I’ve played most of the original Soulsborne games and this is my first game in the genre not made by Fromsoftware. I’m quite enjoying it! I like the loot approach to gear and the Ki pulse is a great addition. Bosses do feel quite a bit different from Fromsoftware ones, blocking being this strong makes it a lot easier to learn and fight them.
What layoffs? If you’re refering to the posts earlier today: The layoffs happened at Hasbro and Larian was only commenting on it because they worked with them. Larian itself had no layoffs I know of.
I won’t support any store that sabotages Linux on purpose. Just earlier today I read a lame excuse for them to not support Linux with Fortnite despite only needing to click a single checkbox. Of course, it’s easy not getting tempted since I don’t have a windos system to begin with.
Same. I haven’t looked up the nominees, winners or even categories. The next day I saw Monster Hunter Wilds and Metaphor news and that’s really all I care about. I don’t get award shows in general since they don’t change anything for me - the product doesn’t get better or worse depending on the outcome.
Kinda a nice example why it is bullshit to rate stuff on a one-dimensional scale. Given the right point in my life, I too would like the calculator app more than Elden Ring, for example during a math exam back when +/-/*// were all the operations I needed. Good times.
Unfortunately you’re right seeing how well the Super Mario RPG remake does. They could have put the original on their online service and worked on a new one instead. That’s something I dislike about pretty much all media.
If I want nostalgia, I go back to the original anyways.
I may be an outlier here, but I don’t think remakes should be done at all anymore. They were great when the medium was still new and we made major jumps between generations or when we started to figure 3D out. Nowadays, I can’t even tell the difference between a PS4 and PS5 game. The medium is evolved enough to just go back and play the originals without them feeling dated in a bad way. Take for example the demon souls remake: Yes, it looked nice, but people argue to this day whether or not it’s better. The gameplay is identical. Or even worse: Look at Pokemon. The remake for Gen 4 is worse than the original and didn’t even include Platinum content. Instead of wasting dev time on a full on remake, they could have ported Platinum to the switch and called it a day. A remake probably only makes sense anymore if you can’t port a game at all. Make new games instead.
Why would it be a straw man? It’s exaggerated for sure, but the point being: If you pay per theoretical hour of gameplay, games will include a lot more low quality padding.
Play times does in no way mean quality or dev time. I could make a game right know, in less than 30 minutes, where you have a single button. You win at a billionen presses. I’ll take my thousand dollars, thank you.
Now you might think that nobody would buy it and that’s fair. The secret is to continue making games like normal and tack my button at the end of my 5h campaign. If everyone does it you either pay up or stop playing.
What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
Paid cosmetics being fine stems from a time where not every other game weaponized FOMO by basically hacking your brain. Yes, it is still easily avoidable by a lot of people, but we shouldn’t allow vulnerable people being preyed on.
Around the midpoint of a game, often while still enjoying it, I start asking myself how close to the end I am. Let’s Plays are great for this. I can just open a playlist and read episode titles until I’m around the same point I’m actually at. Let’s say e.g. 45/67 videos or 2/3. If I rarely do this, maybe even not at all, I’m really into the game.
For context, I mainly play quite linear JRPGs. For other games, I usually just look at howlongtobeat.com and compare it to my playtime.