Idk, I know I’m in the minority, but the stuff I don’t experience in a game is just as important as the stuff I do experience.
As someone who played WoW as a kid, the world always felt bigger and more memorable because there was stuff I wasn’t geared/skilled/determined/lucky/whatever enough to see. Then during WotLK they made a concerted effort to ensure everyone could see all the content. Suddenly the world felt small. Less like a world and more like a series of checkboxes that you tick off and say “done, onto the next game”.
I really appreciate when the creators say “not everyone will see everything, and that’s ok, that’s how we intended it”. Elden Ring is really good about this. I’m about to finish my first playthrough, I know ive missed a lot of stuff, but that’s OK, my playthrough was uniquely mine.
The vast majority of the game is optional so that you can get to the final boss and see an ending. I remember getting the normal ending and thinking “really? That fight was trivial”. Turns out the minimal play-through is tuned for a low skill level. The “true” ending is another story though.
“Linear” is not a word I would use to describe it, hah. I’m pretty sure you can go back to the start, make different choices, and play another 70+ hours of content you’ve never seen. Which is even more insane.
Ah, I guess I didn’t know they didn’t have the rights anymore. Tbh I played through AW2 and didn’t connect that Casey was a reference to Max Payne lol.
What do you mean legally distinct? You know that’s Sam Lake, writer and creative director at Remedy, and face model for Max Payne 1/2, both also developed by Remedy?
As someone still playing through vanilla Elden Ring, none of that means anything to me. And if my first 80h are any indication, I’ll finish the game and still have no idea.
Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.
Not quite the same, but in WoW, you couldn’t talk to the opposing faction. So sometimes people would make characters like this just to hang out in the other faction’s zones and communicate using only emotes. Good times…