I’m migrating to lemmy.zip, at least for the short term. They also have public instance reports, which was the major reason I joined lemm.ee. Transparency and accountability is essential. I guess the fact that those reports got more and more sparse at lemm.ee was a canary in the coal mine here…

Ugh, I can already tell this is my deadline for my getting a GPU upgrade.

Hopefully the switch to a third-party engine means I won’t have to wait a year after release like I did with CP2077. I imagine this game has to be super important to Epic.

This is in Kovir.

If I’m being honest, before Hades, I wasn’t sure how much of a future Supergiant had in game dev. They clearly have talent for making beautiful looking worlds with great soundtracks and writing, but their gameplay was not exceptional for the genres they dabbled in. They didn’t try to iterate either, flitting from genre to genre.

Hades was the result of them taking what they learned from Bastion and Pyre and applying it to a trend. They really nailed the gameplay this time. I think Hades 2 is even better, and I suspect it will be again be a GOTY contender when it comes out.

That said, I think they could very well end up branching out again from roguelites after this.

Has happened multiple times in Australia.

Very similar to that for films, the rating board process mostly regulates games in development. In the US, for example, the AO rating will prevent your game from being sold at mass market storefronts. When your game has borderline content, it’s a back-and-forth process that’s resolved before release.

Game content rating boards work (ESRB, PEGI, CERO, etc.). The difference here is there’s no pressure from the digital storefronts. They don’t have the same taboos on gambling that brick-and-mortar stores had on sex and violence in video games back when they started up.

Yuri’s original post has since been deleted. Erin Fitzgerald, the (second) voice of Chie, also said on Bluesky that she won’t be returning, along with Amanda Winn Lee, the voice of Yukiko, elsewhere:

I don’t know if Sega or Atlus did something to piss everyone off, if it’s some bizarre marketing stunt, or if the others just decided to pile on after Yuri went scorched earth on this. The whole thing’s pretty weird.

Are you saying that Hashino himself was responsible for the problematic content, or that he would have stood in the way of revising it?

Sounds like the solo experience isn’t great. Unless you’re okay with getting matched with randos, I guess you’d better bring exactly three players?

I don’t have it as a masterpiece myself, but Night in the Woods is an excellent exploration of the intersection of the anxieties of young and grown adults in a town setting. The script is tightly written.

I think Astro Bot pokes a hole in that, unless you’re talking about a specific award?

Feels like the GOTY frontrunner at this point, as it seems to have edged out KCD2 in the press. Amazing achievement for a fresh studio.

Death Stranding 2 and Hades 2 (if it comes out this year) are other possibilities.

Absolutely. The vast majority of my sites do just fine when whitelisting only the primary domain. I consider it an essential add-on myself.

Lemmy is one of the few that needs a little babysitting, and it’s only for the purpose OP stated.

It’s a recent one, but I haven’t been able to get Gestral Summer Party out of my head since I first heard it in Expedition 33 last month.

It’s the dungeon design that’s most like Dark Souls. Encounters are a bit taxing, and there’s a bonfire-like checkpoint system that similarly respawns enemies and recharges your equivalent of estus flasks. It’s fairly generous, but there are a few stretches (especially in the side content) where you’ll have to evade combat or avoid damage enough to make it through all the encounters.

Good scores. I enjoyed the first one but it did feel a little thin. Excited to dive into this at some point!

Legally distinct Super Mario RPG, eh.

Good thing this one never took off with how litigious Nintendo’s been lately.

We don’t own our games anymore, so I need to know my library’s going to stick around if I’m going to invest in it. Last I heard, EGS hasn’t made a profit, so that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in me that it’ll still be around in five years.

I think competition is the answer to a lot of problems consumers face, but unfortunately the “are you going to be there tomorrow?” problem is going to be a major disadvantage for any storefront that competes with Steam. It’s why my most preferred shop is GOG, because I still have all my games with them if they close up.

FF12, 13, 15, and 7 Remake were all big sellers. It’s more the recent, poor performances of Rebirth and 16 that have raised eyebrows (although I can understand the argument that 15 and 16 moved away from being JRPGs from a gameplay point of view).

The big names they are left with right now are FF14 (the other MMO), Nier (the brainchild of an auteur, not regular work product), and Dragon Quest. Maybe FF17 will be end up being more traditional, but with the way that series’ dev cycles have gone on top of the restructuring, who knows when that will surface.

Kinda telling that not a single one of those revealed titles on that roadmap is new. Not even a new game in an existing IP.

I’m not sure how much time they have before they start to be perceived as ceding their long-term dominance in their major genre. Persona 6 is around the corner, and RGG has also been growing.