Including in this interview, but not in my summary.

The first person who attributed issues at BioWare to Jennifer Hepler, without understanding how any of it works, only called for her to be fired too.

Oh, I’ve seen the “criticism”, and you can’t point it all at one person, hence the problem. You make a target out of someone without understanding it.

Nah, don’t try to pass this off as, “I was only joking, bro”. People get real death threats when this kind of shit happens in forums. I remember the Jennifer Hepler stuff, and there was just as much expert analysis that went into her witch hunt back then.

One man is not responsible for all of your criticisms of writing in their games for decades. The writing and development processes of games are too opaque for you to be able to attribute anything to one person on teams as large as Bethesda’s.

I would hope, but it is becoming less and less common.

Often times they’re the same thing. The money comes from the owner of the IP, who contracted out the project; owner of the IP decides they don’t want to do it anymore; no more money coming in to fund the people working on it.

That first part is exactly what I’m saying. Many multiplayer games involve starting from zero every time, so that didn’t seem to be what OP is looking for. I wouldn’t recommend Vagante, for instance. It has a small handful of unlocks, but the lack of other progression is a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, a loot game like Borderlands will have you continually upgrading your character and gear over many sessions, and that’s likely what OP is asking for.

Many multiplayer games and roguelikes are based on repeating a loop where you start from zero every time.

This is a date you pick when you want to be nominated for the Game Awards, and also when you’re confident that Grand Theft Auto won’t interfere with your sales.

In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

Oh man, there’s so much. My top 10 from last year would be:

1. The Rise of the Golden Idol - puzzle/deduction game, sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol
2. Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age - fighting game that gracefully handles 4 players at once and has all the good feels of the Xbox Live Arcade era
3. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - lite immersive sim and action game that captures the spirit of the best parts of those movies
4. Metaphor: ReFantazio - a political metaphor in JRPG form
5. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - a beefy expansion pack to one of the best games ever made
6. Dread Delusion - a lite RPG with fantastic exploration
7. Indika - a very interesting cinematic story game with some puzzles
8. UFO 50 - 50 unique games designed to replicate the 80s
9. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - a giant escape room, and the puzzles are HARD
10. The Thaumaturge - an RPG inspired mostly by Persona and The Witcher, but you almost certainly haven’t seen a setting like this in a game before

I have fond memories of being the only one I knew with a Virtual Boy. My mom got it on clearance along with games like Teleroboxing and Galactic Pinball.

I’m currently in the last few hours of the DLC of Borderlands 2, trying to wrap it up before moving on to the Pre-Sequel.

My wife and I finished up Split Fiction and have moved on to Blue Prince, which we’re 3 in-game days into. We love a good puzzle game, and we’re told this one will fit the bill.

And besides those, I’ve still been replaying Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the first time. I made it to the titular city in the former and I’m still probably in early hours in the latter, probably about to get an introduction to a major character in the story (“The Prey” is the name of the quest that I’m on right now, if you’re curious).

I’m pro-paid-mods, but at least the way it was rolled out the first time was pretty shit. The modders were left with a very small cut after Valve and Bethesda each got theirs, and Bethesda did basically no vetting of the content to make sure it wasn’t stolen or malware or what have you.

I did. Its cynicism about making another Matrix movie is well-noted and some of the most fascinating things about that movie, but it’s also a protagonist swap between Neo and Trinity, which makes a ton of sense for the trans metaphor. It can be cynical about the realities of making the movie and still not be sabotage. And also it was only written by one of the two Wachowskis.

I found out a few days ago that my PS4 is no longer accepting Blu Rays, and my basic troubleshooting steps were unsuccessful, which severely diminishes the value I get from that machine, hence my deliberations minutes ago, lol. I have to ask myself how happy I’d be with the PC version of Until Dawn the next time I want to revisit that game, because that’s about the only game on that system I’d want to play that I couldn’t run better on PC. I couldn’t even be bothered to finish Bloodborne at the frame rate it’s got on a legitimate PS4.

I’m not giving them or Valve any shit. I have a living room PC running Bazzite, and I had a Steam Machine back in the day. That’s a product I want. And Microsoft is reacting to market realities before their competition is, because none of them wanted the gravy train to end, but it is ending.

For what it’s worth, I’ve got a number of friends, all in their 30s, who swear by Game Pass, as at least most of them are the type to bounce around to as many games in a given year as they possibly can without sweating if they finish them or not. Many they don’t even like, but they like to have formed their own opinion on them. It doesn’t make sense for me, as I do value getting to keep the game when I’m done, so that I can revisit it whenever I want.

All of my traditional consoles are collecting dust, and just moments ago before reading your comment, I was evaluating whether or not it makes sense to get rid of my PS4.

$10. I’m not joking. It’s a part of the deluxe edition.

But not to the point that you could load up your Steam account or a random Windows game disc from your shelf. That’s the thing that’s likely to change, which has a profound impact on the library you can play on that machine, not to mention your ability to play online without a subscription fee.

Yeah, but the headline cuts out that part where they’re not growing. I think more customers can do math than console manufacturers are willing to admit, or at least more than Sony and Nintendo are willing to admit. The word’s out about how much that online subscription is going to cost you for multiplayer over the years, and if they were interested in running a console the way that consoles have always been run, the lowest hanging fruit to keep that going and to be competitive would be to remove that cost; they’re making it up in digital sales anyway. My guess is that once the new Xbox is just a disguised Windows PC, that will be when they drop the requirement of Live/Game Pass for online multiplayer.

Also worth noting that sometime in the past week or so, maybe, they’ve changed their messaging on Game Pass. They put so much of their weight behind that thing trying to become the Netflix of video games, as a way of pivoting in a world where they can’t compete with PlayStation by doing what PlayStation does, only to end up with a fraction of the subscriber base that they expected to have. It’s a lucrative base nonetheless, but now that they’re decidedly not the Netflix of video games, they’re just leaning into being the industry’s largest publisher.

As I recall them saying, they felt that way maybe in retrospect? They hadn’t transitioned in real life by then, so that’s getting pretty subconscious at that point. At the time, the metaphors that were clear were about dreams, the savior allegory, a sense of not mattering as a cog in the machine, and so forth.