I said this elsewhere, but essentially it looks like a "Turn your brain off" movie which kind of hits the notes that Borderlands is known for while also having a bit of a fun house mirror / "We've got [game] at home" feeling to it.
Overall though, it feels... forced. From the limited bits you can hear, I don't think Jack Black really works for Claptrap (no reason to not just keep the original VA outside of "Jack Black is so in right now" or some shit); the dialog feels overly filtered, if that makes any sense.... Like too many people edited it so that it achieved maximum 'for the lolz' (not that the first two games (the ones I actually have experience with) were the peak of writing, mind you); and I don't have any feelings one way or the other for Kevin Hart, but for this role I think he was also a bad casting choice (but what do I know, I've only seen a quick trailer... maybe he nails it).
Action looks decent enough, and I do appreciate that (at least from the looks of things) they're pushing Cate's character as the lead.
Assassin’s Creed Origins the gameplay started getting repetitive very quickly. Even though I liked the ancient Egyptian settings and the beautiful graphics, I couldn’t follow the nonsensical plot.
Man, that was the only one of the newer style that I liked... Bayek was pretty cool, and it felt 'fresh'... it doesn't hurt that it ticked off two of my preferences: exploration and combat (say what you will about hiding in knee high grass, I love me some stealth). Some of the bits did rub me the wrong way, like no 1-hit kills, but I liked the weapon choices and combat options enough that I had a good time overall.
That being said, I can't for the life of me remember anything about the story of the game so... I guess I just turned that part of my brain off after a while.
The more recent ones went too far in terms of world size, so it went from "I wonder what's over that hill?" to "I'll never complete filling in this map so why even bother?"... which sucks, because Kassandra was pretty cool too (not sure how the viking character was done because I didn't even bother with that game after bouncing off Odyssey).
I'm with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.
Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden... but in a game like GTA? Yawn.
For games that are in genres that I'd actually play:
Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just... underwhelmed. I didn't really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.
I've since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me... but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don't really get it because I can't get over the hump.
The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don't like the combat, honestly. I've tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn't manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn't having fun.
Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is 'going backwards is hard' in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn't get the English PSP port... that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn't resonate with me as much as the other ones did... Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn't hit the same.
Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn't do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or 'walking sims' or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don't tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.
But the thing is, you generally don't just magically have the ability to seamlessly plop an ad into a part of the game. That kind of thing needs to be purpose built, to either have the option to plop an ad on the main menu + map, or to (more heinously) plop an ad ANYWHERE in the game.
So worst case scenario (well, not WORST because the game doesn't, like, go back in time to kill your grandfather or something) is that someone higher up said "Hey, what if we could put an ad anywhere in the game? Get the team working on that" and it was done... best case scenario is that I guess their games are coded so well that they can just seamlessly plop in a chunk of code that doesn't break anything else and just works?
But going off of past experience with Ubisoft games, that best case scenario is kind of laughable (insert a screenshot of the guy's face texture not loading for AC Unity here).
Even taken at face value, it means that they purposely built the ability to have an ad pop up not just on the main menu screen, but anywhere... or at least (giving them a strong benefit of the doubt) on the map screen.
The "error" was that someone popped it into the "show up on map" area of their code and not the "show up on the main menu" area of their code... but the bigger, more glaring problem is that it is even allowed to be a thing that exists as an option.
So even with all that allowance, the fact that it can be a thing is absolutely terrible and it doesn't matter that it happened as an accident, but it shouldn't be an option regardless... is the point of my rambling.
There are third party memory card solutions out there... essentially they hijack the cart slot and allow you to stick in a standard micro SD card to use as storage.
I have two of the standard PSV memory cards (I think a 4gb one that came with my Assassin's Creed bundle, and another 32gb one that I spent like $100 on when the finally dropped the prices into a realm that was at least within viewing distance of sanity), but being able to stick in a cheap-o micro SD card and have ALL the games I purchased (and some extras...) is pretty great.
And because I feel like I'm legally obligated to say this as a Vita owner, hacking the thing was the best decision I made outside of buying the handheld in the first place, when it comes to the PSV. It's way easier now than when I initially wanted to try (and was too scared to do so when the handheld was still being supported), and as long as you follow up-to-date instructions you should be golden.
The main problem is that its not enough to be competitive with Steam at this point... you need to put out something so good that it give people enough of a reason to leave the comfort of Steam... you need Steam and then another layer of goodness on top of Steam.
This is the same issue that a lot of MMOs had when trying to become a WoW killer. You not only needed to have pretty much everything Blizzard put into the game, but more on top because otherwise why would anyone bother to leave the comforts of Azeroth to play something that is maybe marginally better, or a possibly worse experience?
Microtransactions are 'small' purchases made in a game (or via some kind of store that allows you to buy stuff to be used inside of a game).
DLC is any additional downloadable content that is not included with the game (so something like a day 1 patch wouldn't be considered DLC, I'd say).
All microtransations are DLC, but not all DLC are microtransactions, generally (before someone comes along with some kind of physical microtransaction or something I guess)
I personally just view microtransations as anything that isn't 'playable content'. So buying a mount from an in-game store would be a microtransaction, while buying an expansion wouldn't be. Map packs kind of blur the line in this instance, because one could argue that they're essentially 'world cosmetics', but its a hard and fast rule and not something I'd try to enforce as a law, ya know?
I see this take a lot, and while I don't disagree... I think it downplays the number of people who DO make 'sensible' purchases in a lot of these games.
I personally don't bother with in-game purchases (I also rarely buy DLC... but I also sub to FFXIV regularly, and have all the content for Destiny 2, so sometimes I can be got) for cosmetics or especially boosts. I'd rather earn the items in game, or a step down, earn in-game currency to purchase those items instead because I'm, at the end of the day, paying for a game to play it and while I want to look good in game while doing so, I'm not gonna drop $15 on digital t-shirts.
But there are plenty of people who don't mind tossing down $60 additionally a year into a game like Destiny 2 for sparkly new transmog outfits from the Eververse store, and they'll see it as any sort of reason to do so ('because I have the money', 'because I want to support the developer', 'because I have to collect everything', 'because because because'), and we can't just pretend like its a handful of dudes dropping thousands of dollars while everyone else nobly boycotts the practice.
The big problem is that a company will look at something like World of Warcraft/Destiny at the height of their popularity and think "We want that!"
Then they'll put out a (we're being optimistic here) serviceable, good game with a respectable amount of content... but it won't be able to hold a candle to something that: already has that much content + more AND players who are already 'stuck' with the game (sunk cost, friends/family/community, etc).
So you put out a game, get a brief spurt of attention from people who are a bit bored of the same ol' same ol', but then once they breakneck through all the content you have in less than a month they turn around and head back to their comfort food game and never look back. Congratulations, you can now put out a master class on how to waste millions of dollars.
In order to make a game as a service now you need either an extremely good hook, or you need to not only be comparable to an existing game but also EXCEED what that game offers and continue to provide content at a staggering speed until you've coerced people to have invested enough in the game to then be their comfort food/sunk cost game of choice.
If Dark Souls had easier difficulties, they wouldn't have the reputation they do. People would turn down the difficulty instead of learning the bosses and how to beat them.
Which is hilarious because people 'turn down the difficulty' constantly by using summons or 'jolly cooperation' all the time in the games and don't seem to differentiate that from a difficulty option.
Superhard Games without difficulty options. Looking at you Soulsborne games; I appreciate that some people like a challenge, but I really think that whole genre would only benefit from giving the player options. I have noticed that seems to be getting more common though.
I'm torn on this... I love playing Dark Souls 1/2/3/etc for the world and the enemies and exploring and overcoming the difficulties and finding cool gear and weapons and trying out new builds.
But I also absolutely hate pretty much every single boss fight in the games.
Yeah, FFXIV makes is super convenient to revisit a place once you've already been there via the aetheryte, meaning you're probably not going to visit it on foot more than a few times. This means you don't really make that connection between zones (or at least, I didn't) and thus don't really view it as an interconnected world (the loading areas between each zone doesn't really help).
I'm struggling to give proper credit to WoW because I'm not sure if its the staggering amount of time I played the game, the time of my life when I played the game (younger brain retaining knowledge better?), or the seamless transition between zones which lends it to sticking in my memory so hard as a 'real, interconnected world'... probably a combination of the three, if we're being honest.