Andrew Wilson and my personal definition of ‘very exciting’ likely differ greatly, so I’m not going to pay attention to anything until we see the products. I suspect he is very excited to make a lot of money on a bunch of new Star Wars games.
I like these games. I do. But at the same time I don’t. They’re repetitive in the gameplay and it gets stale to the point where I never finish them.
Along with the Assassins Creed series, they have sucked me in and don’t deliver enough to maintain my business, yet a couple of months after a release when I see them go on sale the end up in my collection.
I’m hoping this news will end in an awesome game that I’m obviously going to buy and that I will actually finish, for once
Agree. I’m playing Far Cry 6 and somehow got the feeling it’s even slightly worse (more stupid) than the 5th entry.
The map is filled to the brim with NPCs and animals, yet I’ve rarely witnessed such a dead world. Not a single NPC has a purpose or life. Cars outside the render distance disappear from the game too: turn around and that vehicle is gone like in those 1980’s video games. Turn around again: new NPC.
Finished a checkpoint / road block: your car is gone Baddies reappear in enemy areas although I just cleared it out. Such a lack of persistence is almost an offense.
Not one car that doesn’t sound their horn at me because they think I’m trying to ram them off the road. Arcade games from decades ago were less dumb.
Ubi really need to scale down the size of these games and adopt a quality over quantity mindset. I’ve played multiple Ubi IPs and they’re the fucking same at its core.
Their game reviews are worth shit all, so their only worth is reporting on the game industry itself. And that’s a niche area that not many people are interested in.
While I am a strong supporter of independent games media (and am ride or die Remap):
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
This doesn’t scale. The outlets doing this can support MAYBE 3 people with the outliers being Kinda Funny who have never found a sponsorship they didn’t like and Giant Bomb who are pretty much riding on the massive support wave after they got fired AND have THE biggest legacy name out there and… time will really tell if they can keep supporting the whole crew this time next year. Oh, and MinnMax where Ben has to constantly remind people that he is actually the only full time employee and all the cohorts are contractors with day jobs and that you can also see Janet at Remap or her twitch channel and Charles at Game Informer and Jacob talking about death in a video essay on Nebula and…
But the other aspect, which Remap (specifically Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny) have pointed out is… when you are part of a big org you have, among other things, lawyers. You can’t really do investigative journalism without those. With the power of (I think at the time it was) Kotaku? Jason Schreier is the “press sneak thief” and Bethesda just puts the outlet on a shitlist for review codes until the end of time. Without the power of Kotaku? Jason gets a letter in the mail and needs to find a lawyer who can protect him.
Outlets like 404 Media (and, to a much lesser extent, Aftermath) have more or less structured themselves entirely around this and I don’t actually know how they are pulling it off.
But Independent Games Media is, by and large, just that: Games Media. Not Games Journalism. And the reason you want the latter can probably be summed up with the Nintendo pricing of the Switch 2. They very specifically did not mention it as part of their press event or in the copy they sent out. And many outlets (including Remap and MinnMax) pointed out why. It is not going to look good for them but by doing it that way they control the message. Because all the Hype is gonna be for the Direct. So they get all the benefits of all your favorite talking heads Talking Over a Mario Kart trailer but the actual pricing? That is MAYBE an updated news article or a tweet. Which becomes “it is what it is” when they go to buy rather than “Wait… IS a gameboy actually worth 500 bucks?” discourse that we see for brands like XBOX that couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag at this point.
And we’ve seen similar with so many controversies over the years. People who are REALLY tuned in might have heard about The mordhau “Show us your kni**a” thread and rampant racism or the black myth wukon sexism. But the majority of outlets people actually go to for coverage/opinions are VERY aware that their legal department is Uncle Jack and don’t want that smoke. So you mostly just get “we aren’t going to cover it” rather than “Yo dog, this shit is fucked” that we would in the old days.
I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it’ll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.
It would be nice if more people gave a shit about in depth reporting on the industry but it’s an ever-shrinking niche. I think that’s a problem with any “enthusiast press” though. The game industry is huge and has asinine amounts of cash sloshing around in it though, so maybe we just end up with a bigger gulf between sites regurgitating press releases and sites actually doing reporting?
Most importantly, it’s “press sneak thank you very much!
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