I’d very much like to see them do a sci-fi setting, like Starfield, but as a turn-based CRPG (with more thought and heart put into it).

Larian’s next game is the teased statue that Keighley tweeted, so they’ll have something to announce tonight. The only thing they said it isn’t is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but it could be a different Divinity RPG, or a looter like the old-school Divinities, or a new Dragon Commander, or a new spin-off entirely. They’re also a multi-project studio now.

Well, you said those were the only AAA devs that weren’t making money printing skinner boxes, and we had plenty of counter examples just this year. Obsidian put out 2 or 3 games this year, depending on how you count, and it wouldn’t be crazy for them to have an announcement for a game coming next year.

Absolutely give those two games a try; they’re high on the TGA’s lists for a reason.

The jury is composed of the review outlets, not the studios. It does have a bias toward larger games, because the outlets reviewing games have an incentive to more reliably cover the games that most of their audience will be interested in, but it’s not because Sony’s voting for themselves to win.

We know HL3 is happening, and if you trust Jeff Grubb (you probably should), we know nothing is happening with Bloodborne right now.

On the other hand, winning an award from this show has a tangible effect on game sales, so it’s nice when a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 can beat the mainstays like The Legend of Zelda and earn that bump for themselves.

I guess that depends on where your cutoff is for AAA, but if you’re including FromSoft, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just came out this year at a similar level of budget and production value. And I know people have their issues with Unreal, but it really has raised the bar for what a “AA” might be capable of. The likes of Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, The Alters, Split Fiction, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this year (and games like The Thaumaturge last year) are all what we would have expected out of a AAA game in the not-too-distant past, most of which comes down to scope, where a lot of AAAs are arguably doing too much.

Always a highlight of the show. I hope he never cuts his hair.

Thanks. I know nothing of Warhammer other than the stuff that took inspiration from it.

There’s click bait, and then there’s rage bait. Veritasium never tried to get me upset about gravity not being a force with a thumbnail of an evil Albert Einstein saying, “HE LIED”.

If you want to know if this YouTube channel is of any value whatsoever, click on the channel, then click on videos, and take a look at every video thumbnail and title, and you’ll have your answer. Believe me when I say that I’ll be happy if Nintendo faces financial consequences for some of the things they’ve done in the market, but all this data proves is that PS5 had a large discount and Switch 2 did not.

In fact, Mat Piscatella of Circana says, “On the hardware side, PS5 saw the most extensive discounting. So, it got a big sales lift. Wouldn’t take much more away from the week than that, tbh.”

Does anyone know if this will have any story hooks whatsoever to Rogue Trader? Because if so, I’m compelled to play that one first, but then this becomes a scheduling problem for me.

Because it’s been the best-selling game of the year almost every year for 20 years.

All of these games are demanding of skill and have mechanical depth. Except Hokuto No Ken, but they still put that on Japan’s roster.

EDIT: I’m being facetious. Maybe there’s depth in HNK before the player lands the TOD basketball combo.

It’s a larger scene than the likes of Rivals of Aether II or Virtua Fighter 5, but there’s more at play for game selection than just that. And remember that when it comes to copies sold, Mortal Kombat 1 having a bad day is still about as good as Street Fighter or Tekken having a great day.

By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?

Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?

If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.

The good: WB development studios have been limited to making games off of only WB properties for so long. Developers would come up with a pitch or a prototype, but it wasn’t allowed to be an original IP, which was bad for them and Warner Bros., since it made it harder to sell off the video game division by itself. Maybe this will give those devs more freedom.

The bad: We’re rapidly approaching that Bojack Horseman joke where there are only four companies with extremely long hyphenated names, and Netflix doesn’t seem to know what they want to do in the video game space or how to do it. They have an incentive to lock games exclusively behind subscriptions, which is what everyone was afraid Game Pass would do but Nintendo and Netflix are doing this already right now.