I played DMC3 years ago and never really understood the genre. It was fun, but every other game like it felt exactly the same to me. Then Hi-Fi Rush came out this year, and it clicked, so before this year's releases started really kicking off in summer, I played through DMC1-3 and half of 4. I'll get back to it soon enough, but I really liked what I played of 4; it was the best one so far, honestly. Were your problems with Nero limited to how he plays in 5, or did that criticism also apply to 4?
I've been trying to finish up Backpack Hero, now that, after some meandering, I finally figured out how to progress the story mode. In a game all about UI, it's kind of impressive how much the UI either isn't very good or just breaks on a functional level, but the game is very fun. After I finish it, I'll be heading back to Starfield and Wargroove 2.
Guilty Gear Strive also got a really great new patch, adding Elphelt and addressing some pretty glaring problems with the new mechanics they added. It feels like it's in the best spot it's ever been in.
Outer Wilds. I played this game through PS Plus, and it is the best game I have ever played in my life. The gameplay, the puzzles, the music (!!!), the characters, the story, the ending. Just a masterpiece. I’m not even sure if it was this year or last year that I finished it, but the soundtrack was number 4 in my Spotify...
Tenet. I know, most people would be quick to dismiss this as a movie and a mediocre one at that. I myself saw it on release and gave it a 7/10. But this isn’t actually a movie, it’s a puzzle game that you’re meant to play at home hammering the pause button while frantically trying to understand what is happening. This also increases your time with it by at least a factor of 2. 9/10
I love Nolan movies, and one of the reasons why is that all of his sci fi movies work this way. Even the ones where the world is more straight forward like The Dark Knight are fun to go back and catch all the ways the motifs are used throughout, like "a dog off his leash" and "everything burns" and a handful of others.
They did this over and over again with a lot of their teams, didn't find a breakout hit like they wanted, and then looked for a buyer, which seemingly was nearly Sony and ended up being Microsoft. Chasing the live service thing is why we got Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Fallout 76, as well as Redfall. Hopefully they're done with that nonsense now.
People quite liked Prey. There was an article that came out about Redfall's development where they had something like 70% of the studio leaving because they were put to work on a live service game, but the kind of person who applies to Arkane is interested in the type of game that Arkane is known for, not what they were tasked with building. This led to them filling out the studio with inexperienced developers as they replaced more experienced talent that moved on to other companies.
It's more and more often that I try an open world game and think to myself how much better it would have been if I could just select a mission from a menu.
Rather than tinkering, I often just omit the games that don't work well and buy AMD rather than Nvidia. I've got a Windows partition, but the last times I've booted into it were to update firmware on a fighting game controller and to play Dragon Ball FighterZ, which is basically the only game I have left in my library that I'll play with friends and won't work on Proton (online, anyway). Tinkering isn't even a thing I'm thinking about one way or another, but the nagging and removal of control that Microsoft annoys me with is something I actively seek to avoid. Different stokes, I suppose.
Prior to Proton, it was a popular recommendation to use GPU passthrough to a virtual machine running Windows, with Linux as the host OS, but I never did it myself. Which games are your holdouts? Live service stuff with anti-cheat?
The controller lag might just be a symptom of the same problem, but it's strange regardless. Bummer. In my neck of the woods, Proton has been so good that I often find myself not even checking compatibility ratings before buying a game. I'm actually struggling to remember the last time that Proton failed me, since the things it struggles with these days, like certain kinds of anti-cheat or DRM, are the exact reasons I wouldn't buy a game even if I was on Windows. Kubuntu/AMD, if you were curious.
Sea of Stars took that one. I'm pretty sure the winners are voted on by the same panel that submitted the nominees, but I could be wrong. I guess they could have also changed their minds after the nominees were announced and the backlash happened.
They're going for different things, so it's not even apples to apples, but if any game had a right to beat <the one you think you should have won>, it's probably the one that revolves around its sound design.
Nah, I'd rather not give them my time or my money. If I'm playing Tears of the Kingdom, even pirated, it means that's time I'm not spending on games from companies that have more respect for their customers. If I pirated it, it also means I'd have thoughts on the game that I'd share with friends or forum users, and that would encourage more people to also buy the game. So no, they don't even get my illicit download.
I wonder if microtransactions in big games like apex and genshin are down this year?
In Apex? Yes, and we know this from investor calls. Not sure about Genshin or Honkai, but even Fortnite is making less money. This appears to be an entire economy problem, not a video game problem. Perhaps related to inflation and consumers adapting their spending in response (a potential explanation I offer with no expertise to fall back on).
My problem with it last time around, which was not the problem most people took with it, was how much of a cut Valve and Bethesda took before the mod maker saw any of that money. It's Valve's store and Bethesda's IP, sure, but if Bethesda was going to take that much of a cut, they should at least be spending some of that money on policing the bad actors in the paid mod scene to make sure it's all legit so that they earn their cut.
As long as you can easily turn individual mods on and off, I personally wouldn't have the expectation that one mod must not break another mod. I also don't mod much, but that's why I see potential in paid mods. What's out there the way things are now usually doesn't float my boat, and I'd like to see what we get when people can support themselves in producing mods.
That's not game design. It's the feel of a single mechanic. And honestly, there are so many open world games to play that have driving that feels good.
I don't think any of what Jakey covers, which is very much how I felt playing it, has anything to do with choices that would affect the outcome of the story. It was more like I didn't feel like the game would let me think and handle things my way. Every story beat could still play out the same, but the missions should feel like I'm coming up with a way to do them rather than the game failing me for doing something fun that still ought to accomplish it. I'm thinking really hard about whether or not there are any story choices in MGSV, which he uses as an example, and I don't think there are, but that game will let you accomplish your mission by however you see fit in your Lego bucket.
It's certainly a looker, and the story is super intriguing for this setting.
Now, unfortunately, let me put my cynicism hat on. It's dusty, because I don't wear it often. Red Dead Redemption II was such a bummer in terms of how much freedom it was allergic to trusting the player with, and while GTA V arguably offered more via heist missions, which were very popular with everyone, it was still pretty limited compared to actual sandbox games, and heists were likely the most expensive part of making that game. Short of a proper demo of the loop of the game showing me otherwise, I'm going to assume that it's business as usual, sticking to the same dated design, because they're probably not going to rock the boat when that old formula still reviews and sells so, so well.
EDIT: By the way, only confirmed for consoles in 2025, not PC. This was stupid and outdated back in 2013 and 2018 too. I'm sure as hell not double-dipping on two versions of the game.
This video is a great representation of how I felt about Red Dead Redemption II, but the video author went even deeper than I did into the systems, finding issues. Here's a shorter version than that 40 minute video.
The single player story missions don't actually let you use all of the open world systems they crafted to resolve your missions. They have one specific idea for how the mission should be completed, and anything outside of that is a fail state. One specific instance from my own playthrough was that I had to sneak into a factory's second floor. I snuck around in the dark and found a way to climb onto the 1st-level roof so that I could open the window and get into the boss's office that way. Mission failed. What they wanted me to do was go through the first floor and walk up the stairs for some reason instead of the solution I came up with. If they really didn't want me to go in that way, they could have blocked the window with an obstruction or something, but instead they just gave me a hard fail state. The whole game's story mode ended up feeling like a giant tutorial, so on-rails that they don't want you to do anything but one the thing they're trying to teach you; except you run out of stuff to learn in the early parts of Act 2, so it just ends up being really frustrating when you don't read the developers' minds and solve it their way.
As for the story playing out exactly the same way, that's not at odds with what I wanted. At the end of each Act, there's a big job, something goes wrong, and you have to move to a new camp. None of the missions between those events would prevent it from happening. They can still have their big set piece moments and keep those missions exactly the same. But what they could have done, that would fit the narrative they built perfectly, is to let me earn money however the hell I want, which is an idea the video author had as well. Again, the game itself is what set our expectations for this to work. It's a game that allows you to earn bounty money and sell skins if you want to go legit, and it lets you rob trains and banks if you want to be an outlaw; except not really on that last part. Train and bank robberies are basically scripted events only (and they always go wrong instead of ever allowing you the satisfaction of a well-planned heist, like a good open world game in this setting would). And despite the story constantly revolving around getting more money, they don't give you a threshold of money to reach that allows the story to move forward. It only moves forward after you've done all of their missions, and the money doesn't really matter at all. And this is a huge missed opportunity, because it would encourage you to engage with all of those open world systems that their missions don't actually let you use.
If you want to see a perfect example of this money mechanic already implemented in another game, look at Baldur's Gate II. The early hours of the game give you a simple objective, rescue your sister, and there are three obvious ways that the game presents to you as to how to do it, one of which is to raise like 20k gold. How you get that gold is up to you, or you can also just enlist some nebulous factions to get you the info you need for a favor instead. This objective encourages you to do whatever side quests you find interesting, since most of them pay you money. This structure would have been right at home in RDR2.
GTA V's idea of freedom, which is still better than RDR2 but worse than a lot of modern sandbox games, is to give you like 3 options for any given heist, and you do setup missions for them. That's cool, but it would be nice if they expanded on this to give you less explicit options and more systemic ones. Like maybe one option is to break through a gate, and you could do that with explosives, an armored car, or a 737, if you hijacked one earlier.
It is not clear from that trailer that they're going after a more living world, and after playing some Starfield, it's good to remember that that's not always desirable anyway.
I don't think they stuck the landing with RDR2, so their reputation in my mind is much different than it is in yours. GTA V, though I enjoyed it much more than RDR2, I would have liked to see them push further. I know GTA VI will go on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and I might even be one of those customers, since we don't really have many other options for a good crime story in games anymore, but I'm not sold on it sight unseen like you are. And no, we haven't seen it yet from this trailer; those were cut-scenes. I know for a fact I'm not alone on how I felt about RDR2, though if I were a betting man, I'd wager I'm in the minority; still, that's not a flawless track record to me.
They missed me. Like I said though, I still enjoy a great crime story, but I might have to accept that it comes attached to a game that doesn't want to let me use my brain.
They can't raise the price too much, or people quickly find out that it's cheaper to just buy the games outright. Their sweet spot seems to have stuck right at 1/4th the price of a new AAA game per month. Believe me, I was surprised to find out from all kinds of failed products and services over the past few years that people can actually do math.
If you ask me, I'd say that's exactly why they won't rise further, or much further. They're measuring all of this before and after they take action, and if the price increase sees a trend line go in the wrong direction, it'll be a while before they bump it again. I wasn't angry at Netflix for raising their prices such that you could call it a backlash; it just became too expensive to justify having it around when there isn't anything I know I want to watch on it.
I played a fair bit more Backpack Hero, and made some more progress in the story mode. Still a bit too grindy for my tastes, but I'll either finish it or just stick to the classic roguelike mode.
I've been playing more Starfield, and the recurring thought I have every step of the way is, "this should be better". To go into much more detail than that would be to right a dissertation, but the short description is that the game has barely changed compared to Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
I got through another few missions of Wargroove 2. It continues to be a worthy successor to Wargroove.
Combined with Starfield, Pillars of Eternity is helping me resist starting a new run in Baldur's Gate 3. I also have that feeling of, "this should be better" here, but it's pretty much entirely down to production value. Number 1 with a bullet is that I wish it was fully voice acted, including narration. Still though, loving everything else so far despite real time with pause, which has been less of a problem than I thought.
GamingOnLinux does a good job of tracking the data separated to just the English language, which shows how much effect China has on the survey as well as a decent approximation of the rest of the audience's Linux usage, which is closer to 4% these days, post-Steam-Deck.
They're good outliers to cut out from a sample set. If you want to use the survey as a developer to determine what your audience looks like, how much merit is there in factoring in a player base that mostly only plays Dota 2 and PUBG for major patches or something? And don't forget that the other way to look at that sample set is that for every Steam Deck customer out in the wild, you can double it to find how many Linux users there are, which is a number in the millions.
I'm not saying that Chinese players only play Dota 2 and PUBG. I'm saying that measurably, the biggest swings in the survey come from Chinese players who only play a couple of the biggest games and nothing else, and they play on homogenized hardware at gaming centers running the same graphics card and operating system. In these same ebbs and flows, people write articles saying "Linux usage surges" and "Windows 11 users leave for Windows 10 en masse", but neither is true. All that happened is that those Chinese players came back for one specific game this month compared to last month, and you can see that by the increase in Simplified Chinese users.
There are plenty of people, regardless of location, that use Simplified Chinese and wouldn't be outliers, but you're better off collecting that number during a down month, and you can get a better representation of actual Linux usage over time by selecting one language that isn't Simplified Chinese, like English.
Yes, it's true of all demographics that most people just play those few big games. None are so massive in absolute numbers on homogenized PC setups like China that they visibly swing percentages on their own.
The percentages only matter as far as observing trends, which is why this article and its Windows equivalent need to be presented in the context of how much China moves the needle in either direction, since Valve only releases numbers on total monthly active users at irregular intervals. The last time we got a number on that was March 2022, as far as I know. Home PC usage in China may be on the rise, but 12% of Windows 10 users didn't switch to Windows 11 and Linux in the past month; Simplified Chinese dropped by 19%. That's not a trend in user behavior, the thing that interests us about the percentages. It's just a large part of the survey not participating in it this month.
If we had absolute numbers for monthly active users to go along with the percentages, you're right; the percentages would matter a whole lot less. But since we don't, we can observe trends, and those trends make a lot more sense when you get rid of outliers.
I'm not sure what you're trying to convince me of or why. I just explained why it's worth tracking the percentages with and without Chinese users, and why this article, as written, needs additional context. And that number 130M is over a year and a half old, by the way, like I said before.
It really feels like you just showed up to argue, man, because you took us so far from we started. Just look at the Steam Tracker page on GOL and take a look at English-only versus the one that shows Chinese players. That's all. The "surge" is easily explained.
I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough.
GameStop gift cards probably won't help you if they want the game for PC. There are also a lot of games that you can only buy digitally. Do you know which game you want to get for them? That could narrow it down. Otherwise, you might have to get even sneakier about finding out what platforms they have access to.
Okay, that helps. Both are on PC, but it's unlikely this 11 year old plays them on PC, as this is primarily a game people play on consoles in either case. Both will also have physical versions. If I were a betting man, I'd bet they want the PS5 version, but that's like a 65% chance. I'm not sure what your situation is, but surely you could ask the kid's parents, right? Also FYI, FIFA is the old name for the series, and starting with this year, it now goes by EA Sports FC.
Borrowing money was cheap until it wasn't. When they bought the old Eidos stuff, everyone thought Square Enix was taking crazy pills. Now, given that everyone's cutting back right now, it looks more like they knew something Embracer didn't.
Back of the napkin math says they more than broke even on their $80M investment into the game post-launch. I enjoyed the game at launch (which I know wasn't necessarily the norm), and I largely enjoyed the expansion. Unfortunately, this is what I have to scratch my FPS campaign itch these days, but it's still a pretty good one of those combined with a pretty good RPG. It would especially be nice to see them up the ante on the RPG aspects, because next to Baldur's Gate 3 this year, you don't get anywhere near the same sense of freedom and creativity.
The trend for a long while was to have an in-house engine to save on costs, but many of them, including the RPG companies we've been discussing, have moved off of those engines and onto Unreal.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 10th
What have you all been playing!...
Dauntless, I have manged to get the game to run and join a server but after a few minutes the game crashes anyone with more luck? (kbin.social)
Dauntless, I have manged to get the game to run and join a server but after a few minutes the game crashes anyone with more luck?
Knokelmaat's Top 10 Patient Games of the Year 2023
Outer Wilds. I played this game through PS Plus, and it is the best game I have ever played in my life. The gameplay, the puzzles, the music (!!!), the characters, the story, the ending. Just a masterpiece. I’m not even sure if it was this year or last year that I finished it, but the soundtrack was number 4 in my Spotify...
Marvel’s Blade | Announcement Trailer | The Game Awards 2023 (youtu.be)
LAST SENTINEL Official Announce Trailer (youtu.be)
5 reasons Linux is better than Windows for gaming handhelds (www.xda-developers.com)
Steam’s Most-Hyped Zombie Game Is Out, And It’s A Dumpster Fire (kotaku.com)
The Game Awards 2023 Discussion Thread
Hey y’all. Figured I’d make a thread for this. Discuss anything about the game awards and it’s announcements here!...
‘Hi-Fi Rush’ Anniversary Interview: Director John Johanas on His Career, the Importance of Hi-Fi Rush’s Song Choices, the Possibility of a Sequel, and More (toucharcade.com)
Smash Ultimate reveals 5th anniversary event & confirms new content in 2024 (www.dexerto.com)
Armello studio lays off over half its staff and 'indefinitely' pauses development on its ongoing early access game because 'almost all funding and investment has evaporated from the videogame industry (www.pcgamer.com)
Bethesda is once again adding support for paid mods to Skyrim (steamcommunity.com)
Seems like Bethesda wants another go at this
Rockstar's Game Design is Outdated (www.youtube.com)
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1 (peertube.wtf)
Xbox spends "over a billion dollars a year" on Xbox Game Pass (www.eurogamer.net)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 3rd
What have you all been playing! I’ve been playing… Not much! I’m moving states and haven’t had a lot of time to game 😢
Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November (www.phoronix.com)
store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 5 is a whopper of an update with an epilogue, two new modes, and more (www.vg247.com)
Larian Studios has announced how large Patch 5 will be for Baldur's Gate 3, and it's rather large.
How to gift a video game if I don't know the platform
Please help!...
Embracer CEO confirms TimeSplitters studio faces closure before Christmas (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Passes 4.3 Million Sales - IGN (www.ign.com)
Cyberpunk 2077's Idris Elba-starring expansion Phantom Liberty has sold 4.3 million copies since it launched, developer CD Projekt Red has confirmed.
Bethesda responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam (www.eurogamer.net)