Not sure I care about who will win that one, but if Sony can prove tenc $0.10 actually came to them to get a Horizon licence, only to release “can’t believe it’s not Horizon” shortly after not getting it, that would be quite the smoking gun.
It’s basically a proof that looking as similar as possible was their intention all along.
I am pretty sure the “every game doesn’t need something new” era had already started in the mid-80s. And new mechanics, and new takes on old ones, still happen.
I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest Builders 2. The game isn’t voiced, most of dialogues are classic RPG text boxes that you can speed up and skip, BUT. There are special lines of dialogue that are “voices” in a character’s head.
They are unskippable, and they’re like a dozen words each that stay on screen for about 20 seconds or more. Some of those dialogues have about 6-7 of those. It’s unbearable, and it’s genuinely the worst part of starting a game again. Hell, it was the worst part of doing it the first time, too.
Somehow English localisation created this, in Japanese the messages go a lot faster. Though even those couldn’t be skipped, because… fuck you that’s why.
If we’re complaining about bad UX, and speaking about Soul Reaver, games with no subtitle option. Or bad, unreadable subtitles that spoil 2 minutes of dialogue at once (and that one’s for you, Bioshock).
That’s the “Quadruple A” studio right? The one that was supposed to have “unlimited budget” so it could create “groundbreaking video game experiences”?
And they ended up not releasing anything before they’re shut down. A+ management there, Microsoft.
I mean, it’s true. Killing game services in a way which ensures people have absolutely no way to use the games they bought is… a choice.
And now a million Europeans have just officially expressed that they don’t agree with “developers” (really, publisher higher-ups) being free to choose that.
It’s not a very notable thing, and we don’t see who the hands belong to, but it just seems like what they went for IMO.
Cadence of Hyrule is pretty good, more forgiving and more of a connected map with item-based puzzles compared to Crypt of the Necrodancer. The map is reordered between games, but it’s mostly designed rather than fully procedural. It’s fun.
It borrows heavily from a Link to the Past visually, but has references to many episodes. You’ve got enemies from Breath of the Wild, Gerudo, Goron, even a full Majora’s Mask inspired DLC.