Hopefully slinger won’t have the same softening mechanic as in Iceborn.
Speculatively, they seem to have replaced the mechanic with monster wounds and focus strikes, as shown in the focus video. I’m glad to have them keep some kind of mechanic to emphasize the importance of hitting certain parts of the monstet, because base world was far too forgiving with Weakness Exploit and ignore hitzone builds.
You’re right, but at least there are challenges to be found in FFXIV. Attempting to run past monsters and click the thing will result in death. There are clear bosses where taking you hands off the keyboard for 5-10 seconds means you won’t make it. I am sure the high-end of ESO has genuine challenges, but I couldn’t find them. This is a game where you can genuinely ignore enemies and afk during combat and you’ll still survive. o
To be clear, I think it’s devs really hit on a specific market: there are a lot of people out there who genuinely want a “wind-down, complete quests in vibrant world and feel like a hero” MMO. I was just bored out of my tree after a few days because I am the furthest thing from that audience. Casually getting into ESO, it is truly a challenge-free landscape, far more so than even the intensely story and social driven FFXIV.
It’s not a good article. I was following along until, 5 minutes in, it suddenly decided to be detailing and describing exactly what AI and LLMs are. Like, long after showing some of the ways it’s hurting the industry, presumably to pad words.
For every shitty article pushing AI hype out there, there’s a shittt article pushing AI hate. Extremism generates clicks.
I thinks there are some nuggets of good information in there. The bits on first-hand accounts from former and current Activision employees, and on how it’s mostly the concept artists that are hurt is interesting. But you really have to wade through a mound of shit to get there, and I genuinely don’t have the patience to wade through the second half and see if there any more truth in this soft mound of turd that Wired called journalism.
BPM: Bullets Per Minute. A boomer shooter had an affair with he rhythm game genre and this was the outcome. Amazing game, assuming you don’t mind rhythm games, and an immaculate one if you actively like rhythm games.
Neon White is technically a shooter, but in most ways does not play or feel like one. It’s better described as a first person puzzle/platformer, but I would still recommend it, as it is an incredible game.
Both of the Doom ports run insanely well on the Switch. Seemingly impossibly well considering how dated the console is.
Warframe is good, free and playing surprisingly well on Switch.
A strictly anti-capitalist fever dream adventure RPG getting completely consumed and milked by greedy capitalists who added nothing of value to its creation is peak this timeline.
I just fucking want Elite to be good. I could shoot pirates and 'goids all day if getting a ship ready to do so wasn’t as enjoyable as running dental floss into my mouth and out my asshole.
As a “space games guy” is there anything out there that is as satisfying to simply fly around in as Elite Dangerous is without the absolute shit fuck of ass-backwards, tedious and boring mechanics?
I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS and VR headset, but I will be damned if I am going to roll around on a moon praying I trip over some precious metals just so I can play logistics hot potatoes trying to figure out how I am going to get my module to the relevant station, upgraded, and then placed into the ship I designed it for. Elite is such an incredible space cockpit sim, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent me from wanting to actually play it. I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.
The endgame Sephiroth fight was definitely forced. It reeked of “well, he’s been the secret antagonist all game, so we can’t just disclude him from the finale” kind of thinking.
I liked the more persistent villain lurking in Cloud’s broken mind, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and put a pseudo capstone on that story thread.
That’s so fascinating, tbh. I mean, different strokes, so I can’t judge, but it’s the impressively deep strategy they’ve baked into Remake’s combat that I am particularly impressed by. That said, it makes sense though that if you dislike Tales combat, you’d dislike Remake’s combat. They’re not the same persay, but they’re cut from the same cloth imo.
I can’t get over just how much better Remake is compared to the original, so you do you, I guess. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised to see the ways they’re engaging with telling a different story and taking the name “remake” very literally. I was seriously concerned they were just going to sell the original story again in three seperate parts as full-price titles.
It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.
But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.
This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.
It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.
It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.