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I got this a few days ago. Game's hard, and I'm coming from getting just about everything done in Into the Breach (including unlocking all secret pilots and secret squad) whilst playing almost exclusively on Hard.

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One thing that makes it hard is the AI. I don't remember for sure how the Advance Wars AI played, but Wargroove AI really tries to jockey for positioning, avoids placing units in ranges where you can effectively crush them whilst finding positions that put a thorn in your side, finds offensive lines that involve rapidly pivoting forces between different theatres of battle on the map, etc. I feel like Advance Wars AI would funnel itself into bottlenecks and do other stupid things that'd validate really basic strategies, so this seems to be a level up from that.

The only real flaws I've noticed are that the AI has a commander problem: it'll myopically throw units at your commander in a foolhardy attempt to close out the game (so you can use your commander to melt enemy units and pull apart their careful jockeying, then heal up and repeat); and it'll keep its own commander out of play, putting it at a substantial disadvantage in power, as though it's less determined to get the W than it is to merely prevent you from getting the S rank.

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The game also lacks the Advance Wars-style long string of early campaign battles that heavy-handedly tutorialize you about a unit or tactic by giving the opponent an intimidating-looking but monotone army and giving you a less intimidating-looking army that is just about guaranteed to tear them apart. Wargroove has some of this around when they introduce the aerial units, but even early in the campaign the opponent always seems to have a healthy diversity of units that makes counterpicking with your choices of unit construction/deployment really tough. This is compounded by the game's tempo which I'm still getting used to (I'll get to this) and the AI's aforementioned propensity to pivot the battle to another front.

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Wargroove also feels like it has a careful balance about it, and it's pretty far from what I remember Advance Wars to be. Up to the point I've played to, it feels like this game values the depth of exchanges between what would be mostly irrelevant footsoldiers in Advance Wars. If I spam cavalry, which might be considered this game's light tank, then I'm going to get lit up by well-arranged pikemen and archers, even if I'm getting the first hit. A lot of 3-4 movement units in Wargroove are important, which seems to make issues of tempo and sequencing more pressing.

It also means it takes more turns than I'm conditioned to expect for things to happen -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but maybe it exacerbates issues with the interface and controls (that hopefully will get attenuated in the next patch).

Mind, later on when I'm handed the ability to build dragons and giants and whatnot I might discover that Wargroove's giants, trebuchets, dragons, and witches are Advance Wars's medium tanks, rockets, bombers and fighters, and those units might take over everything and turn Wargroove into medieval Advance Wars. But it's refreshing to see a deep and relevant low-end here, and such a heavy focus on it in the campaign. It could also pan out that unit costs, weaknesses, and crits prevent the low-end from being rendered irrelevant in a standard game with everything involved.

Also, net worth seems like a live concept in this game that the balance seems intent on making relevant beyond just a construction bottleneck. I could imagine a world where the building reinforce heal mechanic or the mages' heal didn't carry a gold cost (they cost building HP and your mage's attack turn respectively regardless, so a more blase developer maybe wouldn't bother pricing them), but they are priced in gold at a level roughly commensurate with unit build costs, and I think that makes net worth a relevant measure of the health of an army in Wargroove. I could see the kinds of minds that brought concepts like card advantage and philosophy of fire to MtG theory coming here and bringing an angle of thought to this game where an army is thought of in terms of its net worth and tactics are about looking for arbitrage opportunities.

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Um, this turned into a wall of text quickly. I think I'm liking this game a lot. I feel like it's hard in ways that speak to me, I'm uncomfortable but getting a lot of satisfaction out of grappling with it. tbh I half expected to wander into the forums and find a thread complaining about the difficulty of the game. Hopefully people really take to Wargroove, I think it's really well thought out so far.

^This. I put >400hrs into BotW according to my Switch.

I'm hoping that Microsoft is able to pull together a future for console gaming that is more continuous than what we have now. (I say Microsoft because I think the best we'll get from Sony is PS4 back-compat on PS5.) I'd like to see Play Anywhere encompass Scarlet as well as the current machines and PC, and hopefully Microsoft brings some tech behind the scenes to bridge the technical gap between the platforms and make Play Anywhere for all Xbox game launches more of a sure thing.

I think there are definitely things to gain from another generation hitting soon (proper support for all those nice 4K screens people are getting, faster secondary storage, more CPU power to enable new varieties of gameplay, hardware support for new rendering techniques and maybe streaming, ... ), but people like OP stand to benefit from a gentler onramp into later hardware generations, and I don't think Microsoft needs to ship loads of new hardware to monetize the Xbox base effectively.

Pretty much any recent Dell XPS laptop would make for a fine machine. I think my XPS 13 was at the low end of the range at the time (1080p non-touch screen, i5, 256GB SSD, etc) and it's been great. You can get some pretty deep discounts if you buy at the right time (and potentially from Dell's ebay store), I think I paid around US$1000 for mine (including tax).

HP and Lenovo also appear to have good offerings.

Bethesda's advertising push for Rage 2 has actually been very effective on me, so I'm pretty stoked for that. The bits and pieces of worldbuilding I've seen for Doom Eternal have me interested; the combat walkthrough was comparatively dull, but I suspect that's just the nature of that kind of presentation.

I'm ready for a new Fire Emblem, but I'm not entirely sold on what I've seen of Three Houses. I could be on-board for the next Pokemon.

On the Microsoft front, I might give Crackdown 3 a shot, though it's very hard to tell whether it's going to turn out well even at this point. If I get through my backlog of Gears of War games (i.e. pretty much all of them), I might be keen for Gears 5. Also, I hear Age of Empires is going to be a thing at some point? Is that soon? I'm on-board if that's good.

I look forward to playing Life is Strange 2, though this time round I'll probably wait for the complete package to drop.

Unlike 2017, I failed to build a 2018 GOTY list (there wouldn't be much more than DBFZ, Smash Ultimate, and Forza Horizon 4 on it). I'm cautiously optimistic that 2019 will be less dry, and that I'll have more time to fill out a 2019 list.

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Seeing Cyberpunk 2077 in action has made me very hyped to see it eat Deus Ex's lunch, though I don't think it's a 2019 game. Similarly, I think anyone who thinks Metroid Prime 4 is a 2019 game is being overly optimistic.

It's all just people assigning weights to each others' opinions on the internet, but I lean towards saying that it is indeed just shitty of you to say this.

Come time for RDR3, once RDR2's impact has had time to be absorbed by the community and reshape expectations, you might have a point. But up until the release of RDR2, it was hard to miss evidence of the fact that Dan was a central exhibit of the "RDR fan" demographic, which makes weighing in on the game as fair game for him as for anyone. He was gushing about all the same sorts of RDR1 open-world nonsense antics that everyone else seemed to have whenever the game came up. It's pretty clear perusing discussion of RDR2 across the internet (including in the comments section for the deliberations in which Most Disappointing Game took place) that the game has been very polarizing for the fan base, and for good reasons. Your remarks basically amount to a claim that the people on the negative side of the newly formed schism are not "true" RDR fans or didn't truly embrace the "right" things about the original, which is really shitty. It's okay for R* to disappoint a chunk of their fanbase and cater exclusively to the remainder who appreciate the purity of mechanics they're going for, but there's no getting around the fact that those former fans have been let down.

wrt your fighting game example, a more suitable comparison might be coming to the (eventually beloved) Street Fighter III after being a veteran of SFII, and being disappointed by the unfamiliar mechanics like parries and the weakened zoning and lack of familiar roster. It doesn't take away from 3rd Strike being an FGC darling that a lot of SF fans just can't stand anything about III. You can make the case that those fans fail to appreciate what 3rd Strike has going for it, but it is shitty to call those fans' views illegitimate. The III series of games is simultaneously immensely beloved and immensely disappointing.

Another example: Majora's Mask is my favourite game of all time, if I had to name one. A lot of the GB crew (especially Jeff) hate it. Hearing Jeff unrelentingly shit on my favourite game can be grating, and I do hope that views like his don't kill a variety of game that I'm into, but I can't say that his opinion ought to be assigned less weight in... well, speaking from nearly two decades of remove from the release of a game, it can become extra apparent how silly it is to even bother thinking about how much relative importance to lend each others' opinions. I mean, is Jeff's opinion of Majora's Mask going to drag it downwards on the Definitive Eternal Platonic Objective Ranking of All Video Games list? Who cares?

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I actually found the pro-RDR2 side of Most Disappointing more, well, disappointing. They seemed intent on conflating "disappointing" with "objectively bad", as though unable to reconcile the idea of a truly great game by the standards of some, having immense capacity for disappointment for others. I felt like someone needed to pause the deliberations and remind some people that the category wasn't Worst Game, so they could take their very low levels of disappointment and step aside while people with extremely high levels of disappointment did their work. I'm glad Dan came out on top here.

Hell, a game can be simultaneously utterly mind-blowing and sorely disappointing for one person. In 2017, the strongest year in gaming in recent times as far as I can tell, Breath of the Wild was my GOTY. I sunk ~400 hours into that game, I even have the dubious honour of having Hestu's golden poop sitting in my inventory to commemorate collecting all 900 Korok seeds. But also, if I were to name a most disappointing game of 2017, it'd be BotW without contest. Nintendo schooled every other open-world game dev shop in the industry on how it's done, but somehow they completely missed the opportunity to seamlessly blend their iconic Zelda dungeon design into the remarkable experience they created. I really badly want those integrated dungeons. You could argue that I should "cancel" my disappointment against my love for that game and move it to 3rd or so on my GOTY list overall, but that just wouldn't be right.

My vague recollection is that they noted that labor practices in the games industry is always a hot mess, and that at least now the issue seems to be gaining traction, whereas Fallout 76 is a fresh hot mess.

But yeah, I think Telltale alone takes this category, let alone bundled together with all the other bullshit. Maybe industry labor practices should just take hottest mess every year until it's finally addressed properly.

Doom 2016, for some reason. I enjoyed it, but I guess I wasn't sufficiently invested, so when I got distracted I kinda abandoned it. I feel like I'd probably need to start from scratch if I returned to it. On the other hand, I finished Dishonored 2 twice in the same era, once without powers, which, given the relative critical reception of the two Bethesda games, probably says something about my preferences.

I just finished Far Cry 2 yesterday, which is a game that feel like I rationally should've abandoned. It's an incredible game in so many ways, but also a jarring and demoralizing slog that I got through by sheer stubborn willpower alone, and feel unsettled having finished.

If I utterly despise the seedy business model of paper Magic, will I be similarly repulsed by Arena? I'm not willing to support anything resembling that hive of gambling, speculation and laundering, that Wizards enables but plays dumb about publicly because they're not willing to come clean about their intentions and put a direct price tag of $400/year on their game. (I guess it could be worse -- they could explicitly sanction the secondary market and somehow profit directly off it. Good thing no one is shameless enough to- oh wait.)

Though I guess the other part of why I bailed on Magic, was the season of shameless midrange value decks that culminated in goddamn Siege Rhino. (And then, oh no, Siege Rhino pushed Melira Pod over the edge in Modern. Better ban Rhino Pod.) If Wizards is still pushing high-power boring cards then I'll probably lose interest pretty quickly.

Okay, finished this yesterday. I think it grew on me by somewhere halfway through. Overall I think it's actually still pretty strong, and I think I can see what it did for the genre.

A few summarized thoughts:

• Turns out my graphics settings didn't take, maybe because I neglected to restart the game after setting them but before going in? I don't know. Visually the game holds its own next to Half-Life 2 in my appraisal, which puts it roughly where it should be in 2004.
• Figured out the movement: even holding a goddamn rifle slows your movement relative to being unarmed. This was colouring my perception of the general "feel" of the game for my entire playthrough (I just thought the movement was always bad), and even in hindsight I think it was a bad choice that luckily has been left in the wastebucket of history. Otherwise I think it generally controls fine.
• Most of the shooting is fun. I liked the rifles, but the shotgun and pistol are bad, so it was basically just a rifle game all the way through.
• I think Mission 14 was the highlight for me. It struck the right combination of island-hopping with boats and scoped inland battles in an environment that felt very open, the kinds of things I think the game does well and probably what made the game innovative back in 2004.
• There were frustrating combat encounters at the end of the game, but I'd say no more or less so than the frustrating encounters at the beginning. In general I think the beginning is weaker than the end.
• I didn't mind the Trigens. It was odd to see enemy design that felt like a throwback to something like Quake or Turok.
• I don't have any strong feelings about the way the game ended, or the story in general.

A last thought: it's utterly wild to think about how much different Far Cry 2 is from the original.

@arbitrarywater: I'm not excited by SFV in the slightest, but I don't think Kage is a misstep. Hell I can just about guarantee you that there is a frothing horde of casuals who have been begging Capcom for Evil Ryu ever since before SFV's announcement, who are collectively losing their shit right now. A certain kind of fan just can't live without the *mouthbreathing* EDGY variant of the main character. Probably the same kind of person who buys all of those recent 3D Sonic games. Kage pretty much guarantees that Season 4 will sell, regardless of whatever other characters Capcom have planned.