I get the theory but I don’t 100% agree with it. Just because someone doesn’t think rapid and massive change is the best way to bring society along with your ideas doesn’t mean they think massive right wing changes are any better.

I’ve seen Antifa and the Black Bloc disrupt otherwise peaceful protests in the UK long before they picked up in the US the other year. They’re not a helpful force in my opinion and never have been.

One party in one country in one time period does not a political philosophy make my friend. Maybe you’re Dutch and that’s your frame of reference, but that doesn’t dictate what the word means worldwide any more than the septic political situation does.

Ok, I’ll bite, link me to the definition of “centrism” that defines it as “fascist” then.

Yeah, I’m not a septic so I’m not going to view all political discussion by the framing of their two party system. You can argue American politics is broken, and I’d even argue there’s some huge issues with the politics in my country right now too, but that doesn’t mean you can just redefine language and concepts to suit you.

Reminds me of all the “if you don’t agree with antifa smashing up your city you must agree with the fascists” nonsense the other year. No, I don’t want facism, I just don’t think that bricking a Starbucks is going to help with that.

There’s a big different between centrism and apoliticalism. Apolitical people are targeted by fascist/authoritative movements as they lack the understanding of the issues at play and are suckered in by easy answers, centrists understand the issues but don’t think an extreme left/right solution is the answer but elements from both sides should be considered.

It’s always like this on release, give it a few weeks and Amazon will have that 4k version to rent for a fiver. Closer to a cinema ticket and much more palatable.

Not every country was playing the NES then. Games on the formats popular in Europe were much cheaper.

In America they have been. In the UK I’ve watched games raise from £10 on my Amstrad in the 80s to £70 on my Series X now.

It sucks that skinflints in the west region hopping to save a few bob made companies wary of regional pricing in the digital age.

I agree you don’t have to justify it, but I also feel like you don’t need to glorify it either. I’m not morally opposed to it and jah knows I’ve don’t some piracy in my day, but people who have to make a big statement about it as you’ve done above invite the arguments from people who are morally opposed.

I wonder how long EA will put out more interesting stuff for given Wild Hearts and Immortals if Avenum both flopped. Star Wars will always be a guaranteed seller though.

It seems most artforms reach the point where the tools are available for the indie efforts to be as good as the corporate stuff.

Games seem to be rapidly reaching the tipping point, and then all the big players have to offer is throwing more money at projects with no guarantee they’ll be as enjoyable.

That’s only because people in the US and Asia overpaid for their games. We weren’t paying that for microcomputer games in Europe.

I think they’re banking on the handheld PC market picking up for that. Obviously Steamdeck was a non-starter for native as it uses Linux, but they threw their weight behind the ROG Ally and packaged that with several months of Gamepass.

I think that’s definitely what’s going to happen. The gaming market is going to see some huge disruption in the next few years as companies who didn’t want to bother with the console market can start an ecosystem based around platform agnostic stores/ecosytems.

If you’re in the eco-system, the idea that you can play a game on your phone, pick it up on the TV at home, then at your deck on the Mac at the weekend is pretty sweet. I can’t see them making a high end console though, those tend to be money syncs and are going to have smaller audiences as mobile & cloud grow acceptable performance for the mass market. This is why MS are making moves they are. They’ll support the home console for a while as they can’t lose the legacy Xbox audience, but I think sometime next decade they may make Gamepass/Xbox store a multiformat service and phase out dedicated hardware.

Exactly, people have been buying worse switch ports for higher prices than the PS/XB versions for the portability for years now, phones shouldn’t be different if it’s a playable port optimised for them.

This is what MS are gearing up to fight with their acquisitions and infrastructure. If you can buy a game on iTunes and it works across your Mac, AppleTV, iPhone, etc, then they need to have the same in the Xbox brand across console, PC, cloud, etc. Sony are only now putting games on PC years late and that business model is looking tired already, multi device is the future.

That’s pretty good. Play anywhere across an ecosystem is always the right move. Sony expecting people to double dip on PS5/PC releases is going to look pretty old pretty soon.

If the word is used regularly in British and Australian language, it’s cultural imperialism for Americans to ask us to stop using it because they’ve decided it’s offensive.

We do have rights, they’re enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. We just don’t have an unfettered right to free speech that makes us have to accept Nazis like the US does.

As someone from the UK, it always makes me laugh when people try and claim free speech as if we have the constitution here because they’ve watched too many yank grifters online.

I had the same experience with CP. 50 hours put in at launch and had a good time. Yet you’d think the game killed players dog the way the chatter online went.

That second paragraph has nothing to do with the quality of the game Bethesda Studio made though, not that Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax don’t deserve criticism for the HR issue, but it’s not fair to put that on Todd and his team.

I wanted it to be a big Bethesda RPG in space, and I got exactly that and I’m happy. People seem to have convinced themselves the game was going to be all kinds of things it never ever hinted at and now they’re upset it isn’t.

Then read the text of the review where that should be explained. Stop putting so much stock in scores. Most sites would do away with them if Meta/Open Critic hadn’t screwed up the system so they have to rely on clickthroughs. Eurogamer actually did for almost a decade but recently had to bring them back.

Stop putting so much stock in scores. That score means those reviewers had a 10/10 experience by their subjective standards, if it doesn’t meet yours, thats fine, but it doesn’t mean the review is wrong. Read the damn text.

Oh no, my lighting is more realistic.

What’s wrong with the inventory, is this a PC centric complaint as it works fine on the Xbox.

There was a brief period when I first got my iPhone 3GS where I got kind of into them, but it was a novelty I think of going from naff java based games on Symbian to proper games. After a year or so, that wore off and I haven’t gone back since.

Because based on the amount of sales they’ve made and the combined player numbers between those and gamepass players, lots of people don’t care.

I started gaming on an Amstrad in the late 80s, I’ve lived though multiple groundbreaking leaps in graphical quality since then and now and frankly, it doesn’t impress me anymore, especially with how incremental it’s become. I’m more impressed by the scale and world building of Starfield and how all its systems come together than how it’s character models look.

One Dev have already pointed out that they have a Unity based game due next year they’ve already contracted to game pass, so that’s 20 million odd subs who’ll have access to try the game, where as they didn’t negotiate with MS on the price knowing this clause was coming.

Fair play to those who enjoy gaming on their phone, but it’s not for me even if they have AAA titles. I can’t deal with my fingers covering half the screen, getting alerts for apps and messages while trying to game, and burning half my battery for the day on my commute. Not to mention for the price a top whack iPhone goes for, you could get a ROG Ally or Steam Deck which are actually designed to play games on.

Yeah, but the SEO rewards anything with the word “Starfield” in it at the moment and there’s enough people seemingly invested in putting down the game at every opportunity that they’ll share this around and drive clicks.

I just don’t see atmospheric entry/exit as being that important to my immersion, yes it was kind of cool the first time you did it in NMS, seven years ago, but it got old fairly quickly even in that game. I’m happy for Starfield to have a more ME like set up and focus on other areas of the game.

The difference being that was NMS whole loop at launch. Exploring barren and mostly empty planets is just side content to a lot of directed story and side missions here.

Yout have to factor in the life sim-element of Bethesda RPGs too. You can theoretically become a mining magnate in Starfield using those planets and resource extraction outposts. That content is there for those kind of players. If you just want to do the directed side content, then as you say, you’d just follow the markets and not need to interact with it. Your exploration will be in the “dungeons” looking about for lore and loot.

Yeah, it’s all part of the freedom the game offers for what you want to do. If you want to be a cargo hauler you’ll rarely see a barren planet as you’re delivering to settlements. If you want to be a bounty hunter, you may see them once or twice when a bounty has holed up there, but if you want to be a space prospector, you will need to spend more time exploring and locating resources to set up extraction plants for.all valid methods of interacting with the universe with different needs for the barren planets.