All the investment in game development right now is going to where labor is cheapest, which I’ll bet does not include the UK. You’ve probably noticed more rising stars in recent years out of South Korea, China, Japan, and some EU territories. The reason a state might want to fund the arts is because that’s how its own culture spreads on the world stage.

I think I’m going to be picking up Screamer when it has its proper launch on Thursday. I’ve waited so long for a racing game like this to come out again. The only one I’ve had in the past 20 years was Trail Out. The Steam forums for this one are full of people asking who’s going to pay $60 for this when they can buy Forza Horizon, and the answer is me; I have no interest in Forza Horizon, but this is a racing game that speaks to people who don’t care at all about real world racing. Let me check people off the road. Make it over the top. Don’t bother with an open world. Screamer seems to be checking all of the boxes of what’s important for me in a racing game.

Yeah, the 3.5-based systems seem to all have a lot of the same quirks, but I’m having a good time.

Gotcha, that’s disappointing. I assumed it was just buy it and keep it, not free to play.

Where does it say there’s going to be a subscription fee?

lol, well, I think a business would look at those small potatoes and say that it isn’t worth burning your reputation on. Now Star Wars on the other hand…

Owlcat has worked on Pathfinder and Warhammer 40k lately, and fans of those properties seem to be fond of Owlcat’s work on those CRPGs. I’m playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker now, and it’s quality stuff, but I don’t have any existing familiarity with Pathfinder. I expect they’re doing an Expanse game because A) they believe they can make “the next Mass Effect” now that they’ve got smaller projects under their belt, and B) they’re probably fans of The Expanse.

Rue Valley is a game they published, not developed.

This studio doesn’t have a reputation of milking an IP for a cash grab. And if you were going to do that, The Expanse isn’t big enough for that to be a very lucrative idea.

Well, hopefully this inspires more devs to “steer into the skid”, so to speak. Stop fighting what your customers are showing you they want.

Well, this is fascinating. I don’t think anyone’s done anything like this before with an MMO, have they? The thing is, in MMO form, the incentive is to keep you grinding so you keep paying a subscription. Without that incentive, I’d want to have a knob I can turn to adjust the grind, like I can in V Rising server settings. It’s cool that this retains some amount of multiplayer, too.

EDIT: Seemingly still via a subscription, so that makes this far less interesting.

There weren’t all that many more off-the-shelf engines back then, and as that eroded, it all quite visibly gave way to Unreal. Making your own engine during the 7th gen (over 13 years ago now) was very clearly a way to avoid paying Epic for Unreal, because there already wasn’t much competition at that time.

Unreal was the defacto engine for large scale games long before Fortnite.

Just because the Switch Pro didn’t come to pass doesn’t mean they weren’t working on one or planning one. He wasn’t the only one reporting that.

I’m rooting for the demise of what Nintendo currently is, but this isn’t so much of a story. They had lofty projections for sales and manufacturing to make sure that they could meet demand, they’ve met that demand, and it’s high. This is revising one quarter’s production down from 6M to 4M. It’s still doing well for them.

It can be overused, but that one’s useful for avoiding a thousand different “are you sure?” prompts.

Walking sideways through a bookcase, crack in the wall, crevasse, is often to mask a load screen, as you suspect. I forget who coined it, but someone online observed that these are literally “load-bearing walls”, and I’ve been calling them that ever since. In the case of Assassin’s Creed, there used to be sort of a puzzle of “how do I get from here to there with only those observable handholds?” Perhaps that eroded over time as the series went on. The last one I finished was Unity, and I sampled Odyssey, but that wasn’t a very vertical climbing game. Assassin’s Creed came from Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell roots, one of which retains that traversal puzzle, and the other is a stealth game, where you have to get from one place to other either without touching the ground or without being in the light. I would argue Hitman’s ledge-climbing fits the same bill that stealth games always have, so it’s not out of place there. I can’t speak to Sekiro or Jedi.

That’s the Vita.

I had to slow mo the video to see what was happening here (which is a good thing; only nerds like me are trying to figure out how this new stuff actually works). Counter Blitz is activated during the slow mo effect of counter hits, and it sort of acts like a nerfed Red Wild Assault. I’m curious about how this affects characters who rely on White or Blue Wild Assault.

To make video games for people, be authentic. Children and people early in their careers usually don’t have a lot of money, so it should come as no surprise that they’re primarily playing games that cost nothing or under $10. We can talk ourselves out of a lot of logical decisions by insisting on grouping people into these arbitrary generational buckets.

Maybe at first, but it’s had a long tail, especially with the TV show funneling people to Fallout games. And even with the reception Starfield got, it probably still made bank.

To set your expectations accordingly, it was probably a skeleton crew working on pre-production, grayboxing, and technology upgrades while the majority of the studio was on Starfield until a ways after it shipped. So they announced it way too early (often a tactic to get talent to apply for a job), and they’ve probably only really been working on it for about 2 years now.