Even the way the cars moved in this video looked…floaty. These ultra photorealistic graphics are really cool but I think you nailed it talking about facial expressions, mechanics, and I would add animations in general. It will be even more jarring when everything looks so real.

You keep asking this in this thread. What answer do you want? The game has a shitload of content in it. I’m 35ish hours in and I have so many random quests and things to do. I’ve spent hours wandering around planets. Around cities. In space stations. Scanning things, reading stuff.

It’s completely fine if what the game has to offer doesn’t appeal to you, but if you truly cannot comprehend how anyone could enjoy it, then I’m afraid you just don’t have much perspective.

This is, objectively speaking, a large scale open world game with hundreds of hours of content. It should be self evident that what it has to offer will appeal to some and not to others. How can you think that because it doesn’t appeal to you, it shouldn’t appeal to anyone? That makes no sense.

Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.

They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.

The Typing of the Dead

I highly doubt Nintendo is attempting any kind of gap closure with the deck, because how could they and why?

The only thing they share is a form factor. Nintendo is well aware that the reason they sell consoles is as a dedicated platform for their own games. I truly believe that is their bread and butter and all they really care about. If the system gets popular enough, then it will get some third party support which means it will have some very limited library crossover with PC/PS/Xbox, but I think we are past the point where Nintendo intends to rely on that as a selling point for this or any future generation of consoles. Ports of games that come to switch are pretty uniformly the worst version of the game to play, and it’s pretty clear that doesn’t bother Nintendo at all.

Which is all to say, I don’t think Nintendo and Valve think of each other as direct competitors, because they serve entirely different markets. I have both a switch and a deck. I love them both. I use my switch to play Nintendo games, I use my deck to play pretty much anything else. I don’t think I’m unique at all in that regard, and frankly it never would occur to me that these devices have anything to do with one another.

Huh. I always heard 3 copies, 2 locations, 1 of the locations offsite. Yours makes sense though.

Not many. Mother 3 and Metroid Dread maybe. I also thought Psychonauts 2, but turns out that was probably more like 8 years.

It’s the same shit across every industry. Successful company goes public, investors demand yearly double digit growth, and after a few years they are imploding.

Investors do not care about the future, sustainability, or anything except immediate profitability. What you described is exactly what happens, in gaming and everywhere else. It sucks.

Solely responsible? Lol

When did we start blaming one private company for inflation? Games should cost $100 or more right now if they were increasing linearly over time.

Lol. I respect that. You keep on keepin’ on.

Good. I hope it is longer than that. Fragmenting the platform will do no one any good at this stage in its life, and its performance is completely adequate for what it is.

What are you on about

I went from buying and never playing PC games to playing them pretty often.

My gaming PC is in the basement. I rarely find the time to hole up down there with kids and family life. But I can hang in the living room on my couch and play now. Game changer.

• I’m not sure why I should care whether the engine is outdated or not
• I keep hearing this but it runs fine on my mid tier rig
• Writing quality is subjective. It’s good enough for me so far
• These feel like a Bethesda calling card at this point, they have a quirky charm to me
• This is EASILY the least buggy Bethesda game I can recall
• Why should this bother me? It’s running fine for me without it.

None of those add up to “shit game”, in my mind.

I’ve played the switch more hours than I think any previous console. For all its flaws the switch is home to so many quality Nintendo experiences at this point that if someone finds that this is the generation that they’ve tired of Nintendo then it’s possible they simply don’t like Nintendo style games anymore.

Mario Party indeed was a pile of shit. But there are so many incredible games.

I don’t think I could pin down a universal number. I really enjoy when a game understands the staying power of its gameplay loop and finishes up before it gets stale.

I’ve got 180 hours into TotK and I’m not sick of it yet because I discover something new every time I play.

Conversely I 100%-ed Dredge in 20 hours and that felt like the exact right amount of time. Any longer and I’d have been sick of it.

Or we can go even lower with something like Untitled Goose Game, which was under 10 hours and also finished up just as it got old.

So yeah. I’m all about the self awareness of a game with regards to the experience. Whatever amount of time that takes is cool with me.

It took me several hours to get into HZD, but once it hit its stride it really hooked me. The opening few hours are quite weak, IMO. It takes that time for the story to start to reveal, and for the more deliberate pace of combat to make itself apparent.

It’s not treading new ground from a genre standpoint.

But the combat is a style that isn’t really very common in open world games, and the commenter you are replying to specifically was talking about the story, characters, and world building…all three of which set Horizon apart from other games, IMO.

I’m really excited to hear that. The real time but actually not combat I think is what really killed me when I played them. I was only like 15 years old but I think I just didn’t “get” it and tried to just go for it in real time which made many encounters incredibly difficult.

I’m really looking forward to playing it (I’ve promised myself to fully beat TotK before I pick it up). I played a ton of BG 1 and 2 when I was a kid and even for me they are hard to pick back up now. A slightly more accessible version of that sounds amazing.