Fezrock

I started it on Gamepass after not having heard about it before at all. It's not quite what I expected, but it seems kinda neat so far.

The amount of management "plate spinning" has ramped up quite a bit already, and I expect that to continue now. So far I've been getting the sense that the management is the main thrust of the game actually, not the story. Though the writing has been decent. There's also some platforming, but its been super light so far.

It's worth pointing out that, based on the ending spoilers, it is entirely possible for Part 2 to be a completely new game that has almost nothing in common with the next big chunk of post-Midgar FF7.

Though if fan reaction is negative enough (no idea if it will be), they might pull back on that stuff and do a more traditional retelling of the original story.

Hugo from A Plague Tale: Innocence. He was fine at first, though I enjoyed the missions in the middle of the game where he wasn't present more than the earlier ones that involve him. But he makes a decision that kicks off the final third of the game that I found idiotic. And the game is linear, which means I had no choice but to forgive him later on. I didn't want to forgive him, bad things happened that were entirely his fault. I hated the conclusion of the game, and it was entirely due to him.

For AAA games: Watch Dogs and Shadow of Mordor.

Got both on sale on Steam and dropped both of them in under 2 hours. I just didn't enjoy how they looked or played at all.

For Indie games: Proteus

I played for 12 minutes on rec from Alex and just didn't get the point.

Major US city; 250 down/25 up. No cap.

Cost is $135, but that includes HBO and network TV bundled in to it.

I've got a good internet connection, 250mbps down, and no data cap, so I should be able to use it of I want. I also don't really have any more morale objection to it; or rather, I think this loss of consumer ownership is a trend that will keep moving forward everywhere and Google is not unique.

However, I have a relatively beefy PC, and it's already hooked up to my TV so I can couch play whenever I want already. Stadia just doesn't offer any value to me right now, and I don't trust that the tech will work the way they claim. Maybe by the time I need to upgrade, their system will be working better, and that's when I'll need to make a decision about whether it's worth the money to upgrade again or if I should try Stadia. But for now, I'm out.

It does seem like if you want to get into video game development, it's better to go to the small indie studios where, maybe there's still some crunch, but it seems like the work is more satisfying and you like the people you work with. At least, that's the impression I've gotten from the various devs that Giant Bomb interacts with. Dave Lang, in his more serious mode, has said talked about this too, and that he specifically created Iron Galaxy to be able to work on his terms.

And even the big downside of indie studios, the potential that the studio goes under financially, doesn't really seem that bad when you look at how often big studios let people go after major releases (or, in some recent cases, had major layoffs due to "restructuring").

On the silly side, does this mean that all the dumb redirect URLs people bought will no longer work?

On the serious side, VICE has mean so mismanaged for so long and has been losing so much money that I certainly understand the corporate decision to shake things up. Pulling all the different VICE brands together under a single banner again may even be a good idea, I've no idea. Maybe they have data that most of their users go use the main VICE.com site as their go-to destination and the sites visible there get more traffic than the more separate things like Waypoint. That being said, even if this works out longterm for VICE and I don't think it'll work out longterm for the Waypoint crew. This maybe saves their jobs, and maybe that's enough (it's certainly a big thing), but I don't see how this won't indelibly change what it is they do. At the very least, I think it means a lot more oversight from VICE (certainly on the technical end, with things like "No, we always publish stories in this kind of format at this time of day, you can't do this other thing") including having to stay more on-brand (no more 6-part Jane Austen podcasts).

The devil is always in the details. Will they be more like Respawn, which has managed to carve its own path under EA, or like Bioware, which buckled under EA and became less than a shadow of its former self? I've no idea, but I don't think anyone else does either.

Do we even have any track record of previous studio acquisitions by Epic or is this the first?

So I've got a question for those who've played it; how well does the UI and Font scale up in size? Because I've had vastly different experiences with Paradox games; Stellaris and EUIV were fine (at least with the Stellaris font mod) but CKII and Vicky II were unplayable for me. Everything was so damn tiny.