Hi-Fi Rush had me going back to play through the Devil May Cry series earlier this year, and I didn't finish them before 2023 releases started popping off, but I left off at DMC4. I seem to remember the impressions of it back in the day being so-so, but I really enjoyed what I've played of it so far, and it feels the most like what Hi-Fi Rush became out of the series thus far. 1 and 3 were great, but 4 seemingly keeps what made those good without as many rough edges.
My Ghost Recon team in my second playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 got past level 8, and they may as well have ascended to godhood then and there. There are several achievements for killing some boss or another before they get to do some kind of attack, but this team just bursts them down before they get the chance to take a second turn. I'm in Act 3 now and just checking out a few remaining plot threads that I missed in my first playthrough.
I'm also trying to finish a run of 30XX. It's good, and the level generation is slightly less repetitive than its predecessor, but it's mostly just more of the same. New bosses and such, and the game is still good, but I was hoping for more of an iterative improvement over the first game.
I definitely went several hours being okay with only the to hit chance, but once you start leveling up and fighting harder enemies, you're looking for ways to optimize, so I wish it was an option to see what the math is that determines that chance ahead of time.
Live service games that were fully developed are being cancelled at the finish line because they don't think they'll make that money back. Companies like Bioware have laid off a bunch of developers in advance of marquis releases, but if everything was rosy, they'd definitely want those developers around through launch. Smaller studios have been hit too.
Eh, not really. Game Pass does have a lot of value in it; it's not the way I want to engage with games, but it makes sense for both Microsoft and customers. It's just not the proof that this headline posits it to be when you use a game guaranteed to sell millions of copies.
Honestly, all this might show is that there's enough hype behind a big marquis Bethesda release that it can power through Game Pass availability. Most games would love to sell in a lifetime what Skyrim sold in a single month 10 years after its initial release.
I have coded a load screen progress bar before, in the one commercially-released game I worked on (I will not be disclosing), using my own defined checkpoints, like you mentioned. There's still a ton of variability even there, so some percentages seem to take longer than others on different computers. I did research before starting on the task and found the same thing echoed over all the place. Here's an example.
I'll tell you that my friend sat me in front of Returnal on PS5, and that game felt unplayable without either M+KB or gyro, even though plenty of people managed just fine. There's even a gryo feature in the PS5 pad! They just didn't enable it for the game. On PC, you can use it on Steam controller whether the dev enabled it or not.
A lot of games don't even have checkpoints, and there are a lot of things that could affect load times very differently. I get that you want this to work well, because we all do, but if it was as easy as your high-level explanation, we'd probably have perfect progress bars in things by now. People far more educated than you or I have tried.