Sometimes, “investigative” journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier’s brand of “I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff” coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn’t clear that bar for me.
This is how the sausage is made, unfortunately. Schreier has to work with the same kind of currency any investigative journalist does, and sometimes that means publishing a piece as part of an agreement. I’ve seen this happen for decades in sports journalism, and in turn, that facilitates a lot of what labor has needed to survive in that industry. Considering professional sports is one of the very last bastions of collective bargaining in my country, I find it easy to overlook there.
Schreier’s work has similarly been important for labor in making games, so yeah, while there’s garbage sometimes, I have zero problem with it.
It’s interesting to hear how sanguine they are about putting so much into content that only a fraction of players will see. A year on ending permutations! That’s exactly the kind of thing that being an independent studio makes possible, because corporate AAA producers and publishers aren’t going to go for that.
Yeah, it doesn’t have an import feature but having an option to export to CSV was a big part of why I set up on Grouvee. Because there will inevitably be a next thing.
Well, that and I didn’t want a site with “backlog” in the title.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was the best I played this year. There might be recency bias, but I genuinely think it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. Persona 5 Royal isn’t super far behind, was also great.
Worst game I finished was Starfield. Did not see that coming. Worst overall was Vambrace: Cold Soul. Incredibly gorgeous game with a complete disaster of a core gameplay loop.
When the pandemic effectively suspended E3, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft started producing direct videos. They haven’t been interested in going back.
I’m sure someone will do a full postmortem write-up on E3, but with this sort of thing, there’s a sort of inertia involved. Once something happens that pauses a regular gathering and makes everyone wonder “why were we doing this again?” there are times the gathering doesn’t come back.
Since we’re talking about your job here, only use games that are public domain or that you’ve gotten permission for use in a school setting (don’t bother trying with any of the big publishers). No abandonware or anything like that. There are some homebrew games out there that may work, but I don’t know how many of them have the kind of story you’re looking for.
If you’re developing a remaster of a game while you have the director of the original game on the payroll, that’s not a breakdown in communication. That’s intentionally keeping him out of the loop.
Trust me, I’d love it if you were right on this, but as far as I’m concerned, this means the leak wasn’t accurate in this case or the project got axed.
If they go back to this IP, I’m definitely picking their next game. Especially if it’s a similar narrative style.
I don’t think I’ve ever played a spacefaring game in a setting with this kind of mega-corporate stranglehold, so I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Maybe if the story involved some sort of game-changing technology breakthrough or discovery.
Still playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I was fully planning on picking up Persona 5 Tactica at release but I was immediately turned off once I heard about Day 1 DLC. Really not okay. The reviews are mediocre and I’m also hearing that it’s short. I’ll probably pick it up on a sale.
Anyway, in BG3, I keep wanting to tinker with new builds and see places/story branches I missed the first three times. I don’t think an RPG has put me in replay mode like this since Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s pretty nuts.
I also restarted my subscription to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight to see the last raid and the end of the story for the expansion. I’ve never been so disinterested on resub like I am this time. I’m getting currencies thrown at me with little explanation, the community is still toxic as hell, and I’m just not into the story.