ll_Exile_ll

Reviews haven't been factored into my purchasing decisions for games in a long while. The majority of the time I know whether I am getting a game based on pre-release information. Most I'll do is use the opencritic/metacritic average to get a sense of the general reception if I'm on the fence, but I do not read or watch reviews for the purposes of deciding if I want to buy a game.

That's not to say I don't engage with review style content at all, but it's not the product style pre-release reviews. I highly enjoy long form critical analysis and deep dives that really dig into a game, but I engage with that type of content after I've played a game myself. I enjoy reflecting on games, movies, TV, etc. after I've experienced them myself through that type of critical analysis, but I have no use for product reviews.

This question is founded on many assertions that I simply do not think are true. In order for this question to even be valid, all (or at least most) of the following must be true:

1. JRPGs have a lower completion rate by players than other genres of similar average game length
2. JRPGs always have bad endings/final acts
3. The people that do not finish these games do so specifically because the story declined in quality
4. JRPGs are written linearly across development, fundamentally differently from other genres
5. JRPGs take longer to develop than other story driven genres

Personally, I don't think any of these are actually true. Some are subjective, but at the very least I'd like to some data to support the idea that JRPGs have a lower completion rate than other games of similar length. Achievement data could tell us this, and in many cases could tell us exactly where most people fall off. Somehow I doubt most people are giving up in the third act, my recollection of looking at achievement data across all genres is that most people give up in the first hours and a majority of people that get past that point end up finishing. Would also like to see any evidence that JRPGs are written from beginning to end across development. In my experience, many games in the genre feel meticulously plotted, not like something that just randomly came together at the end.

And, as @bigsocrates said, stories that are written over the course of years are common across all media, likely the norm. Multi-season TV and books usually take years to write.

Played some of that Foamstars beta with a group of friends and we all had a lot more fun than we expected. But all also agreed that if that game is sold at full price it will be DOA. Free to play is the only way that game will have any chance of catching on.

Consoles are always going to be a balancing act. I think speaking in absolutes like "every game should be 60 FPS on console" is limiting to developers. They should be free to use the horsepower available to them however they think is best. Now, I think every game should hit its FPS target and maintain it without dropping regularly, but dictating that every game should reach 60 may prevent developers from doing other cool or interesting things with their game that may not be possible at 60 FPS on a console. That is especially true when talking about severely power limited machines like the Switch.

Of course, on PC there should be no frame rate cap other than that what makes sense for each user's hardware, but games should go as high someone's PC can achieve.

Cyberpunk was not in development for 9 years. Even if you start counting when the project began in 2012, that's still 8 years until its 2020 release. But that's not accurate either, since it was just a skeleton crew of pre-production until development finished on Blood and Wine in early 2016. Full development of that game took place across a little over 4 years.

I enjoyed this one, but of the several "indie pixel art RPGs" that I played this year, I think I have it behind Chained Echoes and Cassette Beasts.

The specs have never been a secret. Tech wise, the PS5 is a pretty big jump even over the PS4 Pro, especially the CPU. No one was "led to believe" anything, you can just look at the spec sheet.

I think MS is in too deep to ever consider that. They sold millions of Series S consoles on the promise that all of this generation's games would be playable on it. They simply cannot back out of that at this point.

I do think we will see more games shipping with missing features on Series S as the generation proceeds, but they really can't abandon those users completely. The farthest I can see them going is maybe Series S versions of games are not available natively and instead must be played via cloud streaming, the way some generation 8 games on switch worked like RE7 and Kingdom Hearts 3. The Series is already a digital only console, so that wouldn't be too far of a leap.

The real answer isn't on the poll. There are always great games being made, sometimes things line up that many come out in the same year, other years only a few come out, and sometimes things line up that a year ends up pretty dry. 2023 will be added to the list of legendary years in games like 2004 and 2017, among others, but it's not any indication of some kind of change in the landscape of game releases. There will always be ups and downs among the number of great high-profile games from year to year.

You have to wonder how many potential Horizon: Zero Dawn type shifts we have been deprived of due to developers not being willing or allowed to go out of their comfort zone and do something completely different the way Guerilla did when pivoting from Killzone to Horizon.