A betting man would play this one slow. I am definitely part of the crowd that wants this to do well but I am not counting on it.

The qunari design is the weirdest thing to me. They Bioware spent so much effort solidifying who the Qunari are in 2 and had a great design to reflect that. Then in 3 I feel like they maintained and perhaps even improved the design, but kinda watered down the characterization of the culture. Perhaps I’m misremembering and the group of Qunari present in 2 are a more extreme sect than they are representative of the people as a whole. Now in Veilguard they seem to have really softened everything about the race. I’m just confused about the design direction which is disappointing because I really enjoy the qunari of DA2.

DA2 has several bad qualities. I personally would not generalize it as a bad game. I am willing to concede that this is an unpopular opinion, however.

This game was actually pretty fun if you could find a lobby but it was buggy as hell and could become lopsided pretty quickly.

I know nothing about game development, so feel free to reference back to that. If the player is controlling an actual toddler in this game, rather than a 2ft tall Ethan Winters, have you considered trying to alter the camera and movement controls so they are more wobbly/unsteady? The most jarring observation I had from the trailer was "No toddler on the planet moves that purposefully.

Otherwise I think you have a fantastic spooky atmosphere and I think the idea of playing a helpless child really lends itself to the horror genre in a powerful way.

Do you think you could expand on what the gameplay is actually like?

I honestly don’t know. It just seems like a tiny bit of cooperation could vastly reduce the costs of game development for all studios involved.

He is baffled by the focus of assets. Thousands of people from across the world came together to create these beautifully meticulous visual details, yet nobody bothered to make sure the game is actually fun to play.

Also, I know I’m going to be gunned down on this hill but BOTW is boring. I have tried again and again to get through that game and can’t push myself beyond 10-15ish hours. It’s like everyone that is raving about it has never played a basic open world game before. It has a cool physics system but that can’t prop up the fact that the huge open world is just EMPTY and when you do finally find something to interact with it’s either 1)One of 4 enemy types that you can either use the physics engine to cheese or just whack at using the most basic combat system imaginable (and you’ll be punished for using with a broken weapon), or 2) an incredibly basic “dungeon” that involves 1-3 simple puzzles and maybe another boring fight.

To top it off the writing is absolutely atrocious, so you can’t even rely on that to drive you through the mediocre gameplay. I just don’t get it.

This is the thought that really stuck with me from the article. Even if it were through some kind of marketplace, couldn’t developers share assets for reuse across different games? You can’t tell me that an asset can’t be retextured or an animation tweaked to apply somewhere new and be virtually indistinguishable for a fraction of the cost of creating it from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong I adore BG3 and it is absolutely stunning, but I don’t know if we can compare a heavily curated experience like that to something like this which allows for such a high degree of customization and player created content. It will be interesting to see if the final product actually looks like this. You can damn well guarantee all of those customization options will be locked behind micro transactions though.

I have zero interest in playing this but it’s visually stunning. I can’t think of another game with this combination of graphic fidelity and smooth complex animation.

I have considered it a few times and I even have Helldivers installed still, buuuut I’m balls deep in my first run of Elden Ring right now and I haven’t even hit the DLC yet, so 🤷‍♂️.

It’s a very different experience, but have you considered Baldur’s Gate 2?

How is the Helldivers community these days? I had so much fun with that one before the whole PSN debacle. It kinda killed the vibe for me at the time and I have since moved on to other things, but I was so surprised how much a third-person online shooter sucked me in at this point in my life.

I wonder if any of this has been corroborated. I feel more conflicted about this kind of stuff recently because for every one asshole saying awful shit there are hundreds of other people that poured years of their life into making a game like this.

Definitely this. It’s pretty easy to lookup exactly where you are and find mostly spoiler free walkthroughs or sometimes even hints. IIRC there are a few spots that a lot of people got hung up on.

This game is too good not to finish.

It would be a real stretch to classify doom as a platformer.

You’re not wrong. The mass proliferation of listacles with the same 5 advertised products stamped behind a novella of filler to appease SEO algorithms has been increasingly problematic for at least 10 years now. The issue has only been compounded with the flood of “AI” generated content and deceptive ads. I almost prefer when every website had sidebars full of blatant advertisements. Sure they were ever present, but they weren’t trying to literally trick you into buying something.

Lmao I’m leaving it.

Non-essential and predatory are not mutually exclusive, especially given Blizzard’s history of player manipulation. They have perfected the science of making you want someone that you don’t need.

Haha ok so you’re just one of those people whose understanding of the universe isn’t capable of expanding beyond “this good, that bad”.

I haven’t defended anyone and never intended to. I’m just saying get your comparisons straight. “Hey this game has a bunch of annoying bugs” =/= “Yo this shit is effectively non-functional and empty”.