Withywarlock

While I think that the gobbling up of studios seemingly left, right, and centre is not a good thing for long-term industry health, Sony's acquisitions are quite different to Microsoft's. Where Microsoft seems to want to increase their market share by purchasing intellectual properties, exclusivity deals and studio names, Sony seem to buy studios for the people. Destiny might well do better in their hands, Sony were quite keen on live disservices and MMOs such as Planetside, EverQuest, Star Wars: Galaxies, and Free Realms to name a few, but note how most of those have gone or are going. I believe Bungie are good developers with great hardware (albeit dire self-publishers), and I reckon that's what Sony wants. It'll be interesting to see the relationship between Sony and NetEase, the latter of which had contributed no small amount of money ($100M) to Bungie to "begin the creation of new worlds" and gain a seat on their board of directors. For those not in the know, NetEase develop and publish Western games (especially Blizzard's works) in a way that is suitable for Chinese players, or rather, their government. Much as I dislike the feeding frenzy that is noteworthy acquisitions in the past few years, I'm glad these developers are going to see some job security. Here's hoping it lasts. I see where you're coming from but I disagree. Bungie chose to split from MS and I imagine they would've had offers to come back if 343 Industries (the current Halo developers) weren't doing a good enough job. However they seem to be doing fine since Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, and their head is the corporate vice president of Xbox Game Studios.

Anything that the fanbase of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) says they can do can either already be done without the ownership of algorithmically generated artwork, or will not happen because of things like meshes, rigging, copyright, intellectual property law, and developers/publishers/console manufacturers going "nah," like they already do with non-algorithmically generated artwork. Not that being able to play my very own version of Generic Texan Bearded Military Man with a Bandana and Sunglasses in any version of Ubisoft Game™ is a huge loss. NFTs in gaming are solutions trying to find problems, which strangely at this moment in time, is better than developers making problems to sell a solution (such as XP boosts in purposefully grindy games, cash shops for overdeveloped games with piss-poor progression systems, etc.) There are three key questions that I have for the future of NFTs in gaming: Do those spouting this nonsense keep it in the board meetings because NFT - like Metaverse - is a buzzword? If it leaves the board meetings and enters game dev land, how long will it be before developers and publishers create problems to sell NFTs as solutions? And if the second question becomes reality, when will enough gamers make a significant enough amount of money for said developers and publishers through NFTs for everyone else to follow suit? For now, Ubisoft is just talking. They've shown contempt for their playerbase before, so eh, the feeling's mutual.

When I was not in employment, education or training (NEET) I couldn't spend 500 hours on a game, so I'm genuinely baffled with all these requests for triple-digits of content. Even games I have managed to get over 100 hours in tend to be because they're idle in the background (Tropico 4), or I've got numerous playthroughs out of them (Total War: Warhammer II.) You're right about DLC though. If you manage to earn the market's demands for more content after an exceedingly good game, then I can see how DLC adds to it (see expansion packs.) But until the game's out I can't appreciate the quality, and can only assume after myriad examples of filler out there, that this is only going to be a matter of quantity.

As @egghead rightly points out, they've broken it down a bit more: it's actually only 420 hours of filler tripe. That's marginally better, even if I think 60 hours of side quests makes me wonder why they haven't got an editor to cut that down by at least half. Games entering the triple digits of hours better have a damn fine excuse for wasting that much dev time. 500 hours... and we wonder why crunch is 'a necessity.'

Much appreciated. I was going to say best of luck if you're participating, but it's interesting moderators aren't included in the poll. A shame, but an understandable decision.

MMOs tend to let you remove them but that's more because of server limitations, or more cynically, making you spend more time picking them up in a subscription based game (time is money, after all.) I think the desire to remove them is tied to two problems: Fool me once, shame on you. Little Timmy Sticks has been kidnapped by a very hungry bear, and you've been offered a quest to rescue him. You take the request, and continue collecting other quests in town. You decide to do the nearest quest first, which is counting potatoes, and Momma Timmy Sticks isn't going to tell you to hurry up saving her boy. This is because few games have time-sensitivity, unless it's fear of missing out (FOMO) in the microtransaction shop. Be it due to limitations with coding NPCs to chase after you to remind you of progress, or rather lack thereof (which could be done in the days of the Infinity Engine), or the audience of today's games not liking time-sensitivity, side quests can be done at any pace you like, so there's no reason to get rid of them because they may be useful to you at some stage. Fool me twice, shame on me. As Kane points out, many games allow you to collapse them in their own seperate menu. Sometimes, especially in older games, the side quests aren't sorted from the main ones. This is particularly annoying in titles such as Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, where you can't know what quests are safe to progress in case you pass the point of no return with others. So the answer here is to make the user interface clearer: give quests different levels of significance (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim does this spectacularly well with main quests including those belonging to DLC, side quests, and miscellaneous quests) and their levels of completion. "Current quests," "Completed quests," and "Quests nearest to completion" are all good filters to have. Some solutions, including ones offered above, are thus: Scale Mail. A controversial topic in RPGs is the idea of zones scaling to you, meaning that enemies will always be a roughly appropriate challenge for your character. The difference in difficulty between The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and IV: Oblivion is night and day for a number of reasons, but most obvious is that in Morrowind the game doesn't change its enemies and their capabilities depending on your level, whereas Oblivion does. If you go somewhere too high level in Morrowind you'll die. In Oblivion, there's no such thing as any place too high levelled; difficulty is determined by your level and the incredibly generous difficulty slider. My point is that if you were to scale quest requirements, enemies and rewards to the player's level (if they finish the quest several levels higher) they should get rewards appropriate for the investment of time and skill. Therefore they spend (roughly) the same amount of time doing the quests as before but now get rewards they can use. No longer are you getting that lv.3 reward, you're getting that current level reward that makes it worth the time spent. Gone Shootin'. As said before, MMOs typically allow you to remove quests from your journal. They may also have achievements for doing all the quests in that zone, such as World of Warcraft's Loremaster achievements, which grant you a tabard as a status symbol. It's tangible proof that you've done the content, perhaps even absorbing the information. Plus achievements are frequently used by developers and publishers as a metric for who's doing what, to my understanding. I forget the specific word, analytics or something? Quality over Quantity. I will always prefer a good game over a long game. If the side quest adds nothing meaningful, I'd go as far as to say it shouldn't even be in the game, let alone be easy to ignore. Developers and I will undoubtedly disagree as to what adds how much to a game, but as someone who is grossly in favour of more games getting editors in to chop out the chaff, I'd say I'd rather have too few side quests than too many. Add DLC later if you must, and do it properly, not like the journals you get for the Skyrim anniversary edition. TL;DR - The removal of side-quests is a nice idea, but is an admittance of UI and game design failure and shortcomings. Rather than remove them, let's make them worth doing when we get them.

As I've made mention before, I'd appreciate not being included in these sorts of things because of my journalistic code of ethics. I will not cast a vote nor do I wish to be chosen to (potentially) receive a cash prize from a journalistic site. I can't begin to choose a single poster, and I've not been active enough lately to judge this month in particular. I wish the best of luck to all who can be chosen, and better luck next time to those who don't make it this month.

The only full game promotion I can think of was when Pizza Hut attached Playstation One games to certain pizza deals back in the late 90s. My dad bought a pizza he didn't really fancy just so I could get the game, and I don't like pizza, so it was nice to come back with several complete games in cheap jewel cases. Other than that, most recently I've eaten Super Noodles for Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War in-game stuff that I never used, but the double XP was appreciated.

I had wondered how a game based on The Boys would work. An interesting idea, I could quite easily see it being an open world sandbox akin to Prototype. I've not seen the show, but the original comics didn't exactly inspire any thoughts of it being a video game save for a 2D brawler or other fighting game sub-genre.

Not gonna lie, Shagger, despite our differing opinions on this news I do appreciate what you did there as moderator. What you followed up with is a staggeringly good response, I envy you for having the time and energy to be diplomatic regarding that response. China has its own problems, of that nobody here has any doubt, but we don't need to use this acquisition to go on xenophobic tirades that I'd expect from the Disqus comment boards of other websites. My faith in this forum is being rapidly restored of late. Back on topic, in response to @Kane99 I fully expected Activision-Blizzard to have the net thrown over them, but by which company and when was difficult. I was prepared for any other company such as Electronic Arts, Take-Two, THQ Nordic... anyone before Acti-Blizz. But this goes to show that just about anyone's for sale (barring Nintendo and Sony), and it's scary to think Microsoft might become the next THQ or EA: swallowing up IPs and not doing anything with them. Add to that they're a console manufacturer and are likely viewing things beyond the 'console wars,' and there may be more than just gaming companies up for grabs. I can see using King properties such as Candy Crush: Saga to generate revenue from the amount of money they've spent, which means Xbox on your mobile, everywhere you go. That's a huge leap in market control.

Vanguard has been messy in many places, but news of Modern Warfare 2 coming before the first season is even over is attrocious. I wasn't compelled to buy much in the first place but now I'm certain. I'll save my remaining CoD points, enough to buy the Season pass bundle, for that game. If I'm still playing CoD by that time. And much as I have enjoyed the latest three instalments, I don't think an upcoming game is going to fix the problems that have plagued the current. This reeks of desperation. We also have to consider the Microsoft acquisition too. Who knows how that's going to shake up development... and the store. If it's anything like the woes Halo Infinite players have expressed with that game's storefront, not unlike Anthem's, then there's troubles ahead. Then again their Battle Pass will probably improve if it does take on 343 Industries' model. Swings and roundabouts, as they say.

In the DOS era of games you could sometimes get enemies to attack one another because of their scripts/'AI'. Nowadays it's either a hard glitch to exploit or it's intended with abilities. The latest game I've been doing this in is Call of Duty: Vanguard's zombies mode, turning Sturmkreigers against basic zombies for a giggle as often as I can. Shame it's random, it really is rather fun. Whilst looking up DooM's "Monster Infighting" phenomenon, I had come to learn that it was intentionally added in future games. I guess it was too funny to miss out, even in Doom: Eternal all these years later.

I used to abhor the idea of Spyro the Dragon being remade, remastered or whatever. I threw many a shitfit back in my YouTube days over the pUrItY of the classics, and now I don't care enough to do so any more. I like the intellectual exercise, I like joining in forums discussing and debating, but I no longer have the energy to dedicate to actually being tired out by it. The industry has long passed me by and I've got more important things to care about, as well as hobbies that simply don't aggrevate me as much. So remake away. I would add to that "so long as the original remains intact and available for play," but presevation has become a long forsaken concern.

Capital. Good riddance, though I suspect any tears caused by our jeering will be wiped away with the millions of dollars he'll retire on, unless he finds 'work' elsewhere. 🤢

As much as I tire of the 'EA Bad' line, they really do deserve scepticism at the very least when it comes to MMOs. It's quite evident they don't like them, what with their history with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). They'd sold the PvP element in a different game called Wrath of Heroes, another Warhammer-licensed game while the MMO was running and dying, which still required a subscription to play until its very end. They did good things with Harry Potter on Playstation, The Philosopher's Stone being very well received as one of the best movie tie-in games for the platform (whether that's nostalgia or genuine I can't comment), and they've handled Star Wars well if one ignores its monetisation (which even I can't defend.) So honestly, I'm glad they cancelled it, but what other publisher can make an MMO these days? The best ones seem to be young blood, save for Final Fantasy XIV, which had a lot of help from World of Warcraft being godawful. It's Catch 22: the people who can afford the Harry Potter license can't make a good game of it, and those who can make a good game of it can't afford it. There'll be delays applenty with whoever currently holds the hot potato that is HP.

I could've sworn this news was ancient. I must've been thinking of Activision-Blizzard's acquisition of King. And now they've been acquired, I wonder if Take-Two and Zynga's portion of the mobile market has become appealing to Microsoft. Interesting times are ahead.

There's good and bad news to be found in this. Good for Game Pass owners who will (one day) have their favourite Activision-Blizzard titles, either in the form of re-releases, remasters, ports and/or sequels. Good for the developers who (hopefully) will see their abhorrent work culture hacked away at and replaced with something that doesn't involve Cosby cults and drink-fuelled sexual harrassment. And good for Microsoft to, again, (eventually) have their return on investment by capitalising on the market. Unfortunately this news leaves a lot to be desired. Acquisitions are common, Sony and Nintendo have done it before, but no-one in the industry has bought anyone as big as Activision-Blizzard. This now means that the scope of competition has been significantly shortened, as no company is too big for Microsoft to claw up. And until they actually produce some games, they're no better than Electronic Arts with taking intellectual properties (IP) and not using them, but they're not yet that bad because time is on their side, and development takes time. But time is all they have before they're seen as a worse EA. In some circles, that's already happened. Bobby "I'll have you killed" Kotick still remains in charge, and even if his six month contract comes to an end, he'll leave with a god-almighty severance package after years of abusive and neglectful behaviour inflicted upon his staff. I had suspected that EA or Ubisoft would be bought up first, having seen more controveries and less profits. EA Access probably keeps Xbox from gobbling them up, or maybe it brings them closer. Ubisoft may want to think about accepting or denying an offer to bring Uplay to their platform, if they haven't already, if they want a merger (which, fair play to them, why concern yourself with monopolies when you're looking at nearly $70bn?) Square Enix, THQ, and Focus Home Interactive will follow suit. I'll eat my hat if Sony or whoever beats Microsoft to the punch. For now this is good news, but this industry often moves too fast for its own good. To quote one of the jolly green giant's newly acquired intellectual properties, "you will serve the Horde, or be crushed beneath it."

Thank you for the offer but I must decline. As a fellow games journalist I'm sure you can appreciate it would go against my code of conduct to accept gifts that have been paid for by sponserships, especially when I'm invited (and decline) to engage in threads about them. I hope those copies go to good homes nonetheless.

I enjoyed Grand Theft Auto V when it came out, and that's as much as I'll likely ever enjoy them. I don't see how they can begin to make a good game with sexual assault, tax dodging, a general degree of unprofessionalism, draconian IP protection and copyright claim abuse being aired out in public. Were I working there I'd be ashamed of it, were I not so worried about being the next person to be groped by an exec.

I've not read them but I used to love Pat the NES Punk's content way back when. Totally forgot about that because he and his Ian Furguson did the awesome Completely Unnecessary (CU) Podcast. So honestly, I'd trust the content of those books to be well cited. It might not be well written, but his reviews were always good stuff so I trust in that too. At $60 a pop though, I'm not so sure. Then again I've just purchased The Book of CRPGs which is £30, which is considerably more limited in scope, so I'd be fine paying that much for a complete rundown of all NES games.

I tend to stick with smaller communities where everyone knows each other on a first name basis and can adequately remember things mentioned in conversation, so that usually requires people to have relatable lifestyles. Weekends work best for my D&D group because we've all got those off mostly, but due to time-zones (one of our players is in Idaho, another Poland, and one who's between England and the US) it can be a bit difficult for us to schedule sessions and the amount of time we can spend for activities. Honestly, it's tough to find time and compromise is hard. I'm grateful for any time I can spend with my group; how many are there who only get to play D&D at conventions, after all? ^^

S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 was going to have NFTs until 24 hours later developer GSC Game Worlds was bombarded with fan outcry. Of all the developers... So, name a developer or publisher and there's a good chance they'd want a piece of that money laundered pie, baked in a blazing rainforest.

I don't think we'll have another 3 main characters again, its novelty is long over. I suspect at the very least we might have a female companion character, or a DLC with a female lead, but I'm not so sure the protagonist will be. I'd like for there to be, I think a female avatar could provide some commentary that only a good female voice actor could deliver on, but then would the next instalment of Grand Theft Auto have the bite to pull off such satire?

Hazelight Studios, the developers you're referring to, aren't owned by Electronic Arts. They were given money and office space at DICE to develop their games as part of an initiative to support independent developers (which, err, are no longer independent) but have not yet been acquired. Even so, I'm sure for every studio that has a good game published under the EA Originals initiative, there's probably another studio that one deserves its critics through no fault of the publisher. BioWare, for instance.

Quite possibly. It's becoming increasingly common that, with the advent of motion capture, voice actors are having to do the motion capture as well, thinning the line between VA and 'full-on' acting. Matt Mercer and a few other VAs from Critical Role had talked briefly about this during the intro to one of their D&D sessions, but then that was for Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, which was a fantasy setting and they were playing Uruks, so it made sense in that case. But for a lot of games I'd rather just have live action as opposed to CG. The good news is FMV is coming back in the indie scene, mostly in the form of adventure games.