superfriend

When did Dan leave? Beginning of 2020?

I'd say there has been plenty of time to hire new people. Since then, FIVE more people have left. And while it's true that it would be unrealistic to expect new hires within a month of Vinny, Alex and Brad leaving, it would have been possible to hire folks some time after Abby and Ben left.

They didn't hire anybody. So I guess it's not unreasonable to consider they might go the freelancer route after all. That's not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing would be a company / manager forcing them all to continue working from home. That pretty much kills everything GB stood for.

Oh and bless the people talking about GB 'growing'. I truly want to know where to find that kind of optimism.

Thanks for all the good times!

I'll miss Brad on the Podcast and the guys on all the other stuff they did. But I guess if it felt like the right move for them, they should absolutely do it. I just hope to hear from them again, in due time.

I guess people have predicted doom and gloom for this website more times than I could count- it always sort of recovered. Changed, sure, but still breathing. This loss, however, is heavy and whatever comes out the other end, I'm not sure what that thing will be.

Who wants this?! The people selling the Hotwheels license, probably.

I thought the weird Lego / Hotwheels expansions for Forza Horizon were kinda garbage and that game at least had decent car handling. Now this new thing could be straight up bad.

Play for a little longer. Its a good game, just way, way too easy. It gets hard after you beat the main game basically. Then it gets super hard.

The perception of both these games was probably colored by the pandemic. A lot.

I mean, there were some insanely hot takes circling around, like Ghost being the "fastfood of gaming" or some nonsense like that. With Last of us 2, almost every aspect got blown way out of proportion, even before the game released. There were a lot of people with a chip on their shoulder, either for or against it. And since everything either has to be the greatest thing ever or the worst thing in existence to stay relevant on social media, people focused on the violence in The Last of Us 2. Oh, and of course Joel and Abby.

What really irks me about this whole situation, is that I have yet to see a nuanced take on the whole subject. I guess the time for that is over, since we're all just screaming at each other? Kind of what The Last of Us tries to be about? It's frustrating.

For me personally, TLOU2 hit much closer to home. I played it during the summer, when the pandemic seemed to recede. I can imagine not being a fan of the level of violence during the whole first wave. But the same goes for Tsushima. It can paint some really gruesome scenes. Not as hard as TLOU2, but still crazy violent.

@everybody in this thread: No Mans Sky.

Also, I think EA will just can the rework, because of how little progress they've apparently made. Unless they just worked on a lot of stuff in secret? If they are deciding whether to staff up or not NOW, does that mean the game will be in development for another year and a half?

Any Rogue experts here? You have to get lucky to get a good run, right?

I mean, if you don't find any leather armor and run into some monster that melts your regular armor away... stuff like that can't be salvaged by 'skill'?!

Edit: So, what I'm saying is, he will probably not beat it.

They should make more games that aren't old ass Wii U games.

If they really make a NEW system and not some half step thing next year, I will be sorely disappointed with their current game lineup.

But even if it's some new thing, they will almost definitely do another hybrid console again. I guess it will be a marginally more powerful hybrid console, but it will have some weird twist, or new controllers, so you HAVE to get the new thing to play the next Zelda or whatever.

As long as they stop it with the Wii U ports.

I think blaming the pandemic for this is way too easy.

They had what - 5 or 6 years to work on this? I seriously doubt the game would have looked any better under normal circumstances. Like a lot of other videogames, there is probably serious mismanagement going on behind the scenes.

At least they delayed it by almost a year, so I hope the team won't have to crunch to fix the mistakes made by leads (like the artstyle, the game being cross-generation and that god awful main antagonist)

This.

It should be fun to listen to, not tedious. Even sites with way bigger staff can not possibly cover every game that came out and that is just fine. Nobody needs a 'definitive' ranking. Each staff member gets a top 10 list and you're done.

But I guess those GOTY podcasts get them traffic and all that, so they will probably do it again. With added latency it will probably be even less fun.