ll_Exile_ll

CDPR being an industry leader in crunch culture seems to indicate things may not be much better there for game developers.

I think it's as simple as the fact it's cheaper to operate in Poland than it is in Tokyo or Texas. Poland is a growing game development locale thanks to CDPR, so it's full of developers with AAA experience and you can produce a AAA quality game for less than you can in Japan or North America.

This just seems like a return to the broadcast format where you'd get an autumn half season, holiday break, and then a spring half season. And that was just the best case scenario, often you'd have sporadic broadcast schedules with maybe a few weeks of regular episodes and then weeks with repeats (remember those?) thrown in here and there.

Like, if the "2025" block of episodes happens by March that's basically a classic September - May length TV season but starting and ending at different times of the year. Not crazy, but I personally wouldn't be a fan of returning to the days dragging a TV season out over almost a whole year. I already wait for all the episodes to be out before watching with the shows that will do like 8-10 weeks of week to week episode releases. Turning that into 8 or 9 months instead of 2 would be disappointing.

I played this game 25 years ago! I don't need any excuses.

This game had been on my radar for a while and when I saw it on game pass a couple weeks back I took it as the perfect chance to finally play it.

I enjoyed it a lot. Very cute with chill vibes. In terms of recent-ish Zelda inspired indies, it doesn't exactly stack up against something like Tunic and its phenomenal puzzle design and combat, but as just a low impact 5 hour experience Lil' Gator Game was very good.

Multiplayer games have always consumed more time than single player games, so popular multiplayer games are always going to be at the top of playtime lists like this. Even big open world games or lengthy RPGs are typically only going to be 50-100 hours per person in the year they come out. Regular players of multiplayer games are going to average much more than that per year in their chosen games.

I imagine if data like this existed 15-20 years ago you'd see games like Counterstike, Battlefield, and Halo topping the playtime lists while stuff like Half Life 2, MGS3, and Bioshock are nowhere to be found.

I don't think it makes too much sense to try and read into this data too much. We know that plenty of single player games are being well received and selling at a high rate. The nature of multiplayer games will always mean they occupy a lot of time, but that doesn't invalidate single player experiences that come to an end after a shorter amount of time, either in terms of financial success of overall relevance.

For all its faults, Destiny is really the only AAA PvE live service that is actually able to keep up with a regular cadence of substantial content. With expansions complete with a full campaign and new endgame content every 12-15 months and 4 seasons with new story content and PvE activities between expansions, plus a couple dungeons every year, you can't really argue against them actually providing legitimate live service.

Of course, you have to pay for all that. Expansions are practically full priced games, plus the cost of each season and now dungeons are sold separately. You add those all up over the course of a year and basically the equivalent of an MMO subscription fee. Still, regular community uproar aside, Destiny is at the very least definitely holding up its end of the bargain in terms of actually providing a live service.

The Rean Harem aspects of the series are really my only major criticism of the series a whole. I know some of that stuff was present with Joshua and Lloyd as well, but it really goes overboard with Rean. With Joshua and Lloyd it was just something to roll your eyes at here and there, but with Rean I feel it genuinely detracts from his character and the character of everyone that fawns all over him.

It's the main reason he's my least favorite of the three main protagonists the series has had thus far, even if I do like a lot of his personal storyline in other aspects. I have kept myself pretty much blind regarding Kuro/Daybreak, so I don't know if this type of thing continues to the same extent in that series, but I sure hope not.

Still really looking forward Daybreak's english release this year regardless.

@ben_h: I agree with pretty much everything you've said here, but I would also like to add that the expanded scope of voice acting is awesome and something I've wished the series would do for a while. Having every social link fully voiced is what I've always wanted for one of these games, and the voice acting itself is all great too.

Not to mention all the additional night time scenes with the crew that are all fully voiced, including very specific ones like group study sessions that always happen on the same date so you get these cool extra scenes with the party where they all talk about things relevant to that point in the game. The original game definitely had a problem where you basically ran out of stuff to do at night a little more than halfway through the game, and while that still will eventually happen, all these extra night time activities with party members delays the point where you run out of stuff by several months.

I also think their solution to the guys not having s-link originally was pretty nice, giving them these "not quite s-link" series of events that trigger throughout the game, condensing an s-link type storyline into 5 longer events instead of 10 and giving stat rewards instead of the usual s-link progress.

All told, this game has so much more voice acting than any other game in series by a wide margin. It's great.

Twitch really should just branch off its sexualized content into its own thing. Having the Twitch front page being a combination of gaming content and a softcore onlyfans alternative just really doesn't make sense. I get that sex sells and always will, and I don't have a fundamental problem with content like that existing, I just don't think it makes sense mixed in with a bunch of gaming content.

Twitch branched off from Justin TV back in the day to put all the gaming content in one place, maybe something similar needs to happen again with the Just Talking category. Give that content its own space where it can exist on its own with the TOS around sexual content more relaxed and refocus twitch itself on games. Of course, that would require them to admit that their platform makes a ton of money on sexual content and basically create a streaming site that has the explicit purpose of titillation and I don't think they're willing to do that, even if it improves their platform for viewers looking for both types of content.