Vordus

@Vordus@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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Vordus,

The problem you’ve got is that the two lists that you’re looking at are ones with concrete release dates, and we’re currently in the period of the year where the release dates are the hardest to come by. Basically everyone’s either just started their fiscal Q1 and so have a completely clear slate, or like Microsoft have just started their Fiscal Q4 which means all they’ve got left on the slate are the delayed stragglers.

Vordus,

The Elden Ring expansion straight up has a release date: June 21st 2024.

Vordus,

More like grabbing a bargain; When Embracer bought Saber it cost them more than $500 million. They sold it to Beacon (who are basically just a bunch of investors and one of the Saber founders) for just under $250 million, and are now stacking up extras from the Embracer spending spree while they still can.

On a similar note, who do we reckon is buying Gearbox? My money is on Take 2, because who would be stupid enough to buy Gearbox (Embracer aside) when the Borderlands publishing rights are permanently in 2K’s hands?

Vordus,

realMyst

Of course, that’s not the most recent remake of Myst. The current one is called, er, ‘Myst’.

Sigh. Looking forward to Riven. Again.

Vordus,

The problem with Watch Dogs Legion is that all of the player characters are all procedurally generated, so while there’s plenty of plot, it’s pretty threadbare as a story.

Vordus,

They’ve got the look spot on, but everyone’s miscast and none of the jokes land.

Vordus,

Oh god, it’s 2K publishing.

Which means that the game disappearing from storefronts is one of the better case scenarios. It’s entirely possible that they’ll patch out the licenced songs from the soundtrack from every digital copy of the game.

Where's Our Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Review? (IGN denied review code) (www.ign.com)

In a bad-vibes moment, they’re denying a huge outlet like IGN a review code. No matter what I think of IGN in particular (nothing good tbh), that’s not something I can find a real explanation for other than “We made DC’s Gollum and want to avoid bad press as long as we can”.

Vordus,

It’s Rocksteady, so it’ll be higher than 40s. Heck, it’s almost impossible to get a score lower than 40 on metacritic…

Mid 60s I’m guessing, perhaps as high as 69 if reviewers are feeling generous. The kind of score which would be absolutely fine if it were a cheap and cheerful B-game made by a scrappy team of underfunded devs, but which is an absolute embarrassment when applied to a multi million dollar tentpole. The kind of score that implies ‘meh’.

Vordus,

How would they fucking know? The article is behind a paywall!

Vordus,

The game released on the 19th September, Nominated games had to be released before the 29th September. Golden Joysticks voting was from the 3rd to the 20th October, and the premium DLC that made everyone angry was confirmed on the 24th and then released on the 27th. The timing could absolutely not have fallen more perfectly for MK1.

Vordus,

It’s not AI-based. Articles like this are generally repeatedly republished with extremely minimal editing every six months or so to keep them ‘fresh’ for the search engine optimisation.

Vordus,

Especially when it released almost immediately after the new Harebrained Schemes game flopped. Paradox was absolutely not in a position to let a tentpole slip, re: investors.

Vordus,

It’s a shoe-in for Merriam Webster’s word of the year, I reckon.

Vordus,

That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly.

It’s ironic that we always seem to praise RollerCoaster Tycoon specifically, as that’s one’s based on the Transport Tycoon engine, which was also by Josh Sawyer and also in x86 assembly.

Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release.

I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...

Vordus,

My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.

Vordus,

Not Trombone Champ, 2022’s best indie game?

Vordus,

I think they published it, but don’t actually own it.

Vordus,

Psychonauts 2.

Vordus,

Ultimately the problem with Perfect Dark as a franchise is that everyone who made it great went off and formed Free Radical and made the TimeSplitters games.

Vordus,

That’s fair. It’s one of the most minimal abstract puzzle games ever made, so there’s not a lot to grab onto.

Vordus,

And it’s even on Game Pass! Oh, wait…

Vordus,

I mean, if we’re gonna namedrop completely unique indie darling difficult puzzles, then Return of the Obra Dinn also deserves a mention.

Vordus,

But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!

Vordus,

GIMP is free and also doubles as a way to express just how much I hate myself!

Vordus,

The Wolf Among Us 2 is straight up a cursed game at this point.

Vordus,

It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.

Vordus,

They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they’ve sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.

Vordus,

Quality, no. Reception, yes. These two things aren’t necessarily the same.

Vordus,

Give it a few weeks and it’ll be $7.99. Maybe even $5.99 depending on how many sales they got last time it hit $7.99.

They keep it at this price because it allows them to advertise an ‘80% discount’ several times a year, which gives them better visibility in the sales.

Which is a wholly different level of suck. But hey, ho.

Vordus,

It’s not entirely against their own self-interest. More accessible engines on the market means more beginner devs who may graduate to Epic in a few years, and more products to sell on the EGS. Also more devs potentially means more asset store customers.

Regardless, it’s certainly more helpful to the industry than Unity at the moment.

Vordus,

No, that’s the Xbox One S. This is the Xbox Series S.

Vordus,

It becomes even more confusing when you think about the fact that the Xbox One is not the Xbox 1, which was just the Xbox. And that the Xbox One X, the souped up version of the Xbox One, can be abbreviated as the XBOX, which again, is not the original Xbox.

Vordus,

Depends on whether you’re willing to spend $20 to turn your Series S into a devkit, at which point the S can be an utter beast for emulation.

Vordus,

If you have a quest marker, you can jump straight there using the quest log, no fiddling around with the map required!

Vordus,

Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.

It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.

Vordus,

In previous Bethesda games I eventually just started doing calculations in my head constantly about whether the stuff I was grabbing was worth the weight involved. I’m still not quite at that point for Starfield, but I’ll get there.

Vordus,

Now there’s a difficult job!

Vordus,

Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there’s a $60 game already on there (which also isn’t normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.

Vordus,

A shame, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Volition was never quite the same after the THQ bankruptcy, and that was still several years before Embracer took over.

Vordus,

I’d make a joke about the pistol having repeatedly fired blanks over the last couple of years, but I think that’s the point of a starting gun isn’t it?

Vordus,

It’s also a holdover from arcade games, which would have an ‘attract mode’ when there was nobody playing.

What games have you played in the last 365 days that stand out to you as the most memorable experiences?

I think the most common answer is going to be Tears of the Kingdom, and that is one for me that stands out for sure, but I will try to add some more unique inputs as well. Many are games that came out longer than a year ago, but i didnt get around to playing until more recently....

Vordus,

I replayed through Hypnospace Outlaw. And hoo boy does that game hit harder when you’re playing it whilst the major social networks are crumbling.

Hideo Kojima Says Death Stranding 2 Will Redefine 'Strand' (kotaku.com)

At the beginning, there was the theme of “connecting,” and after that, I made a lot of notes about character settings, game ideas, and so on. Like how to connect it. I put it together while maintaining a balance…But I had to rewrite everything because of corona. In Death Stranding, it was justice to connect, but with the...

Vordus,

Still waiting for more Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment genre games, personally.

Vordus,

Vampire Survivors has more story than vampires. Which is a low bar to clear but it just about does.

Vordus,

The gameplay loop uses getting to interact with the characters and to advance the various subplots as part of your reward/consolation at the end of each run. I’d call that story-heavy.

Vordus,

I’m not enjoying just how often it wrenches control away from you to either show you a barely animated cutscene or a flyover.

Vordus,

You’d think we’d have perfected an onboarding tutorial for this kind of game by now, but they always seem to either not tell you anywhere near enough to actually play the game, or intimidate you with so much detail that you lose focus. It’s unfortunate.

Vordus,

Bloody ChatGPT

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