Generally, devs have felt very pressured when given multiple release date goals. By that I mean getting out a playable E3 demo, a “beta”, a demo, an early access for preorders…

It means if, say, the character has always had a clipping issue with their holster but it’s not a priority, the team can focus on important work/bugs first and their QA just kind of acknowledges the weird holster. But anytime they’re releasing, every detail like that has to be trimmed up for however many levels are coming out.

So yeah, I’m in favor of them avoiding any marketing betas if it helps them.

I’m kind of okay with them going whichever way they have creative ideas. Even RE’s action design has been really fun except when they tried to “streamline” it in RE6.

All I really know about this game is the ridiculously stylized animations in its cutscenes and fight moves, which has definitely made me want to try it out.

I’m trying this game on PSN, but often the dealer is just throwing high numbers at me and I can’t see any economic way I can match them with my own summons. Two bears in a row; what do?

It’s my common issue with Roguelikes. You’re replaying the first level a lot and things don’t really develop much very quickly. I kinda just gave up.

As someone who never touched the difficulty, I think my smooth experience came down to considering the encounters more, not dial-mashing the controller. Some fights work a lot better with certain equipment. There’s three kinds of defense suitable for certain attacks: Shield, dodging, and sprinting (a certain enemy has a long gun attack, for instance, that’s good for sprinting).

I think I did struggle a bit at an eventual “rush” segment, but that’s coming up near the end of the game.

I’d go one further: The movement can come across as whiney and impossible to please when it echoes the message in a super-blanket way in places it doesn’t make sense, like this one.

It’s like protesting government actions with “All government should be abolished so we can ALL BE FREE”.

These days most apps vaguely related to gaming have a DVR function, so that might not be a pressing thing to keep it for. Xbox game bar and soon Steam get that function.

Hopefully the rise of this feature doesn’t mean people accidentally have 8 DVRs running on their gameplay through various gaming apps (not to mention Windows’ Xbox Game Bar does this too)

Which, in a way, makes it weird that I’ve felt okay with FFXIV. It’s a very different form of satisfaction to its gameplay.

Welcome to getting old.

This might actually be a very good idea.

My first thought was to abuse something that rhymes with “Mild Topography”. But that would likely lead to legal repercussions for both you and Microsoft. A better solution would be to store hundreds of medical records in your Documents folder. You have a right to store your own medical information. If Microsoft is uploading those to their servers without your consent, and without appropriate HIPAA measures, that smells like an extremely silver-wrapped lawsuit.

Ironically, I was already using OneDrive but that very push is likely to be the thing that gets me to stop using Windows in the next few years.

I mean…I think yes, at some point a marketing department made that claim, which is unfortunate because that’s ultimately far from reality and most people know it. The claims made of the Series X and PS5 are also usually exaggerated, because most salespeople can get away with prefixing any claim with the words “up to”.

What I want out of romance in games is to have it take you by surprise, which often means it’s not a “romance option”. Some of the best character scenes I’ve seen wrapped some other major plot point into the fact that one person cares a bit too deeply about another, and processes it all very suddenly.

So I’m fine with this removal. All those romance choices in RPGs like Fallout and Skyrim felt ultra shallow to me. Even BG3 just seems like raw wish fulfillment from a horny cast.

Similar to how the PS5 had “8K” on the box; it’s only technically capable of that for the sake of videos, but most games tend to go a bit smaller resolution for practical rendering.

So instead of DS4Windows4Linux, just DS4Linux. Makes sense.

Xbox has a packaged release system designed for that. Since the Series S isn’t really meant to go over 1080p, developers are encouraged to only include smaller versions of textures since anything too detailed would be wasted.

PS5, by contrast, tends to have simplified video settings panels so gamers can prioritize what they want - be that raytracing, 4K, or 60fps. Often, just having the extra power doesn’t necessarily matter if the game is coded against taking advantage of it. (I think Bloodborne is infamous for this - it hasn’t gotten an update, so even on PS5, everyone must play it locked at 30fps).

The thing is, if a game releases on Series X without any bonus bells and whistles like (pick one) 4K, 60fps, or ray tracing, it’s kind of failed the move to next gen. If it then cannot scale any of those things back for the Series S, then it’s failed at designing scalability.

The new consoles do not exist to serve programmer inefficiency.

There’s a game with pre-rendered backgrounds called Alisa. I always really enjoyed the pre-render look. The excitement of reaching a “cinematic FMV” that moves the story in a PS1 game is very different from standard cutscenes.

My idea for it is a social network that heavily relies on webcam-recorded opinions and the occasional hand-written letter.

Yes, that’s super high-friction and inconvenient. I’d argue social media has become so lazy, incorporating effort into it might improve the experience by changing the quality of posts you see.