I think they’re called that because they postdate the “looter shooter” that combined Diablo-esque “action RPGs” with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. “Looter” without the “shooter” is a much better name for Diablo’s genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

I’m still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don’t know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn’t also get assigned the label of “boomer shooter”, because then it’ll be harder for both audiences to find what they’re looking for.

I beat the base game of The Outer Worlds and started the DLC. This game ought to have more eyes on it in the wake of Starfield. It’s just a better version of that game. Each settlement you come across might have about 10 NPCs in it, and each one of them is connected to the other ones via quests that help you form a picture of just what happened here before you landed. It’s excellent.

I also finished Penny’s Big Breakaway. When you hit a flow state in this game, it’s so, so good, but a bit of jank in the physics and controls for the game hold it back. Like last week, my recommendation is still to wait a few months to play it, in hopes that patches can square away some of these issues.

And then there’s my usual fighting game shenanigans in Street Fighter 6 and Skullgirls, trying to be the FGC equivalent of “swol”. The Capcom Cup finals for SF6 were a lot of fun to watch despite there being too many Lukes.

I don’t mean to sound rude, but it seems strange to pine for something lost that not only isn’t lost but also you don’t seem to have looked very hard for. There are some high profile turn based RPG hits all the time. Pokemon games are still turn based RPGs, and that’s the most successful entertainment property of all time.

That game is worth putting up with its jank. You may not know exactly what the character is going to say, but each option is always channeling either James Bond, Jack Bauer, or Jason Bourne.

I don’t know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:

• only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
• those factions’ quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
• change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine’s “Narrative Legos” video, but it doesn’t even have to be that advanced

It wouldn’t involve grinding. If I still haven’t articulated it well enough, don’t worry about it, because that game doesn’t exist anyway.

I’m going through some more of The Outer Worlds. Still really enjoying it. It’s got a good pace to it.

Palworld is still my second screen game for podcasts and such. It needs some tweaking in the progression, but I’m at the point now where I can expand to additional bases.

I picked up Penny’s Big Breakaway. It feels great to play. The boss fights are really interesting. This could and should have been one of the best platformers I’ve ever played, and maybe it still is, but some bugs and jank occasionally get in the way. If you’re swinging from your yo-yo and hit a wall, you’re supposed to do a small climbing animation, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes when riding your yo-yo, you’ll kind of just skip and jump off with poor feedback for why. Sometimes you get stuck in a wall. The design for air dashing by pressing the button twice can often get eaten by other inputs, and that doesn’t feel great. The bugs and jank are not the most prevalent part of the experience, but they happen enough to bring down my opinion of the game a peg or two. I’d highly recommend this game, but maybe wait a few months for a couple of patches.

My friends and I beat the main campaign of Quake II in co-op. It’s much faster in co-op and with the compass feature than they intended, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Next we’ll move on to the expansions.

Still labbing some stuff in Skullgirls for my Combo Breaker grind. It’s painful going through replays for my losses, but it’s necessary, and I took good notes.

I had been dipping my toes into the waters of loot games with Titan Quest, and I think I’m at the point now where I can say I see the appeal with the genre and I’ll stick with it. For this game in particular, I do wish the bosses were more involved, because they don’t really hit a crescendo that a boss fight should have. Due to what defensive options the game gives you and doesn’t give you, they often just end up being running away from the guy in a circle until you can land some hits. Still, it’s fun. After this game, I might check out the sequel, Grim Dawn, or V Rising.

The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.

But this isn’t a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.

On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:

• The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
• Baldur’s Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for “moon logic” for a reason, and I’m not sure we’re better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
• What you might call “handholdy”, others might call “better UX” in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur’s Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
• People’s attention spans didn’t necessarily drop, and it’s even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.

I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction’s quest line in the same playthrough.

I don’t see a technical debt problem getting any better by ignoring the problem for longer. No better time to start than when they’ve got Microsoft’s war chest to help aid the transition.

It’s a real time game, but if you try just mashing buttons, you will die quite quickly.

We just got Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.

Did you play Starfield? It’s definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn’t cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)

I’ve got to say…both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they’ve always made for the past 30 years.

For the author and everyone else. If they’re not throwing away their entire tech stack and workflow for how they build this sort of game and starting from scratch, they’re making a huge mistake. At least start with what Obsidian built for Avowed and work from there.

Congrats! Yeah, lots of tricky fights in that game are solvable by just observing statuses and such. The game exposes almost 100% of its information.

I’d recommend playing them in release order. You can skip the MSX games and go right to Metal Gear Solid, but these games do build on each other. MGSV is probably the best-playing game in the series, but it has the least of the story bits that the series is known for.

Metal Gear is a series that will turn on a dime from being deathly serious into breaking the fourth wall for a joke or gameplay reasons. They’re amazing.

CD Projekt Red is owned by a public parent company, and their last game was probably in the top 50 of most expensive ever made, with some of the highest production values we’ve ever seen, at least with the latest 2.0 update. Valve wouldn’t count as a AAA developer by your definition, but it’s difficult to call Half-Life: Alyx anything but a AAA game. I don’t think most people would follow your definition.

Do you have much crowd control in your party? Can you disable either him or his minions? Pay attention to what he is vulnerable to and what makes him vulnerable when he goes into that other state. Remember that you can inspect any enemy and see their buffs and what type of enemy they are. Perhaps you have special arrows strong against that type. Perhaps you have some spells that do a type of damage that works well against him.

Do you have any more info to provide for that fight without spoilers for others so that I can point you in the right direction? What’s the issue you’re running into in that fight?

You think that’s the year the Epic store closes?

400 people across multiple countries and $100M spent on development doesn’t count as AAA?

They almost certainly buy fewer things when the stuff they already have is designed to be played infinitely.

Careful with the spoilers. I’ve only done one trial so far, and it wasn’t that one.

Yeah, I haven’t seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there’s more depth there, the game didn’t want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren’t just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I’m hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.

This game also does something that I haven’t seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that’s a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn’t be so rare, but the industry’s obsession with being “bigger” made it rare.

I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game’s core loop, and the one I’m not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.

When I’ve got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I’d like to see them tweak about the progression, but they’re very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn’t in about 20 years.

I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it’s answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it’s far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.

Ahead of Combo Breaker, I’m also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I’m giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.

Yup. I think this is it, but you might find better scans elsewhere. It doesn’t tell you everything, but it shows you most of the map and labels the first handful of dungeons. Even knowing where the first dungeon is is such a huge help, because then you get a new checkpoint when you die, and once you beat the dungeon, you get an extra heart container.

I’ll give it a look. Thanks.

Gotcha. Is that in the game, or would I have to modify it externally?

It exists in at least the enhanced editions of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and I’m told the first Dragon Age had this too. Though to be honest, even with the ability to script AI behavior, I’ll likely end up just setting tons of conditions for auto-pausing like I usually do in RTWP games so that I can decide what to do for each character whenever some condition in the battle changes.

I also played the original Zelda via emulation, but the physical game came with a map that makes the game much more feasible to get through on your own. Once I had that, I was golden.

I finally finished Pillars of Eternity. I’ve got lots of criticisms for it, but mostly I really enjoyed it. I do wish there was less combat and that there were more opportunities to talk your way out of combat, for instance. The combat is very good, but there’s so much of it that you can easily get decision fatigue. I’m going to take a slight break from Pillars of Eternity before I start the sequel.

So I moved on to replaying Planescape: Torment instead. I last played it about 12 years ago, and there’s a good amount of it I’ve forgotten since then, but at the time I felt it was the best writing I’d seen in games to date. As poorly aged as it was then, even on the enhanced edition now, it’s perhaps aged even worse now, so I’m not sure if I’ll finish replaying it this time, but we’ll see. At least it’s not particularly long.

My friends and I are continuing our co-op playthrough of Quake II since we don’t live in a timeline where we’ve got a plethora of modern FPS games to play instead; not the traditional campaign variety, at the very least. The indie scene is mostly replicating Doom/Quake 1 sorts of games, and Quake II is surprisingly much more modern in its design…at least when you use the compass built in to the remaster.

EDIT: Changed my mind. Moved on to Pillars 2. There are already a lot of great improvements.

People always talk about this being physical versus digital, but I’d say this is about DRM. Physical media decays. DRM-free games can be perfectly copied over and over again, and it comes with the bonus of not taking up space in my apartment. If a game requires a server to connect to or stream from, that’s often just a fancy form of DRM.

The distinction is that they’re making a decision that will likely result in not making consoles anymore. It’s like how governments don’t decide to increase traffic; they decide to expand freeways to more lanes, but the only thing that can come from that is that they increased traffic. They think they’re solving a problem, but they’re actually, usually, making it worse by those actions that we have a historical record for how they play out.

Sony will hold on to that kicking and screaming, because once they’re just selling a PC, they lose money for each third party game sold, and they lose PS+ revenue.

Latency is enough of a thing that even a child raised on it will recognize the benefits of running the game locally, not to mention mods and other privileges that come with having a local copy of a game.

If Xbox disappears and leaves only PlayStation at that tier, I think it’s more likely we’re looking at the end of consoles altogether in as little as 15 years.

To be fair, the rumor isn’t that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they’re making decisions that will, in a handful of years’ time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.