I'm still working on my second run of Baldur's Gate 3 with the Ghost Recon team in Act 3. The two big bads of the chapter before the final boss went down like chumps. For one of them, without spoilers (you know the one), I didn't even need to stop the chant, because I just had so many actions with each member of my team. I've been playing less of BG3 now though, because I already did a pretty thorough run of Act 3 the first time around, as opposed to Acts 1 and 2 where I left a lot of content behind with my first character.
I beat 30XX. It's very good. I don't think it's as good as 20XX. The upgrade system is significantly more complicated to understand for basically no discernible benefit. There was also one major problem with 20XX, which was that, as a roguelike, you could see the seams in the level generation and easily identify the same pieces of the levels way too quickly, as opposed to something like Streets of Rogue or Vagante where you could play for over a hundred hours before it feels like you've seen these exact levels too many times. 30XX did not address this problem. So in the end, it's more 20XX, but it's not better 20XX. It's a shame, because I know the developers spent a lot of time trying to make this a substantial sequel, and the art style is improved at least, but this feels like a lateral move. Play it if you liked 20XX and wanted more.
I've also been playing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. Similar to that 30XX review, I think this is a step back from Mimimi's predecessor games, Shadow Tactics and Desperados III. It's still great; it's just that those games did it better. I'm in Act 3 (of 3), and this game's got ideas, but only some of them seem to work, and most of them feel like they're worse than the more linear design of the other games. It's also a bummer that this is Mimimi's swan song, as the developer is dissolving after this. Play it if you liked their other games and wanted more.
The great thing about Baldur's Gate coming to an end is that there's no reason you can't just start it over again with a totally different type of character and play it entirely differently. I'm coming up on finishing the game a second time.
As a kid in the 90s, I couldn't really tell the difference between the capabilities of the SNES or Genesis and a hand-drawn cartoon on TV. As far as I could tell, if it was 2D, those machines could process it, but my brother and his friends just a few years older than me could tell where the limits were. When Mortal Kombat got big, I thought that was the end state for video game graphics. Everyone's just going to do that, because you can't get more real than real people, I thought. Early 3D graphics did age more poorly than the best pixel art the SNES and Genesis had to offer, and we knew at the time that that would be the case too. After years of revisiting those 2D games via emulation, a trip to a local Barcade reminded me of how important scanlines were to the art style of most games from the era, and now I basically only emulate those games with scanlines on and the most accurate emulation available when I'm playing anything earlier than the PS2.
Half-Life 2 was insanely impressive, and the thing that sold it most was the big real-time G Man head at the beginning of the game. Valve took cutting edge research in animating faces during dialogue and implemented it into the game in a way no one had seen before. It did wonders for selling the "realness" of what you were looking at. Just 3 years later, we had Crysis, a game pushing graphics so far that no one could even build a machine that could run it at max settings at the time, but even on medium settings, it was the best-looking game I'd ever seen.
Nowadays, I can look at a Digital Foundry video with side by side examples of ray tracing on and off, with them explaining to me how and why it's so much better, and I often can't really tell the difference unless I squint. I did see an Alan Wake II example that seemed pretty noticeable, but mostly only in the side-by-side, and if I was in the market for Alan Wake II, I likely wouldn't notice what I was missing when ray tracing is turned off. The things that make games look best to me now are when they can add all of that fidelity to the textures and animations of human beings, like in Death Stranding, because we're wired to more easily detect when a human being isn't real than anything else.
Haven't there been multiple MMOs from former WoW devs that have all gone under by now? I remember Firefall used to have the biggest presence at PAX, and Firefall is no longer a game that exists anymore.
People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise.
I wanted to replay Planescape: Torment, and I knew it had a mobile version. Oops, it's not compatible with modern Android. Situations like those teach me to stop bothering with mobile. Then there's the fact that if I want to play the game on a larger screen once I'm home, not only do I not get the desktop version of the game included with my purchase, but there's also no standard, easy way to sync my saves. Like someone else here in this thread, I stick to board game adaptations and things like Slay the Spire (which I've also thoroughly played on desktop).
People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.
The mobile games that bubble to the top and are the most played are often driven by some of the worst business models, so it's not surprising to me when the term becomes a pejorative, even if there are good mobile games out there.
Starsector is definitely a sleeper hit building a cult following. I wouldn't have heard of it if not for a friend of mine. If fantasy settings don't typically do it for you, you can encroach on a lot of things that people like about Divinity and BG3 in the Wasteland games. Wasteland 1 is an old RPG that's almost a text adventure, but Wasteland 2 and 3 are pretty modern. Cyberpunk also got a huge revamp right before its latest expansion drop, so even the original game's RPG systems and world systems work very differently now, and there's a lot of positive buzz behind it (I haven't gotten to it yet myself, but I liked the launch version).
For fantasy settings, definitely don't play Wargroove for the story, but one thing I learned to enjoy about fantasy stuff is it can create a rock/paper/scissors of strengths and weaknesses of classes/races that you can't quite hit in most believable sci-fi settings. I never got far into Divinity, but one thing that really worked for me in BG3, apart from its production value, is that it doesn't just bombard you with lore. It gives you the bare minimum setup you need to get going, and then it diagetically fills you in on the larger world as you go, with dialogue that doesn't feel like an info dump, much like Game of Thrones managed to do. Plus, IMO, there are far more interesting tactical options in BG3's combat than in XCOM; and I love XCOM.
You've got RPGs and strategy/tactics games listed as some of your favorites, but Baldur's Gate 3 never caught your eye? How about Starfield or Cyberpunk, or the early access game Dread Delusion? Given tactics games and an interest in MGS, you could check out the Metal Gear collection or Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (or Shadow Gambit's developers' previous games, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados III, which I think I like better than Shadow Gambit). There's Wargroove 2, if you like the Advance Wars brand of tactics. It's 2D, but given your interest in other space games, you could take a look at another early access game (not on Steam) Starsector that a friend of mine got really into.
There's just so much out there this year that I'm not sure who'd be left unhappy.
It would also be nice if celebrated a larger percentage of the non-Japanese side of things, if they go back to guest characters. Other than better netcode, the way you make a smaller roster make sense is if you flip the game on its head with a new set of universal mechanics, like how Street Fighter 5 to Street Fighter 6 is acceptable because everything is about the Drive system.
Even if it were the best year for the products (there are several titles in the article that are curious), it’s definitely one of the worst years for the people who work on them.
For sure. As an armchair analyst, it seems to be the result of getting out of the era of cheap credit and VC money. I don't expect it to get worse, but I do think live services and enormous open world games ran out of money spreading their customers across too many games.
Agreed. I'm putting 2023 in my pantheon alongside 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. A great year for RPGs and fighting games, with the latter bumping up two of my favorites from previous years, Skullgirls and Guilty Gear Strive, a few notches via updates. Hi-Fi Rush is the first game in the character-action genre that clicked for me, and I've tried to make it click so many times before.
Oh, I see. WB also refuses to make games that don't have to do with their movie properties, with few exceptions. And since they've entered the gaming industry, some of their other notable games have been live services like Infinite Crisis and Gotham City Imposters that have since shut down.