I hate to say it, but if MS released a competitor, it will probably outsell the Deck 5:1 regardless of quality, if only because of the advertising reach. Your average non-gamer has never heard of Steam. Everyone and their grandmother know MS and would therefore be more willing to get one for their kid.
Edit: I suppose I should explain a bit. People here are comparing Steam DAUs to console DAUs. That’s not the same as sales.
All of those users are already playing on a computer. Also, many of the most popular games on Steam I are free and low-spec. A lot of Steam users are not spenders.
Compare the 3.7 million Deck sales to the 2.2 million Switch 2 preorders (and the 150 million Switch 1 sales) before it even hit shelves. You can’t even buy a Deck in a store and you won’t see an ad for one. If MS makes a handheld, they’ll have billions at their disposal in advertising.
My mortality in video games waivers all the way from stopping at traffic lights to modding in God Mode to going HAM on every NPC within firing distance. It all depends on how my day has been.
GTA IV reoptimized to run in modern hardware with less or at least more reasonable piss filter would be a nice upgrade. None of the visual mods could get ride of the weird haze around everything.
tl;dr Dark Ages doesn’t have anything left that made Doom 2016 fun for me
I had a real sense that The Dark Ages wasn’t going to be my game. Am I the only one tired of games just piling on completely new feature sets and complicated feature sets to remember, level over level?
I enjoyed Doom 2016 because for a large portion of the game, the mechanics were simple enough that you could get into flow state even at the higher difficulties. I couldn’t make it halfway through Eternal before I was annoyed at having to switch strategy every 5 seconds.
Dark Ages looks more like an Action RPG than Doom. Not to mention the constant tutorial interruptions. Can we go back to ammo, health and maybe grenades for once in a AAA game? It always feels like AAA means complicated game mechanics, rather than letting a simple gameplay loop speak for itself in a AAA environment with all the other benefits that come with it.
Last thing to add, the intro level of Dark Ages looked incredibly bland, like it was a midpoint level of one of the other games. The game just sort of assumes that the other games have been played and that you enjoyed them and starts from there, rather than standing on its own.
Neon RGB with lots of tricks feels very San Francisco RUSH 2049/Nitronic Rush/Distance. Take a look at those. If it’s not them, let me know how they differ. Racing games are my jam, so I should be able to help you track this down.
Trevor’s speech following the mission actually has a decent amount of meat to it. He makes a valid point and the mission is used to demonstrate his point.
He points out how the guy was completely willing to give info, but because everyone is so torture happy, they make a game out of it the whole time (yes, I’m aware), cracking jokes and totally enjoying the guy’s pain.
I really hope the social commentary that permeates Los Santos is still there in GTA VI. Based on what we got in RDR2, I have no reason to doubt this game is going to be scathing on the current political climate. Time will tell.
I just replayed GTA V after the update and I forgot how bad I feel on the torture mission. But then I remembered what the guy looked like and only had to deal with two cutscenes worth. Also got a great line of dialogue if you shout the target early.