Pretty much this.

I will likely get downvoted into oblivion for saying this (as usual), and I will prelude by saying that I generally never care if there are gay, trans or whatever stuff in games. But transgenders and pronouns were never ever a thing in the Dragon Age franchise, and now they suddenly feature these so prominently. They just handled this very badly.

The fact that writing is generally just plain bad for this game, these inclusive options also seems to affect the rest of the game as well. And it indeed makes it look like they focused on the wrong narrative so much. The way Skill Up reviewed the game was perfect, his best summary was “it’s as if HR is standing in every room” or something along those lines. Like nobody is allowed to insult, or be insulted, in this franchise that used to be pretty dark and grim.

I haven’t read much into GTA 6 so far, only seen the trailer basically.

I do hope the singleplayer will still be as good as previous games, although I definitely would expect them to try and cash in on online even more.

T2 and Rockstar definitely fucked up with GTA 5 too. Originally there were supposed to be singleplayer expansions. Which they of course dropped in favor of how popular online got. And then they even proceeded to ban mods that took multiplayer-only cars to singleplayer, fucking disgusting move.

I’ll wait and see how the singleplayer is. I never bought GTA5 for its multiplayer, it only got less appealing the more they added to it too. The only part that interested me much later on were the RP servers, it genuinely looked fun on some of the moderated ones, so maybe Rockstar will try to get into that, but if online is just a carbon copy of GTA5 I won’t even bother.

People who don’t have a gaming PC but still want to game would be the next target audience in line, since they wouldn’t have another machine to play third-party games on anyway, so the exclusive would just be a bonus on top.

But I don’t think they’re even interested in paying so much extra for features they don’t even care about. Perhaps a smooth high framerate in casual shooters would be something they’d care for, but that can easily be achieved on base PS5 with at least 60+ FPS. I don’t think they’re the ones that care about true 4K, 120Hz/FPS or slightly better textures.

The only thing I can think of that people are hyped up for is GTA6. I fear that Rockstar might sell out to Sony and deliver a shitty 30FPS locked, low resolution and texture version of the game on older PS5 models on purpose, just to “push the hardware” of the newest model. But then again, they also couldn’t even be arsed to unlock framerate for RDR2 on PS5, not even after so many years.

That’s interesting and all, but I still don’t see a reason to upgrade my PS5 to a Pro, and frankly it wouldn’t even be that interesting for the price as a new player either.

Are there like any games that will really make use of the new hardware? Other than perhaps upgraded framerates and better 4K support. The average console player probably isn’t going to care that much, not for the giant price increase over minimal gains.

I feel like all games on this generation will still be limited to the base PS5 anyway, can’t imagine hardware matters much until the next generation consoles.

Well I got the game back when it came out. I did not know the game would be leaning so heavily on paid content after that, so it often felt like missing out on new stuff. It was the same with Elite Dangerous, I backed that from Kickstarter, and then they pull shit like that paid early access content.

I’d say I easily got my money’s worth out of both games for what I paid at the time. But it still feels like being screwed over when they start putting price tags on all new content. And it’s often not even a lot of content that justifies the price tag. Compare this to games like No Man’s Sky, that get free updates quite often.

I think this would’ve bothered me far less had the base games been free to play games, and then charge for DLC. To me Frontier turned into a greedy company so fast, it’s really up there with EA, Blizzard Activision and Epic.

I don’t know, it just looks like a €50 stand-alone expansion that could’ve been DLC for the first game. But now they get to sell it for more, and add new/more individual smaller DLC for this one.

Not been much of a fan of Frontier ever since Braben left. They started focusing very heavily on paid DLC since, especially back when for Elite Dangerous it was first just cosmetics, but they got greedy and now have paid early access for new ships, after the game was content starved for years. And before that instead of focusing on new content there was a long period where the only thing that got updated was a new microstransaction currency and raised prices of the DLC.

Doesn’t feel much different with the Planet Coaster and Zoo games. They get littered with paid DLC, and it’s almost taking The Sims forms of additional paid content.

Even if they had put it on Spotify they would’ve gotten royalties from there. Which would be a nice bonus for them, because I can’t imagine anyone paying Nintendo Online just for the music.

Of course they’re not doing it on Spotify, and instead choose to lock it behind their own subscription service.

Nintendo is such a greedy shitty corporation. I wouldn’t even be surprised if now they are gonna go after people that posted their music elsewhere.

This would’ve actually been a perfect to be included with the alarm clock they recently released.

Would be interesting to know what positions they’re firing.

I bet it’s yet again none of the project and management level staff. Since they’re talking about “saying goodbye to a number of incredibly talented and dedicated team members”, after they said “we made the difficult decision to restructure our studio to ensure our long-term sustainability”.

So you have to fire people, but you fire the “incredibly talented and dedicated” employees. All this tells me is that projects they’re working on aren’t going to improve, if they ever get wrapped up even.

There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.

Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.

Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.

As long as the delayed time is actually enough to fix fundamental issues, usually a short time of a few weeks, or even months, is hardly enough to fix core issues with a game.

The article says it’s about the network infrastructure. Which frankly seems like something pretty significant for this kind of game. The 3 weeks delay makes it sound like it’s not an easy “just upscale the server capacity” fix, so hopefully it’s nothing too complicated that cannot be fixed within that time.

That said, I would rather that studios would just stop publishing release dates if they don’t even know if they can uphold the deadlines. I know it’s become part of the hype culture and pre-sales and everything else pre-release, but I had much preferred that games would only get announced when they’ve practically gone gold, and worst they’d need to do is to iron out some imperfections.

It’s like moving release dates has become part of the project development and PR in the past decade, just to hit players with that “We wish to deliver the best experience possible, so we decided…” yadda yadda. Some might be genuine, but a lot of games still release in an absolutely garbage state after being delayed (multiple times even). It just gives the impression they do it to drive up pre-orders and hype. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if Rockstar would hit us with that crap sometime next year, and move GTA6 to late 2025 or somewhere 2026 or something.

Just watched the first part of his video. It seems to line up perfectly with what I was expecting based on the gameplay we were shown so far, it’s just outright boring. The amount of criticism and the footage in his review does not line up with the high ratings this game got.

Looks llike it’s gonna be a skip. Shame, because visually it looks nice to me and I kinda dig the art style (except for the Qunari), but if story, animations and gameplay are bad and boring it’s gonna be a no from me.

I’m still gonna wait and see, I think user reviews might turn out very mixed in contrast to the critics reviews. Not that I value user reviews all that much, but I’d like to see a bit more from the game before deciding anyway.

What really put me off from this game was the insanely boring dragon fight they recently showed in the PlayStation presentation, it dragged out so long too and nothing really interesting seemed to happen, it felt like a really outdated kind of boss battle, especially after games like God of War and Horizon. It just did not look that fun honestly, but perhaps story and other parts of the game are more entertaining.

I never expected graphics to improve honestly. Plenty of good games out there that have been in development for a long time and look like old games, like Project Zomboid.

Wonder when they’re gonna do that for Adobe products in Europe. Has to be one of the most scummiest subscription services present day. If you cancel too early you have to pay up a “cancellation” fee for remaining time of the month, or sometimes even more I believe. If you do it too late you’ll have to pay for a whole new subscription, and pay for the cancellation fee. I don’t even know why they’re allowed to pull that shit on consumers.

Guess who’s not bothering with subscriptions.

That’s no comparison. McDonalds doesn’t sell the infected products intentionally.

Transactions are from two parties, if the product didn’t sell they wouldn’t keep doing it. The product wouldn’t exist if it failed to sell in the first place.

Plenty of shitty products in the world that never get sold, and then stop being produced.

I frequently had to test other developer’s code, the fucking amount of times I heard that shit.

“Your code ain’t working”

“It’s working for me”

“Well it isn’t working for me, did you actually test it”

“Yes”

“On anything else than your own PC?”

“It was working fine for me”

“It fucking isn’t, look!”

“…huh”

For fuck sake just take like 1 minute to press on a frikking button to see if it actually does work.

Glad I’m not doing that shit anymore.

Not even a new trend in WoW either.

Can’t even blame Blizzard, it’s the people who keep buying this shit that are actually the problem.

If these wouldn’t sell in the store they could’ve been items to obtain through in-game activities (which don’t require eternal grind).