Not sure if you watched up to the end of season 4, but it ends on a cliffhanger. They were building to a final season that would answer the “Can humanity and AI coexist in the same world?” question that the series had been asking since the beginning.
I sincerely hope so. The later seasons weren’t perfect, but they were still interesting enough to leave me wanting more, and to have it just unceremoniously cut off stings pretty badly. Real Netflix move.
A game like Elden Ring I could get, but the player character gets a lot of facetime in Baldur’s Gate 3. Conversations/interactive cutscenes are a main pillar of that game.
Even if you wear a full helmet, of which there are relatively few compared to open face helmets, hats, circlets, etc., a lot of cutscenes still take place at camp or in other situations where your character takes off their armor and switches to casual clothing anyways.
And on top of that the game includes toggles to turn off headwear in cutscenes or always, which gives the character 100% facetime be they wearing a helmet or no. That’s more than what I’d call “split second” at least.
Graphics are debatable. 7 Rebirth has a larger, more fleshed out world, and the characters are a bit more emotive and varied, but there are definitely a few parts of the environment that feel a bit last-gen (water especially). They really nail interior clutter, though, so buildings feel so lived in.
16 is smaller in scale, and honestly doesn’t even have many comparable town environments to put up next to 7, but the field environments are simply gorgeous throughout. The give and take of visual budgeting at work, I guess.
Yes, I know a lot of people who barely touched the open world content and have just been blitzing the story.
I guess my take is that this is all a big step up from the older standard of grinding enemies outside of town for hours just to level up your materia, so I don’t mind the large volume of side objectives to do. Variety is always nice.
Valhalla was one of the few games that launched on newer consoles, with visual enhancements over the previous gen, which may have had something to do with it. People were looking for something that would take advantage of the hardware they just sank a lot of money on and there weren’t many choices on the market at the time.
I’d say Mirage, the more recent game, should be indicative enough of the health of the series and made them $250 million, which is still good but not Valhalla level.
I’m assuming that this one will perform better because a Japan game is what people have been clamoring for this whole time, but I think this is still going to demonstrate a downward trend for the series overall.
Ghost of Tsushima 2 is rumored to be announced sometime soon, though, and that’s what I’m holding out for.
I am guessing this is meant to be the Switch 2 launch title. With that system being delayed (it was supposed to be released this year but now it’s 2025), hopefully they’ll use the extra time to heavily polish the game and make it pretty.
Based on the trailer, I am assuming the entire game is self-contained within the city, though I’d expect it to be a lot bigger than the city was in X and Y.
Right, but what I was getting at with how prone to change online experiences inherently are, it seems odd to rely on reviews to begin with. Sure I suppose it is irresponsible for a publication to make claims about the quality of an online experience, knowing that there is no guarantee of consistency over time, but the customer also shouldn’t approach any online/live service experience with an expectation of consistency, because change is inherent to the model. Enjoy it while it lasts if it is fun, but again, caveat emptor.
The feeling of betrayal people have about online experiences is thankfully leading to pushback against live service models in general. Too many companies out there doing bait and switch bullshit.
If a game like Tekken happens to have a solid campaign and fun local multiplayer, I would be okay with leaving a good review up, because that is pretty much all that would have been reviewed ahead of time before there were other players to do online modes with. If a publication has a specific “no microtransactions” criteria, though, then I suppose they can do whatever they like afterwards. But anyone should be able to still obtain the day 1 version of the game and play it offline if you don’t like the direction they went with its updates. You might just need to be more creative on PC to find them.
On the one hand I agree, it was obviously a calculated move to bait sales before microtransactions were added, which is incredibly scummy. But on the other hand, if a game reviewer gave it a certain score before microtransactions were added and nothing was altered/removed from the experience that was originally reviewed, I guess I don’t see the problem with the score they assigned at the time (assuming it was reviewed in good faith).
You can install it out of the box and disable game updates and not see any microtransactions, which will let you play it exactly as it was when it was first reviewed. You won’t get to do any online play, but I guess the bigger takeaway in that case is that any game which relies on online/live service elements for continued engagement needs to have a big fucking “CAVEAT EMPTOR” on every review.