Really stupid that a company can be forced to do business with someone they don't want to do business with. Epic is a stain on gaming and anything else they tried to claw their way into, and would rather be slimy anti competitive trogladites led by their manchild Tim Sweeney trying to steal peices of the pie in a market rather than actually provide honest to goodness products and services that people want to use.

EGS is 6 years in and is still a complete failure on any competition metrics, and yet they want to employ the same anti competititve practices on iOS? Good luck I say, computer literate people don't even use EGS, imagine how many people will forego sideloading on iOS while they have to pay to maintain their new app store.

Didn't they already offer a "Epic Games Store" on Android since that's open and allows sideloading already? And Android is an OS more prone to sideloading and that store still failed miserably.

That concept immediately makes me think of the card game Fluxx.

Yeah, I added a few western names too (I'm a bit biased to Japanese devs, growing up on JRPGs and whatnot).

But there's tons of people over here that get name recognition too, for sure.

It seems like the reason they claimed the Switch was the platform of the year was due to exclusives, so I suppose if that’s their only metric I guess the Switch wins out by a longshot.

Steam Deck, being a PC and all, has more "exclusives" than every single currently sold console combined by an enourmous margin.

But naturally by 'exclusives' they mean hugely funded "AAA" games from Nintendo or Sony or Micrsosoft.

Because in an industry dominated by yearly rehashed minimum viable products like CoD or AC or Battlefield or the plethora of lootbox infested live services meant to fuck your wallet for easy quick RoI for shareholders, Kojima spends time and resources creating new, novel ideas and taking the artistic medium (yes, games are art despite what capital G Gamers want to say) to new and exciting and interesting places.

This is why Hideo Kojima, Yoko Taro, Fumito Ueda, Hideaki Itsuno, Keiichiro Toyama, Eric Barone, Terry Cavanagh, David Szymanski (etc etc etc, I could go on) all get name recognition.

People always SAY they want games to expand and try new things/don't want the same game every year, but then when someone actually tries, the games get panned as "gimmicky" or "niche" or "pretentious" "pixel graphics indie garbage" or some other flavor of the month phrase gamers use to instantly discredit something that doesn't immediately and specifically cater to every single one of their preconceived demands on what a "game" is and/or should be.

Good riddance. E3 offered nothing over just watching trailers on YT except for the multiple hours of advertisements and marketing pushed throughout the convention.

anti competitive practices should be stamped out

This is why Epic shouldn't give a win. They're just trying to get competition out of the way so they can do all their own anti competitive practices.

While I am impressed that No Man’s Sky pulled a 180 in the end

It didn't really. They added a lot of what they promised, but still not everything Sean Murray lied about at the beginning.

A hypothetical mainstream consumer is the least educated person on the topic and is exactly the kind of person that gets swindled constantly by review scores. They're the ones that need to hear more than ever that following review scores as some objective truth is stupid.

Once a generation you might get a Death Stranding 2 or something, and really enjoy it, but other times you’re stuck with the original Lords of the Fallen, because you like Souls-likes, and that’s your only game this month or quarter.

And sometimes the original Lords of the Fallen is exactly what you want to play, even if everyone else says it's bad. That's entirely my point. General consensus of "good" and "bad" means nothing. Equating popularity and quality is dumb

The Steam deck is very quick though. I just paused Like a Dragon Gaiden and it took about 2 seconds to go to sleep, left it sitting on the table for an hour or so while I did some errands. Picked it back up and hit thepower button and I was back on the pause menu in about another 2 seconds.

Steam Deck "sleep" is more like locking your phone than it is like putting a Windows PC to sleep

LotR MMO in the works, but they also made New World and Crucible

How does the open world affect it? One of the reasons I liked Zombies mode in the earlier CoDs was being able to do quick maneuvers through tight spaces and really getting the game down to a muscle memory to see how far you could go.

I'm all for people buying what they enjoy playing, so if someone genuinely enjoys CoD I'm excited for them that they get some new stuff to play.

What I don't get is the constant group of people buying it every year and complaining. Like, guys, if you don't like the product you're buying, stop buying the next product from the same place until they fix what you hate about it.

There's literally tens of thousands of video games out there. You'll be fine if you don't play one of the most creatively bankrupt franchises in the industry, I promise.

Mostly just Valve specific software implements to make the experience better. SteamOS has a really good suspend/resume sleep feature where you can just power off the Deck during a game like any other console, then when you hit the power button again it just lights back up to where you were in the game.

Not sure if that's in any other distro

What I mean is even if a game looks interesting, but then I see it’s mixed on Steam or has a bunch of 5/10 reviews, I’d probably give that a pass.

I don't see how letting other people's opinions on something you think looks interesting should matter. I play games for me, so I don't care if someone thinks something is a 1/10. If it seems interesting to me I'm going to play it, because that's what matters. Some of my absolutel favorite games are panned by reviewers and critics alike, and most of the games I can't stand are highly reviewed yearly rehashes. Scores meaning nothing.

There might be a chance it’s some hidden gem or totally up my alley, but why risk it? I’d rather play it safe, and give the 9/10 game a chance, even if the premise isn’t that compelling.

Because you're risking it with either purchase regardless, so why not pick the one that actually sounds interesting to you? Letting review scores bias your decision making on an entirely subjective medium of art expression completely takes the point out of art.

The only way I will ever begin to even attempt to trust Konami again is if they license the SH IP out to Kojima so he can Del Toro and the gang can finish Silent Hills.

Sometimes it’s not that easy, mainly if you can’t just afford every game that catches your eye.

I'm not sure how a review score will change that. The entire point of my discussion is that anyone who extrapolates a subjective review score as some objective quality measure is just wasting money.

It's better to play a game that interests you than play a game because it's scored high. "Scoring high" isn't a metric of what makes a game fun.

We more or less got HL3 in Half Life: Alyx. People can deride it for "not being a real Half Life game" because they personally don't like VR or something, but it's pretty much HL3

For me I just don't get how anyone can realistically extrapolate a game's score to anything about the game itself. Reviews are fine, and people providng their own experience and interpretations of and pros/cons is fine, but then boiling that perosnal subjective into an interpretive score that somehow is supposed to convey they same information just makes no sense.

I do agree that most people just see a score and don't bother to look further past that, it's very annoying to see comment sections just talk about the score itself and how it might be "right" or "wrong".

That's the part I don't get, when people think that someone giving CoD a 6/10 is "wrong" because another reviewer gave it a 9/10. Like, seriously, who cares what the score is. I don't play games because the score is high, I play games because they sound interesting to me. I don't care that some website gave Death Stranding a 4/10 because they didn't "get it". I still liked the game and their review doesn't tranish that in any way, neither of us is right or wrong because not every game is made for everyone and people's own subjective tastes and stuff will obviously affect the kinds of games they like.

I just overall think people care WAY too much about some arbitary scores that ultimately don't mean shit. IGN giving a game I didn't like a high score doesn't mean I was "wrong" about the game, but too many people want to just use scores to argue with other people. Like bro, just go play the games that interest you, stop caring about scores

It's definitely not going to be a game for everyone, but I'm one of those weird people who still sees games as art, so I really appreciate games that just do different things and provide experiences you can't really get in other games. Even if they don't 100% stick the landing, I can enjoy and appreciate them for adding some variety and trying something different.

Jusant is on Gamepass by the way, which could be a very good way to give it a try