Yes, the two hour limit affects game design. Based on what I’ve read about Blue Prince, it probably didn’t affect that one much at all. The business model always affects the game design. When games were expecting to be rentals, the first few levels would be front loaded with the best that the game had to offer, and then later levels would be more phoned in. In the arcades, games would be louder to catch more attention, they’d be harder to make you put in another quarter, they’d reduce downtime to get the next person on the machine, etc.

Oh, things are trending in the right direction, but we’re still a long ways away from needing smaller sub communities.

I think a lot of these are going to be placeholder for a while until more generalized communities like this one see more growth. It’ll be a while before we even hit 100k subscribers here, and you need to have a subset of those people who are looking to talk about an even more specific interest in more depth.

I gave it a chance, and I remember the objective design being different for the sake of it to the point of being worse. They had a capture the flag mode involving charging a battery, but it could be charged to 99% at one base and then scored at the other base at the last second, making everything except the final play meaningless. It had a point control mode, but the points were only active in certain intervals, creating a real stop and go feeling that made the inactive periods as meaningless as the aforementioned first 99% of CTF.

Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.

For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.

No, they contracted this game out to another developer, and it’s in Unreal. It’s been in the works for a long time. If they’re smart, it’s a testbed for getting future games off of their usual Creation engine.

That game only really went into production after Starfield shipped.

Video game marketing changed dramatically about 2 years ago. No one likes long marketing cycles anymore. There are too many opportunities for delays or “puddlegates”.

I haven’t played it, but it’s on my list. A very long list. And Rogue Trader is 40k, right? Meaning fantasy trappings but in space? That can also be fine, but I appreciated Starfield’s setting for sticking to harder sci-fi tropes, like its obvious inspiration of Interstellar.

I wasn’t a fan of a number of choices they made in their RPG systems in the Original Sin games, so until we see what their next game is, I’ll wonder how much of the heavy lifting done in BG3 was due to D&D rather than their designers. Still, BG3 knocked basically everything out of the park, so even a lesser RPG from this team will still likely be great. It would be nice to have the CRPG equivalent of Starfield from Larian, since most sci-fi RPGs tend to stick to the post-apocalypse.

I watched two Jobst videos, and the second one didn’t sit right with me, so it’s no surprise he played fast and loose with facts that might see him lose a court case.

As for what I’ve been playing, I just beat Borderlands 2 the other day, and now I’m working my way through the DLC before I move on to the Pre-Sequel and 3. It’s mostly a huge improvement over the first game, but they definitely unflattened the progression compared to the first game, which is something a lot of RPGs and adjacent games do. It’s never been my preference, and it comes with its own design problems, like how the game refused to give me some decent guns toward the end of the game and then suddenly gave me guns that trivialized the next part of the game.

I’m still in the middle of Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well, but I’ve only inched forward in it since the last of these posts.

And I’m always playing fighting games like Skullgirls, so that’s the free space on my Bingo card.

I built my last PC in 2021 just accepting that graphics card prices would never come down anytime soon, and I paid about $1400 for one. They did come down, not long after. I can wait more patiently this time.

You have to go specifically to the giveaway section.

When I build a new computer sometime in the next year or so, I’ll probably end up buying the second-best AMD card available at the time, because that’s where there tends to be the best bang for my buck. But in reality, I’ll be using the full power of that card for only a handful of games over the lifetime of that machine, and I’ll spend most of my time playing a 2D game that came out in 2012. Yeah, you can absolutely get away with cheaper cards and have a great time.

a backdrop of a challenging economic environment, including high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates

I think that’s all you’re going to get.

I doubt it. Maybe Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart can get away with charging more, but a lot of games asking $70 aren’t finding many customers willing to pay that price right now.

Yes, they charged for it years ago on the last gen system. This type of rerelease usually includes the DLC in the package so that they can go back to charging full price for a game that’s no longer in the zeitgeist and not worth as much as a brand new game.

That’s what happened to that cancelled TimeSplitters reboot, too.

By sheer compatibility, we’re well more than halfway there.

No one can predict the future, especially not now, but things are clearly changing. Microsoft is getting messaging out there right now to let you know the ways that they’re rolling with the punches. The next Xbox, and corresponding handhelds, will in all likelihood just be thinly disguised PCs that absolutely let you just install Steam, Epic, etc. on them if you so choose. So in that world, when you can buy an Xbox that also plays PlayStation games that have released on PC, how does Sony compete with that? That’s very up in the air.

And for all the ways that Nintendo has historically handled consoles, they’re under new management now that may be open to doing things differently. The way they’re trying to press their market advantage at the moment, which was already going to result in fewer units sold, could be even further undone at the worst possible time for them by a stupid trade war. How will they choose to respond to that? Because bleeding money by sticking to their old ways isn’t going to be what happens. If they did burn to the ground, the insurance company that owns their intellectual property would dig them out of the ashes and sell them where they can make money again.