@bigsocrates: We're on the other side of the Unity Hubbert's Peak, which probably lines up with the 2020 IPO. The ascent you mentioned was very real, and was due to the fact that the engine matured with better features, tech, and documentation. And of course there was the Asset Store, and while it contributed to Unity's reputation as the engine of choose for no-effort shovelware, it also did gangbusters, had actual utility, and lit a fire under Epic to follow suit (boot up the Unreal launcher and you will see that oh yeah, they definitely did).
And then a few years ago, Unity the engine took a backseat to Unity the Financial Asset and Holding Company. Hell, even the additions to the engine itself became more and more focused on marketing and monetization. This isn't a company that makes and sells a product anymore; its business is now to make itself look as good as possible to investors (by demonstrating its potential for landlording in an endless stream of captive dollars) and get sold at a massive premium. The past few years at Unity have been comically top-heavy -- like look we all know that execs make decisions that benefit their portfolio over the company everywhere, but at least try to hide it a little.
Unity is my Lock of the Week for sure, but I think Embracer still has a plenty of gas in the tank to make a late-year push for runner-up in terms of sheer potential bodycount.
I often describe the Borderlands games as "some of my favorite games that I have to meet waaaaaaay more than halfway" and yeah, BL3 fits the bill. It's got the good action and wacky builds, buuuuut...
- the writing fails to deliver on a promising premise
- there's way too much time spent turning in quests or waiting for Lilith to finish talking already
- it desperately needs 2 features from Reaper of Souls: an armory for quickly switching between loadouts and an "adventure mode" that allows me to play through alts in a way that isn't just going through the story again (and then again and again for each new difficulty level). Whatever problems the game's writing may have, they would be much easier to forgive if I didn't have to deal with them twelve times.
Soulstone Survivors: I think it's great until you get way up in the difficulty and it devolves into a bunch of dashing around attacking offscreen bosses.
Halls of Torment: Absolute garbage. Slow, repetitive, nothing in the way of interesting build choices.
Spellbook Demonslayers: Fantastic, if visually uninteresting. Lots of fun builds
One thing none of these games have: that amazing brain tingle you get in Vampire Survivors when you pick up a bunch of XP gems and get that rapid-fire bling sound.
This year seems a little less train-wrecky than last year (as long as we confine all Amico news to fiscal year 2022). None of the "this game was bad/buggy" stuff seems to be qualitatively special. So by default, I've got to hand it to Blizzard just completely own-goaling on Overwatch, even though my horse in that race retired to a nice glue factory upstate years ago. I would expect that sort of over-promising and inconsistency from an overambitious indie, not from one of the world's biggest developers that had to scramble after it saw its Overwatch business model challenged in European courts and has been suffering massive brain drain and OK I hear it now, I hear it.
Shoutout to Dying Light, which had a sequence in which I, unarmed, had to run through of gauntlet of gun-toting enemies shooting at me from windows and such. Of course, they spawned "just in time" so that they wouldn't get a bead on me -- it was all about the illusion of danger and the fast paced dash to freedom through a hail of bullets! The bad news is that I died anyways, so I respawn at the checkpoint and go at again. The problem here is that this isn't an old school hard reload -- the world doesn't reset at all, only I do. So this means those just in time shooters are already spawned and waiting for me, and they have no trouble sending me back to the starting line dozens of times. I don't bandy the phrase about lightly, but absolute dogshit.
I wasn't wild about the first 4 episodes of Andor, but the 5th episode rules (nothing happens, it's all character!), the 6th episode is the best thing I've ever seen on television (at least for a few weeks until it was supplanted by the 12 episode), and once it takes off it doesn't miss. Take it from someone who hasn't cared for any of the other contemporary Star Wars output but especially despised Rogue One: you gotta watch Andor.
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