I’ve been playing Division 2, finding a lot of fun gear that promises skill enhancements to the team on various activations - but it ends up feeling irrelevant when most players you team up with use rush tactics that dump everything into damage, meaning there’s no time to process those.
I really like the feel of action games that punish players for acting too quickly; rewarding more deliberate gameplay (even if the net result isn’t really “hard”). I wonder if Helldivers would meet that, but I didn’t like the first game and it sounds like they have server issues.
I enjoyed what I played of it, but…ran into a game-breaking bug. Not sure what else to say. They’re probably right that if city builders are best on mouse, you can’t easily enjoy that on Switch.
It’s a big stretch on the definition, but try the Hitman Trilogy. There are tons and tons of solutions to achieve the kills without trying for tricksy, difficult stealth challenges - just by recalling a bunch of hints you’ve seen/heard by wandering around the region, and combining them in fun ways.
Basically, if you see that the target is inside a complex guarded by two armed men, you shouldn’t be trying to flick a coin to see if you can turn a guard just long enough to use your garrot on one, and hide him around a corner, all in 10 seconds. You SHOULD, instead, look for options like:
Find a pizza delivery guy, get him alone, knock him out, take his uniform and pizza, and greet the guards so they let you in
Set off an alarm in a nearby room that causes a guard to go shut it off
Call the target on the phone and tell him you want to meet about his secrets. Then, he leaves the complex himself with one bodyguard to your proposed meeting spot “right underneath the suspended ornamental anchor”.
What’s often misleading about the games is they orient themselves around all this equipment you can bring in, but the best way to explore a lot of levels is with no equipment at all (sometimes not even a pistol). Granted, the game changes in speedruns and other challenges, but it DOES feel like playing a Monkey Island game at times.
If you don’t like the jank of emulation or the risks of going to pirate sites: An Xbox Series S, Game Pass, and a few controllers is an okay replacement. There’s a bunch of Rare games on Game Pass, classic Goldeneye, and they even have stuff like Timesplitters in the store.
I don’t expect it’d even be worth $20 to me, but I can sort of understand the online appeal. Sometimes having a relatively basic game happen in a shared open world, where people can choose to cooperate, adds some fun moments. The Division and Sea of Thieves would be examples of that. Watch Dogs 2 also had some very good times where you might be driving around, and without any “prompts” or loading, have a chance to join a midcity chase with/against another player.
I noticed there’s now a Batman Arkham Knight port on Switch. As you might expect, like a lot of other AAA ports, it doesn’t run so well. Seems there’s demand for these games on there, indicating a lot of players only end up with one console. Even if Nintendo can work with their low-power devices, I get the impression third party developers will generally need more to get Unreal Engine going smooth.
It’s such a tragedy that Xbox controllers are the only major controller not to have any gyro. We could’ve had cross-platform shooters that allow for gyro ironsight aiming, or even allow it on PC (it’s currently a common option on Steam Deck, with some tinkering)
From article notes, it sounds like disjointed artistic messaging between departments, in this case development and marketing.
For what it’s worth, it is RARE for a developer to directly throw marketing under the bus by saying anything other than “We stand by our messaging blah blah”, so for the president to agree the trailer is bad is kind of significant, and might even get him internal flak.
I think the process of taking your time and flipping off the marketing managers is a good one; but I’ve also seen signs that if development takes TOO long, the internal creative momentum can kind of grind to a halt or even be overtaken as they become outdated against advances in game design.
The developers are generally gamers too, and the passion for development is often fueled by excitement for the concept - excitement that can fade the same way as with fans (granted, they have to be more patient than most fans). Sticking with something too long can even lead to low confidence in that concept.
I can be patient, I just hope their approach hasn’t lead to internal burnout.
If they wanted to focus on live service, I’m surprised they made a trilogy of games. In the meantime a bunch of other devs just kept adding content to the one game their players play.
Not good for Payday’s fans to compete within their trilogy for attention.
Even if I agree some games have gone too far on censorship, I don’t like having this totalitarian attitude to any kind of “offense”.
There are certain weird themes I really like in niche games, but I acknowledge if they were “thrown in” to a game about shooting or adventure, would sour the experience for a lot of common players. I’d point to perverted character designs as a common one - sexualized character designs are obviously appealing to some players, but to others they can actually make it hard to get absorbed in the story of a game like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Nier Automata. Even for a series like Persona, there have been players that decided “What weeb shit” and abandon the game because of the way female characters get harassed at times.
It’s easy to call it “political”, but politics comes from personal opinions - and it can genuinely affect how people view the media. These days I have a much more vehement reaction to stereotyped Native-American depictions (“Indians”) over when I was a kid. I doubt it’d make me hate Tomb Raider, but I can see why they’d have a warning.