yyninja

I played both! They are both great games, but I would recommend XC3 as long as you don't mind minor spoilers from XC2.

Persona 5 Royal is extremely polished, stylish and has a bumpin' jazzy soundtrack, but I really hated the dungeons in the fall semester. P5 has discrete dungeons instead of the randomized ones in P4 and the latter dungeons take several hours (at least 3 hours) to clear. P5R is a like higher budget version of Persona 4 Golden and you'll know what to expect: time management, social links, going to high school, dungeon crawling, etc.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 doesn't have as strong a story as the original, but makes up for it with better gameplay and character interactions. Nopons are less annoying compared to the previous games. XC3 follows the open-world RPG design of XC1, but that's where the similarities end. The game features a class mechanic similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. Also XC3 is much more tasteful than a typical anime JRPG. An early scene has our characters take a shower together and it's not shot like a horny anime scene like you'd expect.

@shindig said:

Seconded. The duders greatest strength was being able to shoot videos and talk in the same room. The shift to remote work killed much of my interest. There was also this pivot to do non-gaming related things which turned me off too. I stuck around because I enjoy the podcasts and the forums, but now I'm not even sure about that anymore.

According to the most recent Game Mess Mornings, Jeff said the layoffs were seemingly random which doesn't bode well and depicts a lack of direction by the new owners.

I hope Jess and especially Jason land on their feet soon.

Thanks for organizing @zombiepie!

The List function is buggy for me, just goes to an endless loading popup. So decided to link my 2022 GOTY list instead.

Hades 2 - Mostly positive on this, at first glance I thought it was DLC or a remastered edition of Hades with new content. I've enjoyed all of Supergiant Games except for Pyre, so I'm eager to see more of this game.

Judas - Curious what the hell Ken Levine has been up to ever since Bioshock Infinite which was released a whopping 9 years ago. A bit concerned because there was no actual gameplay, but from the looks of it, it sure has that Bioshock DNA.

Replaced - I'm a sucker for the HD-2D trend that started with Octopath Traveler and this game's trailer sure caught my attention.

Final Fantasy XVI - Not SquareEnix's strongest trailer, (their Dominance Trailer was the best) because of lack of gameplay footage, but still eager to see how the giant summon fights play out.

Same as before honestly. Giant Bomb hasn't been the same since 2019. The secret sauce that made the site irresistible to me was the in-person videos.

I can at least appreciate this iteration of the crew trying different things, Arcade Pit is a nice addition.

From what I gathered, the RTX 4090 looks really really good.

It is an impressive generational leap over the RTX 3090. It is much more power efficient than the Ampere line (30 series). And the card is so powerful that it can cause CPU bottlenecks in 1440p even with the best CPU on the market. This card only makes sense for 4K gaming with ray tracing turned on. I still don't think it makes sense to drop $1600 on this because...

DLSS 3 is a gimmick and only works if there is already high frame rate pre-DLSS. Turning on DLSS 3 will cause flickering and glitching at low initial framerates. Buying this for AV1 encoding is overkill, just get a cheap Intel Arc or wait for other video cards to adopt AV1 codec encoding. The reference design is huge and there are ridiculous AIB models that won't fit in most computer cases. Getting this card will require a 4k 120-144 Hz monitor, a fast CPU, power supply and large case which is easily another $1600 if you don't have those already.

I'm still planning to wait for what AMD's RDNA3 can bring. If their flagship comes within 70% the RTX 4090 rasterization performance, has a normal video card size, doesn't require more than a 850W power supply and costs up to $1000, that's a win for AMD in my book.

In other news... not sure if this belongs in another thread, but Nvidia is reportedly "unlaunching" the RTX 4080 12 GB model after fan feedback: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/12gb-4080-unlaunch/

@bigsocrates

1. Agreed, he's being a dick, but personally I think he's appealing to his followers by maintaining his Kayfabe persona as someone who shits on the AAA industry.

2. Yep, also agree. That's why I think he should have secured a deal with a developer before this announcement. As for workloads, I suspect Dunkey will be serving as a producer/investor role and contract out the more difficult elements to other people. I have no idea how deep his connections are so this is hit or miss.

3. Oh definitely. Dunkey is taking a huge risk here. There are several possibilities:

1. Publishes a "good" game, gets massive success and more studios want to work with him. Fanbase rises.
2. Publishes a failure. Less studios will want to work with him due to bad coverage. Fanbase might stick with him.
3. Game never releases and becomes vaporware. Only desperate developers will want to work with him. Fanbase will drop
4. Bails and never fully funds the developer. No one wants to work with him and fanbase is ruined.

I'm in the minority, but I actually like using fandom for walkthroughs and reading lore. The ads are a pain the ass though and their sites are not mobile friendly.

So far it sounds like the staff are all okay, but I would hate to see Fandom grab tech-stack (API and wiki) from GB and just dump everything else.

I'm lost with what's wrong with this. Love or hate the guy, Dunkey is putting his own money where his mouth is. It's not like he's launching a Kickstarter campaign to start a publishing label and asking his followers to chip in.

I think the announcement is premature though. He should have waited until he secured at least one deal with a well known indie developer/studio.

With regards to his large fanbase, it actually keeps him honest. He's not running some giant corporation like the Embracer group so he has the obligation to deliver on his word to publish "good games" or risk losing a lot of his fans.

Stadia had good ideas but a terrible marketing strategy. They should have done something like GeForce Now which allows people who already own their games to play them without purchasing the game again for full price on the Stadia store.

The initial pitch of Stadia had all these ideas but never made it to fruition. It had no killer app to demo their multiplayer asynchronous gameplay technology. No playable demos straight from YouTube. No feature where everyone can play from a specific snapshot.

I was aware Stadia was dying but didn't expect them to go out this suddenly. Sigh, Phil Harrison is the opposite of King Midas, everything that guy touches turns to shit.