Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

There is a legitimate reason why we may see “something” in the future.

Ubisoft accepted subsidies from the French government for the production of BGE2, which puts BGE2 in a similar place like “Skull and Bones”: “Skull and Bones” was partially financed by subsidies from the Singaporean government. So BGE2 is trapped in the same weird limbo “Skull and Bones” was trapped in for years. Ubisoft has to figure out whether they actually want to finish the game or write a big, fat check to the French government.

We all know how that turned out for “Skull and Bones”, so I am not going to get my hopes up.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

“Hey, are you playing that super popular, brand new open world survival base building game?”

“No, I am playing the other super popular, brand new open world survival base building game.”

Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.

At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as “Spider-Man 2” and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.

Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.

I wonder if 2023 will go down as one of the last good years for gaming (and even that only works if you ignore all the layoffs that already happened).

Piranha Bytes is/was owned by Embracer, that should say everything about its chances of survival.

If you are up for written reviews: Buried Treasure does a very good job of digging up stuff that hardly ever gets any attention elsewhere.

That’s one part of the reason: Google seriously angered the judge by deleting possible evidence (Google got in similar trouble in the anti-trust trial in regards to their search engine). Additionally there were emails that showed that Google was very worried about Epic and that they bribed phone manufacturers to not install pre-install a Fortnite launcher (or other app stores) on their phones.

So there was a clear paper trail that showed how Google execs used their control over Android and the Google app store in order to undermine Epic’s efforts to circumvent having to pay Google for being included in the app store. That’s the main difference in regards to the trial against Apple where the evidence was not that clear-cut.

Fair point. Though the article points towards Uncharted and her work on Legacy of Kain is not as well-known IMO.

They are totally right, it’s a shame that PC Gamer did not name a single woman.

One nitpick though: Two of the women named in the article, Rieko Kodama and Amy Hennig, did not create games for PC. Both were employed by console makers. Jen Zee being acknowledged is certainly deserved, but a there are many, many trailblazing women in PC gaming which should be highlighted: Roberta Williams (co-founder of Sierra Online), Brenda Romero (Wizardry series), Jade Raymond (Assassin’s Creed producer) or Danielle Bunten Berry (M.U.L.E.), just to name a few.

Particularly the omission of Roberta Williams who has not only co-founded one of early gaming’s most successful game dev studios and publishers, but also designed the long-running King’s Quest series which transformed and defined the adventure game genre, is inexcusable. It does not get more influential in gaming than that.

Nobody could see this coming.*

*except for all the people who knew that execs like Ritticiello saddling a company with tons of debt would result in a financial mess that would undo even the most financially stable business.

They are banking on nostalgia, because nostalgia is all they have left. After so many people have left I don’t even know what to expect from a new ME or DA game.

The answer is as simple as it is horrible: It’s because for every burned-out, overworked and underpaid game dev, there are two starry-eyed kids who want to realize their dream and create games - and the C-suite knows this.They will replace any veteran dev with someone right out of college as soon as it is convenient

Mind, I am not blaming young people who want to create games. They lack the experience to know they are getting exploited. It’s all the cynicism of managers who know no loyalty and only want profits.

And if anyone wonders why every new game somehow manages to be a buggy mess that needs fixing, you have the answer right there too: Because the devs who fixed it the last time got fired and replaced with rookies.

If there is one upside to the Microsoft/ActiBlizz merger, then it is that this parasite will finally get out of the gaming industry. Kotick has shown again and again that he barely knows what his studios actually did. He infamously stalled the development of games with his incompetence, burdening devs with needless extra work.

So that guy now thinks he knows what the future of gaming is going to look like? Get f***ed, Kotick!

My sympathies. Keyboard producers are really dropping the ball for you guys.

A beak or feet work too, but I get your point. Invertebrates obviously have a hard time with typing.

Thank you. I try to make an effort, but it is really hard to type. Humans should make smaller keyboards.