bigsocrates

@chamurai: It took me three because it's been a long time since I played the game. It's weird that it never made it to backwards compatibility NOR did it ever get an Xbox One port, even though it got PS4 and Switch ports. That means that it's more accessible on Nintendo and PlayStation than Microsoft consoles.

Rare. There are a few games like Resident Evil Code Veronica that never got Xbox One ports because of backwards compatibility but many fewer that were Xbox games but never got any way to play on later hardware despite being playable on the other platforms.

@cikame: Some do and some don't. But LOTR is somewhat bullet proof as an IP, especially with the big new TV series getting a lot more attention than the games, and it's not like there haven't been bad games in the past. The same with Star Wars to some degree. But licenseholders have taken licenses away from companies for poor quality in the past. I think EA lost the Star Wars exclusivity because of the bad reaction to Battlefront II and some other stuff, even though EA has improved things of late.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Tears of the Kingdom is phenomenal. And Hi-Fi Rush is among the best shadow drops ever.

But man games as a service sucks because it's never like a GOOD service, it's always a nickel and diming service like the goddamned cable company. It's always unplanned outages, hidden fees, and the constant upsell.

@notsosneakyguy: I will never forget NOR FORGIVE how in the original Destiny a lot of the lore was not actually in a game but in like associated apps and websites. Not even like there was ancillary media that filled in the backstory but you would literally unlock stuff in the game and have to go to a website on another device to read it. It was such a massive fuck you. Maybe not as big as the fuck you of no matchmaking for raids.

God I hate modern Bungie. I feel like they don't get enough shit for all their terrible ideas and implementations just because the shooting is good and a lot of people are utterly addicted to the treadmill.

THEY LITERALLY REMOVED CONTENT PEOPLE HAD PAID FOR BECAUSE THEY COULDN'T BUILD TOOLS GOOD ENOUGH TO MAKE THE GAME WORK WITH ALL THE CONTENT IN IT!!!

@shindig: And then they can rip chunks of the campaign out and throw them in the garbage so new players have no way of seeing a cohesive narrative!

It's still wild to me that they got away with taking away content people had paid for on the grounds that "We built this too incompetently to keep it all up at once, even though games like EverQuest that came out in the 90s seem to have managed to do it."

@thepanzini: Alien, The Terminator, and Rambo had almost immediate sequels that were in the same general genre but tweaked to be more action oriented. Rambo 1 is an action thriller. Rambo 2 is more straight action. Terminator 1 is a dark sci-fi action thriller. Terminator 2 is dark sci fi action. Alien went from sci fi horror to sci fi action horror. And there were not significant time gaps there.

A Fistful of Dollars is irrelevant because it had absolutely no obvious connection to the source and wasn't marketed on that at all. The Mummy just used a generic public domain monster and put it in a new setting with maybe a couple minor winks at the earlier film like calling the mummy Imhotep. It made no attempt to market based on the earlier Universal Horror movie. Mission Impossible went from small screen spy TV show to big budget spy movie and then slowly morphed into a more pure action franchise, but the first movie had many, many, connections to the source material. Battlestar Galactica, Perry Mason, and Lost in Space just took old franchises and remade them in modern style. You can't remake Perry Mason as a 1950s style lawyer show but it's just a 2020s prestige lawyer show. Lost in Space and Battlestar Galactica likewise just moved from 1950s and 1970s style sci fi shows into more modernized versions of the same thing.

None of these are the same as taking a single player focused FPS from the 1990s and making it a zero story multiplayer extraction game in 2020s style. Nobody expected it would be EXACTLY the same as Marathon from the 90s. Like nobody thought there were going to be flat corridors like Wolfenstein with flat sprite enemies. They expected something more like the Doom update, where they took the basic premise and remade it in a modern style with new twists.

Doom 1993 to Doom 2016 is much more similar to Battlestar Galactica 1970s to 1990 or Lost in Space and its remakes. It's the same basic genre but for a new time period.

@apewins: If they're smart they'll pull a game pass and release it day 1 on one of the PS+ tiers. Assures a player base. Then you make up the sales through microtransactions or other platforms (since it's cross platform having a robust PS playerbase will make PC and Xbox players feel safe jumping in.)

@thepanzini: I think we all understand why this happened the way it happened. But that doesn't mean people weren't disappointed by the way it was baited and switched.

And extended universes like that do exist but they generally do not revive a long dormant franchise to do it in the same medium that franchise once existed. So you get a franchise like Star Wars that has been around in every medium for a long time doing a lot of different things, but you didn't get the Top Gun franchise returning as a big musical on the big screen.

The closest I can think of is that Fresh Prince reboot, but even that just took elements that were already in the sitcom and teased them out into a drama.

@thepanzini: Just because you're making 1 game doesn't mean you can't make another especially with a studio that size. Plus live service multiplayer games can have a single player component (Gears and CoD and Halo all being examples.)

And Marathon being multiplayer only is...kind of a strange fit. It's a weird thing that games do where they bring back a franchise you loved but in a manner that doesn't involve the things you loved about it. Other industries don't tend to do this. You don't see "There's a new Terminator film coming but it's a romcom" very often.

@michaelenger: To be fair some of the extraction games don't even have gear or XP rewards (though most do.) They're just about running the same maps over and over and over.

And some of them don't bother with the deep lore or polished aesthetic. Rainbow Six sure didn't. "It's Rainbow Six but now there's....aliens for some reason?"

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that all this feels like it used to be just some random mode added to a full featured game. Like Call of Duty when it added zombies or then that alien version of zombies.

Now its its own game that you pay for AND put microtransactions into.

On the plus side since I have no interest in these games I can safely ignore them instead of buying a game and ignoring one of the modes, saving me money, kind of?

In general games feel much less generous than they used to. There are exceptions. Like when Forza Horizon 4 added a limited track editor and a battle royale mode both for free. But a lot of publishers would have just spun each of those off into their own $40 projects.