I'm honestly shocked that Vinny dislikes the voice acting in FF7R, I can't really stand clearly Japanese'ish stuff dubbed into English but I feel like the FF7R Characters sound really spot on. There's a lot of good line delivery, some really nice moments between characters, some good characterization through dialogue and so on.
Not everyone in the cast is consistently perfect, but in general it's some of the best "English" voice work I've heard in a game in a good long while.
NPCs were never going to fix Fallout 76, that line of thinking was from people who didn't know what they were talking about nor did they know what they want.
Not having NPCs was the one good decision Fallout 76 made to begin with. Bethesda cannot write compelling characters or interesting dialogue to save their lives, they just cant, it's been a joke since 2005.
So saving time and money by not doing that was honestly a really smart idea, the game didn't need it. However the real issues with 76 are too deeply embedded in its foundations and its core design philosophy for any one thing to fix it, let alone goddamn NPCs. I put 80 hours into it because I had to see everything in that game top to bottom to know if there was anything redeeming about it, I really wanted it to be good, there just wasn't anything in it and very few redeeming qualities.
Though I did actually really like the region they designed, it was more interesting to look at than Fallout 4 or 3 and I had moments of arriving at a city and being like "Wow that's genuinely really cool looking." But that doesn't change all of the far larger issues with the game as a whole.
Ben's bewilderment at lack of customization freedom in previous games is a bit over the top. Ben, you gotta understand that this is the first major installment since New Leaf in 2012 on 3DS.
Before that was City Folk on Wii in 2008, Wild World on DS in 2005 which were still kind of significant leaps (feature wise) from the original Animal Crossing in 2001 on Gamecube, which was a port of the original N64 Animal Crossing in Japan.
So for like 11 years they were basically iterating and bolting things onto what started as an N64 game.
The fact New Horizons is an entirely new thing built from the ground up, honestly is totally mind blowing to me as someone who never expected these games to ever change much beyond being glorified N64 games.
"So do you guys play through games again for multiple endings?"
That might be the silliest e-mail on the bomb/beastcast in quite sometime. If you know GB more than absolutely not at all, you KNOW they don't really do that stuff, hell Vinny and Jeff just give up and cheat through stuff just to see content on the first playthrough of something. (Which is not really a knock against them. I've done it on a couple of occasions, but it speaks to how unlikely it is they'd bother to come back to a game in most cases.)
The GB mentality (usually) is a game should be as quick and as painless as possible, because anything that takes time, effort or thought to get through goes against their workflow. While I do think histortically that has warped their view on alot of really great games and has also caused some REALLY weird opinions to form that are unique to GB. I do get *how* that mentally has come about, it's just an unfortunate side effect of the way they do things.
The mascots thing revealed some interesting perspectives. If you're talking classically you'd absolutely put Crash, Spiro, Cloud and Lara Croft as Sony Mascots as well as probably Jin from Tekken and maybe Snake from MGS1 not far behind them as well as Leon.
Those were always the characters I saw on sony Magazines over and over in the same way you saw Mario, Donkey Kong, Link and Banjo/Joanna Dark a little later on for Nintendo.
You can almost always pick a safe bet with an FF character as a sony mascot, Tidus for PS2 for example as well as MGS2 Snake/Raiden and others I'm forgetting (Probably RE4 Leon). Then on PS3 you have MGS4 Snake, Lightning from FF13 and Nathan Drake proooobably with Joel & Ellie at the tail end.
The more recent you get the more muddied the waters get, but you can't really go wrong with Cloud Strife being the face of sony given how big FF7 was for people.
I'm not even a huge FF7 fan but even I can't deny.
I'm glad they covered the hacked Pokemon, it's been a huge issue ever since the original games and only got worse on GBA as that was when fully fledged save editing programs were born on PC, they could edit rom saves or spit out varying types of Codes such as Gameshark, Codebreaker and so on that could feed back to GBA and it's only ever gotten more accommodating and more elaborate on DS onwards.
As far as I have ever experienced there has never really been any protection against cheated Pokemon in these games unless you are entering in some sort of official Pokemon tournament I believe they check then to know if your team is Legal.
To add to this, these save editors have allowed people a way to find, restore, catalogue and archive basically every event Pokemon ever released dating back to the GBA era with all their data accurate and intact. They probably had to be manually restored to a state where they had their original moves and no exp in some cases which is where it got iffy for me. (By Event Pokemon I mean all the ones given to players at certain events in Japan, US, EU etc. over the years where you had to physically go to the location or see a movie to get it into your game.)
Learning and knowing all this sent me down a really crazy and OCD filled rabbit hole in my own Pokemon games were I realized I could never trust anyone with any Pokemon at any point, even if a Pokemon shows as "Legal" in a save editor who's to say it wasn't created to be that way? So I've gone to insane lengths over the years at different points to manually catch everything my self in whichever game I was playing at the time and store them in boxes unused in case I wanted to ever transfer them to a service such as Pokemon Bank or Home and have a perfect collection. Entirely too much effort and for something so unnecessary, but that's just how elaborate Pokemon editing got.
I'm with Jeff, Bioware have proven nothing since probably 2012 or whenever ME3 came out.
I don't think Anthem deserves a second chance. It made more sense for FF14 because it was still a learning process at the time and honestly if they couldn't save FF14 there is *a* possibility Final Fantasy wouldn't be a thing anymore in this day and age, so they had to do something.
Anthem doesn't have that legacy and all my faith in Bioware as good developers was a version of Bioware that I don't think has actually existed for the better part of a decade, the lead up to ME3 was probably the last time I was genuinely looking forward to a Bioware game.
Just take it out back get it over with, put it out of its misery and go back to making somewhat unsatisfying Dragon Age games, even if they're completely forgettable these days, at least it wouldn't be this trainwreck. I dont believe they're capable of anything better than that.
Community is often a bit segmented between people who find 4 to be incredibly frustrating, shallow and a step backwards compared to the older games on a core level in terms of what Sims do and how differently they behave from eachother. Sims 4 Sims have next to zero discernible personality despite the traits you give them, story progression had to be modded in for 4. But really even that is just applying a salve to a tumor. (For reference, story progression is a thing where other Sims in the world over time get married, have kids and just in a sense seem like they are progressing through their lives independently of the household your playing. This is a thing previous games did but 4 opted not to.)
But the other parts of the community are the younger people who don't know really what the Sims *were* like and the people who only focus on building and making stuff.
The Sims pricing structure is also a total ripoff because the packs are incredibly hit and miss. But that is also partly because the genre has no competition so they don't really have to try, sadly. I would like to hope Sims 5 does better but honestly I feel like they're going to try and go the multiplayer route so they don't have to put any "life" into Sims.
TL;DR: Sims 4 has problems with its pricing structure VS amount of content. As well as issues with the simulation aspect that were handled better in older games. But some people stomach it because it looks nice and EA have no reason to do better because there's no competition.
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