@scorch: The thing is most of them don't ever finish the bigger open world games. Maybe one of the team end up finishing the bigger releases but most of the time they start them and end up falling off before finishing because they have to keep moving onto the next thing for coverage (see the discussion of nobody finishing Ghosts of Tsushima).
PC focussed RPG's seem to fall into that bucket even faster either due to a reputation of being long and complex or maybe the thought that the audience interested in them is probably quite a bit smaller.
Brad's issue with playing Mario after Spelunky is why when I played my first Mario game about 5 years ago (always had Sony consoles as a kid) I could never play more than an hour before putting it down. The movement feels so strange coming to it so many years later and having spent hundreds of hours with Spelunky
Co-Op Spelunky is hilarious. Things that are normally harmless like throwing pots or setting off arrow traps end up causing a chain reaction that hits your partner in a very funny way. I hope it's been improved for Spelunky 2 to take away things like having to be on the same screen as the lead player.
@pancakepatriarchate: It does seem this is exactly the direction they are heading and I think it will probably work. None of the games they have put out since gamepass became a focus have been outright awful but equally none of them have been discussed in the same sentence as any of Sony's first party output. Every release can be seen as worth playing for the cost of a month of gamepass and they'll be hoping that is enough to keep people subscribed until the next game they put out with some good third party stuff filling the void in between. It will be interesting to see which third party developers come back for a second game with gamepass, will be very telling of how good the deal they get from Microsoft is versus what they make selling the game outright on PC or PS4/5.
It's seems like Microsoft is definitely focussing entirely on the value of gamepass (which is excellent) which might be a smart play when Sony has a pretty clear advantage in the first party development department. As long as Microsoft can keep up a good cadence of releases to keep the gamepass subscription money coming in they will continue to do really well although I do fear their quality is going to move further into the 'it's worth playing on gamepass' category rather than us talking about industry leading products.
Halo looked pretty good but there was nothing there which really showed off the possibility of a new generation of hardware the way the Ratchet demo did at Sony. Maybe native 4K 60FPS will be enough but I'm not so sure.
I'd be all in on PC gamepass if the windows store and Xbox app was functional. Surely they have to fix it in the near future right?
@therealturk: I wonder if this was originally going to be shown as the E3 demo following a big flashy press conference segment. A tutorial for a mechanic is definitely a weird thing to lead with
@dbinshal93@mclargepants I was able to just copy the link from the RSS button under the audio version and paste it into Pocket Casts search bar and it came straight up. Just make sure you are logged into your GB account on whatever mobile browser you are using, mine has a habit of logging me out regularly.
Unlike a lot of other people I really enjoyed the format this year. I like the removal of some of the more negative categories as I feel the end of the year should be about celebrating what was great through the year instead of a wall of negativity.
I also think the top 10 discussions were a lot better than previous years. It probably helped that there was a stronger consensus about where games should be on the list because it can sometimes feel like positioning has come down to a comparison of the negative aspects of the best games which wasn’t the case this year.
For the first 3 days I think it’s important to remember that the majority of people don’t watch every quick look or listen to every podcast so it’s good for them to go over a lot of the games that came out. It also means a wider variety of games get discussed. In previous years it has often been a case of just a handful of games being discussed in lots of different categories, often with the same arguments each time
Questions about what will be ‘cross gen’ releases seem a bit weird to me given Sony has confirmed all PS4 games will run in the PS5 and we can assume the same for Microsoft so everything is technically cross gen until they stop supporting the old consoles. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the big releases over the next 12 months get a PS4 Pro/One X style patch to take advantage of the extra power of the new consoles. With backwards compatibility I don’t think they can get away with the ‘upgrade fee’ we saw early in this generation
Every time they do one of these I’m shocked at the amount of B-Roll that is the game being played fairly poorly. It’s weird to see promotional material of cars/bikes/snowmobiles banging off the sides of the track regularly compared with the very carefully produced optimal gameplay and fake voice chat we get in game demos now
stinger061's comments