A little while back, Netflix started putting out some games through its app. No further microtransactions, just a game (I think). It gets some good-hearted efforts like Valiant Hearts: Coming Home and Oxenfree. I feel like the best thing for genuine mobile games could be some kind of App Store that curates just to things like that, and disconnects from the past of cheap crap.
Imagine a popular subscription service like Game Pass tying into well-built story-based games, for instance. I think it could work out well.
The solution is slow depletion of title power in order to drive competition. Basically, encourage each others and yourself to explore other games that aim for the same goals as the original property, ideally expanded with some vision of innovation.
For Pokémon, players could likely try out Casette Beasts. For Silent Hill, there are other survival horror properties examining psychological properties of their heroes, like Cry of Fear and The Park.
Much as I love abridged series and mods, I sometimes feel like there are people too invested in existing franchises that could have made something substantial if they ventured their creativity out of fan works. I’m sort of one of them - I made a lot of TF2 animations back in the day, and past a point realized for all my work I had nothing I could claim to have truly been made “from scratch”.
Not to disparage parody makers, just that I understand the sentiment.
I’ve got so many Like a Dragon games in my queue I don’t even know which to go for yet. I still didn’t finish Yakuza 6, bought Judgment 2, and now game pass has Isshin and MWEHN.
The one thing that pulls me away from JRPGs is when their story is too generic. All the best ones I’ve enjoyed had some truly unpredictable, or even just highly dramatic, elements to their story.
The act is very important in the event of an SEC investigation. Since I don’t hold stock in the company, I’m safe to say this, but basically if they wrote “Yeah, I don’t have any faith in the company itself, I just caught Wall Street tycoons making an insane short sell” then that comment could become a major exhibit in an exchange fraud case that makes them forfeit their shares.
Definitely hated their use of universal ammo to cater to their weird weapon system. Maybe I’m not quite into this kind of horror, but I also didn’t care much for the direction the story took right at its ending.
They’re often forced to equalize global prices because of sites like G2A. Even if they want to sell a game for the price of a Zimbabwean loaf of bread, G2A picks up a thousand copies of that and resells them in America, driving the global revenue down.
So, now no one in Zimbabwe gets cheap local prices because there’s no such thing as a “local” price. And the defenders of G2A use their own mental gymnastics to justify it.
Don’t trust the software company to do what they have made legally sound claims to doing, and that hundreds of thousands of people have said they’ve done.
But do trust the script kiddies writing crackers not to install invisible keyloggers and ad trackers.
Given the unremarkable difference in appearance I’ve seen on the “ultra modern” Unreal Engine 5 demos, I’m all for it. We can’t get the new generation right yet, let’s stay on the old where we can manage a consistent framerate.
I understand you have a lot of demos to cover, though I can’t help but feel there’s some dishonesty about the Robocop demo. First mission gets you used to killing gangsters in simple corridors, though after that the demo actually gives a lot of focus on side quests, and very traditional “community policing”, including detective work, and many occasions of trying to find the best balance between community lenience and upholding justice. I even managed to avoid a gunfight in one case by finding clues and negotiating some of the gangsters down.
Maybe you played all that part and it just didn’t feel significant. I admit, it just felt pleasantly unexpected to me.
Hoping for fun times, but I guess I’m a little worried that the story for this expansion might lose appeal without a good conflict.
It’s very possible to make a well-written, region-localized storyline with lowered stakes than “potential end of all life”, I’m just uncertain how well they’ll do that given what the Warrior of Light has been through.
I was disappointed to hear allegations of toxic work environments in Moon Studios, the people who made indie darling Ori and the Blind Forest. So while abusive employers are certainly an important issue, it doesn’t appear to be one that’s specific to large companies. Furthermore, it was never going to get solved under the supervision of Bobby Kotick - a man who was never going to leave unless something like the Microsoft deal happened.
There’s lots of horrible companies in the world, and I salute anyone’s efforts to boycott the ones doing horrible shit. Part of the reason I’m ambivalent about the merger is, I don’t even buy (or care about the success of) Activision games. But I don’t see that as a topic directly relevant to corporate merging/growth. Two publishers merge, that hasn’t added to the amount of employee abuse going on in each of their studios.