10 characters, in my experience, is about as small as a roster can be in a fighting game before it feels like you’re seeing the same matchups over and over again. That might be a bit worse in a 2v2 game, but there are other reasons, like Vanguard, that I’d argue are more compelling reasons to avoid 2XKO.
Would you say that the game cleaned up some of conveyance of information from the first game? Or have you not played the first game to compare it against? Maybe I just have to get used to what the game does and doesn’t tell me.
For the record, I didn’t skip the dialogue; I accidentally chose one option too quickly and then was not presented with the option to choose the other one the next time I spoke to the same NPC. The kind of quality of life I’m looking for is the stuff that makes it clear to me, a person in the modern world, what Henry would know. Or at least to be able to jump over a shin-high chain without hitting a collision box that tells me I can’t.
I’m playing through the first one right now, in the early hours, and for anyone who’s played this sequel, did they add any quality of life improvements? In theory, I like a lot of what the game’s doing, but when it tells me I need to find a way out of a castle, and it doesn’t let me jump over a short chain barrier, it can be frustrating. I talked to one NPC who I accidentally quickly buttoned through a dialogue with without clicking on the option that clearly would have given me a hint on what to do next, and without reloading a save, I couldn’t get that dialogue option back. There was also another NPC that I found the first time, before reloading a save, who gave me similar advice for how to progress, but due to the schedule system and the lack of any sort of notation built in to the map, I couldn’t find her again, because she wasn’t in the same spot. Things like that are why Avowed was built to be “static”, as much as it got criticism for it, despite most RPGs being built that way to avoid exactly this problem I had with KC:D. (I have since made my way out of the castle, after looking up a walkthrough and save scumming a chest that I had to lockpick, because the tutorial was very bad at teaching me how lockpicking actually worked.)
These are some strange criticisms. Yes, there was a focus on games being “cinematic”. Yes, there was also a counter-culture to that, because there’s a counter-culture for every popular culture. No, Half-Life didn’t invent it; it iterated on existing ideas. Yes, others copied it, because iteration is far easier and more likely to be financially sustainable than outright invention. Likewise, others in the counter-culture didn’t copy it. There are pros and cons to that sort of design. If my friends and I both play through a game like that, we can reminisce and “hell yeah” and high five over our favorite moments. A more immersive sim “lite” design like Indiana Jones can easily lead to me getting the intended experience where Indy has to improvise his way out of a blunder by punching Nazis and my friend ending up in what he perceived to be automatic fail states (true story). The “detour” through Half-Life inspired games came coupled with those same years being littered with games that didn’t stick to its ethos.
The one thing I’ll agree with the author on is that we’re definitely currently living through the stark aftermath of this peak FPS era. It’s so rare now that a new FPS is made for me anymore. Maybe it’ll be Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but it won’t come with a split-screen deathmatch like the good old days.
Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
I think you missed the sarcasm in the rhetorical question, but yes. It’s one of at least three or four movies I’ve seen utilizing the Dances With Wolves trope, though I’ve never seen Dances With Wolves itself, and that’s okay. It was entertaining.
Are you telling me The Last Samurai wasn’t skillfully made or imaginative? Nah, it was no masterpiece, but I liked it just fine. Having some westerners in Japan training their military on modern weaponry as the samurai are fading from relevance passes my threshold for “remotely historical”, and it’s definitely not a requirement for me that Tom Cruise’s character needs to have an American historical analog to meet that criteria. Any historical fiction will inherently have to change things about what actually happened in that era, after all.
Hey, I’m sure it solves a problem for people, but the easier solution is still just the absence of DRM, as much as Nintendo would not like to do it, and it introduces exactly the kind of complexity that Sony mocked 12 years ago.