I feel like most of that hasn't been super relevant since FF12 outside of the item hoarding (which frankly I prefer 16's system over my classic never use items methods). No offense, but if all of that is still in your "explicitly what defines an FF game" list, I sincerely wonder if you've touched a new FF game in the past 15 years before now. They've been steadily moving away from all of that, and it feels kind of silly to critique 16 exclusively based on what you w...
It's releasing in less than three months. If they're still using pre-alpha footage this close to release, well, it just wouldn't make sense. Like at this point the game should be basically done (as done as a live service game gets anyways) and they should be primarily cleaning up bugs and any remaining gameplay issues.
All of that is to say, if they have showed off anything in the past couple of months, it should be pretty representative of the final product.
Trading a comprehensive party system with slower more methodical turn based combat for a protagonist focused active combat system has just been where FF has been going. Was anybody suddenly expecting a pivot just because they did a bit of a mix of systems in FF7R? Especially considering they made it abundantly clear how they were crafting the combat in 16 with the earliest trailers and info drops? Was anybody really thinking "15 had issues so clearly they'll pivot back 20 years to FF...
Everyone has their own preference. Why do you assume everyone wants to play everything with a controller? Is it suddenly a bad thing if people actually have access to their preferred control method? Believe it or not, ending a comment with "lol" as if it's just so darn obvious does not suddenly make your point valid or good.
The only complaint still out there in force I would like to see addressed is justifying the value of the Premium tier. So far they are really doing the bare minimum when it comes to the new Premium tier games, well shown by the fact that they still have not put a single plain 'ol PS2 game up for offer.
I mean, I would hope TotK made waves. It's first party Zelda and a followup to one of the most popular Switch games to date. With an install base as large as the Switch has, if the game didn't break 10 million in no time that would have been alarming for many, many reasons.
When people say the Switch is clearly entering its twilight years, they mean that at the moment TotK is the last really big first party game that we know is still for sure coming to the Switch, w...
It's basically the problem with modern numbers reporting. You don't get digital sales until the publisher reveals numbers directly, and that often only happens at end of fiscal year shareholder meetings as far as when the general public gets to see the numbers. Physical still plays a major role, but that role strongly differs across markets. So while this article sounds doom and gloom for FF16, we don't have any concrete idea of the actual numbers it's doing right now.
I think after so many years, people just reasonably expected that the scope wouldn't be neutered step by step in the lead up to the game. The more they assign hard numbers to things about the game, the more expectations sink. That said, I don't think it's inherently a bad thing to get expectations in check before launch. Sure beats a crap ton of post launch bad PR talking about how the game over promised and under delivered. And like you noted at the end, best not to overthink it....
RPGs have evolved. It's almost not a genre on its own anymore. It used to be games either focused mostly on story or mostly on gameplay. Bam, easy boxes to check, start organizing. These days games borrow things from genres across the board, will be story focused, and suddenly we can't easily put everything into its own box nice and clean like.
My opinion: it really doesn't matter. I get as humans we are downright obsessed with labelling things in a very strict ...
I mean, E3 ultimately died this year because publishers and developers preferred going with what Summer Games Fest was doing. Pretty sure E3 isn't going to magically win everyone back to the days of making insanely expensive stage shows and absolute money sink show floor setups.
The nature of video game announcements has simply changed and E3 failed to keep up. The show basically hadn't evolved in 15 years, and this is the end result.
Indeed. This is just the opposite of news. It's why you'll often see final trophies/achievements for beating a game often cap out around 30% of players at the absolute highest, while you'll even see a solid 50% drop off for mandatory story achievements by the mid game. Most people simply don't finish the games they start.
I wish I could say this was far off, but man the state of Destiny 2 really drives home that they'll go out of their way to make a confusing, predatory model for everything they do with absolute certainty. If you just want to see the tip of the iceberg, I encourage anyone to look at the current Destiny 2 Steam page and tell me you understand what exactly you would even have to buy to have all the current content. It's a horrible mess made to confuse people and take as much money as the...
Of course they don't want to openly share that they're trying to secure a monopoly in the western gaming market. I'm sure they discuss internally how to push all competitors out of their involved markets regularly. They prefer to be sneaky about it and hope regulators miss their plans until everything is too locked in to really make a difference. Keep in mind this is a company that has gotten in trouble multiple times now for trying to create a monopoly absolutely anywhere they ca...
Man Microsoft has gotta love people that will rewrite history for them. The Hololens was at best okay. It was never made for the general consumer though so a $3500 price tag (hello Apple) absolutely wouldn't be the failure point. The failure point would be that it didn't serve any industry related purpose well enough for mass adoption in any field. It was never good enough to use it in all the ways Microsoft envisioned. They tried mixed reality and ultimately found they managed to pro...
A AAA game that is still pre-alpha is not releasing after only a year of development lmao
You may want to look at Microsoft's ventures over the years. The Kinect was basically just bad AR that understood the idea of you mixing with the game, but couldn't get the game off the screen. The Hololens was a mixed reality headset more focused on productivity that crashed and burned because it just wasn't a very good product.
This isn't Microsoft being smart. It's more Microsoft has already tried and failed to follow the AR and VR trends. Don't l...
I know the Nintendo crowd here is going to insist on hating on this no matter what since it's pretty clearly Splatoon inspired, but at the end of the day if SE actually ends up releasing something fun and interesting with Foamstars, that's just the way of it. Assuming there is no improving on the foundation Splatoon has put down seems like the biggest error some folks are going to make.
Yeah, it currently speaks more to a likely error. Not that I think Switch is off the table entirely, but it really depends on if Nintendo announces a new Direct soon like we saw with the Persona ports last go around.
3D Action RPG? I'm surprised. This series is basically prime generic fighting game fodder. I guess no one really having anything that would constitute a power (past the main character's time travel schtick) made it too much work though for an easy multiplat cash in so they went with the next best template.
XVI's side quest system isn't as straight forward as "just do these ones". The entire game from the main story, to side quests, to even what a random NPC might be saying is all interconnected to build the full view of the world and people, and you could probably make a fairly interesting flow chart on how side quests chain together throughout the game.