xDefiant has a class with an invisibility skill (which lets one do plenty of shotgunning losers in the back)? Apex Legends has Mirage with various decoy and invisibility skills? idk, I don’t know every single one of these shooters, but I will grant you that the way the Spy works in TF2 is pretty unique.
By tf2 are you referring to Team Fortress 2? I feel like every shooter these days is a class-based shooter, what sets tf2 apart from something like Overwatch?
the theory i hear a lot is that live service games are a big source of this sales slump. If you only play Fortnite, COD, and Madden, you haven’t had a reason to upgrade yet because those games play fine on the current consoles. Even Madden 25 is coming out on PS4 still. Word is that College Football 25 is actually giving the PS5 a decent sales bump, because it is (1) the first college football game to come out in a decade, and (2) the first EA football game that is exclusive to PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
I’ve been watching Jeff Gerstmann work through and rank the NES library over the past year, and I agree with your sentiment. It seems like there are only like 10-20 NES games that actually hold up, and the rest of the library is either “good for the era” or absolute garbage.
It’s funny because a lot of the things that bug you are immersion features that gamers of 20 years ago would be blown away by, regardless of how badly they were implemented. Goes to show how spoiled we are for immersive games these days. But interestingly, it sounds like RDR2 was less immersive for you because of those additional immersion features, because it always had little hitches that completely shattered your immersion. I guess realism has an uncanny valley in games - a game with more simulated elements also needs a higher degree of polish on those elements, as the errors become more obvious the closer you get to reality.
Looks awesome! and the fact that the dev is starting from a place of having the pathfinding algorithm figured out is promising. Better to start there, rather than end up like Cities: Skylines with abysmal frame rates that even top-end hardware can’t keep up with.
I’m not sure how I feel about the artstyle yet. It certainly looks gorgeous in screenshots, but I wonder if it will be difficult to read when you are actually playing. Camera rotation will be the key for me, personally. If I can’t rotate the camera to get alternate views, that might be a dealbreaker.
I just finished a long fever with Pokemon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire. Trying to build your collection of Pokemon across sessions is so addicting. I couldn’t believe how good I was by the end. I highly recommend it, just use a GBA emulator.