I loved Death Stranding, but anyone else feel like that guy putting on the bandana might have been Kojima making a little dig at David Hayter?

The character design looks very reminiscent of the MGS Delta materials we’ve seen, and Hayter has been more open lately about how miffed he was when Kojima dumped him for Kiefer in MGS V. That coupled with how much promo work Hayter has been doing for Delta makes me think it wouldn’t be too surprising if Kojima was annoyed with him.

When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that’s really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That’s a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.

When I “buy a game” on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn’t going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn’t around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I’ll just regret not buying the game on GOG.

State of Decay is one of my guilty pleasure series. I know it’s got its faults, but I keep going back to it once every couple years or so.

The standard difficulty just nails that dopamine cycle of grinding and reward, until you’ve got a thriving community that can hold off all threats until the resources in the map are totally depleted and it’s time to move on.

I could probably get a bit better at the game and tackle the harder modes, but that would up the stress factor and make me more likely to put it back down faster.

I’m glad Microsoft is dropping their internal releases on competing platforms now, because otherwise I’d probably never play the upcoming third one as a Linux and PS5 player.

Damn, Jeff Vogel’s still at it? I remember scraping together chore money and putting in a mail order for Blades of Exile back in the day. I wonder if those floppies are still sitting around here somewhere.

Corrupted Blood taught us that we needed to add the vital “I’m a malicious/selfish asshole” variable to our calculations.

Seems like a good move for everyone. If you like the Civ series and have wondered if there was a decent fantasy or sci-fi version, Endless Legend and Endless Space 1 or 2 have you covered, respectively.

The PS3 also had damn few games to play at launch. If it wasn’t for Sony’s decision to ship it with a BD-ROM drive it probably would have been a total flop. Home theater nerds saved the PS3.

The PlayStation store is also a miserable shopping experience. If you don’t know what game you want or just want to browse, good fucking luck finding it there. No screenshots, no gameplay, no user reviews, no related games to compare to, no info about if your friends are wishlisting or playing it. Just a choice of buying the expensive version or the more expensive version, and good luck figuring out which DLC is already included in the deluxe editions.

Outer Worlds is way closer to a Fallout spiritual sequel (or beat Starfield to the punch) than an Elder Scrolls game.

Did they ever fix the reputation system? I managed to instantly piss off an entire city while I was in the middle of it because I accumulated one too many “We don’t like you” points in the middle of a quest. Completely ruined my immersion and was a hard stop for me.

I also don’t buy his take that the game started development in 2016, this is what was big culturally in 2016, and the team just retreated into a bunker until launch and didn’t have any way to course correct.

That’s not how game development works. I guarantee the headcount for this project didn’t peak in 2016 and stay steady. This was a low-priority item on a few people’s kanban boards for a couple years, probably had multiple starts, dead-ends, and reinventions.

I have to think Sony saw the writing on the wall, pushed the project out the door because they didn’t think it would get any better barring significant reinvestment, and braced for the impact. I credit them just a tiny bit for not writing it off on their taxes and canning the project like Hollywood has been doing lately.

I don’t have downvote arrows in either my browser or Jerboa on Android.

Fair points, but I can’t participate in this thread because I’m on an instance that doesn’t allow down votes. The up vote solution is at least a bit more inclusive

I don’t think many adult games can afford mocap though. Typically the adult content is purely animated models.

I just had flashbacks to Dead State. It was a AA title written by one of the guys from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines so I was watching it closely during development.

Suddenly, it went from EA to full release. I was surprised, but picked it up without reading many reviews.

I enjoyed the game and put maybe 15 hours into it, but then I had to move and had to pack up my PC for a few weeks. By the time I got settled and booted it up, it had gotten a massive patch which fixed a ton of bugs, filled in missing content like item descriptions and a bunch of other polish that would typically be done during pre-launch.

Meanwhile, one of the devs had gotten into a high profile pissing match with the community over accusations they had rushed it out the door. I normally try to sympathize with devs over a reactive community, but I couldn’t help feel like I got punished for buying the game at launch and experiencing those relatively non-replayable opening hours in a non-optimal (Dead) state.

Because many of us remember before that, when Valve revolutionized the single player first person genre again and again with the Portal and mainline Half-Life games.

Any other dev would have capitalized on the massive interest in a sequel or at least sold off the property so someone else could have continued those franchises.

On old gen consoles, yes. On PC, it was merely a rough launch, not the industry shattering event it was made out to be.

(First off, the last gen versions were a shit show and I fully believe CDPR should have bit the bullet and cancelled those preorders. That was a failure at the high levels, not with the devs. This is about the PC version:)

Hey yo, I’m one of those idiots that gave it a good review, and that was day one. Yeah, it had a bad launch, but I’d argue it was no worse than No Man’s Sky, or Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, or The Witcher 3. All of the above are some of my favorite games of all time.

If you don’t like the core game, cool. Agree to disagree. But the things that people love about the game now have been in there since 1.0. Sure, there are genuine criticisms to be made, but most of the hate this game got has either been patched out or was pure bandwagon hate to begin with.

Yeah, I just set it up because I don’t want Meta’s shit on my phone and my friend group insists on using WhatsApp. I still had to install the native WhatsApp client but I was able to remove it as soon as I had confirmed the account creation. It also means I can stop giving out my cell number when I want to meet someone from Facebook Marketplace to buy something.

They advise against removing the apps on your phone, but at the least, you can turn off notifications for everything other than Beeper and use it as a single interface. On the desktop app, it makes a bit more sense. I’ve stopped running the Telegram, Signal, and Google Chat apps. I just wish Google Voice played nice with integrations and could be added to the platform.