It wasn’t out of left field. They telegraphed it frequently.

I definitely wasn’t playing Borderlands at any point for the story. I like that it has one, but if they wrote some terrible villains, it doesn’t affect how much fun I had with my build synergies in those boss fights.

Borderlands 3 was significantly better, in my opinion.

Alright, fair enough. There are two ways to interpret that sentence in English, and I guess I read it the other way, haha.

Having played through the entire series this year, they’ve constantly communicated via their actions that they’re aware of what the previous game’s shortcomings were, and they acknowledged as much for BL4 in the marketing materials as well. As for Jack, leave him be. We’ve killed him, killed his fucked up clone, killed the AI preservation of his consciousness, teamed up with him in a prequel, and allied with the Terminator 2 friendly version of him via a body double/face-off situation. We’ve had enough Jack. Come up with a new good villain, lol.

The new DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II came out, Legacy of the Forge. I’m playing it after finishing the main game, but it’s looking like it will probably be best enjoyed when slotted into the main game. It’s early goings, but it looks like it will involve a lot of crafting and then selling things to upgrade your home, your shop, and your reputation. Still, there are new quests and more backstory for Henry’s “pa”, Martin, and I’ll take any excuse to play more of this game.

I’ve been playing Mafia II: Definitive Edition. It’s a pretty good crime story that leans heavily on Goodfellas inspiration (I guess if you had to pick one, that’s the one to pick), but the gameplay often feels arbitrary, which is a weird way to put it but probably most accurate. There was one mission that was literally just drive to a place and drive back with some story in between. Most are simple setups where a firefight happens in the middle. There are mechanics from GTA IV present that don’t really fit back into Mafia II’s core loop. In other words, this game is totally fine but not exactly a masterpiece. It’s serviceable, and I miss crime stories in video games, so I’m playing through this series before I play The Old Country.

I’ll also throw in an anti-recommendation for New Tales from the Borderlands. It animates well and looks nice, but this game basically is only story, and the story is awful. I played through it because I’ve now played through the rest of the Borderlands games, except Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and I suspect this game could be canon. If you don’t have the same compulsion to see the rest of the canon story that I do, steer clear. At least I’ve got Borderlands 4 waiting for me this weekend.

For anyone curious, I politely asked a streamer to check for me, and this game seems to still have LAN, despite the lack of mention in their FAQ and the store page and the explicit removal in Borderlands 1 GOTY edition.

Through lawsuits, we did get to see what those payouts were in the past, and they’re all individually negotiated in lump sums, not determined by algorithm. And those payouts were from the good days. Reporting indicates those payouts have dropped off dramatically, which was followed by a drop-off of Xbox ports, since that seems to be the primary way Xbox players play games at all.

It actually is, and they listed that in the article.

I’ve seen Mat Piscatella talking about this, and it seems like his take is, paraphrasing, “it values different games”. Some games see far more success with the broad access they get to subscriptions, and some see less, which seems to be corroborated by the author of this article.

Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore.

I mean…you can for anything in Game Pass, but that’s not the case for Nintendo.

Without wishing to portray myself as a comprehensive researcher … I have come across one study of Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus that appears to bear elements … showing that in contrast to the music or movie and TV industry, these subscription services have not “substantially cannibalized existing revenue streams”.

And I think a lot of that has to do with how much longer we spend with a given game than any song or movie. And even in television, every current show is on some streaming service, and you really can’t buy those, but in games, it’s the opposite. With few exceptions, you can just about always buy the game, and they’re often not present on a subscription service. When games are sold, they tend to command a higher price, too.

Then, not mentioned in the article, are weird cases like Indiana Jones or Doom, where they’re quality games that don’t sell many copies despite impressive pedigrees, presumably because everyone knows they can get them on Game Pass. But then games like STALKER 2 or Clair Obscur, with low-ish review scores and basically no pedigree, respectively, sell plenty of copies despite being available for far cheaper on Game Pass. Some of this might be the association with Game Pass being for Microsoft-owned studios or something, and Microsoft is aiding that association by making fewer lucrative deals for third party studios.

If you’re using Hamachi, you won’t need port forwarding, correct. I tried to make that clear above, but maybe it was easy to miss.

I’m fairly sure every Battlefield game until BF3 had LAN and private servers, so it ought to work, yes. Bad Company 1 never got a PC version, so you’re at the mercy of what those consoles allowed for, but Bad Company 2 is on PC.

Because then I’d have to set them up on a new chat program that uses a server that isn’t always running.

For sure, my list was not comprehensive. I singled out shooters and racing games because they’ve gone the most astray, and they’re the ones making me pine for the old days.

I suppose the goal here was to put any burden of setup on me and not on my friends. I’m a programmer by trade and not afraid to learn things, but it doesn’t mean I’ve seen it all in my day to day.

It’s been a few years, but mostly I just remember needing to go to the shop over and over again from various points in the map and it being a long trek. I don’t remember a custom fast travel point, so either I never got it, or it came so late that I didn’t remember its utility.

So irreparable. They’ll never financially recover from this.

I think it’s fine to litigate that again if the same criticisms go unaddressed in a sequel. It took how many souls games before From ended up putting checkpoints right before bosses? When they finally did it, they had their most successful game to date.

What about people who like the game but have criticisms? This is the time to discuss it.

I liked Hollow Knight, but yes, it kind of was. Frequent destinations were far away from fast travel, and there was a low level area that they transformed into a high level area later in the game specifically so that crossing the map wouldn’t be a cake walk. I’d argue that earning the power to make an area like that into a cake walk is a core part of the fun.