Stovetop

Stovetop, 3 miesiące temu

Shoulda been a launch title. They spent so much time throwing more money at it they failed to strike while the iron was hot.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

Well, it’s not siding with Microsoft, it is Microsoft. This is a Microsoft game.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

Companies are never your friend.

Valve is like any other company. They’re as good as your money is good.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

Fair, but not-shitty companies eventually become shitty companies in almost every circumstance. I hate making the argument that someone is fine because they only hurt a few people compared to the guy who hurts lots.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

You’re probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

I bet I’ve played a lot more of them than you have.

It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn’t as good as Oblivion. The games weren’t getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.

Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it’s the only one that has some semblance of soul.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

isles excited to write a comment about Kotaku being excited to write a story about Ubisoft being excited to let you know Prince of Persia Remake is Still Years Away.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

When those two stinkers are the only content they’ve put out in 10 years, there’s not a lot to really build a more optimistic outlook from.

Even then, Inquisition was iffy and Mass Effect 3 generates bad reactions to this day (though I still enjoyed Mass Effect 3 for what it was).

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

No, Inquisition was an incredibly middling game. I dropped it after about 15 hours when I realized I was having no fun.

If you enjoyed it, great. I still enjoyed Mass Effect 3, too. But they weren’t great games.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

I got past the hinterlands. Skimmed through it, in fact, after hearing online that there was nothing there worth doing.

The rest of the game failed to grip me as much as the first one did, and I didn’t even like DA:O as much as other games in its genre. Granted, I also dropped Dragon Age 2 like a hot potato, so perhaps if I had enjoyed that game more, I wouldn’t have been so turned off of Inquisition for being marginally more tolerable.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

It’s definitely easier to have that degree of support when you’ve got a common architecture now. There has never been a console generation before this where you had literal years of overlap with games releasing on previous and current gen, because it didn’t require much extra work to maintain additional versions. They were already doing that with the “Pro” consoles before anyways.

Hell, PS4 players are still going to get the highly anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for Elden Ring in a few weeks.

Stovetop, 4 miesiące temu

It’s the video game equivalent of Legos. I think it has staying power in a way few other games have, precisely in the same way that Legos have remained popular toys for generations.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

According to the article at least, that is essentially what they did. But their model was based on earlier years when there was higher projected growth, so the budgets were set too high as a result.

Personally, as long as the final installment in the FF7 Remake trilogy is made with the same budget as the first two and ends on a satisfying note, I’ll be happy. A good ending gives the trilogy as a whole have more lifetime sales than it would if part 3 makes the first two less good in retrospect, i.e. the Mass Effect 3 effect.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

I will just agree to disagree on that front. Playing casually, I clocked over 100 hours on the 2nd game, which is more time than it took me to complete the original full game on PS1. I enjoyed basically every minute of time played (save for one particular mini-game that I didn’t care for), so I’d say I got a good value out of it for the cost. It is also hard to say that it is a cash grab when it provides a much fuller experience than most AAA games these days seem to have.

Basically, I don’t hate it any more than I hate the fact that The Lord of the Rings is three separate movies; it’s not like The Hobbit.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

I would say in one sense yes, because typically property being bequeathed follows different customs than property being sold for profit.

But the point in this case is that your Steam library is not even “property” to begin with, it is a contract that becomes invalid when one of the parties (the customer) dies.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

I am happy it’s on Steam, but admittedly Kingdom Hearts 3 is not the main offender here when they still have games trapped on single consoles. KH3 was already on PC, it’s just more accessible now. Can’t say the same about Final Fantasy 16 or Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Hopefully that is what they fix next.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

Stadia is probably the last product I’d want to be compared to, but hopefully this helps push gaming on Linux more than Stadia was able to.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

I have been in the process of doing the marathon slowly but surely over the past year and a half.

I play XIV when I can and I enjoy it, but hardly have time for one MMO, much less a second one. I decided that trying to do XI was too big an ask, so I opted to replace it with Tactics (the PSP War of the Lions version specifically).

Tactics is a much-praised game that, despite not being numbered, is considered part of Final Fantasy’s core identity (and comes up a lot in XIV), and it provides a nice tie-in to 12, both being Ivalice games, so I thought it worked well.

The only difficult part is that there is no PC port of Tactics. I had to emulate it. Though I do know that there are iOS/Android ports of it which may work better for some.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

For what it’s worth, Rebirth is an amazing game that I would honestly consider to be the gold star of anyone making a AAA experience today. If the goal is truly quality, I don’t think it’s feasible to try to make every game better than Rebirth given the breadth of content in it and its overall production quality.

Really what this announcement boils down to is that they won’t be making more games like Harvestella, Valkyrie Elysium, Diofield Chronicle, and Foamstars, and they aren’t keen on keeping things platform-exclusive anymore. And maybe they’ll also be a bit more mindful of the budgets of their AAA games like Rebirth instead of taking the “spared no expense” mindset like they have been, which could come at the cost of quality, but I hope that’s not the case.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

The difference is that Helldivers 2 was already a released game; people had paid for a product which was going to be taken away from them. After all the controversy, Sony decided not to follow through with that plan and let people keep what they already had.

This is still scummy, but with Ghost of Tsushima, no one has received anything yet. People put in an order, the order was canceled, and money refunded, so in practical terms there is no loss…other than not being able to buy the game.

It may be possible to set your account to a different region and purchase anyways, but in my opinion, piracy is absolutely justified in this case when the vendor literally refuses to make a product available to you. If there’s no legal option for obtaining it, then there’s no harm in pirating it.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

It would have still been an issue because the root of the problem is that there are a lot of regions where PSN is not supported and you can’t make an account even if you wanted to. The game was being sold on Steam in those regions, and so in practice it would have been like saying:

Please note that in a future update we will take away your ability to play with no recourse unless Valve is willing to refund your purchase. Take it up with them.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

Lesson learned: there can be no good Suicide Squad title unless prefixed by “The”.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

Well, hard for it to succeed at the box office when movie theaters were still closed/avoided in the midst of the pandemic.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

Yeah, it is already available.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

If anything, Nintendo is likely the company about to make lightning strike twice with the Switch successor due to be announced this year. Will be interesting to see what it’s like, but no matter the case, it is going to sell like hotcakes.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

But it was, so who is going to take responsibility for it? Is Sony going to back down from the requirement? Is Valve going to refund all those users?

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

FWIW, no need for it to be an attack vector if you just use one of those throwaway email services to sign up for a PSN account you’ll never use anywhere else.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

Could just make a throwaway account with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, what have you, then. No real/personally identifiable information attached.

Not saying I agree at all with what Sony is doing, but anyone who is concerned about their email/personal information getting leaked by something they didn’t want to sign up for, there are options to protect yourself.

Stovetop, 5 miesięcy temu

They shouldn’t.

I am just saying, if the concern is about putting your email on another service, then don’t put your email. You can use a throwaway one if you just want to get through it and play, or if it’s a matter of principle and you don’t want to, that’s cool too.

Just offering my 2 cents on keeping personal information safe on the web. It’s often unsafe to put all your eggs in one basket and email is no exception, so having some “burner accounts” on hand can help.

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

The PC version of XVI is being actively worked on, Rebirth not long to follow I’d imagine, given that they released less than a year apart.

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

Is there a dead dead game news channels channel?

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

The title seems a bit misleading, it sounds like it is saying FromSoftware made a dungeon crawler-inspired game (or classic titles-inspired game, as the article title now states).

I’d have added a single “by” and moved some words around to make “This FPS Inspired by FromSoftware Dungeon Crawlers Is Made with GZDoom”

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

No you’re good, it’s the article title itself!

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

Even worse.

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 6 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 7 miesięcy temu

What does Larian have to do with any of this?

Stovetop, 7 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 7 miesięcy temu

Other than it being anti-cheat software failing to do the one thing it was made to do?

Stovetop, 7 miesięcy temu

PS4 controllers use Bluetooth and can be paired with a phone.

Stovetop, 7 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 7 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 8 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 8 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 8 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 8 miesięcy temu

youtu.be/Uw0yUlHefwU?si=s5boMchKwyKxkOAB

Stovetop, 8 miesięcy temu

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.

Stovetop, 8 miesięcy temu

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.