Flanders

The Soulsborne base games do get easier the further you get in them, but of the ones I have completed Dark Souls and Bloodborne raise the ante with DLC expansions that are absolutely brutal compared to the main game. I never finished Bloodborne’s and spent about five hours each on two of the main bosses in the Dark Souls one before finally beating it. I understand it’s no different for Dark Souls 2 and 3 - Demons is the odd one out that doesn’t have this kind of DLC.

Unanswered Resi questions - did 5 get hamfistedly turned into a coop game because after the first proper trailer dropped everyone pointed out that Aryan superman Chris Redfield gunning down hordes of black people solo was a touch racist? Not that coop is 5’s only problem. It’s a game where it feels like the developers had ambitious ideas that they couldn’t make work on the PS360 tech so instead they had to revert back to a very uninspired rehash of Resi 4 with none of the quality design or charm. Such a shame, because ‘Resident Evil in Africa’ was a wonderful concept. Probably the most let down I’ve ever been by a game that I played through to the end.

I’ve never subscribed to the whole idea that New Vegas is better than Fallout 3. 3 is a much better designed open world to discover things and mess about in, and there’s plenty of lovely offbeat weird stuff in there that I remember really fondly like Oasis, the Republic of Dave, the vault full of Gary’s. This more than offsets the supposedly deeper story and mechanics that New Vegas offers - I say supposedly because I find Obsidian’s writers to be way less clever than they think they are. And I can’t remember any of the New Vegas side quests at all. The Outer Worlds had the same problem of the levels just being really boring places to explore.

Play Resident Evil 4. Then find some way to wipe your memory of doing so - a blow to the head, electroshock, hypnotism, whatever. Then play Resident Evil 4 again so it’s as if it’s the first time. Repeat ad infinitum. The single greatest videogame ever made.

24 was always weirdly politically confused though. For every dodgy torture scene and bug eyed Muslim terrorist there would be an evil white military contractor who was the real instigator of all the wrong doing for profit. The second half of season 2 after the nuke goes off is all about stopping military strikes against three Middle Eastern countries over fake evidence. The show’s biggest villain is an obviously Republican President who looks just like Richard Nixon. It’s wild.

I haven’t played Cyberpunk yet but I agree with a lot of this - lots of gamers have a peculiar habit of viewing each new big release through the prism of ‘ideal game’ rather than what the developer has done in the past and what they’re likely to be good and bad at. Witcher 3 was a game that really had a lot of flaws - even the main narrative is a bit of a mess - but it was carried through by extremely good characterisation and incidental writing. The problem is that lots of people who loved the game don’t seem to be able to isolate exactly why they liked it - ‘I love the game so the combat must be decent!’ - and then they expect CDProjekt’s next game to have amazing interactive systems and FPS gun play even though there was nothing in the Witcher 3 to suggest this was likely. Of course it doesn’t help when the developer itself appears to have fallen victim to some of this blindness, but it would be nice if people could approach games on what the final product has tried to do vs what people (and yes, marketing) have created in their heads.

That Eurogamer review is really good - but it makes me want to hold off until the game is fixed. The uncooked aspect doesn’t sound restricted to bugs, it seems like the balance between the deeper RPG mechanics and how your character can actually use them isn’t right - which also seems like something that could be improved with more time in the oven.

My biggest takeaway is that I don’t understand why more open world developers don’t do iterative sequels like this in the same world instead of spending years and hundreds of millions on creating a new location.

The biggest fall from the previous gen was Rockstar, who went from: GTA 4 (and two hefty DLC expansions) Midnight Club Los Angeles GTA Chinatown Wars Red Dead Redemption (and a hefty DLC expansion) LA Noire Max Payne 3 GTA 5 to Red Dead Redemption 2 I love RDR 2, but ouch.

I use guides all the time for the Souls games, and feel zero guilt for doing so. The games encourage you to get help - there’s messages on the floor for goodness sake!

Its funny how you learn what play style suits you over time, and how it’s not necessarily what you think it will be. When I first played Dark Souls on the 360 I fancied myself a dextrous dancing spearman. It wasn’t until I got Ludwig’s Holy Blade in Bloodborne that I realised my true self is a man who likes hitting things with enormous swords. By the end of Dark Souls Remastered on the Switch I was rocking the full Havel set and fully upgraded Claymore. Straight up tanked the Four Kings.

I think it is worth pointing out that if you’re trying to do it early, the 1-2 runback is one of the more awkwardly designed ones in the whole Souls series because of the narrow path, having to wait for the dragon to do its thing, having the two knights pop up at the end. There’s other equally convoluted run backs that are much less annoying because they’re less stop start - Firelink Shrine to the Four Kings in Dark Souls is on the face of it just as mad as DeS 1-2 but it’s just a lot more fun to feel like you’re breezing through and almost breaking the level design every time. I think the issue with 1-2 is that you don’t feel like you’ve escaped the shackles of the level when you rerun - on first visit anyway. I think going away to level up is less about tackling the boss and more about giving you the tools to rapidly mangle all the goons in your path.

I absolutely loved this, one of the great things about it that it really is a proper game with a reasonable challenge while also being a showcase - I died way more times than I have in Demons Souls so far. Absolutely ludicrous that Sony now have a studio that can produce Mario-standard platformers to go with their cinematic action mainstays.

That’s because Michael from Alan Partridge is the voice of the meerkat adverts!

Well, I stuck on Spiderman after playing Astro and Demon’s for a couple of hours. Even the opening cutscene in the default 30fps fidelity mode felt a bit off, and then the actual swinging felt really off - then I switched to the performance mode and it absolutely popped. It gave me flashbacks to 1998 when my sister and I played Diddy Kong Racing on the N64 after a six hour F-Zero X marathon. We didn’t know about frame rates so we thought Diddy Kong was broken.

For my entire life I have been a graphics over frame rate type, especially for story driven games. But playing Demons Souls and Miles Morales at 60fps last night was like a Damascene conversion. When I tried switching to the 30fps fidelity mode on Miles it was like swinging through treacle. The reflections were not enough to make up for that. I think fundamentally that until recently the graphical sacrifices needed for so many console games to hit 60fps meant you could accept the hit to smoothness with 30fps. But now the new consoles can run games looking as good as Miles and Demons can in performance mode then it’s a different matter - you can have fast frame rates and shinies, even if it’s not the shiniest it can be.

I imagine the later Demon’s Souls reviews are so they can maintain marketing momentum across a one-week launch - a bit of extra hype ahead of the Europe/Rest of World release next week.

What is the Death Stranding time extend like? I remember Edge’s coverage of it at the time was really, really weird. Was in the vein that it was some kind of grand folly that was almost unplayable. It was a line that some other big outlets went with as well, but which rather fell apart when people started playing the game and it became clear that although obviously not for everyone, it did resonate very strongly with an audience and that even if it didn’t work for you it was certainly not the total disaster that some portrayed it as.

I played Halo 5 for the first time this year and was kind of staggered when I first came across one of those levels. Completely pointless and so far away from what you want in a Halo game. I quit when I got to the first Warden Fight as it was so aggressively unfun and again so contrary to the Halo ethos. But even aside from all the glaring problems, the encounter design was really tedious compared to the Bungie originals. I can only assume Halo 5’s multiplayer was excellent because otherwise I cannot understand how it sits at a mid-80s metacritic - its single player is just flat out not a good FPS campaign.

I think it’s a great idea for Demon’s - it doesn’t compromise the fundamental difficulty but the fact is that all the Souls games have loads of content hidden away in some of the most nebulous ways. I would simply never have found, say, Cainhurst in Bloodborne by myself if I hadn’t found out how to do it online. Without a guide I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to trigger Dark Souls’ DLC that I bloody well paid for!

What you’re describing was always going to happen once Halo Infinite got delayed. That was what the whole Xbox Series launch was geared around and what was positioned as the hype driver. The AAAA flagship franchise, reinvented back to its best and you can play it day one for ‘free’ - I know if that had actually come off I would be thinking about getting a Series S right now. The Xbox marketing’s readjustment to Halo’s delay has actually been a triumph of squeezing the maximum from what they had to work with.

This really. From Software, which is not a particularly large developer, have released six massive action-adventure games in the space of 11 years with a ton of DLC on top - are we really to believe that was done by people working anything close to normal hours?

See, I would dispute the notion that Death Stranding is a megagame at all - I think it is very much an indie game in spirit. Whereas I think the kind of game described in the OP and throughout this topic is something that aims to be truly ‘Mega’ - massively ambitious but also truly mass-market. I don’t think Hideo Kojima ever thought that Death Stranding was going to sell 10 million copies.

Metal Gear Solid 5. The only major release this gen to rival Breath of the Wild for pure system-stacking ambition, but also worth noting how awesomely optimised it is. Might have been some corners cut narratively but there is zero compromise on the gameplay experience.