I do appreciate that they generally (BG3 review notwithstanding) aren’t afraid to call out bugs and aren’t one of the publications rushing to press with reviews. Even if their scoring system is ridiculous.
I don’t know if they are truly any more independent than any of the other big names, especially considering they have a (formerly E3) trade show now. They are also part of the same publishing group as Tom’s Hardware, which hasn’t been my first choice for hardware reviews for a while.
1998 was such a monster year because it spawned so many big franchises, including two that were arguably the genesis of e-sports. It’ll be a while before we know how 2023 measures up in that regard, although there’s not much new stuff this year that might have legs. Hi-Fi Rush and Starfield, maybe?
I’ve been thinking for a while that this is probably already the best year since 1998 though.
Unfortunately, it’s also here again with 2.0 so far. I started playing the game in 1.3, so this is the most buggy I’ve ever seen it. Vertex explosions, jumpy character animations, skills not working correctly, incorrect sound effects being played.
This is indeed the new normal, and I shouldn’t expect Phantom Liberty to run smoothly next week either. If took months after the recent big Witcher 3 update for it to play okay on mid-spec systems.
I think I was happier when I still catching up on games from a couple generations ago. Now that I’ve done that, I keep running into this stuff. 😕
I’m firmly in the “no FeMC, no buy” camp, but I’m not really surprised. Including FeMC in this project would have dramatically increased the amount of dialogue, and they’ve already said P3R will have the most voiced lines ever for a Persona game.
I first played Cyberpunk after 1.3 came out so I never had that early bad experience so many did (I only ran into one major bug, blocking progression in one sidequest). It was also my first introduction to anything in the Cyberpunk setting so I didn’t know what to expect, but I quickly fell in love with it. Even without Phantom Liberty, I’m sure I still have a half dozen major sidequests on top of the nomad origin story that I haven’t done yet.
I’m pumped for this, especially after being a bit disappointed in Starfield. I’m ready for graphics that pop again, the amazing facial animations, the fluid combat, and more Cherami Leigh. Hell, I’m ready to hear the character creator music again, lol.
Finished up my time with Starfield for now. If you’d told me a month ago that it would be the main story that would keep me playing, I wouldn’t have believed you. The story was way better than I was expecting and far and away my favorite one in a Bethesda game. As for the rest, ehhh. There are a lot of steps back here, and I really don’t like the visuals. Felt like my character was smoking inside her helmet or something. Having framerates regularly dip into the 40’s even with DLSS and tons of other tweaks really didn’t help.
I will say this: aside from some sounds with oddly harsh high frequencies (there’s a mod for that), the audio team really nailed this one. The voice acting is phenomenal, and I’d love to hear this soundtrack performed live.
Feeling non-committal at the moment. Was considering replaying Disco Elysium, but really I’m just waiting for the new Cyberpunk content.
Well, they wouldn’t, because not all of the nine thought the game was perfect. A 100 on Metacritic only means the game placed in the top score for a given publication (4 out of 4 stars in WaPo’s case, for example).
In games criticism, a top score doesn’t always mean a perfect game. It can mean the game met or surpassed the current benchmark in its genre, or it simply was good enough to be in a top tier.
Yeah, Vanillaware is one of the few remaining Japanese third-party devs to hold out on the PC market. The Japanese PC market is growing rapidly though, so hopefully we’ll see it later.
Then again, we were saying the same thing two years ago with 13 Sentinels.
Tactics Ogre Reborn works just fine too. Both it and LUCT have their pluses and minuses. The especially nice thing about Tactics Ogre (both of these versions) is that it has something like 4-5x the content that FFT has.
I was more speculating on what Delita was doing next. By the end of the war, the heads of virtually all the major houses are dead and he had strong support from the commoners, so it’s certainly possible he just upended the whole system. We don’t know, though. Given Delita made his deal with the church to rise to power and it taking centuries for the truth to come out, I’d say it’s implied that from then on Ivalice became a theocratic state or went heavily in that direction.
And yeah, the joke has been that it’s only there because JRPGs always have to have some sort of high stakes, non-human confrontation. I think Matsuno handled it much better in Tactics Ogre than he did here.