Markatron84

@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. 😜

@Nighto4 yeah, although nothing is certain in games as the industry does like to dupe us with smoke and mirrors pre-release, it all looks very promising and exactly what I was hoping for from a Bond game made by IOI. 👍

Hollow Knight: Silksong? Never heard of it.

@Nighto4 as a fellow WoA fan and having watched the video, I'm incredibly looking forward to First Light. I imagine you also will be once you've watched it. Not to spoil too much, but it very much looks to be mixing the im-sim aspects of WoA and Bond-y big action set-pieces.

Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends are two of my absolute favourite games of all time. I've purchased and played through them both on way more platforms than I should have over the years. Speaking of which, I own neither of them on PC... 🤔🤦

If Ubisoft can bring out another Rayman game (remake or otherwise) that matches the quality of Origins and Legends, I'll be the living embodiment of the "shut up and take my money" meme.

However good or bad this film turns out to be, or whatever direction they decide to take it in, I bet that you could make the exact same film and not call it Call of Duty and it would just come and go, whereas sticking the Call of Duty name on it guarantees that people will turn up to see it in droves. Which is really, really sad if you ask me. It's smart marketing if nothing else, I suppose.

Who in their right mind would enable RT on console and play a multiplayer shooter at 30fps anyway?

It's a very pretty game (on PC, had it running at 4K/60) but the vehicles feel so unpleasant to drive. I remember really enjoying All-Stars, Transformed and Team Racing, but this feels really... off. I'm really disappointed.

I find it absolutely wild that given there's a whole decade between Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and Gears of War: Reloaded, all we got was Gears of War: Reloaded. In ten years we couldn't scrape together remasters of Gears 2 and 3? Wild.

@Fiendish-Beaver my immediate thought was "Dom wasn't in Gears 4 or 5", then around 15 seconds later realised that's the joke 🤦 Time for bed, I think.

@Fiendish-Beaver mate, don't worry about accidentally braining your fellow Divers. You can't make a democratic omelette without breaking a few eggs 👍

@Ricky-Spanish the Helldivers 2 community is largely a friendly and welcoming one. You come across a dick every now and then but for the most part everyone is just there to help each other out and have fun.

I play on Steam, and I've never sent anyone a friend request on H2 so I'm not sure how adding friends across different platforms works, but if anyone wants to add me, I'm - unsurprisingly - Markatron84

@DannZan 6. Profit!

Anyway, we don't have a date yet for this, nor do we have any real idea of when it'll be coming out

🤔

@InheritNegative 277,000 concurrent players is obscenely high. Only a handful of games are ever reaching those sorts of numbers.

@Ricky-Spanish not really. He only said he feels that gamers are happy with the current consoles. Microsoft (and other companies) wanting to keep iterating and bringing out new hardware goes without saying.

And he's probably not wrong either. I'd wager that a sizeable chunk of players would prefer console generations to last a lot longer than they currently do.

@Deformedpye for managed democracy!

@Balaam_ if it helps, as somebody who has all the Helldivers 2 achievements I can assure you that it is infinitely less of a grind than Gears' list. In fact, if you play with friends there are a load that would take you far less time to unlock than it took me.

@Tasuki you will lose absolutely nothing by having not played the first Helldivers. It's not like there's even a narrative you'll be missing out on. I've never played it and have put over 340 hours into Helldivers 2.

@Sol4ris I had to check out the validity of your statement and you're right. That is wild. I dunno what Liam was huffing that day 🤣

@Medic_alert I did like their scaled down Edinburgh in FH4, so fingers crossed.

@Medic_alert it'll more than likely have a scaled down approximation of a smaller Japanese town or city, if the last games are anything to go by.

@Ricky-Spanish you thinking that the picture was a picture of me is even funnier than the picture itself 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@Questionable_Duck I saw the picture online and I had to make it my profile picture on everything because it cracks me up 🤣

So far I've been in the mindset of "I don't need another handheld", as I already own a Switch OLED, Switch 2 and Steam Deck. It all depends on the price, though. Being able to easily run games through Steam, Epic, GOG, etc is a big plus, so when Microsoft finally gets around to telling us how much these things will actually cost, if the price isn't too egregious then I may be swayed to sell the Steam Deck and move over to the ROG Ally. Doing so would also get me to resubscribe to Game Pass, as not being able to use that service on Steam Deck was a big factor in me ditching it.