I believe the game showed pronouns on the character select screen. That’s all it takes to make certain people mad, unfortunately.

I hate the term “Quadruple-A”. The entire point of Triple-A was to be the biggest of the big. There’s no cap on that size.

They have Doom and Wolfenstein too, and series they’ve seemingly abandoned like Dishonored and Evil Within. They’ve tried to expand to other games but have mixed results at best: HiFi Rush was an unexpected hit early this year, but Redfall was…well, not. The hype on Starfield fizzled pretty quickly too.

Ghostwire sadly got middling review scores. It had a promising reveal a couple years back, then spent a while in troubled development before releasing as a fairly basic open world game.

D4 was the first of their games to charge extra for early access by attaching it to premium editions.

Ever heard of Spiderweb Software? They’ve been putting out lo-fi old-school cRPGs for nearly 30 years now. Take a look at Avernum: Escape from the Pit (a remake of their first game, Exile) and see if that scratches the same itch.

Aw, not Beamdog. :( They made all those enhanced editions classic D&D games like Baldur’s Gate 1 + 2 and Planescape Torment. I didn’t realize they were under Aspyr, which has had serious issues itself lately, not to mention the ongoing money issues at Embracer. We’re going to hear a bunch more stories like this over the next year, aren’t we.

It’s when there’s a disconnect between the storytelling and the gameplay. Usual example is Uncharted or the last Tomb Raider reboot: the main character wrings their hands over the possibility of having to kill a person, but the gameplay is you mowing down an army.