HowHammerYou

I think we'll get at least one more generation of consoles with physical media (at least from Nintendo), but after that things look pretty dark. The type of physical media may change as well. Even the 4-layer blu-rays we have now are going to be inadequate for 10th-gen games, which are likely to have install sizes ranging from 500gb to 1tb. We may see vnand flash-based cartridges become the norm, or they could decide to go old-school and ship out bulky game cases filled with multiple cheap dual-layer blu-rays (like how PC games were sold back during the CD era). Personally I'd find the latter hilarious.

Golden Sun. The first two were some of the finest JRPGs ever made. Then they had one mediocre DS game, and the series fell off the face of the earth. SOCOM. Easily one of Sony's best first-party franchises from the 6th gen. I'm amazed at the lack of interest Sony has in reviving it, especially considering how obsessed they are with keeping military shooters on their platform right now.

Most likely some big megacorporation, so my bet would be Amazon, Google, Disney, or Meta. Realistically, the number of companies that could release a new console today is pretty small. The R&D alone costs millions of dollars, and then you have to be big enough to lose hundreds of dollars on each unit sold until you start to see profits coming in from the sale of games. I'd love to see SEGA and SNK get back into the home console business, but realistically, neither is really in a financial situation where they could.

I think both MS and Sony will release new hybrid handhelds within the next couple of generations, I believe hybrids are the future of game consoles and will eventually replace the traditional bulky home console. I think both companies are taking a serious look at the success of the Switch and Steam Deck, as well as the massive boom in the number of companies making and selling hybrids within the past year or two, and see where the market is going

Probably not. I don't really think we'll see the death of traditional full-sized home consoles until it becomes possible to achieve stable 4K/60 photorealistic gameplay on hybrid consoles (such as a future Switch or Steam Deck). I think 4K is as far down the resolution rabbithole as the general market is willing to go, seeing as you need a giant TV to get any benefit out of 8K. But realistically, 4K/60 photorealistic gameplay on a hybrid console isn't that far off. I think that threshold will be reached by the middle of 10th gen, and then by 12th gen, the market will be dominated by hybrid consoles and smaller-form-factor NUC-style consoles.

Pandemic and Visceral. Also, Squaresoft as an independent entity. The games they made were never quite the same after they merged with Enix.

Having a worldspace that's no larger than it needs to be is always beneficial to an open-world game. In fact, it's probably the single most important aspect of game design within that genre. Two great examples of this are Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. New Vegas' map is tiny by today's standards, but it's absolutely packed with points of interest (nearly 400 if I remember right). You can't walk for 2 minutes in any given direction without finding something new to explore. The Outer Worlds leverages smaller worldspaces to allow the player to visit multiple worlds, and even multiple biomes on certain worlds, which really cuts down on the repetitiveness the genre has become infamous for. There's also the fact that limiting worldspace size also allows for better visuals in areas such as facial detail, since it frees up resources that would otherwise be used to render a bunch of unnecessary trees and rocks in the background.

Predators: While I was watching this movie recently, I kept thinking to myself that it was like a movie adaptation of a video game that didn't exist. It would work great as a video game, where you play as a soldier who's been abducted and dropped on the Yautjas' game preserve planet with 7 other random soldiers. You'd have to work together as a squad while trying to find a way off the planet and avoid the Yautja who are hunting you, and you'd have to watch your back in case somebody decides to betray you.

On the contrary, I think today's games have gotten too dark. I'm tired of having to bump the brightness up several notches above normal when I start a game, just to make everything visible. I miss the gen 6 and gen 7 days, when the devs realized people actually had to play their level and compromised realism for the sake of playability.

I'll be doing my traditional playthrough of Resident Evil 3 Remake on the day itself. RE4 used to be the game I'd play on Halloween, but I switched to the remake of 3 due to it being much easier to finish in one sitting. Besides that, I'm also planning to re-play Until Dawn, Little Hope, and House of Ashes as the month goes on.

I had a blast playing Space Hulk: Deathwing. It seemed to work really well as an FPS. Sure I wish the devs could've polished the game a lot more and gotten rid of some game-breaking bugs (like the damn auto turrets on the last mission that started firing on me long before the loading screen finished), but mowing down hordes of charging tyranids with the heavy flamer was pure joy.

Depends on the game's genre. Generally I prefer more action-focused games to take 6-15 hours to finish on first playthrough. For RPGs, Open-World games, and Action/RPGs, the story should take 20-50 hours to finish on first playthrough. Now when I say "finish", I'm talking about playing the game from beginning to end, not sidequesting, trying to 100% the game, DLC, or post-ending gameplay. That stuff's all well and good for people who want the option. What I have a real issue with is when just the main story or questline of a game takes over 50 hours to complete, such as with many of today's games. It's often due to deliberately terrible pacing where the devs force you into grinding hell in hopes that you'll pay real money to make things quicker. Not only is it a terrible business practice, it's also a direct attack on the player's well-being, and I really do think it should be illegal to make a game that takes an average player more than 50 hours to reach the ending of. When a game's that long, there's always room to cut filler out of it. If Peter Jackson was able to cut Frodo's journey to Mount Doom and back into roughly 9-12 hours of screentime (theatrical vs extended editions) in his take on the LOTR trilogy, there's no way in hell it should take Eivor 80-90 hours to conquer England in AC: Valhalla. As for the "dollar value per hour" argument, the hours only have value to me if there's something good happening in them. Hours spent riding horses between quest markers have no value to me. I can beat the Resident Evil 3 remake in less than 3 hours now that I know what I'm doing, but I get far more enjoyment out of a 3-hour playthrough of that game than I did during my 110-hour slog through Dark Souls 2. RE3R is very short, but is also one of my most replayed games, while DS2 is a very long game that I will never play again. Both games released at the same price, but if I had to buy them again at full price, I would only buy RE3R. Hell, I'd rather spend $60 on a copy of the movie Aliens than I would on DS2.

Good riddance. It says a lot about the viability of a service when not even a tech giant like Google can keep it afloat.

I agree. I've said this before, but with both consoles running the same chipset now, there is no longer a legitimate reason for exclusives to exist. What's even worse is when companies paywall the next part of a remake/remaster behind the purchase of a new console, like what S-E just did with part 2 of the FFVII remake. It's not even a sequel, it's part 2 of the remake I already purchased on PS4.

The wal-mart nearest me has been getting Series X consoles pretty regularly since late August. I've seen 4 or 5 so far, and it's the first time they've ever had them in stock. Still no PS5s, though.

During 8th Gen, devs focused way too much on using the consoles' power to render increasingly massive worldspaces at the expense of every other aspect of their games. As a result of this, the few games that bucked the trend (such as Until Dawn) tend to look far more visually advanced than open-world games which released 5 years later. The open-world concept, which had been fun in 7th gen when worldspace sizes were far more manageable, grew to become one of the greatest blights video games have ever seen. Thankfully, I've begun to notice a trend very recently where big devs seem to be moving away from the open-world concept or at least reducing the sizes of their worldspaces. This makes me very happy.

I'm glad console exclusives are dying. I have no problem with them when console makers differentiate their hardware from each other (the way it used to be in the old days), but when both major consoles are running the same chipset, exclusives are just an attempt to coerce prospective buyers into buying one machine over another without adding any real value to the machine. Imagine having to buy multiple blu-ray players because Sony, LG, and RCA were selling "exclusive" blu-ray movies that were programmed to only work on their brand's machines. That's the absurd point the video game industry is at now.

I really enjoyed Mafia Remastered and Saints' Row 3. One of my more off-the-wall reccommendations would be AC4: Black Flag, which is more of an open-world piracy simulator than an AC game.

1: The Witcher 3. The cut scenes for the main quest line seem to drag on and on. Then there's the Novigrad arc, which is 90% walking from cut scene to cut scene for what seems like 10-15 hours of the game. 2: Red Dead Redemption 2. All those annoying mini-cut-scenes and long, drawn-out animations whenever you try to do anything. 3: Dark Souls 2. Technically not cut scenes, but when an NPC has an item to give you, you always have to exhaust their entire dialogue queue in order to get it. This usually means talking to each NPC you meet 10+ times, which gets old really fast.

I'm still hoping for Nintendo to announce the Switch 2 or whatever their next console is. Not necessarily a release date, but just a "Hey, here's what we're working on, here's what you can expect it to look like." trailer would be great.

I got curious and watched the most recent trailer after posting. Seems they backtracked and will allow the player to play as a dark wizard. Earlier in development, they specifically stated they would not have that in the game. Now I'm interested again.

Favorite: Adult Link. One of the best character designs ever made. Least Favorite: Kratos. Dude is butt ugly and only speaks the cursed language of Capslock. I liked him back when I was a teenager, but as an adult I can't stand him.

I was interested until I learned the game doesn't let you be a dark wizard or even cast dark magic (which was what I wanted to do). The online element worries me as well, as I was hoping for a single-player experience. That said, I haven't really read any articles on it in a year or two, so I'll give it another look after the finished product is out.

Wii U: Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HD, Xenoblade Chronicles X. (I'd love to play them, but I'm not buying a console for 3 games. Still hoping for Switch ports.) PS5: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. (Would it have killed SE to make a scaled-down port for PS4 -the same console part 1 is on- instead of paywalling the next installment behind a $500 console?)

Supermassive Games (makers of Until Dawn and the Dark Pictures series) is the only developer I've ever seen get QTEs right. Maybe it's because the QTEs are your main way of interacting with the game, instead of a parasitic game mechanic shoehorned in as a way to cause cheap deaths like they are in most games. I love their games, which is saying a lot since QTEs are one of my most hated game mechanics.