Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive games… Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite…

Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.

Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren’t on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.

Huh? That’s not a problem at all. TF1 had a totally different cast to TF2, actually. Fully replacing the cast would be par for the course, and that definitely doesn’t preclude them from making a full set of new characters

Just give us Team Fortress 3…

I feel he’s right. Youtube alone completely exhausted my patience to be advertised to in 2021, and when you’re fed up with something and it keeps getting shoved down your throat at every corner then you get annoyed at first, and then you really start to actively despise it, and then it becomes completely unbearable. I absolutely cannot stand adverts anymore, including video sponsors. If I see a particularly obnoxious advert I’ll go out of my way to AVOID the products in question, if I couldn’t avoid paying attention to it. I’d like to go on record and say, absolutely fuck the electronic billboard outside my workplace, that piece of shit makes it dangerous to drive at night because it’s so bright and I hope to god it gets vandalized beyond repair.

Most games that I try these days were recommended to me by people who I know personally. BG3 was one of very few exceptions, and honestly? You know what sold me on BG3 and made me think ‘this is going to be a really high-quality game?’ It was when there was a news article discussing the controversies after they confirmed that you could get railed by a druid. Not even something I’m interested in, but that design choice actively showed they were including niche options that not many people would pick into their RPG. That was what made me go ‘Oh shit, if you can do that, you can probably do a lot of other things! It’s an RPG with actual impactful dialog choices! They weren’t just throwing that out as an advertising buzz!’

Difficulties of making 5e DnD work in a video game beyond 12th level

BG3 might have missed the mark for me in the end, but God Damn do I feel that one. Full respect to them for managing to make such a good game even when working from such a flawed base

Aw, RIP. Guess time comes for us all in the end, and I hadn’t been watching for nearly a decade. Congratulations for lasting as long as you did.

Well, it’s set in DnD; I tried to keep expectations in check for the whole thing but they did a legitimately good job with presenting you with a varied set of options for how you can approach and resolve dungeons in Act 1 and 2. So I did tentatively allow my expectations to be raised.

In any case, I was looking forwards to seeing how they’d handle their dragon encounter. The one I’d been looking forwards to all game. And BOY did they fall flat on their face. The dungeon is one of the most frustrating and unrewarding ones in the game, and the encounter with the dragon (a highly intelligent and charismatic creature within DnD where the conversation with them is half the fun) won’t even talk to you, only to a complete dickhead NPC that’s a mandatory tagalong with your party. There is NO variance in how you approach or resolve the dragon, there is no way you can influence their storyline for better or worse, and you can’t even kill Dickhead NPC. For high hopes to be met with by far the hardest failure to meet expectations… yeah, it just killed my enjoyment.

(For contrast, compare how they handled their dragon to how they handled their Hag, Devil, the entire Thorm family, the Gith Creche, and Grymforge. Look at how much your choices can influence those. Look at how much they will talk to you.)

You know what? I may not have ended up enjoying BG3 at the end since they stumbled at the hurdle I was most excited to see them clear, but this is a stance deserving of respect. I’m glad that Larian is making good use of their success.

Hot damn. I’ve seen friction between upper management before but it’s literally inconceivable to me that I would ever wake up and see that level of genuine hatred from like, one of my place’s senior management tweeted out to an ex-CEO.

I guess Bobby was a very special guy to the Blizzard crew, huh?

Dwarf Fortress.