Markatron84

@SaltySpitoon957 yep. Lots of different factors at play.

@Kaloudz Same here. Real-time strategy and 4X games just aren't for me. For example, I've tried Civilisation VI on three separate occasions and every time I have quickly become completely overwhelmed by all the systems and information it throws at me.

@SaltySpitoon957 I imagine that already happens. Games get censored and/or altered all the time for all sorts of different reasons in lots of different markets.

I'm one achievement away from getting them all in Vampire Survivors. It's not even a hard one (settle down) so I should get that tomorrow. I also got the super deluxe ultra mega edition of Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 for a song and have been playing that. And I started Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, but that's not really grabbing me.

I love how they cling to the past five years in these Xbox roadmaps. Guys, you've got some duds lingering on there; just start at the current year.

@Kaloudz you're in luck. The remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is coming sometime before the entropic heat death of the universe.

Lost Crown is excellent. Anyone who likes Metroidvanias should try it out.

@ButterySmooth30FPS a game that's announced and never comes out.

Mmmmmmmmm yes please.

Cool, so I've got until 14th March 2027 to keep not playing MyFaction in WWE 2K25. Why anyone regularly engages in those sorts of modes is beyond me. I got around 2 hours into MyFaction before finding myself in the position of either having to grind out the currency or spend real money. Nah.

At this rate it's going to get to the point where the money I spent on my PC won't seem so ridiculous.

I was three years late to the party, but I've been playing Vampire Survivors the past two weeks and am borderline obsessed with it, having put 51 hours into it so far. And I'm definitely going to be looking at Deep Rock and the games some of you have mentioned.

@OldGamer999 pop a laxative and watch the whole thing 👍

@Ricky-Spanish Sammy couldn't be unbiased and objective if his life depended on it.

@Fiendish-Beaver which is why showing restraint is in our best interests. Games launch broken because publishers know people will buy - or even worse, pre-order - them anyway.

@themightyant 🤣 don't forget that it's also a premium product for premium gamers.

@Titntin wait... you were at Bullfrog?! What did you work on? Did you know Peter Molyneux?! The questions are coming quicker than I can type them!

@somnambulance oh, they would have got somewhere. But 8 years is a long time and there was no way either game was going to be the success they'd need to be to warrant the time and money spent on them. Like you said, incompetent management is probably what's to blame when you get down to it. Unless someone like Jason Schreier gets the skinny then we won't know for certain.

@somnambulance I feel like even Microsoft isn't stupid enough to not realise the backlash and ill sentiment it would face if it shut down Double Fine. Tim Schafer alone is just too beloved in the industry and by the people who play DF's games. If, hypothetically, Microsoft decided it didn't want Double Fine anymore, they best have a buyer lined up or set the studio up to go independent again.

The Initiative was a bad idea from the start. A new studio set up that does very little of its own development and partners with other studios who do all the work? Ask Keiji Inafune how well that goes. Now add to that numerous management shakeups, a protracted development cycle and the stress and expectations that come from developing so-called AAAA games? I'm amazed they lasted as long as they did, to be honest.

@Kaloudz thanks for the info, much appreciated 🙂👍

@Jenkinss but it also takes nothing away from your accomplishment if you don't use the escalator and someone else does.

@CenturianShark

I remember this was supposed to be a launch title for the xbox one.

Maybe in your timeline it was. In ours, proper development didn't begin until 2013 and the game was announced at E3 2014.

@Kaloudz is there a way to alter the length of the parry (or party, thanks again autocorrect) window? I played through Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown earlier in the year and while that had a lot of parrying, it let you lengthen the window, which made it a lot more manageable.

@Kaloudz out of interest, what are the accessibility and difficulty options like in Expedition 33? I've had my eye on it - as I heard it wasn't obnoxiously long, for a JRPG-inspired game anyway - but I'm a bit wary of the talk of parrying.

Yes, autocorrect: parrying. Not partying, although I am also wary of that.

@BacklogBrad I don't remember if you can do it in Remake, but in Rebirth you can set hotkeys for stuff like spells, skills, synergy abilities, etc.

I'll never understand people bemoaning the inclusion of optional difficulty options. If it allows more people to play a game, then that is in no way a bad thing and doesn't take a thing away from you if you played the game "normally" or "as intended".

I just finished up Rebirth and had to tone down the difficulty for a few of the boss fights; partly because some of them are quite tricky anyway, and partly because there can be a hell of a lot of visual effects going off in combat, and as someone who is visually impaired I found it difficult to see what was going on sometimes. I dare say that had the ability to adjust the difficulty not been there, I might not have been able to finish the game. The forthcoming extra difficulty options would have been even more welcome.

@Broosh my wife and I invariably make fun of grown men riding scooters in public, so yeah good on them for moving up in the world, I guess.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which I should finish up today. Also - three years late to the party - Vampire Survivors, which I am almost hopelessly addicted to.

@yeaman Yeah, I could be completely off base. It doesn't look to me like it's going to cater to the people who've been asking for it, but I do hope I'm wrong. One thing that is certain is that if EA doesn't see a big enough return on the investment then they will drop the game long before it reaches a 1.0 release. They'll be very gun-shy about trying again and fans of the series/genre will probably be waiting another 15 years before EA takes another crack at it.

@ScalenePowers they're working their way through the good games first 😜

Sorry, that's my opinion of course. But I imagine it won't be too much longer right? There can't be that many subseries or games left. Off the top of my head I can think of Legends, Legends 2, Soccer and X Command Mission. Oh, and the Game Boy games; were those different from the NES/SNES ones?

I only ever played a demo of one of the Skate games on Xbox 360. Wasn't my thing. Judging by what I've heard and seen from previews and gameplay streams, this isn't going to be the Skate 4 that people want it to be; I think that the free-to-play live service approach is going to rub a lot of the fans of the old games up the wrong way.

I also don't think it's going to be the success that EA might be expecting. They've been bitten at least once before by listening to a vocal minority repeatedly demanding a sequel - Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, anyone? - and now they're not only once again pandering to that vocal minority, but at the same time not pandering to them by not giving them exactly what they wanted? Doesn't seem like a recipe for success to me.

Just my thoughts, though. Hopefully I'm wrong.

@AverageJoseph as Fry would say: shut up and take my money.

Can today's Ubisoft really be trusted to not shut down a potential Far Cry multiplayer game around a year after it releases? No.

Does the next Far Cry game need dinosaurs in it? Yes.

What do I think of Destiny 2's new Star Wars-inspired expansion?

On Xbox? 😉

In all seriousness, I've been Destiny sober for nearly a year now, and every time I see or hear anything about what's going on with it these days, it invariably makes me think, "ugh, no".

@themightyant this reminds me of when I saw an electric toothbrush being marketed as "HD". Bore off, Oral B 🤣

@FrenchVaniIIuxe I dare say Bioware was on the ropes way before Veilguard. Mass Effect 3's ending, Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem all saw to that.

@Fiendish-Beaver my advice would be to not try and do everything in Rebirth specifically. I did everything in the first three areas. By the fourth area I gave up on ticking off every box; a lot of the side activities in Rebirth are just straight up bad.

@Coletrain it's absolutely my most anticipated game of 2025. Like you, I've been looking forward to it since seeing the first trailer. Mina the Hollower hits the same way Shovel Knight did, for me personally.

@Decimateh yeah. Final Fantasy VII Remake is part one, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is part two.

@Fiendish-Beaver it'll be massive if you do that. Remake took me around 43 hours to finish doing almost everything. I'm currently 64 hours into Rebirth, not being close to doing everything available.

This sounds like an accident waiting to happen; yet another distraction for drivers. I wouldn't want someone in the back seat raging over being battered in Halo. Plus I hope it's not coming to Tesla models. Those things are rolling powder kegs as is.

I've said it here before, but for the love of god everyone try out the demo for Mina the Hollower. It's my most anticipated game of the year.

@Kezelpaso DOOM 2016 is in the console Game Pass library, but not the PC library. Maybe that was what was being referred to.

Games of this calibre being allowed on digital storefronts make me think, hell, I should make a game. It won't be the worst thing available, that's for sure.

@darkswabber SEO it most certainly is. However, you can definitely tell which of the three sites - out of PX, PS and NL - has the lowest readership and engagement. Compared to the other two, PX's headlines are so relentlessly aggressive with the SEO I could press criminal charges for assault and battery.

@jesse_dylan I played it during either the most recent Steam Next Fest or the one prior. Sorry, I shouldn't have got your hopes up there; my bad 🤣 It's worth the wait though, honestly. It's going to have me glued to the Steam Deck (if I can stop playing Vampire Survivors, which is my current obsession).

I'll have to buy two copies to be able to play co-op with the wife, so I'd be waiting for a bit of a price drop anyway. Then there's the fact neither Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 3 nor Wonderlands really did it for us either of us. I'm cautiously optimistic about Borderlands 4, but I'm not throwing myself at it as soon as it comes out.

My first thought was Sea of Thieves. Shows what I know.

@jesse_dylan when I'm playing a demo, if I decide I'm really into it I'll immediately stop playing and wait for the full game. Unless it's Mina the Hollower, which I had to tear myself away from. It's preposterously good.

@everynowandben a prime example of a joke not translating well when put into text. I'll try harder next time.

@HeavyHoggJP

What is all the hype behind silksong though? Can someone elaborate??

The first Hollow Knight game was quietly an underground hit and highly regarded by a small subset of people. 😜