I’m at the final boss fight of Divinity: Original Sin II, I’m pretty sure. At this point, I’m quite ready for the game to be over. It’s largely very good, but Baldur’s Gate 3 this game is not. I used a lot of my best moves up front in the fight, only for the boss to transition to a phase 2 and regen all of its health while those good moves were on cooldown. Then the game pulls out one of its favorite tricks, which is that the map transition automatically clumps up my entire party in one spot, and the boss’ initiative is always higher than mine, so I just get hit with AoE attacks until my whole party is dead or nearly dead. Larian got much better at encounter design in BG3.

I’m also a stone’s throw away from finishing The Rise of the Golden Idol, which is probably my favorite game released this year, and there were a lot of very good games this year. I think controller support might be worse in this game than in its predecessor, The Case of the Golden Idol, but I really like the way they integrate the story throughout this one rather than sort of surprising you with a pop quiz at the very end like the last one did.

One might argue this kind of thing is inevitable when your solution to everything is “the cloud”.

It’s lightweight, which makes it feel cheap, but it’s actually quite durable. Then again, I seemingly experience drift way under the rate that the internet would have me believe that I should.

Personally I’ve never felt compelled to use the left touchpad, and I’ve never found a problem worth solving that the left pad would solve.

Track pads and gyros are major features of the first Steam Controller that were brought forward to the Deck, and they can be game-changing for certain genres that have typically never controlled well on traditional controllers.

Honestly, I think the Steam Deck has worse ergonomics than that last Steam Controller, but at least it has a d-pad and a second analog stick so that there’s always a way to play a game with no configuration.

Asset reuse happens all the time even between sequels.

It’s bigger than lots of full games and has a proper beginning/middle/end. In the old days, it would have just been a sequel.

Quality or sales, I meant it the same way.

The state of AAA gaming is that releases slowed way down, resulting in way less output, which means you’re going to have fewer winners, by the numbers. Not every year can be like last year.

Black Myth: Wukong would surprise me, but the other 5 all have a real shot.

Yeah, it’s no Baldur’s Gate 3, and I do hope they learn more lessons from contemporary CRPGs, but I’d say it has other strengths. I liked the combat, and I liked the story, characters, and world-building. Open worlds in most open world games are pretty shallow, and I’d say both this and The Witcher 3 follow that same template to the same ends, but at the very least, it allows you to approach an objective how you’d like after scouting it out, which feels satisfying. It’s RPG-lite, which manifests as a pretty good action game with some story branching, and I’m not upset about that, as much as I’d prefer they lean into the RPG stuff harder.

deleted by creator

It got noticeably worse in the summer of last year. I have no idea what actually changed around then, but that was the first time the Steam forums were so toxic that it may not have been worth asking your question.

Everyone was experimenting with their own lousy DRM, including those that had activation limits and would require a phone call to reset them.

My hope is that consumers have lost confidence in games that they know have no value if they don’t attract a massive audience. We used to get games like StarCraft and Halo that had single player, cooperative, and competitive modes. We used to be able to host our own servers. Without those things, the value proposition drops precipitously if it isn’t a massive hit. I hope that’s the reason it flopped.

They made a pretty big promise in Alyx, which he acknowledged in the documentary. It’s also been about 5 years since Alyx was announced and released around the Game Awards, so given that promise that they made 5 years ago, maybe this year is the year.

I’ve only got a few. Several of them don’t really track hours, but I know I’ve put over 1000 into them. Games like Super Smash Bros. (Melee, Brawl, and 4) and Rock Band 2.

Other than those, the only one I’ve measurably put 1000 hours into is Skullgirls, but Guilty Gear Strive will likely get there in a few years. Skullgirls is a game with so much depth that I can’t imagine ever getting bored of it. If anything, I’d just lose motivation because I can’t see the path to improving, but I’ll definitely never see every permutation of strategies you can employ by combining characters together. Guilty Gear Strive has so many creative ways to use its expanded Roman Cancel system that any Evo highlight reel is full of creative ways out of situations that you’ve never seen before.

You can pay for online multiplayer and not have an offline option on consoles. There’s no reason to believe that paying for it would make more games playable offline.

You don’t remember pre-Steam then, because it was already headed down this path. Piracy and used copies have been the boogieman for a long time, and doing anything they can to prevent both was always the natural destination of the industry, unless more people start shopping on GOG.