God of War always struck me as the wrong game for that gimmick. Sure, there are no camera cuts, but you need to pull up your menu constantly to check the map, change gear, etc. It ends up feeling like there are hundreds of cuts.

It depends on the game. I wouldn’t remove the open world from Elden Ring at all, since sightlines are so important to you figuring out how to get somewhere. Horizon: Zero Dawn and Ghost Recon: Wildlands are two games that I love, but both would have been better if you just selected missions from a menu. In Metal Gear Solid V, they basically give you the option to play the game that way, which is nice, since there are open world systems, but you don’t really interact with them constantly. If you can get away with the Uncharted thing though, where you’re seamlessly moving from one thing to the next, it can be great for pacing and presentation. Especially since Bandai-Namco had the patent on loading screen mini games, a lot of developers ended up inventing “load bearing walls”, where tight spaces that you have to crawl through will mask a load screen between two scenes.

It was a subjective statement. It can’t be objectively wrong.

I’m playing D:OS2 now, and it’s most of the way to BG3. I’d also highly recommend the Wasteland games.

That actually came out last year.

The unanimous game of the year last year is a turn-based RPG, and I can promise you Metaphor: ReFantazio this year will do well critically and commercially, just like Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth did earlier this year. There are plenty of turn-based RPGs to go around. If you meant turn-based tactics or strategy, same thing; plenty of those to go around as well.

RTS sort of peaked with StarCraft II, at least in terms of popularity, but you find some here and there. Battle Aces and Stormgate are both from ex-Blizzard devs chasing that high, and both are live service, so those two will soon be dead, but there are others out there that are less popular that come out from time to time.

That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.

20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.

GTA V is second only to Minecraft in copies sold across all of video games, and it still appears in the top 10 for copies sold on most months, 11 years after its initial release. It’s also available on other stores and consoles, so Steam is not a complete picture.

Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.

Half of Halo 4 was the best Halo story. The other half of it was the worst Halo story.

Well, that also saves money on localization costs, when you’re selling to people across many different languages.

If I had to read documentation first, I wouldn’t be using Linux. We write software so we can automate things, so we should be able to automate away most of the troublesome parts until we’re just left with a useful device that does its job.

Put a space between the # and “Balatro”.

I thought I did a fairly good job of segmenting it so that it wasn’t a wall, but maybe next time.

#4: No early access games, except for games that were in early access and hit v1.0 this year. Even if it’s a great game this year, odds are it’ll be a better game when it’s done, so I made this thread to call out games that are done.

I can see that. I was pretty happy with my ending though, and I have a feeling there’s no way to make everyone happy. The game does let you know right at the beginning that the player character is no saint.

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore (Steam, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox X/S)

Arzette is a very specific joke for nerds like me who know too much about the history of video games. It’s designed to look and sound just like a Phillips CD-i Legend of Zelda game; a cursory glance at the credits seems to indicate that someone from Digital Foundry may have consulted on it to get it right. A friend of mine has a CD-i that he allowed me to play some time ago, and you have no idea how badly games like those play, especially on that awful controller. Fortunately, this game plays totally acceptably while still having a slight metroidvania angle to its 2D action platforming levels. It’s got a bit of a slow start, but after that, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, so if you’re in on the joke, you’ll likely have a good time.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (Steam, GOG, Switch)

If you liked The Case of the Golden Idol and want more of it ahead of the launch of its sequel, Duck Detective is a miniature version of that that’s suitable for children and still fun for adults. I won’t say it’s quite as good as Golden Idol, and it’s definitely not as long, but it’s priced accordingly, and it’s a good way to spend a weekend afternoon.

Penny’s Big Breakaway (Steam, PS5, Switch, Xbox X/S)

Penny’s Big Breakaway is a 3D platformer somewhere between Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario 3D Land, I suppose, though that’s not a perfectly accurate picture of it either, and it’s also got a lot of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater DNA. You’ve got a yo-yo that you can use to attack, swing, or ride for mobility and speed. It’s very close to being one of my favorite platformers ever, but there’s just a bit too much jank around how the game handles certain edge cases with its physics system, and it can break the flow of an otherwise very good game. If you’re anything like me though, that won’t stop you from having a lot of fun with it.