Word is this live service push was Jim Ryan’s initiative, and he left the company right before it all fell apart.

I think the reason Sekiro 1 happened was that they started making a Tenchu game and then changed their minds.

He’s only got vibes to go on in the EU, but the vibes were good from the people representing the movement there. There’s an NGO that already got the ball rolling in the US, and even though it’ll still be difficult, there may actually be legislation drafted in the US before the EU, which Ross finds hilarious. The UK’s initiative hasn’t been going well, but there’s one more long shot chance they have of some movement there.

I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.

I want a modern Tenchu game too, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

It happens all the time, but you need startup capital. And a lot of what they did is remaking games (at high quality) that they don’t own the rights to.

What a needlessly stupid thing it was to put them on a live service project, and what a waste to close it down.

I’m reading between the lines a bit here, but back when I regularly attended PAX East, one of my favorite panels to attend was the video game data panel hosted by EEDAR (now a part of Circana). The games like NBA 2K, GTA, Call of Duty, or Assassin’s Creed that can regularly break $1B in revenue are the kinds of games that may sell to people like you or me on a gaming forum, but also that they can sell to the kind of person who only plays four or fewer games per year. Since then, I imagine live service games that keep you hooked on that one game in particular have only exacerbated that figure of four or fewer games per year. That’s a huge segment of the market. And I imagine that’s the customer that the market is losing on a Friday night to TikTok or OnlyFans.

There’s plenty of great new stuff too, often times even modern iterations of the retro stuff we loved, but it doesn’t get the same level of marketing, so it’s harder to find.

Dr. Mario 64 is my family’s most played N64 game by far. It didn’t hurt that it was a game that my dad actually found a taste for. One of the things that made it so easy for everyone to play is that you could adjust difficulty individually for everyone until it felt fair.

I doubt any of us were playing at the highest level of competitive play, but the reason garbage would be a factor for us is when you start taking risks to catch up to a player in the lead. Otherwise, I always appreciated that it was sort of a race to clear your own board. Garbage does slow people down, and not just in the animations but in how much time it takes to clear the garbage from what otherwise would have been an easy clear.

I said this before when you made your Puyo Puyo video, but if you’re left wanting by the state of the competitive puzzle gaming scene, even if you’ve never made a video game before, nothing could be a better target for a first project. The barrier to entry is just about zero these days. Take your pick of Godot, Game Maker, Unity, or Unreal, and iterate on one of these.

I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.

I didn’t think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur’s Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.

Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they’re going to look outdated in 2030.

Yours is an aggressive timeline, but I think the market is naturally trending that way for a lot of reasons.

Optimizing for development time is a worthy pursuit as well.

They’re also not really comparable. Teams were so small and project timelines were so short that you often knew exactly what the end would look like. My favorite optimization story from 20+ years ago is that a dev (who went nameless, and so did the game, as the story was posted anonymously) made a habit of declaring a large empty variable at the beginning of a project, and that variable’s only job was to be deleted when they encroached on their memory budget so they knew when to stop.

The most anyone can do is make hay while the sun is shining and prepare for a rainy day, because it will rain. This is probably not the first or last bubble in your lifetime.

The further you get into CO:E33, the more it becomes about parries, and the less your actual RPG systems matter. And the story…I’m guessing you understood it just fine. It kind of discards a lot of its setup in the transition from act 2 to act 3, replacing the beginning of one story for the ending of a totally different one.

Yeah, it’s exactly where the genre started to lose me, haha.

I played Remake when it was included in PS+ back in ~2020, and I played the original right after (I was very confused by the ending sequence of Remake at the time). I have yet to play Rebirth, but I’ll get to it after a replay of Remake and before part 3 comes out.

I thought very little about the story differences between the two. The part that stood out to me was, politically, why people would support Shinra at all (a change in Remake), as you hear more from the average resident of Midgar. And I thought they gave you more time to get attached to all those doomed folks in your band of eco terrorists before they die.

I’m way into prog rock, so the soundtrack was just better for me in Remake. Maybe it’s not as good as the orchestral version of the original soundtrack, but that wasn’t in the original, so I only have the MIDI to compare it to. The main theme sounds fantastic, way better than the original actually, and you still get that Kansas-esque battle theme against the robot when you’re scaling the tower. Loved it. Going from either of those back to the original MIDI is cute, but it’s a downgrade.

The story changes are because this isn’t a straight upgrade meant to replace the old game. This is a game whose story is about the reverence for the original game. Or at least, that’s what it sets up in Part 1, and I can’t speak to Part 2. As for wasting your time, yeah, it does that. I had a great time skipping the side missions in Remake, and from what I heard of Rebirth, that’s probably what I’ll do again, since that content is pretty phoned in. The original game’s version of wasting your time is a random battle encounter rate that’s set too high, plus the macguffin hunt right before the end of the game.