RPGs come immediately to mind. Your partner in Disco Elysium is more competent than the main character for reasons that will be immediately obvious. Bethesda’s RPGs are also open world, and while you’ll start out alone in them, you get permanent companions pretty quick (especially if you know where to look). They also get more chatty in the world and more character development in the later games. Fallout 4 more so than Skyrim more so than Fallout 3, for example. Starfield makes you swap them out if you do the main story, which I don’t know if you’ll like or not.
For a dedicated shooter, I think Titanfall 2 has the most protective companion I’ve seen in the genre. Get this one on sale, since it has its robust multiplayer priced in, but it has an excellent–if a bit short–single-player campaign.
Probably the same reason it’s happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).
Dropping a random tip here that might help a couple people that are running Metaphor on PC with an RTX card: turn on DLDSR and FXAA from your Nvidia Control Panel, and set 100% rendering scale in-game. The game doesn’t have anti-aliasing for whatever reason and the shimmer is real bad compared to Atlus’s earlier games. The best you can do in-game is crank up the scale, and I think some pretty beefy hardware is still required for good framerate with that.
Some stuff is probably going to be bad no matter what you do (like Strohl’s vest), but this way I can reduce a lot of the aliasing and still get a rock-solid 60 FPS on my modest 3060Ti. There are likely better third-party solutions being developed by the community right now, maybe even some good presets in Reshade.
Meanwhile I’m over here thinking about how I greatly prefer to put my saves in my own cloud storage (too many games these days not giving me as many slots as I’d like), the community forums are some of the most toxic places on the Internet right now, it’s a coin flip whether Steam’s going to give me a problem with my DualShock4, I hate how the Workshop is a walled garden, and I’m so much happier with my streaming now that I’ve dropped Steam Link and moved to Moonlight.
I guess the guides and Big Picture Mode can be nice?
Steam’s still the #2 best option for me on PC storefronts; the battle.net launcher has some aggressive advertising, as an example of hellscape we’re avoiding here. But Steam continues to not offer me much added value. I go there only because some of my games aren’t available on GOG.
I will say I appreciate what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, and I’m really hoping it continues to grow an ecosystem that directly competes with Nintendo. They are actively burning up banked goodwill right now, and that segment of the market is getting unhealthy without someone keeping them in check.
As a general rule of thumb, if it has dialogue, it’s going to be pretty good, and surprisingly so a lot of the time. The Witcher 3 is still unmatched for quality and quantity of side quests.
This wasn’t a particularly good open world game even for its time, so I’d say ignoring the map markers completely is often smart.
I blame Metroid Dread for that one. Such a bizarre design choice for Phantom Liberty, especially being very late in the game. At least Dread flipped that around.
Unfortunately, FromSoft wasn’t on Tenchu until later in the series when it…wasn’t so great. Still, that Sekiro started as a Tenchu concept is why I picked up the game in the first place. And like Tenchu, effective stealth is there, it’s just especially challenging.
Now, Zelda: Skyward Sword is one I can’t defend (and one of the reasons I’m surprised OP is getting crushed for this post).
Can’t help but feel like this is a step back for Brace Yourself on their music games. Loved the first NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule. Tried the demo, but this one just wasn’t for me. Maybe I need a gimmick for these kinds of games–for Dance Dance Revolution it was the dance pad, Rez had the vibrator and the visuals, Frequency and Amplitude exposed me to new music genres, etc.
Elite Beat Agents and Theatrhythm both did well in the games that were just press-the-right-button, so I know there’s an audience for this. I’m just not in it, I guess.
They really leaned into the Chrono Trigger vibe with this one.
I like their marketing approach here by making a big splash at TGS. Sea of Stars also had a broader marketing approach. I’m not entirely sure how possible grassroots marketing is with this kind of thing anymore, at least in English-speaking communities. Chrono Trigger is a sacred cow in the JRPG community, and Sea of Stars got a surprising amount of backlash for not living up to those lofty expectations (yes, ridiculous ones considering CT was lightning in a bottle even among a dream team of developers and producers).
Same. I had my eye on this because anything that remotely looks like the next Pharaoh or Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom always catches my eye. There was also so. much. micro. I’d rather be shuffling citizens or buildings around than manually selecting what plants to harvest. Plus I hate the name, lol.
LiS2 wasn’t my favorite. It started to feel like misery porn after a while, not to mention bordering on the absurd with the variety of situations they put the kids through. I think the story would have been stronger without the cult chapter. Expanding on the themes in the last chapter might have been a better choice and more consistent with the overall narrative. I will say, though, the endings are solid in the “choices matter” department. Best in the series with that, and a standout in gaming in that category.
I liked Before the Storm and True Colors, so I’m definitely looking forward to Deck Nine continuing the series with Double Exposure.
Yes, there are going to be opinion pieces like this one filling the space for a major news story like this one, but there’s still room for proper journalism right now. I recommend folks check out PC Gamer’s interview with an IP attorney that worked in Tokyo (which was also the second link in this posted article).
Software patents are a thorny topic, and it’s worthwhile for enthusiasts of the industry or those interested in IP law to read up on the concept in general. There’s risk for Nintendo here, and I found Sigmon’s offhand comment about how Nintendo’s ramped up legal hiring to be particularly interesting.