Some games I replay a lot, but always on a fresh save. I think I’ve finished Dark Souls about 10 times without ever touching NG+.

Notable exceptions are:

• Nier Automata, although you kind of have to if you want the whole game and it still brought down the experience for me.
• Chrono Trigger, for the quick kill on Lavos. I did not play much of the NG+.

No matter how similar their game might look, without Robert Kurvitz, it won’t be a true successor.

On that note, he’s written a novel that is related to DE. Entirely in estonian of course, with only fan translations available.

I think the second FF7 part isn’t on steam yet? But personally speaking, while I’m slightly interested, I not to eager on these games. FF16 semms to have cut back on too many RPG mechanics for my liking and FF7 just isn’t complete yet. I’ll have another look once the ‘full game’ is out.

FF16 and FF7 are the only PS5 exclusives I would consider, but two games aren’t enough to buy a new generation - one that’s almost over even. Maybe release some graphically worse PS4 versions like almost everyone else? Oh, and PC ports of course if they haven’t.

I honestly don’t even think vanilla Skyrim was that good of a game. It had nice world building, but the combat sucked, the main story was kinda whatever, it was glitchy and a lot of systems were poorly thought out. It’s only ever been the promise of a good game which was mostly found in mods.

That was fast. We might as well start doing the lettuce thing for any given live service game at this point.

Just finished the Elden Ring DLC, which was overall still fun but felt overtuned at times. While I didn’t use any summons throughout the base game and initially tried to keep it that way, some bosses simply weren’t fun to learn anymore.

Afterwards I dove into my backlog and started God of War 2018. I had pretty high expectations, given how beloved it is. Honestly, it’s fine at best - the combat is boring and the overall design can be summarized as AAA slob. Maybe it does get better, I’m not very far yet.

That’s just such a nothing article. Some bloodsucker investor asked about their AI related plans and, as with everything else in the Q&A, they gave a non-answer.

Execs ruin everything for short term profit, that’s just their job.

Don’t get me started on state funding, there is none at my location.

Just for context, you can’t actually apply anymore and it’s been like that for about a year. And that’s not the first time period for which aplications are blocked.

In addition, both founding a start-up and actually applying is a lot of bureaucracy. You’ve probably run dry of money long before it’s approved.

Lastly, I believe they mostly fund mobile games.

It’s Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth.

4k gaming is nice and all, but I’d never get a new console and a new TV just for that. At that point, I might as well quit buying consoles for good and go for a PC - Sony started releasing more games on steam anyways.

There’s barely a point to get a normal PS5 yet. I can think of only one game I’m interested in that’s not also on the PS4.

For starters, they are by far the worlds largest video game company. They own shares for a good chunk of gaming companies worldwide, for some even a majority. They own WeeChat and are involved with Discord. If nothing else, they are just way too big and hold way too much influence - that’s never a good thing.

They are known for censorship and are involved with the chinese goverment. You won’t find many games the chinese goverment disagrees with and since they have a majority share in most large esport titles, being overly critical of china could end your career.

Some of their own games are known to be blatant rip offs, companies they invested in tend to get worse with mtx.

TL;DR: They are too big, hold too much data and have a bad track record.

That may be true if you’re into some F2P/gacha stuff, but not in a full-price game. These people just encourage more enshitification. Diablo used to have no microtransactions and was arguably a lot better too.

I feel like it’s just wrong to call these games ‘free’. They are ‘partially free’ with the incentive to extract as much money from you as possible in order to get the ‘good stuff’ or simply to avoid endless hours of unfun grinding. It’s just inferior in every way compared to games you pay for once and that’s it, because they don’t need to drip feed you ‘fun’.

Exceptions apply to competitive games that need a changing meta and content updates. New content for non-competitve ‘free’ games mostly amounts to new stuff you can buy to surpass new arbitrary walls built in front of you.

I couldn’t tell you exactly as I don’t speak japanese, but I believe Hidetaka Miyazaki does quite lot of interviews. Surely there’s something in there you could make an article on, otherwise people would probably stop interviewing him. But of course, you’re right, Larian could also be especially vocal for some reason.

If people actually wanted a lot of coverage about the individuals behind those generation defining games, I feel like I would have gotten a lot more of “Miyazaki said…” or “Breath of the Wild dev wrote…”. The Larian coverage seems more like a lot of cheap and easy articles churn out by those sites because they can throw in keywords about the currently popular thing and because even the intern can write them since they happen to speak English.

I think it’s kinda weird how obsessed the gaming press is with Larian. I get it, they made one of the best games that released last year, but that’s not enough to make an article out of everything they say. It has been months of these articles being on my lemmy feed and they have yet to say something interesting.