Didn’t Epic just win an anticompetitive lawsuit against Google, off the back of losing a similar anticompetitive lawsuit against Apple?
Methinks they’ll be coming back for round 2, and this will be the provocation that will give Epic a win. Regardless of your thoughts and feelings on Epic, I think we can agree that Apple is a shitty company and they could do with an L.
Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon’s Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it’s time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3’s worlds were by comparison, I don’t think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.
Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki’s ambition.
People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda’s writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.
A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I’m not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.
It’s going to mean smaller selections of games, more gambling/gacha bullshit, and “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” will dominate the industry. When licensing runs out for music, they’ll just pull a game instead of trying to “fix” it, if it’s not profitable enough. We’re entering an era where there will be a dead-zone of lost media and history because so much of it is increasingly locked up behind corporate barriers.
I have some bad news about the past few years for you…
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I’ll choose to believe that the “then” era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as during the 80s when you’d see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don’t think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
They tried for like a decade before finally giving up. Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons while trying to work on their gaming arm, and some of them have actually stuck. I would expect titles to be sold on Steam until Phil Spencer retires.
It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.
Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.
I totally apologize, you’ve unlocked a memory. It’s so good in KOTOR that my brain doesn’t remember it’s a cRPG. I’m really hoping that if it gets a remake, it keeps all the guts of the original combat system, and doesn’t get simplified to a toggle between real time and pause.
To me, it fell into the same trap basically every cRPG falls into; late game combat is a chore. Once the number of enemies and skills you have to juggle gets high enough, you can’t realistically use real-time on the harder fights, but you can run into so many enemies that turn-based takes forever.
I don’t even really mean that as a criticism of Larian, since nobody else ever managed to fix that issue either. It’s a big reason why the genre died off for so long.
I mean, Larian isn’t even a AAA studio. They’re still technically an independent studio, though with the success and polish of Divinity I think most would have considered them AA even before BG:3. Also you’d need a lot of evidence to convince me that any cRPG isn’t a product of antiquated design, there’s a reason the genre completely died off. From my experience playing it, even Larian couldn’t figure out how to make combat with 20+ enemies feel fun, a problem nearly every cRPG has had for years.
No, not even remotely. The biggest game of the year was an antiquated cRPG, followed by a bunch of sequels and remakes. The industry as a whole has been rocked with scandal after scandal, with the most recent being the large, widespread Christmas layoffs. Innovative gameplay is now something that completely eludes AAA studios, who only seem to know how to regurgitate trends popularized by better games.
2023 was another shite year for gaming, and rewarding it with brain-dead articles like this is why 2024 probably won’t be any better.
I mean, Call of Duty: Another One is one of the best selling games of the year, despite even casuals lambasting it online. I think devs want to feel like they’re making something people want to play though, rather than feeling like they’re shovelling out garbage for the hogs.
Definitely should give it another try if you still have it. The writing and creativity of the quests is still top tier, but now the combat is incredibly fun. You probably can use that controller, Steam is pretty good about third party controllers these days, but I wouldn’t know much. It’ll definitely play well on a controller though, though you might want to grab the keyboard if you’re going to do any advanced inventory fiddlin.
Best: System Shock: turns out the 90s darling gal can still run with the best of them in 2023 thanks to Nightdive’s excellent remake. Citadel Station was a real blast to explore. It almost made me disappointed to see how little gaming has advanced since that time, I’d have expected to view the remake as a relic of a simpler time. Instead I played something way more fun than the typical hand-holdy shooters of today.
Cyberpunk 2077: Update 2.0 made this a real videogame. I absolutely hated playing Cyberpunk 2077 when it released, so much that I refunded it. The combat felt awful and floaty, the RPG systems felt stupid and poorly thought out, and don’t even get me started on the bugs. 2.0 is the reason to buy the game again, and with modding support already available I have a feeling this game is going to grow the kinda legs of Witcher 3 and Skyrim. CD-Projekt Red managed a real miracle. Oh, and the DLC is pretty rad too.
Warframe: There’s been a lotta new content added to Warframe this year, and it’s all been pretty good! I was a little worried about the game considering the change in leadership, but Rebecca Ford knows what the players want and seems really skilled at walking the fine line that makes a grind enjoyable. If you’ve never played, and have always wanted to play a mass murderer in space with magic powers, I’d recommend hopping in.
Worst:
Elden Ring: Miyazaki please where is the DLC. It’s been two years, I just want to play through a new poison swamp.