Ares42

@thepanzini: If that was the case, wouldn't they at some point involve more studios to handle the scope of the game ? The game has literally been in development for 10 years now, so their other studios have finished and started other projects several times during the development. If they truly wanted the game to be bigger in scope they've had ample of opportunity to make that happen.

I just had a strange thought about how this game became the game that it is that no one wants to play. Could it be that when Ubisoft was told people wanted "Black Flag without the AC stuff" they internally have this prideful idea that what makes AC AC is the parkour and melee combat and campaign missions/storytelling etc ? So for them to make the game "without the AC stuff" they needed to remove all those aspects, not just make it a story unrelated to the AC IP.

It just seems like it could be a case of the typical pretentious artist that thinks all the generic stuff they do is somehow unique and special. A lot of people speculate that it's just Ubisoft trying to push the game into a more monetizable format, but after this long it's fairly apparent that there's a basic miscommunication between the developers and the target audience.

I'm with you man. It's one of the few games I've just learned to accept that people adore for some unfathomable reason to me.

Already talked about it a fair bit here when the game first launched, but yeah, Elden Ring is the game that proves that for Souls games less is more.

Establish a large publically funded developer union and establish a regulatory system for MTX. The only thing that needs to happen to "fix" gaming is for it to stop being the modern gold rush. Gaming was fine 25-30 years ago when it was still a niche industry and not driven by profitability. While this wouldn't necessarily solve everything, the only actual solution would be for videogames to become outdated, like radio or magazines. But that comes with another host of problems and only pushes the problem to another industry.

But then again, I come from a "socialist" scandinavian country, so ofc my solution is to not allow rampant capitalism.

Not to downplay the impact of this decision, but the bigger concern is really how it happened. 'Cuz that's some real "we're all fucked" shit. The fact that one party basically hijacked and politicized the Supreme Court (which is supposed to be the neutral arm of the government), where appointments are for life (meaning this will stand for decades without any possible challenge) is just straight out of a dystopian nightmare.

I largely agree with @franzlska. Keighley makes TV shows. It's what he's trained to do and what he's "good" at. That's why his shows are filled with ad spots and celebrity appearances, because that's what TV shows does. His goal has always been to establish the big televised show that legitimizes videogames to the public.

Oxygen Not Included, hands down. My Steam says I have 340 hours in the game, never made it past mid-game. I dunno how many times I've spent a day re-building my starter base only to run into some issue with running out of water, or generating too much heat or whatever. The furthest I've ever gotten was to a point where I had a decent smelting set up, a fully automated hatch kill room and I had just finished building a steam power setup, only to realize the setup I was using was from a different patch and I had just spent a bunch of time building something that was completely useless.

Love the game though, both it's pure gameplay mechanics and all the underlying systems, but oh god does it suffer from being nearly impregnable.

Back during my early teens competitive shooters was all the rage. We played Quake tournaments on local LANs, moved on to Quake 2 mods once that arrived and graduated to online Counterstrike tournaments. At some point I got really into RTSs and put a ton of time into Starcraft and Warcraft 3. I remember very clearly going back to Counterstrike after a while and having a mind-opening moment of "oh, I can't play these games anymore". I've had a few flings with competitive shooters since then, but I can only enjoy them in casual public lobbies.

Outside of that, I just can't stand anything indie pixel/block-art anymore. I don't care how good the game is supposed to be, the older I've gotten the more I've realized that enjoyable animations and sound design is really fundamental to making a game engaging.

Put in about 8 hours as well before I had my fill. I have two major issues with the game, and they're both very central to the game. Firstly, the building system is simplistic and boring. You build floors, you build walls, you build some crafting stations, that's it. I know you can unlock more decoration stuff as you go, but there's not really much potential there.

Secondly, the blood hunting is tedious. You're asked to go to specific points around the map to kill "bosses", and unless your castle is just perfectly positioned it's gonna be a hike to get there most of the time. If you're lucky there's a teleport spot nearby (or you've put the time in to create teleporters all over the map), but even then literally every resource item in the game stops you from using the teleport, so you're gonna be hiking back to base.

I tried jumping back in a couple of times, but every time the prospect of going on another blood hunt just made me log off instead. The game has been compared a lot to Valheim, and both of these issues are very stark differences between the games.

Maybe the game is fun if you're playing on an active PvP server, and it's all about scrounging whatever you can before you have to fight for your life, but even then the combat is far from good enough to create a fullfilling PvP experience.