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.

If you only care for the JRPG stuff, go with Like a dragon. Along with the new gameplay they added Ichiban as a new protagonist - he’s the second one overall for the mainline games.

If you want to play the ones with brawling gameplay too, then go chronologically. They are somewhat connected and follow the same protagonist up until Ichiban is introduced. There’s the Kiwami series of remakes if you want something more modern - they are quite good, but some folks prefer the originals.

Like a dragon and Infinite wealth, I assume, don’t reference much of the old games, but knowing them still adds a bit to the experience.

For the most part, I only play a single (sub-)genre and nothing else. The E3 was a nice event to get up to speed on anything else. I don’t care enough to keep up with all these different presentations and announcements if they are not bundled together. I’ll kinda miss it.

As always, you guys are way too fixated on size.

I’d only consider using game pass if games wouldn’t rotate out of it. I want to replay stuff. Even worse, I don’t want to lose access mid-playthrough.

Sometimes I wonder how fast adoption rates would actually be. There are tons of jobs out there that could be automated with simple code ten years ago.