Atlantis was talking mad shit. They had to respond.

Been charging my phone overnight for years. Battery health is 100% and I never have to worry about charging.

Seriously though, who asked for photorealistic graphics? If people agreed on a reasonable target, we could just have games at a reasonable size and cost, hardware upgrades wouldn’t need to be so insane, and teams could be put on other important things like, I dunno, making sure the game works instead of just looking pretty.

Starfield, Diablo 4, and Tears of the Kingdom for me.

Starfield was a hard pass at 30FPS on my Series X. But also, the gameplay and story just didn’t interest me at all.

Diablo 4 was monotonous. Grinding for hours to get a percentage of a percentage increase on gear was not fun. I’ve played every other Diablo game along with numerous other action RPGs of that style, but D4 is a snorefest. It’s frustrating being chain stunned by all the crowd control, it’s frustrating that a lot of enemies have a lot of health for no reason, and it’s bland when you face the same few bosses over and over again. It wasn’t so bad in the other Diablo games because you could just nuke the bosses, but in D4 each one is a straight up chore to kill.

Tears of the Kingdom… it’s a fun action adventure game, but if it has The Legend of Zelda on it, it needs to be held to The Legend of Zelda standards. And it, just like Breath of the Wild, is an awful Zelda game. If it didn’t have LoZ on it, I’d probably rate it much higher.

One child rule. Minimum.

Google search results are literally the only time I read Reddit content these days, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. They’re going to lose so many views if they block their content on Google.

Make 4K textures a separate download, via a free DLC. That way if people only ever play in 1080p, they don’t need to waste disk space on files that will never get used.

Not in a position to say. But I can say that, anecdotally, they’re always high on searches and contribute very little.

I mean it’s Exputer, do they even have human writers?

Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.

It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.

Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.

Why not both?

I didn’t decide to pirate when games went from $70 to $80 (CAD). I didn’t decide to when they went from $80 to $90. I decided to when, on top of that price, I also am encouraged via predatory tactics (such as matchmaking intentionally matching you up with players who have all of this nonsense so you can “see what you’re missing”) to buy a deluxe edition, season pass, monthly battlepass, “cosmetic only” microtransactions, second season pass, additional DLC not part of any season pass, and whatever other crap they want to nickel and dime their playerbase into buying. All just to actually get the full content of the game. Remember when games had the full game when you bought it? Maybe an expansion pack that had a substantial amount of content that was developed and released after the game was released?

It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?

Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.

At least there’s potential now!

If Keanu was in the studio that day, someone should have said “Silverhand, arm the nuke.”

Personally I’m still a fan of GameMaker. Pay for the tool, use the tool, pay literally nothing else even if your game is the next Minecraft.

Downside is it’s 2D only, but that’s fine for my preferences.

Allow me to introduce you to Screeps. You’re welcome.

Guess I’ll stop my current playthrough since everything is getting revamped. I want to re-experience it with a fresh character.

But what to do? Street samurai? Knife throwing one hit kill ninja? Master of explosions? Puncher of faces, exploder of heads? Netrunner 2.0?

The possibilities are… well, not endless, but abundant. The only gripe is that no matter what you need to spec into Technical Ability to be able to craft/upgrade the best gear. Making it pretty much mandatory if you’re minmaxing damage (to my knowledge there is no vendor that can do it for you if you lack the skills) makes it so that 14-17 points of your character are going into that stat no matter what.

I’ve got one - Hotline Miami 2.

Hotline Miami 1 was such a fantastic game. Frantic, high energy, fun, good art style, a confusing at best story but that’s not why you played it. HM2 was full of off-screen instant kill bullshit that you literally could not prepare for in any way other than to die to it a handful of times before you memorized enemy positions off-screen. In the first game, you could always see threats before they could kill you. Not the case in the sequel. “You died and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it” is a bullshit mechanic in any game.

Predatory usually implies that you’re being lured in to buy something, but the game has no microtransactions. At its worst the mobile version (which is free) has the option to watch an ad to get 1 revive per run. Don’t watch the ad? The game is the same as the console/PC version.

I think the lights, sounds, slaughtering massive hordes of enemies with overwhelming damage, and constant dopamine rush from them could certainly be predatory in nature if they were used to bait you into buying microtransactions, but that’s not the case here. I see where they’re coming from, but I can’t necessarily agree.