitalist nothing game but I can’t deny it’s relevance.
Eh, each game had a very different feel. I didn’t play GTA 1 or 2, so I’ll start after that point:
GTA III - caricatures the mafia and the FBI, but otherwise is somewhat light on satire (good setup for the franchise though)
GTA VC - lots of satire about the 70s and mafia in Miami
GTA SA - lots of satire about a wide range of topics, from 90s gang culture to the burgeoning tech scene in San Francisco
GTA IV - lots of statements about the immigrant experience, with satire along the way
GTA V - satire about middle class life in LA, the excitement of tech getting stale and turning bad, etc
Each has a fair amount of satire and something to say about the world, I just found GTA V a lot less interesting than previous titles. GTA IV is my favorite for a playthrough, GTA SA is a close second (I love exploring SA).
So far we’ve gotten good single player games along with those online modes, including RDR2 after GTA5, so it’s at least plausible that GTA6 will have good single player still.
Won’t be playing it until it’s on PC anyways, so I’ll for sure have found out by then.
You’re right! But the hype exists. It will reach peak for the four months post the launch, creating fomo. Peer pressure with such launches are a human problem
I get it’s a massive franchise, like Madden or Call of Duty… don’t buy those either.
whew, I’m trying to understand your comment, but this is kinda coming off pretty…holier-than-thou? Which, I do get that because I can find myself like that with movies/tv, but still…we gotta let people like what they like.
In this case though, I honestly think this is a pretty terrible comparison. Madden and CoD don’t have massive single player appeal that GTA or RDR have. They are total schlock in that regard (though, I hear CoD’s recent campaigns are actually good).
GTA and RDR on the other hand very skillfully mix elements of RPG, immersive sim, and adventure game. They’re huge sandboxes for the player to explore and discover new things, within which are nestled very well written stories that critique modern life and touch upon themes that, yes, you could find them in various indie games if you look a bit, but are somewhat unique in the blockbuster gamescape. It’s difficult to find other single player games with the scope of Rockstar games, though I think it is getting easier.
But comparing GTA to Madden or CoD is kinda whack unless you’re looking at GTA Online in isolation.
Still, there’s very little overlap in GTA Online and Madden/COD. GTA Online is still very much sandbox-y, caters somewhat well to playing alone, and has a team gameplay loop. People tend to play this periodically but probably don’t have it be their main/only game.
Madden and COD are both highly competitive games with pretty much no sandbox, and their appeal is pretty limited after a couple years when the next one comes out. People tend to stick to these franchises as their main game, playing very little else.
The main similarity is that they’re AAA games, but that’s really it.
I think GTA online could be compared to Madden and CoD in that they all have aggressive(-ly lame) monetization tactics. But the way jordanlund frames it (sorry jordan, I don’t mean to rag on you – like I said, I can also be like this) sounds more to me like a “i only listen to artists with less than 1000 monthly listeners” type of statement
Jordanlund’s comment could be read/interpreted that way sure, but personally I read it more as “yes gta is a big/popular/genre-defining game, but not my cup of tea” kind of vibe.
I have played and enjoyed previous gta titles, but I myself am partial to slower more thoughtful games like Baldur’s Gate (I suspect same could be said for jordanlund as well).
For sure for sure. I definitely read it that way, in part, because I have to consciously remind myself that my taste is my own and I should try not to dismiss people who like their art to be more…palatable, i guess? Because I have the capacity to be that guy, unfortunately. So I try to watch a blockbuster every once in a while, so to speak.
I think it was probably the comparison between GTA and Madden and CoD that threw me, because they have almost no similarities besides being AAA.
Their comment kinda reminded me of how the Kingdom Come: Deliverance fandom can be. I mean, I fucking love KCD and KCD2, they’re two of the best games I’ve ever played. They can slow AF though, and frustrating at times. But whenever someone mentions that, or that they didn’t like it, someone else invariably comes along and completely dismisses their opinion, like “You just don’t understand it,” or “Maybe you just don’t have the attention span to really immerse yourself.” It’s like dude, you don’t need to make someone feel bad for not liking a game.
Wow, I gave you a lot of benefit of the doubt in my comments, but you’re really out here to just denigrate other people’s tastes, aren’t you? How refined, how cultured your game library must be. How sweet your shit must smell. How does it feel up there, where you’ll never touch a game frequented by us Dorito-eaters and us Mountain-Dew-drinkers? Feels good, huh? Feels better.
I enjoy it, I don‘t (allegedly) 100 bucks enjoy it though. I‘ll wait for a few years and grab it on sale. And ngl, I‘ve grown pretty tired of triple digit playtime games anyway.
I’ll still want it, I’ll feel a strong sense of FOMO if I don’t, but I don’t really care any more. After seeing how much money GTAO was making I strongly suspect they’ll put a lot more focus on that. In my opinion gta online sucked a lot of ass. It was fun as a playground to hang around with friends in, but as an actual game I’d rather we’d have agreed on any other game to play. I would never load it up to play by myself.
I hope I’m wrong and the story mode slaps, but at the super-premium price it’s going to end up costing i won’t justify it.
If they just released what people were expecting (and wanting): Dreadwolf, a true Dragon Age sequel - then it would’ve sold by the figurative truckload and they’d be riding the money boat right now.
But no. The reality-disconnected decision makers decreed that it had to be ultra sanitised, corporate, Disney-esque slop. Not an awful game, sure, but absolutely not a Dragon Age game.
You should play the original if you can, it really is the best Dragon Age game. Steam has a guide to get it up and running on modern machines.
Also, were you able to follow the story of Veilguard? I haven’t played it yet (and honestly I might never) but I got the impression that it was pretty tied to the story of Inquisition.
Yeah ngl, I don’t really care for the more Elvish focus that Inquisition (and now I guess Veilguard) has. The best part of DA was always the mix of all the lores clashing.
I have been talking a lot with a friend of mine about DAV and Dreadwolf.
I really think that even if they released the Dreadwolf, the version from the artbook, they probably won’t made a profit, the game could sell well like Inquisition but not like a Cyberpunk/The Witcher 3/BG3 and for the amount of time and resource they used sales like inquisition is not enough. They blew their chances with the 10 years of delays, the IP was not in a good place.
Only a miracle, a game on the same level as BG3 for Bioware to make a profit again.
There’s a lot going on here. I think other devs, Apple, and Google are all going to look at this and say it’s not the type of game people want on their phones, but I’d say that’s the wrong conclusion. If I got an APK included in the purchase of my PC games, I’d play a bunch more games on mobile, but even some of those that have mobile ports are no longer compatible with modern Android. Even some of those that still are compatible do not work with controllers, and many of those have bad touch controls. And if you narrow down that library of great games to the ones that still work and have good controls, it’s always an inferior version of the game by way of being the mobile version of it. There’s no easy standard to dock it like the Switch or to transfer saves like Steam cloud saves.
If you want this type of game to do well on mobile, Apple and Google need to make a standard, quality, easily portable mobile controller. Games need to support that controller more often than not. There needs to be a standard for docking the device and outputting to a larger screen. The device needs to retain compatibility with older software, reliably. This is at a minimum. But there isn’t really an incentive to make premium mobile gaming better, so they’ll stick with manipulative, low barrier to entry games that control well with touches, taps, and swipes.
I fully agree and just wand to add my suspicion that people in the Apple ecosystem are a pretty tough crowd to sell a Resident Evil title to begin with. Most gamers I know would never buy an Apple PC if they have a choice, and the overlap between “serious” gaming and Android is probably a lot stronger.
(I hear a faint echo of “Don’t you guys have phones?” in this.)
Apple has been making decisions hostile to a thriving gaming scene for decades at this point, so they engineered that lack of overlap. Just because they paid big money for ports of Resident Evil and Death Stranding, it doesn’t mean that any other big games have a reason to follow them.
So I’ll admit that it has been a couple decades since I played RE2, but I think there is some room to evaluate what kind of experience players are looking to get from that game and question how much overlap there is with mobile device usage.
When I think “mobile”, I think about games that I can play in a waiting room, on public transportation, in a break room at work, in a cafe between classes, etc. And I think about the games that work well in those situations. Turn-based puzzle games like Candy Crush or Sudoku. Idle games like Armory and Machine, Adventure Capitalist, Fallout Shelter, and Merchant. Even simple runner games.
These games cannot consume all of your attention- you need to still have some awareness of when your break is over, your name is called, or you have reached your stop. You don’t have a ton of time to catch up on what you did previously. You don’t have 15 minutes to spend getting used to controls. You probably don’t have a controller with you. You can’t afford to get into a long cutscenes. You need to be ready to put the game down at any moment.
So something like Resident Evil needs to be significantly re-designed to work. Horror in general is difficult because the player is probably in a well-lit room, possible with music playing, surrounded by other people having casual conversations. Resident Evil itself is particularly bad for this because it famously limits when and how much you can save. That whole system would need to be scrapped. We would need checkpoints at least every 15 minutes, probably more like 5. Any cutscenes need to be skippable and re-viewable from a menu.
There are certainly other situations where I could see it working. A camping trip, a long plane ride or airport layover, killing a few hours at a hotel, etc. I could install an android version onto my NVIDIA Shield, and it might be possible to do similar with a GoogleTV, Fire stick, or Apple TV hardware, although I would speculate most smart TV hardware would probably be too weak to run (cloud could be an option, but that’s already failed pretty hard). It would be cool to be able to play it in any room or out on my porch instead of being tethered to a living room TV.
The problem is those are incredibly niche use cases in comparison. I don’t think there is enough demand to justify Android and IOS ports. Other games sure- Pokemon would be perfect for mobile but Nintendo needs to keep it exclusive to their hardware to, well, sell their hardware. The Genesis classics are already on Android and a lot of them are great. But cinematic games designed around long play sessions just don’t translate well.
On my Steam Deck, or if you prefer a Switch, any game is a mobile game. You can suspend and resume quite easily, and as long as you can do the same on a phone, it’ll fit that use case just as well. My mobile use case might be killing 15 minutes at the DMV, or it might be an hour long train ride. I’ll pick the right game for the job.
My experience on the Deck and Switch is the opposite: different games lend themselves to different form factors. And both of those (along with other handhelds like the Logitech G Cloud, PlayStation Portal, AYN Odin series, etc) are not really in the mobile space. I can’t imagine a middle schooler taking their Deck or Switch to school. I can’t imagine breaking one of those out on a 15 minute break while working retail or food service. I would not have lugged those devices around campus to play between college classes. The Switch is an exception because it’s a home console too, but the rest of those devices are incredibly niche products that sell orders of magnitude less than either consoles, gaming PC’s, or phones.
And you said yourself: you pick the right game for the job. I could totally emulate Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 on the Deck, maybe even 4. But I would inevitably get stuck in a 30 minute long cutscene from Kojima. It may be possible to either use a save states or just hit the power button to suspend, but that’s still a bad experience. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s good. I do keep a selection of games on the Deck for different situations.
My wife and I love Skyrim and have almost every version of it. I probably have 1,000 hours in, she is probably close to 10,000 at this point. We always joke about how one of the worst things you can do for yourself is save and stop playing mid-dungeon. You get in a groove and reserve some of the RAM in your brain for keeping track of the in-game space, and if you stop and come back to it a day, week, month, or year later it takes some work to mentally recover. We always try to go back to a house, or at least a town, to save.
For something like Candy Crush or Sudoku? No problem, I can get right in. For a big AAA action game? I need to remember the controls, the map layout, what’s going on with the plot, what my items or build or whatever is, what the enemies are like and how to deal with them, etc. If I’m sitting down for a 2 hour gaming session it’s no problem if I take 3 minutes to get up to speed again, but for a 15 minute break that’s 20% of my time.
Another factor is how long it takes to get in game. I recently played through Subnautica (streaming with Steam Link to either my Deck or Shield), and while it was a great time I was annoyed at just how long it takes to get into the game. Even on an SSD it simply takes forever to load, sometimes close to 2 whole minutes. And I know of plenty of other games that are even worse with all the splash screens and BS before the start menu- the Crash N Sane Trilogy is a big offender for example. If I’m on a 15 minute break I don’t want to spend 20% of that time waiting for the game to start.
It’s exit points and entry points. Most console or PC games are designed with play sessions of at least 30 minutes, usually more like an hour. If you don’t take the exit points, you’re starting a new dungeon or new quest line or whatever and are locking in for the next 30-60 minutes. (You could argue games like Civ might have intended play sessions more like 8-16 hours). Successful mobile games have much more frequent entry and exit points.
RE2 would certainly work fine on the Deck and Switch, but not in those “mobile” contexts. And I don’t think there is enough demand to add Android and IOS support on top of that.
But I get to choose what I think is the right game for the job. The Switch is successful because it serves both masters. Not making the game available just makes me less likely to bother with mobile games at all.
So the market and ecosystem would have to substantially change before these kinds of ports could ever become viable. I doubt any of that is likely to happen.
Yeah I’ve had this problem recently. I bought limbo on steam to play on my steam deck. Recently realised there’s an android version but it seems like to use it on my phone I would have to buy the game again on Google play. Maybe I’m wrong about this, it seems to me that once you’ve bought a game in one format you should be able to download it in any format.
In an ideal world, every game should be fully cross-buy IMO, but that tends to never be the case.
PlayStation used to have PS3/PS4/PSVita cross-buy games for a while, but they didn’t keep it going for their recent PC porting efforts (that clearly wouldn’t help their bottom line).
Xbox has Play Anywhere, and that’s likely the closest to a functional cross-buy (and cross-play) we have today - that’s the main draw for me if (when) I ever buy games digitally on Xbox.
“We’re listening and we hear you,” Phil Spencer wrote on X earlier this week. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
If I understand corporate speech correctly, this means that XBox is essentially doomed. This is far more damning than anything that he is responding to could possibly have been saying.
If Larian simply releases an honest to god Addon to BG3 like they used to be in the early 2000s, they're going to break the internet, I think. A complete game that is good with a complete addon that is good... Kinda like Witcher 3 with Blood and Wine, etc.
In the US, expansion packs were the general term used.
For example, RCT2 had the Wacky Worlds and Time Twister expansion packs. Empire at War had the Forces of Corruption expansion. While some were called add-ons, those were typically like tiny things, one-off characters or whatever.
I feel like the only one who still remembers that DLC simply means “DownLoadable Content” and can apply equally to big expansions as it does to MTX. The name comes from the delivery method more than the content itself. Keep in mind, it was first coined when the primary method of content delivery was selling shit on a disc, so easily distinguished from things you could buy in the store irl vs what only was available as a download.
The infrastructure of the Internet at the time made it easier for this to be smaller things. But now? Dude, we are downloading 120GB games and sometimes updates off Steam and nobody is batting an eye anymore. lol
Yeah, in my mind expansions were map pack discs released for Halo and Ghost Recon, DLC was promotional armor from Pepsi codes. That's obviously warped since 2004, but in general, that's what it felt like back then.
These are still being released for many games. Xenoblade 3 was released as a full 100+ hour RPG with basically zero bugs and no microtransactions at all - the DLC included a full new story expansion worth 40+ hours, new characters, battle system changes, an entirely new world to explore, etc. They could sell the fucking thing separately and it would be fine as a standalone if it weren’t for it bookending the series in plot.
Releasing a good, finished game, with a good, finished DLC campaign that respects the player should be standard and expected. It’s not something that should be considered unique to Larian - but we need more like these and I’d love them to bring a Xenoblade 3:Future Redeemed size expansion, like the ones you mentioned, to BG3.
Edit: the old fallout 3 expansions were great too iirc
That’s another thing if they could allow specific api and opensource those parts they remove so someone can create mod that brings all of this back. Like we removed it but we make those things opensource, do what you want, we don’t care. It’s not in paid version of our app.
I think everyone understands that nintendo are bad guys in this this situation but pocketpair is just scared. They just say we want to get over it as soon as possible to focus on our game. I understand that small company is scared of old, long timer in this business. But they need to turn it over because if they behave like a sheep they will be eaten by wolf.
If they could change narrative and simply add. We removed those things and replaced it with this but we don’t care what you do with our game. Here is api. Do what the fuck you want.
Sorry, I meant that most companies do fixes to comply with local legislations/sentences and then ignore them everywhere else, Pocketpair can’t do that because they are being sentenced in their home jurisdiction, so their infractions in other jurisdictions could and would still be brought to court.
Giant Bomb deserves more than a thread hanging off the Polygon story post. I don’t think it’s ever looked nearly this dire.
I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled across GB, but I think it came up randomly during TheSpeedGamers Final Fantasy marathon in 2009 (which was the inspiration for the first GDQ marathon in 2010). They weren’t necessarily the first to do the very personality-focused, video heavy, gaming coverage, but they definitely went at it the hardest and with the fewest fucks given about doing anything the “right” way. I’ve spent over 16 years now following the site and the people that have come through it, the Giant Bomb Extended Universe. I couldn’t possibly quantify the impact they’ve had on me over the years. It may not technically be the end but I don’t see a path forward from here.
Giant Bomb deserves more than a thread hanging off the Polygon story post.
Agreed. Giant Bomb pioneered so much in games media, and for it to end like that is such a shame.
As far as I am concerned, the GB I loved was already struggling after Alex, Brad and Vinny left ; and it ended for good when Jeff Gerstmann was fired abruptly (again !). This news still saddens me however, and I wonder what will be the legacy of GB down the road.
Without knowing anything (beyond what’s said in the article) about Giant Bomb, I’d assume it’s the same path forward as when the F-word fucked up Gamepedia beyond all recognition. Find alternatives. In the case of Gamepedia other wiki hosting services, like Miraheze and wiki.gg, and more independently-hosted wikis. And some of the wiki.gg admins were Gamepedia admins, as far as I’m aware - it sounds like a similar restart may well end up being the case here too.
It sucks, especially because the F-word is good at search-engine optimisation, but it’s not the end.
I’d rejoice, but I’ll believe it when I see it happening consistently. I want smaller, denser, and richer worlds. Not giant, sprawling, and barren. It doesn’t add anything to a game for me if I have to walk or drive 10 minutes to get to my next location and it’s just empty in between.
When asked if he was sure that Albion couldn’t be copyrighted due to its historical context, he replied: “I don’t know if I’m honest, I don’t really know… I hope so. I mean you would think that the responsible person I should be, I would’ve spent the last six months in lawyers’ offices…”
I played Braid ages ago, and it was okay. I can see it being influential when it first came out when there wasn’t many indie games.
Don’t think I really want to play it again though - it told it’s story and that was that. Unless it adds tons more levels or something, I’m not sure what value the remaster adds.
It’s sadly one of many “platformers with interesting mechanics but slow and clunky controls” that the industry has moved away from.
I’ve only heard of the creator making official statements a few times - but they were all like “im the only person in the world making a game that completely innovates its genre every time” and “my remaster is selling like dog-shit”
I took one videogame design class, and the lecturer was like - this guy is a massive douche, but his game is amazing, so he’s allowed to be~
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