If you haven’t done GTA 5, that’s the one you really need to get.

RDR2 is a very good game, but it’s a slower pace that’s not for everyone.

GTA 5 is a masterpiece for dicking around. I’ve spent entire evenings just stealing a waverunner and racing through the canals, or the scuba boat and scuba diving, or stealing a bike and biking up and down the mountain, or taking a helicopter up to interesting places and jumping out and parachuting.

In particular, you’re going to want to check out “Director’s Mode.”

This is a mode where you can toggle things like turning off police reactions or giving access to guns or having a super-jump that lets you fly through the air to the roofs of buildings with one leap.

You can really enjoy some of the finer details in this mode, like shooting up cars to see the deformation physics and how the tires get flat or the specific gas tank locations for different cars where they start leaking and shooting the gas trail to blow it up.

Infinite ammo for the mini gun is also quite worth it.

Teleporting around the map is extremely convenient too for things like getting back to the top of the mountain to bike down it over and over.

And oh man — controlling the weather and time of day, and being able to freeze the time of day to exactly when you want? Keeping it at nighttime and rain for an entire play session? Hit the golden hour with an overcast sky and keep it there? Makes a huge difference too.

(The only negative of Director’s Mode is you can’t explore stealth mechanics and certain types of special NPCs like the mime don’t show up.)

There’s so much detail to the world. Get into the military base and see if you can find where one of the landing strip lights is on the fritz because the drain next to it is overflowing. Or some of the graffiti in the tunnels underneath the city.

For your specific ask, I really can’t think of a better game in existence.

(I’ve also spent hundreds of hours messing around in Cyberpunk 2077, which is an outstanding game and open world, but not quite at the level of polish and variability as GTA 5.)

So weird this occurred not long after it’s become clear Xbox is getting out of the hardware game.

We assessed how endoscopists who regularly used AI performed colonoscopy when AI was not in use.

I wonder if mathematicians who never used a calculator are better at math than mathematicians who typically use a calculator but had it taken away for a study.

Or if grandmas who never got smartphones are better at remembering phone numbers than people with contacts saved in their phone.

Tip: your brain optimizes. So it reallocates resources away from things you can outsource. We already did this song and dance a decade ago with “is Google making people dumb” when it turned out people remembered how to search for a thing instead of the whole thing itself.

Live service doesn’t need to be shit.

There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.

But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.

In many cases yes (though I’ve been in good ones when playing off and on, usually the smaller the more there’s actual group activities).

But they are essential to be a part of for blueprints and trading, which are very core parts of the game.

You’ll almost always end up doing missions with other people other than when you intentionally want to do certain tasks solo.

A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.

PvP sucks and it’s almost all PvE content vs Destiny though.

Let there be this kind of light in these dark times.

The DLC is really the right balance for FromSoft.

The zones in the base game are slightly too big.

In the DLC, it’s still open world and extremely flexible in how you explore it, but there’s less wasted space.

It’s very tightly knit and the pacing is better as a result.

It’s like Elden Ring was watching masters of their craft cut their teeth on something new, and then the DLC was them applying everything they learned in that process.

Can’t wait for their next game in that same vein (especially not held back by last gen consoles).

I hate that the Smithscript weapons can’t be buffed.

Especially for the daggers.

Wanted to pew pew little bolts of lightning buffed daggers doing an additional 200+ damage per hit. 😢

No, it was awesome. Went to like 12 over the years. Early 2000s was peak E3.

Probably added after that update.

The new items stuff in particular seems like QoL considerations for “we just added a hundred items to the game for players coming back to it after months away.”

I’ve always thought Superman would be such an interesting game to do right.

A game where you are invincible and OP, but other people aren’t.

Where the weight of impossible decisions pulls you down into the depths of despair.

I think the tech is finally getting to a point where it’d be possible to fill a virtual city with people powered by AI that makes you really care about the individuals in the world. To form relationships and friendships that matter to you. For there to be dynamic characters that put a smile on your face when you see them in your world.

And then to watch many of them die as a result of your failures, as despite being an invincible god among men you can’t beat the impossible.

I really think the gameplay in a Superman game done right can be one of the darkest and most brutal games ever done, with dramatic tension just not typically seen in video games. The juxtaposition of having God mode turned on the entire game but it not mattering to your goals and motivations because it isn’t on for the NPCs would be unlike anything I’ve seen to date.

The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.

Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.

Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.

Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.

I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it’s been so successful.

It’s outstanding, but even right now at its best it still isn’t perfect.

I’m very, very much looking forward to what they can eventually do using UE5 as the base in an era with generative AI to fill out the edges.

When the polish (pun intended) is there, the game is beyond everything else. But when you end up just a bit past the edges of where it holds your hand, it quickly loses the veneer, which is the key difference vs something like a Rockstar open world (but also very different budgets and aims).

There’s a handful of studios I think will adapt especially well to the future of game development, and CDPR is one of them.

Because it is going to be possible to have CP 2077 main scenario style interactions across an entire open world within the next decade. And who better to curate that experience than the people delivering it in a diagonal slice?

I love how he’s modernizing the punch lines to all the old Soviet jokes.

Sports games.

I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.

It’s like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.