because “hurr durr it’s an IP we own.”

Same reason as why Bethesda slapped Prey on Arcane’s spooky space station imsim. It doesn’t need to make sense, the games don’t need to be connected, the IP doesn’t have to be popular, companies are just so adverse to a new IP that they would rather change everything about an old one.

That honestly is being too generous. I’d say it feels like an incomplete mod, because I usually have to add a mod to actually make the settlement system worth interacting with.

It actually is just another open-world action game with crafting elements, they may have been rare once but now they’re a dime a dozen.

Just pirate anything Sony puts out. This shit makes it clear that it’s not worth giving them a single dollar. And if we’re being really honest, all their games are super generic and very mid, you can just ignore them as a developer completely and you won’t miss out on anything.

How would you even collect? Better yet, can you collect both this bounty and the $150,000 “posted” by his would-be assassin?

It’s a shame that I’m a quivering pussy, because I think the combat against the replicants in FEAR fucking rules. The shooting feels awesome, slow-mo karate is awesome, the game feels awesome to play.

…and then the game goes quiet after the shooting stops, and it delivers some of the spookiest atmosphere I’ve experienced even after two decades of age. A single light fixture moves suddenly, showing the shadow of something just behind me, and I jump out of my skin and have to take a break from playing.

They were too razor focused on setting up Thanos as a big bad. I’d bet if Disney knew the morass they’d be in now, we’d have seen an Ultron survival tease.

I think the record still goes to Amazon’s Crucible, which was cancelled before release after a closed-beta that nobody played.

Thanks for the heads up! I’m one of those weirdos who thinks Burning Crusade is like peak WoW, but it’s hard to find good private servers focused on the era.

The problem is that to argue this point, you have to start going through all of the facts like case conversion rates, the domestic abuse rates, the rates of racist attacks by law enforcement, and the membership overlap between law enforcement and white supremacist groups. Once you start bringing up that many numbers, the idiots get confused and their eyes roll out of their skull, whereas the centrists get too scared realizing that basically no cop is actually trying to keep the U.S. safe and try to shutdown the conversation.

Yeah, this sounds more like a win for handheld PCs than some sudden shift across gamers. The Steam Deck has done well enough to spawn a sea of copycats, it’s not surprising that it’s making a statistical impact now too.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a let-down when you compare what’s on offer here with a previous Larian title like Divinity 2. That game lets you make full on campaigns.

God I remember the hell out of Spiderman 2. I only had it on like a demo disk, so the game ended shortly after your battle against Rhino, so I just spent ages swinging around the city.

The problem is that it flat out isn’t a space exploration game. Space is more or less a glorified loading zone. You can do some dogfighting if you want, but you’re mostly just going to fast travel from planet to planet while completing modern, bland Bethesda quests.

If you really just love Bethesda games, and have enjoyed your time in Fallout 4 or 76, there’s not anything wrong with it structurally. The gunplay is about as good as the Creation Engine allows, and there’s some actually cool new game+ additions to encourage a replay. The problem is that if you’re someone who saw both of those games as signs of Bethesda faltering, Starfield is your proof that their open-world design is outdated, and their writing can’t compete in the same arena as someone like Larian.

The Sims 2 Castaway is basically the proto survival crafting game. It’s kinda cool to see the classic Sim stats get used in such a different way. I sometimes wish EA would return to those days of selling spinoff Sim games like Castaway and the Urbz, rather than just dumping every single new idea they get into one game as DLC.

I mean, Solomon left recently, who I kinda consider the reason those XCOM remakes were so good. Not sure if I’d really be that excited by a third entry.

Huh, they’re working with someone other than Owlcat. I wonder if that’s just a consequence of Owlcat currently working on Rogue Trader, or if the last few launches of Owlcat games made Paizo want to try a different team.

Or is this just another dev team licensing the ruleset, and it’s a total coincidence that the former director of marketing at Paizo is working with them?

They’ve already announced that they’ll be requiring the service again for Ghosts of Tsushima’s online component. The only thing Sony learned is to never let a game launch without making sure the account service works day 1.

There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.

These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.

If they don’t walk back these changes, expect every PS title to get reviewbombed, even if it doesn’t make sense, by angry nerds. That’ll probably be to the only implication, so it’s on Sony’s beancounters to determine if that’s more important than falsely inflating MAUs for a quarter.