TheRealTurk

Nioh 2, sort of by default. It's a good game, but it isn't that much better than the original. However, I've found this to be a super disappointing year for the big releases.

1. RE3 wasn't as good as RE2.
2. Ori was nearly unplayable with the frame rate issues.
3. The FFVII reboot feels crushed under the weight of the (better) original.
4. And DOOM: Eternal - woof. If you'd told me I would be bored playing a DOOM game, I would have laughed at you. Turns out I was bored playing a DOOM game.

• The Witcher 3 + DLC, assuming you haven't played it on a PC capable of running it.
• Bloodborne
• Ratchet and Clank
• Horizon: Zero Dawn
• Hitman 2 (this should come with all the Hitman 2016 levels)
• Doom 2016
• Dead Cells
• Stardew Valley, if you don't have it on PC
• God of War
• Control

Yeah, I had the original floppy version on Mac back in the day. It was a fun little adventure game, at least until you lost the manual and the attendant star chart that came with it. I remember it being pretty short, though. The map was pretty huge, but you only went to like six of the planets or something.

Still, good times. It had a lot of wacky little touches for a game of that era, like the aforementioned star chart and a whole semi-hidden upgrade system that was never very well explained. I'd love to see what a modern version of the game would look like. There'd definitely be an achievement for finding all the ways you can kill the redshirts on missions.

You know a game that did this well? Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Oh, you want to explore do you? Well, while you were dicking around hacking everyone's email, those terrorists got impatient and murdered all the hostages you were supposed to be rescuing. Better luck next time.

I would saw sprawl is a more accurate description of my problems with AAA games than actual length. I don't mind having a lot of content as long as the content is good, but so much of it is broken up by these massive open worlds with little to nothing worthwhile in them.

AC: Odyssey is a prime offender in this regard. That's a 100+ hour game, but I'd wager at least 40-50 hours of that is just wandering around in a relatively sparse wilderness area or sailing slowly from island to island. To the extent there are "things" to do, it's almost always the same set of 5-7 military camps and maybe a small cave.

I get that some of that is based on technical limitations. You can only have so many structures and NPCs in one place at a time before the current generation of consoles just can't handle it. That's why my big hope for the next gen is that we get smaller but denser games. Rather than all of Ancient Greece, just give me Athens, but make it really well detailed with tons of stuff to do in a smaller area.

It does look very pretty, and I like a lot of what they're doing with the dialogue where you can actually follow-up on previous responses if appropriate.

Worried about the combat, though. As others have said, there might be too much Divinity in there. I'm not necessarily opposed to a lot of the ideas and interactivity that system has, but watching this it looks like it might have the same problem that drove me away from both Divinity games - even the basic combat encounters take so long to resolve.

I know the presenter was deliberately trying various things to show them off, so it was probably not the most efficient play through. However, if every combat scenario is taking 10-20 minutes to get through, that's going to be a problem.

New Vegas is the best of that group. Although, with the exception of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I'd play all of them before taking on Odyssey again. I liked Origins well enough, but Odyssey was such a terrible slog. That was a game that needed to be 30% the size it was.

I really like a lot of what P5 did, but I admit falling off pretty hard around the 4th dungeon or so. I felt like the actual level design of the dungeons never lived up to the visual design of the dungeons and none of the antagonists ever really reached the heights of loathsomeness as the first one.

A big part of it, though, was just feeling like combat was such a slog. I loved the parts of the game where the objective was just "live an honest student life." Unfortunately, the dungeons kept getting in the way. The game's emphasis on deadlines and the fact that going into a dungeon took up an entire day meant you were incentivized to complete dungeons in the fewest number of longer sessions possible rather than breaking them up into smaller chunks. I never found the combat interesting enough to pull me through those longer sessions.

I'd love to see a Persona 6 that was less obsessed with deadlines and had a much more streamlined combat system. I'd also love to see a version of a story that dealt with adults rather than a bunch of high schoolers. Generally speaking, I found the adult's storylines to be more compelling since they had more complicated problems that couldn't just be solved with some variation of "growing up and realizing who they are a person." I kept finding myself wishing there was a version of the game where your party was Coffee Not-Uncle, Goth Doctor, Slutty Teacher Lady, Gun Shop Guy and maybe the Totally Not Bernie Sanders politician.

Also, Makoto is definitely not best girl. Anyone who says so is crazy. Fuck Makoto. And not "fuck Makoto," I mean "Fuck. Makoto." I knew so many women like her in law school. Believe me, she would gladly shiv you in the back and step over your still warm corpse if it meant moving 1/4 step closer to her goal of becoming Queen of the Pigs.

You should have picked up the Address Disrupter from a room near where you fought the boss. That lets you get past the glitched wall.

I'm not a gigantic fan of the ending myself. Part of that is the structure they've chosen - I get that they didn't want to invest so heavily into a full remake unless this first bit was successful but doing it this way just leaves things feeling incomplete. I don't think I'll get additional chapters until all the chapters are actually out, and given the pace Squeenix tends to work, who knows when that's going to happen?

The other part I find hard to describe. I have issues with what I view as . . . a lack of narrative economy? Smugness? The sense that the devs are kind of giving fans of the original the finger? I generally hate 4th wall breaking in stories because I think it's usually detracts from the overall narrative and this is no exception. If one of the goals of this project was to redo significant parts of the story then they could have done that without a bunch of hooey about destiny and shadow time-beasties and probably had a better narrative.

I get that they need to have a story that works for both newcomers and people who played the original, but they could have done that by just . . . changing the story? Personally, I think it would have been better if Barret had just been straight up killed. Boom. Dead. Done. That would give newcomers a spiritually similar experience as the original (Sephiroth murders a party member) while signaling to the old-guard "Hey, this is doing things differently. Expect more surprises." If they're going to make large-scale changes, then they shouldn't have felt this overwhelming need to justify it somehow. Just change it.

The issue they now have is that they need to provide closure to the arc they started. That means they've basically committed to continuing with the large scale world-altering time-ghost/multiverse stuff over the more character focused narrative of the original, which personally I find way more compelling.