Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
shadps4.net to be precise. Differs from other emulators by not emulating the hardware, but by reimplementing the API, from what I’ve read. More like Wine than eg. rpcs3.net
I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.
Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.
Made worse in nu xcom because shooting generally ends your turn and leaves you open to retaliation - sixty percent shot implies forty percent chance of death, and death of an experienced trooper is extremely bad. Old xcom, you could duck out of cover, take a shot, and duck back in, so “bad” chances to hit aren’t such a problem.
Which leads to my other part of the problem with nu xcom. The original, you could load fourteen dipshits into the skyranger and they could all take their 14% shots; if half of them came back alive, then it’s promotions all round. A meat grinder for sure, but the loss of a couple of soldiers isn’t a disaster - your fault for sending your most experienced guys first through the door if it is. The new one requires exceedingly cautious play and luck. Nothing like as bad as Phoenix Point, of course, but spoiled it a bit for me.
Tactics is choosing who to send in first. Strategy is being able to recover if that goes wrong. Nu Xcom is all tactics and not enough strategy.
Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.
Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.
Identity is a many-layered thing, and I’d never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let’s go!
So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.
Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)
A shame that all the really early 3D games use their own software rendering engines, and aren’t so amenable to being “cranked up” like later games when accelerators became common.
Get some of the early freescape games like Total Eclipse or Castle Master, early cyberpunk games like Interphase, or even Frontier: Elite II running in big resolutions with silky framerates and insane draw distances, I’d be so pleased.
Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.
It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.
Genesis is a different style of game tho, isn’t it? Diablo-like rather than third-person hack and slash?
Love the series. Personally prefer 3 due to its more limited scope; the other two are great, but to on for a very long time, and I really can’t be bothered playing through the Portal-like bits again. Happy if 4 is the same length as 3.