I don’t need an EA key, and I’m not really one for jokes, but for some reason you just reminded me of this wild article I read recently - you might have seen it; apparently there was a short-term art exhibit featuring Salvador Dali’s works at some museum a couple months ago. The artwork had been displayed for two or three weeks already when it was discovered - by a patron, no less - that every single one of the works on display were forgeries. Absolutely wild. Apparently nobody inspects the Spanish exposition.
I bet they’re going to get a ton of sales off of this, because the campaign - especially the beginning of the campaign - is a masterpiece. Absolutely fantastic gameplay. It’s not until you get most of the way through and into the endgame that the cracks start to show, but oh boy do they show.
Strongly recommend that anyone who plays this this weekend and enjoys it give the reviews a good read if you’re considering buying it. Also, you should know that the game will be free to play once it’s out of early access.
All that said, I do strongly recommend giving it a try this weekend if you enjoy ARPGs. It has a very different feel compared to other ARPGs on the market and if it clicks with you, you’ll really enjoy the campaign. I’d strongly recommend playing Solo Self-Found, or at least just ignoring the player market. You can trivialize the gameplay if you buy gear from players; the game feels very much balanced around SSF (and player to player trading is a terrible experience anyway).
If they didn’t want to over hype or give false hope on development for the game, maybe they shouldn’t have hyped the game off the back of their first game more than 6 years too early, idiotic choice imo.
Hey, just in case you’re unaware, they kickstarted the original Hollow Knight, and one of the stretch goals (which was met) was a second playable character (Hornet) as a DLC that backers would get for free. While they were making that DLC, the scope just expanded to the point of it being an entire standalone game (Silksong). They had to communicate to backers that they were forestalling the promised DLC in favor of a sequel; the cat would have been out of the bag then whether they wanted it to be or not. Better for them to announce the sequel publicly at the same time, rather than have it leak via their Kickstarter update.
If you enjoy the old school vibe, City of Heroes has been revived through a community effort, and is free with all of the original content plus some new stuff. This has been given official blessing so it’s not going to disappear suddenly.
I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but one compelling reason I’ve heard is that adult content has a considerably higher chargeback rate than other content, making the risk much higher for payment processors. This makes sense - I could absolutely see some horny person buying some adult content, getting off to it, then doing a chargeback in their moment of introspection.
Looking at this list of 3rd party games, I wonder if the reason for this is that most of these games have been available on other platforms already for quite some time. If you were interested in e.g. Hades 2, unless you just didn’t have a PC available, you probably weren’t waiting for an at-the-time unannounced Switch 2 to play it on. Heck, Cyberpunk is 5 years old at this point. Street Fighter 6 is 2 years old and was on a lot of other platforms.
I expect we might see different results when we see more 3rd party games getting simultaneous launch on Switch 2 and other platforms.
I love the callout that the story was delivered via text logs, as if voice acting was typically present in anything except FMV-based games in that time period. “Bog standard FPS” is a really funky term for an era when there were only really a few well-known FPS games out there at all.
You’ve got to remember that Marathon 1 was released in 1994, the same year Doom II was released. What else was there at that point? You really had Doom, Marathon, Pathways Into Darkness (also a Bungie title and only sort of an FPS at all), Wolfenstein 3D, System Shock, Hexen / Heretic, and some really niche ones that most people had never even heard of at the time, never mind now.
Agreed on this. They’re just so good at making new interesting things that it feels like a bit of a shame to waste time on sequels. I even really enjoyed Pyre, despite it being generally considered the weakest of their games; it was such an interesting setting and premise.
Bastion and Transistor both had very satisfying conclusions to their stories and revisiting either doesn’t feel necessary.
I didn’t say that the overall review is ‘mostly negative’, to be clear; I said that almost all of the (many) negative reviews that exist seem to be talking about the failure to live up to remnant 1.
Thanks for the detailed review; it’s helpful to have a nice comparison between the two. I did enjoy Remnant 1 quite a bit. Would you say the DLC you played is worth buying even considering the generally mixed reviews?
Can you elaborate? Specifically because almost all of the negative Steam reviews, of which there are many, say more or less the opposite - that it tries to do that, but fails to capture what made Remnant so good.
(Not to criticize your opinion, to be clear; it’s on sale and I was strongly considering it as someone who likes Remnant. Sell it for me?)
The Borderlands franchise is really past its prime at this point, anyway. I’ve got absolutely no issue skipping this one. Might pick it up when it’s on sale for $10 in a few years. The franchise really peaked with BL2; it’s been down hill since.
No, EGS is plenty shitty now; what they’re saying is that EGS’s one singular saving grace - the free games they give away - likely won’t last for the reason they outlined.