The eight main heroes are receiving an alert about the empire starting its invasion, and the hero’s cousin is leading the charge? That scene deserves good VA. It’s dramatic, plot important, and can get you invested in characters.
A farmer is giving you a radiant quest to kill an optional boss? That kind of thing absolutely doesn’t need VA. It even means that people cycling through content can speed-read his introduction, and aren’t forced to listen to horrendous voice acting.
The only thing I wanted for the corruptor or was just to slightly reduce its giga giga armor so it doesn’t take a whole supply drop’s worth of ammo to whittle down. I know it’s meant to have a weak point system after you’ve foamed it off, but it didn’t seem to work for me, especially with the many low-accuracy weapons you tend to use and other enemies around.
People have floated this idea of “dockable devices” for decades. Microsoft even made a Windows Phone that did it. The only time it worked was the Nintendo Switch, where they sold the dock together - and even then, I think their studies showed that a majority of players only play in one mode.
So it comes down to consumer friction. What do they get in one box, and how likely are they to buy a second?
I get the impression any more urgent gaps will be covered by the community.
I’ve used my Deck in its desktop mode, plugged in a dock, for extended periods when I didn’t have access to my PC, and it was a decent enough experience for the most part.
Any chance of this being a flop? Years ago, we would have said no way, but we’ve seen some high-profile screwups before. It’s certainly at the time period where Rockstar might have brain drain on its better developers.
It’s great that the well-paid gamers have their options of exciting, linear singleplayer games. Realistically, if we want AAA gaming to be defined by that, it needs to be profitable enough, which means people buying those games on release consistently, and even maybe accepting the $70 price tags.
Some people do so - but many others are only buying one or two games a year due to shrinking personal budget. And those games need to fill the hundreds of spare hours they’ll have during that year.
The situation could be reversed if more people had a generously-sized personal budget; if they weren’t fearful of managing their rent each month, or debating whether to save a few pennies from their paycheck for retirement. $40 or even $70 for the hot new 10-hour singleplayer game of the month shouldn’t be a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it’s everything in a world with so much income disparity.
A little while back, Netflix started putting out some games through its app. No further microtransactions, just a game (I think). It gets some good-hearted efforts like Valiant Hearts: Coming Home and Oxenfree. I feel like the best thing for genuine mobile games could be some kind of App Store that curates just to things like that, and disconnects from the past of cheap crap.
Imagine a popular subscription service like Game Pass tying into well-built story-based games, for instance. I think it could work out well.
The solution is slow depletion of title power in order to drive competition. Basically, encourage each others and yourself to explore other games that aim for the same goals as the original property, ideally expanded with some vision of innovation.
For Pokémon, players could likely try out Casette Beasts. For Silent Hill, there are other survival horror properties examining psychological properties of their heroes, like Cry of Fear and The Park.
Much as I love abridged series and mods, I sometimes feel like there are people too invested in existing franchises that could have made something substantial if they ventured their creativity out of fan works. I’m sort of one of them - I made a lot of TF2 animations back in the day, and past a point realized for all my work I had nothing I could claim to have truly been made “from scratch”.
Not to disparage parody makers, just that I understand the sentiment.
I’ve got so many Like a Dragon games in my queue I don’t even know which to go for yet. I still didn’t finish Yakuza 6, bought Judgment 2, and now game pass has Isshin and MWEHN.
The one thing that pulls me away from JRPGs is when their story is too generic. All the best ones I’ve enjoyed had some truly unpredictable, or even just highly dramatic, elements to their story.
The act is very important in the event of an SEC investigation. Since I don’t hold stock in the company, I’m safe to say this, but basically if they wrote “Yeah, I don’t have any faith in the company itself, I just caught Wall Street tycoons making an insane short sell” then that comment could become a major exhibit in an exchange fraud case that makes them forfeit their shares.
Definitely hated their use of universal ammo to cater to their weird weapon system. Maybe I’m not quite into this kind of horror, but I also didn’t care much for the direction the story took right at its ending.