injurai

I can't get my cyberpunk kink on if I'm not being fleeced by some corpo.

wtf mate

Racing wheels certainly aren't the standard for racing games, I sort of doubt VR will become standard. It's great for first person games, whether shooters, puzzles, or "point and click" adventure games. But It does not seem to be the future for may 3rd person action/adventure/over-shoulder games. I suppose laying on your back looking at a hires image while you casually play Civ7 or something might work out well too.

Oh wait... I'm thinking of the early six-axis motion control stuff. You're right. Which makes it even more odd to find the hands jarring... most games have hands in FOV.

The floating guns were jarring in HL1/2 until you realize your hands are at your keyboard and not awkwardly superimposed in your view. You feel less disembodied from the world for it. VR is the opposite, you are inside the experience and not seeing your hands or some extension of yourself it would be hard to place your presents in the world.

My hope is that people not having VR is the issue, and Valve is waiting for wider adoption before releasing Half-Life 3. Half-Life: Alyx is hopefully a huge "*ahem* get ready" wake-up call for the real thing. Plus I have a feeling the GPUs need to be made specfically for a VR world, because there current line-up is reminding me of the awkward 8800 GT days which was a killer upgrade but seemed to take forever for a truly "next-gen" card to come out.

Great acceptance speech, it not only needed said, but it was an important Emperor has no clothes moment for the industry.

Age of Empires 4 won’t have microtransactions or in-app purchases Huzzah!

Shame Pedro Pascal got snatched up by this project. I was really hoping he'd play Duncan Idaho in the Dune movie. When I reread Dune after watching Narcos, I always imagined Duncan's scenes as Pedro Pascal. Probably because he is a perfect cast for that character. Not that Jason Mamoa doesn't look the part after a haircut, just his performance history doesn't exactly fit the same mentally collected role. *shrugs*

Hnnnngggggg oooomppphhh

I'm mostly looking forward to Sawyer's project, and whatever AAA enthusiast rpg they end up putting out. Grounded reminds of of those small creative side-projects that Insomniac has been doing for a few years. Not the studios staple, but good side-work for people to build up their skills and lead something they are passionate about. It seems instead of cancelling games that aren't getting off the ground, they cut it at the vertical slice and release are small "gamella" to test interest.

I wonder how long the Microsoft deal was in the works prior to us knowing about it. We knew they had a handful of games in the works, so either Microsoft is now just championing work they already had going. Something as cancelled. Or a project was made in preparation for the deal being publicly disclosed.

One thing I don't see many people mention. It's a sequel. To a dense classic crpg. Which demands lots of reading, and strategic understanding. People apt to get it are likely older, whose time is limited. Where the first game satiated their fix and other things are now more important. Where the new comers choose to play the first in belief they'll go on to purchase the second, but never even finish the first game. The fig campaign raised almost as much funding, with half of the funders. I think that is evidence that the series is largely cared for by a niche of a niche, and it's the whales coming out to bolster the numbers. Fig always seemed a bit like writing on the wall to me, as if you know you're going to play it. It's cheaper and you likely get more if you back early. So a lot of people didn't even find that compelling this time around. They knew if they would ever get the game, it would be in a deep holiday sale on steam or gog years down the road when maybe they've finally beaten the first game.

I must be remembering wrong... apologies... I think I was recalling a comment that said they weren't going to re-use Divinity's combat model, and I somehow played telephone with myself... Obviously I'm a wishful thinker Plz no lashings

This popped up in my feed. I don't watch Discovery, because I saw the writing on the wall... but I didn't realize it could get this bad... It's not just the contrast. I'm shocked beyond belief of the later on it's own accord. Who is this writing for? Who writes that? What purpose does it serve for the show, or for the market? It feels like a self-insert of someone on a power-trip being validated for their bad behavior? Or maybe it's just expedient writing to force the plot into a new state that could be better salvaged? Honestly this is so bizarre.

If we are talking about rulesets, I prefered PoE's design to earlier D&D rulesets. Though D&D 5e is fantastic and maybe people wanted that above all? It's possible, but people seemed open to 1's innovations, and trusting in the team to try more new things in Deadfire. Outside of rulesets, there is a "fantasy core" that I think people generally crave. It invokes a sort of archetypal sense of adventure that also lifts people out of a world that hits too close to home. Various fantasy books, video & pnp games all achieve variations on this. I thought PoE was a really refreshing take on that, while still invoking the escape into that core paradigm. Deadfire is a deviation from that, which is probably less gripping. Not that Deadfire is inconsistent with the first game's lore, it's just each game emphasized very different things as being the primary drivers of both the world and the player's place within it. (Including from a marketing standpoint in which people judge the game before seeing it's contents.) I can't help but feel that Pillars issue in general isn't that it disappoints grognards, but it fails to convince a new generation to fall in love with RTwP style games. Honestly I don't find Divinity compelling, but I give Larian credit since they seem determined to create a true RTwP Baldur's Gate 3 in a way that invites a new generation into this fantastic genre niche. I wonder if Pillars 2 had been more like 1 yet with some sort of online experience, would it have done better? Already being RT the online mode could drop the wP or it could be configurable per session. I'd imagine the game would be much more enticing to a new generation. Maybe that would look too much like Diablo minus the loot farming? Maybe it wouldn't work? Maybe it'd work more as a WarCraft 3 styled co-op campaign RTS that tells a parallel story with lite-rpg mechanics, but derived from a deeper single player campaign? Who knows... I'm still not sure if using the setting to eat The Elder's Scrolls lunch is the best choice for the IP, but maybe with Microsoft things would be different. The Outer World's is a good first attempt and with improvements maybe they'd do something worthy of beating out TES. I still want a proper RTwP 3rd entry though.

I don't think many people hate Pirates, rather they are tepid and disenthralled. People always seem open to the idea, then gradually loose interest. People also don't argue a games setting once it's been fixed, that's like saying make a different game. The strongest dissent that doesn't fall on deft ears is usually something constructive like "I hope they pick yet another radically different setting for the third game, airships or something right?" and leave it at that. Which Is a really sentiment I actually saw from numerous people. I even found myself affirming the idea and In hindsight I think I was just bargaining for a stronger fantasy grounding to come back, whether or not that was the direction I really wanted.

Yeah, I think it's a mix of all those reasons. The discussion over on Reddit is bringing up the pirate setting, which I have to also agree with. It's a sequel to a dense classic crpg game. People interested in 2 probably feel the need to have played 1. RTwP is niche (I ****ing love it,) which has similar technical demands as a RTS. 2's changes don't really offer a clear mechanical payoff other than greater character expression, but that could usually be achieved through party building prior. Any choice is less about expressing yourself, and more of building your "yu-gio-oh deck." The KickStarter craze was dying down, fig introduced some skepticism and I think also reduced some exposure. Coupled with the change in publisher, I'll be honest I saw basically no advertising for Deadfire. It was all word of mouth. If anything, the marketing seemed to be guerilla marketing trying to attract the tumblr crowd to developer character fandoms based mostly on out of context slice of life drawings. Lastly, the game wase simply more of the same (obviously within in the series it added a lot, but compared to the whole video game market it doesn't feel like a revolution.) Which gets back to people wanting to play through PoE1 first. I saw a lot of people jump into the first game in preparation and I have to imagine many didn't finish and just moved onto to other games as the months rolled on. So being a sequel and a pirate game are probably two of the major issues.

Zoo Tycoon 2 is a great game. The best part is making the whole place a giant exhibit then trapping people in with the Animals. If you can do that in Planet Zoo, I'd consider trying it.

David Kim. Yeah he was one of the lead game designers as well as the competitive game balancer all the way back with Wing's of Liberty. I remember he also played the game as basically Blizzard's strongest internal competitive player during development. Dude seems wicked smart about game design and balance, and he was easily my favorite developers from that era.

I just had a terrifying thought... So those "end game dungeon keys" that modify and level up the difficulty of a dungeon (also opening up the chance to drop the best loot.) You know the keys themselves will be rare drops. Those will probably end up sold as micro-transactions since you won't get them frequently enough. Basically you end up paying for the privilege to have a chance at rare loot, and even then you might die. Oh god... did I just surmise "the catch" of D4?

I hate when my the cat jumps on the Risk board!

Stanhope is a man of legends

No-offline won't deter me. I do recall that single-player lag TrueNeutral mentioned, which was a bit of a buzz kill when playing on launch. It got better, though I can see how it's to the detriment of permadeath runs. Personally online is a huge part of Diablo's appeal even though I tend to associate the games as a single-player experience. I also associate replayability with the games, and that's always more fun with friends. I started a fresh D3 run at a LAN-party once, when the venue closed and we had to leave, all of us in the run logged in online back at home and finished up Act 4 late into the night. It's one of my fondest memories. I also hadn't finished my single-player run yet, so I also got a totally fresh experience in that run. Maybe they'll find a way that requires a connection, but doesn't use a server to propagate the world state forward, that would be the best compromise. But that's probably easier to crack than having to reverse engineer server side game logic.