I finished up Divinity: Original Sin, finally. The game stops and makes you just find something a lot, and I was definitely getting tired of it by the end of the game. Then the ways that they intended you to solve some puzzles on the critical path toward the end were a lot of “did they really intend for me to solve it this way?” kinds of things that made me break out a walkthrough, especially since they went out of their way to make more intuitive answers impossible, as the game gets fairly finicky with where you can throw something or what counts as being visible from your perspective. Still, I enjoyed it enough to immediately boot up the sequel.

I’m now in the early hours of Divinity: Original Sin II, and they sure did close a lot of the gap between D:OS1 and BG3 when they made this one, especially in graphics, art style, and tone. The way they reworked the action points and armor systems caught me off guard, but I think they’re likely to be net positives as I spend more time with the game.

I started playing Phantom Fury, and despite some middling reviews, this is exactly the kind of FPS game that I wish more companies would make. For the better part of 7-8 years now, this kind of game mostly disappeared. When I’m playing it, I’m transported back to 2003 console first person shooters.

UFO 50 has been a really good time so far. I do really wish the game featured manuals though. The simple games are holding my attention more than the complex ones, largely because the era these games came from would have had manuals to help get you started. As it stands, I have far less patience for figuring those games out.

Multiple sources disputing:

https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/

They’re typically some of my favorite stories. And after everyone stopped trying to chase GTA, we don’t get all that many crime stories anymore either.

It was free in an open beta, and hardly anyone took the opportunity to play it then. Chances are they burn through more money than they make by making it free to play. I’d happily pay $40 if that same game had split-screen, private servers, and LAN deathmatch, but no one makes that kind of game anymore.

You claimed it got attention for reasons other than being a game many people just plain enjoyed despite critical evidence to the contrary, you strangely expected them to go back and change non-trivial things in a non-live-service game that had no beta tests or public demos, backed up your opinion with numbers that completely ignored real world context and did not support your points, and then somehow took that to mean that criticism isn’t allowed?

Player counts are a strange metric to use to try to support any sort of argument like this. Bayonetta is currently on a 70% off sale, and Hi-Fi Rush isn’t on sale at all.

i said i believed it could have been even better if they paid attention to criticisms that put off the people who didn’t enjoy it.

What would you have them do? Change large swaths of a game after it’s already been released and people really enjoyed it? Again, the game was shadow dropped. Most of these decisions were set in stone by the time anyone ever played it, and if you’re going to iterate on feedback, you do it in the sequel.

also just looking at the percentages on the global steam achievements and most people do not even see the ending for a 9 hour game. The achievement for beating it on normal difficulty is …16%.

Most games have an astonishingly low completion rate. Hi-Fi Rush separates its achievements by difficulty. I have the achievement for beating the game on hard mode (which 9.1% of people have) but not on normal. So the actual completion rate for Hi-Fi Rush is somewhere between 16.6% and 31.5%, which is very normal. Your own example of Bayonetta has an achievement for beating the game on any difficulty, and it’s only 19.7%; according to How Long to Beat, the games are a very similar length.

I think you need to better understand the sample set and context of the data you’re reading and also understand that not every game is a live service. Thankfully, not every game is a live service. With any luck, we’ll see far fewer of them, and then expectations like yours can begin to disappear.

The premise is that Palworld got too big, not Pocketpair.

Making hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t big?

Given that it’s pushing 90 on OpenCritic, I think they got more people in the masterpiece camp. And I think it’s fair to say that it attracted attention because plenty of people found it to be a masterpiece.

What player feedback? The game shadow dropped. I loved it start to finish, and it was so good that it got me to go back and play old DMC games. So far, I still prefer HFR to all of those.

I mean, if we assume that guy makes 6 billion won per year, that’s less than $5M USD. You could absolutely turn around a sequel to Hi-Fi Rush and profit by significantly more than that. It’s not like it would be a drop in the bucket.

I don’t see why it couldn’t. It had twice the value of other high-profile Microsoft releases but cost half as much. Put out another one, flesh out the friend attack systems, and charge what it’s actually worth. Without Game Pass eating into copies sold, you should be able to make money off of a $60 release, surely.

Doesn’t Battlefield use dedicated servers though? I don’t know of any peer to peer game that handles that many players.

I haven’t played Obra Dinn yet, but I keep hearing that anyone into that game is also into The Case of the Golden Idol, which I can confirm is fantastic. I’d recommend the DLC as well, which has a neat story hook to it after the main game.

I’m not sure how literal you meant the “fighting” tag, as opposed to something like a boss rush, but I’d call Skullgirls the best game ever made if you’re into the multiplayer aspect.

Metacritic and OpenCritic scores are the best way to gauge whether or not they’ll win GOTY at “The Game Awards” though, since the same people who awarded those scores are largely responsible for nominating and selecting winners at that show. So it’s possible that as bugs were ironed out in patches and over the subsequent years these outlets all found their “Kingdom Come: Deliverance guy” who came to the game late that perhaps this new one does better, but it would have to do a lot better to be a real contender.

Conscript requires a lot of time set aside to play it in order to make any progress, so instead, lately I’ve been playing Divinity: Original Sin. I had put it down toward the end of act 2, and it took a good deal of looking at a walkthrough to figure out how to progress from where I left off, since the quest log only helps so much, but I wrapped up act 2 and got to act 3. As combat-heavy as this game is, I do really enjoy the cut of Larian’s jib, even when it’s not as good as Baldur’s Gate 3.

I also removedd up Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, or the MvC Collection for short. I never had a Dreamcast back in the day, and I had probably only played a couple of hours of these games in arcades or via emulators in my entire life, so I never got to dig into these games before. I put together a ratio team using Justin Wong’s 2024 ratio list of Dhalsim/Juggernaut/Thanos and even won some matches online with it, so that felt good. For a high-tier team, I do want to avoid as many of the mainstay characters as possible, not just because I’m not a rushdown player but also because it’s more interesting to see anyone other than Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel on screen, so I might run Dhalsim/Dr. Doom/Cable. I don’t imagine I’ll stick with MvC2 for too long, since Skullgirls is, in my opinion, just a better MvC2, but it’s fun seeing what I might have been playing if I had a Dreamcast in the early 00s instead of a Gamecube, especially with the next fighting collection on the way too. I also tried out X-Men: Children of the Atom in this collection, and boy can I not figure out how to stop the CPU-controlled Colossus. That dude expertly dodges my ice beams, seemingly can’t be stopped once his armor is up, and will air grab me the second I try to super jump out of the corner.

Well, sure, but in a few years’ time, the definition of what a console is might change.

It’s a popularity contest in either case, so the winners will hardly change.

Out themselves with regards to what? For a game to win GOTY at the Keighleys, the best way to stand a chance is to be a game that the most reviewers played, and they’re all going to cover the next Assassin’s Creed.

That last game didn’t break 80 on metacritic. This second one would be quite the unlikely game of the year contender.

EDIT: Also just remembered that game doesn’t come out until 2025.