LittleDansonMan

This is good advice, but I probably wouldn't recommend looking up walkthroughs, wandering around and getting lost is part of the experience. If someone is truly stuck, then yes go ahead and look it up, but I wouldn't do it from the start. I think the only thing a new player absolutely should look up to start the game is how to get the bell for summoning ashes, it was a mistake on From's part to make that tool so easily missable.

Right now I can only put together a top 4 of 2022 releases I've completed or played enough of to know they will be favorites this year. Elden Ring is a clear first for me right now, beyond that there's three games that I can't rank in any particular order yet: Nobody Saves the World, Rogue Legacy 2, and Neon White.

Nobody Saves the World is a fantastic game that I think will unfortunately get lost in the shuffle by the time we get to year-end lists because it came out in January.

I've just been getting the ace medals and gift for each level and then moving on, but I'd love to add some friend times to beat!

Steam ID: Prance Rosner

Friend Code: 67352653

Mostly yes, my favorite part of RPGs is character-building and customization so I will almost always manual spend those points. One recent exception was Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. I just couldn't grok the Pathfinder system, and found leveling up extremely confusing. I've played a lot of CRPGs, but couldn't wrap my head around that one. I decided to just manually level the main character but auto-level the others, although I haven't played a ton of the game yet.

I'll also sometimes just skip it if I don't feel like a game is giving me interesting choices, and the various stats, skills, etc. don't seem to make meaningful differences in play style.

@csl316: He's done interviews with industry folks who haven't just left their jobs too! They're pretty good even.

GB East premium features were nothing but bangers from the time Austin joined up until the end (RIP).

Project BEAST, Shenmue Endurance Run, Beast in the East, 13 Deadly Sims, Exquisite Corps, Steal My Sunshine, Crime Crew, Burgle My Bananas, and probably others I'm forgetting. But yea you can probably just go through every East feature in chronological order and have a pretty good time.

This, and if MS did make the games multi-platform those same people would turn around and say "Xbox has no games" and buy a Playstation. Yea it'd be great if we didn't have to deal with exclusives, but they work and consumers respond to them by buying the console with exclusives.

@thepanzini: Yea Avowed is the most exciting upcoming thing from Xbox first party, but Obsidian seems to have a lot of projects going simultaneously (Avowed, Outer Worlds DLC/Sequel, Grounded, and an unamed Josh Sawyer project) that makes me worry the scope is going to be a little smaller than the Elder Scrolls type game some of us are expecting.

For hypothetical stuff from Xbox I'd like to see them do something with the Shadowrun and MechAssault IPs, not totally sure the status of that because I know other studios have made Shadowrun and MechWarrior/Battletech games but I think they own those IPs for games?