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Until they give a “better” reason, I am going to assume the one they hinted at is true, and Microsoft just decided that it was worthless because it wasn’t “Mikami’s studio” anymore. Honestly, I already suspected it.
In which case, fuck them. These games were not made by one person, a studio is bigger than its director. And the rest of them didn’t get even one chance to prove themselves.
Truly shows how little they value the people who make their games.
For a long time I thought I didn’t like Tetris very much. Tetris 99, Tetris Effect and Puyo Puyo Tetris made me reconsider that. Turns out I just needed a push, and now I occasionally spend hours on the stuff, gladly.
I think excluding rhythm games, Tetris must be one of the only game that gets me into “the zone”.
The only reason gamebryo modding is “easy” is because the community has been working on tools for it for decades.
It uses weird proprietary formats nobody else is using and full of stupid quirks. Back when Morrowind released, officially all Bethesda provided along the construction set was their plugin for a thousand-dollar licenced product to make nif models. Nowadays they don’t even do that anymore because they know people have been making their own free tools for Blender etc.
As for the modding structure itself, other games support a plugin hierarchy like they do. Rimworld in particular, and it runs on Unity.
Motion Twin is an interesting studio. They have a completely horizontal structure, they keep their studio small (10 people at most) on purpose and they’re more like a partnership of independent developers agreeing on common projects.
Most of them also seem to prefer switching to completely something else once they consider a game is done. Dead Cells is a special case because after a year part of MT wanted to keep working on it, so they created their own, more traditional studio Evil Empire and hired people just for that.
But then, things at MT apparently didn’t go too well. They spent months vetoing everything because no game concept seemed good enough for everyone to agree on it. The lead dev on Dead Cells tried to push them to at least try something, it didn’t go well and they pushed him out instead.
He talks about the whole thing on his blog : https://deepnight.net/blog/going-rogue/
Looks like there has been quite a bit of turnover on the studio since Dead Cells, and very little news, and since we’re talking about a studio of 8-10 people, it’s a bit worrying.
There have been 4 paid DLCs, Castlevania is just the latest.
However, I agree it’s been all worth it until now. Every new area feels like a new experience with cool new gimmicks, gameplay has been refined with stuff like the backpack, we got cool free indie crossover stuff…
And Return to Castlevania has more love for the series in it than anything Konami has done in the last 15 years (which is not saying much, fuck Konami).
I’m okay with the next DLC being the last. The game has had a fantastic life, and I wouldn’t want it to go past the creators’ motivation and start becoming bland. Excited to see what Motion Twin and Evil Empire have in store now (though Motion Twin’s situation seems a bit complex).
I think Castlevania : Lords of Shadow’s IP kind of worked against it. It’s useless to non- fans of the series, and it’s jarring to those who are.
It’s like it is constantly wondering if it’s a new take on the universe, or just a whole new one with useless, random references thrown in. There are lots of people completely displaced from their original time and background, and I am not talking about the game’s big spoilery reveal, but completely random ones with no point.
One example among many : in the main series there is a character who is a 20th century German artist who tragically turned mad because he lost his family during WW2. He is “reimagined” into a random bat-faced vampire general in the 11th century. His name is just mentioned in narration before a short fight and he’s never seen again.
Despite all of that, the game is great. Mostly linear, definitely has some pacing issues, but it’s pretty good at telling its story, it’s a decent spectacle fighter, and the environments are great.
Sequels… Yeah, not so much. But I really liked the first one. I just feel the Castlevania name only set it for something it wasn’t though.
Personally I got through the “standard” white palace (not the side path. Fuck that).
But I never could beat the Radiance. It’s fast, its attack hitboxes are completely bonkers, and I absolutely hate the fact I can’t properly train against it to make sense of its patterns. Because every time I lose I have to redo that stupid Hollow Knight section again. It’s not even a hard part, it’s just wasting my time and making me more nervous when I have to face the real deal.
RTS means real time strategy, it’s stuff like warcraft, starcraft, age of empires etc. X-COM is turn based, so not real time.
If you are searching for turn based tactical games (I don’t really play RTS), yeah, Mario + Rabbids is very reminiscent of X-COM, only with an emphasis on movement combos (using other characters/enemies to boost your jumps, that kind of things). It does have multiplayer maps, though I have not tried them myself. Main campaign is single player.
In that move combo aspect it looks quite a bit like Chroma Squad, a tactical game with a cast of super sentai/power rangers-like actors who do combo stunts as they move. It’s pretty fun, though I have not tried the switch version and I think it’s single player only.
Fire emblem has two episodes on switch, three houses and engage. I have played a lot of three houses. It’s not for everyone, it’s a very long game with loads of dialogue, many characters, a lot of schedule planning etc. Battles are turn based, though in Fire Emblem fashion more about tricking the (basic) AI to break against your high defence “wall” characters while protecting your glass cannons characters. Difficulty being there is a lot of those (admittedly dumb) enemies with various strengths and weaknesses. It’s fun but again, single player only. I haven’t played Engage, because honestly, Its character design is terrible and it looks quite silly.
Triangle Strategy is another turn based tactical RPG with an heavy emphasis on story. Lots and lots of dialogue, to the point you may ask yourself when the strategy starts when you begin. It has branching story paths, with a rather unique voting mechanic where you have to convince your people to choose the path you want to take. Battle maps are typically less flat than fire emblem, and turn order is determined by each unit’s speed instead of being player turn/enemy turn. Again, single player.
Into the Breach is turn based strategy on a very small scale (each battle is 5 turns on a 10x10 map). It’s almost more of an open-ended puzzle than a strategy game, requiring you to use your squad effectively to defend key locations against waves of bugs with different abilities. It’s very good.
Wargroove is Advance Wars inspired, so instead of unique characters like Fire Emblem etc, you play one commander with a special ability, and armies of nameless soldier units that you recruit in cities you control. A remake of Advance Wars 1 and 2 is on switch too, I have not played it. Not a fan of this type of game personally, but they have their fans. Those are multiplayer, kind of like chess with more rules.
Now for something turn-based and strategic but completely different, Civilization 6 is on the switch, though I don’t know how well it works on it. It’s Civilization, so long games on random maps where you found your cities, find resources, develop technologies, trade, and choose a way to overpower the other empire. This one is multiplayer.
Yeah, I agree with that. Installing freaking rootkits on people’s personal device, with the express purpose of identifying them and knowing what their machine contains, is not OK. A multiplayer client should be as lightweight as possible and shouldn’t be able to fuck with a game.
Even if they agree not using your data for anything else, the next security breach on their servers will make that promise useless.
And I am not sure why one would trust big publishers to have any kind of ethics anyway. Do you remember Activision’s patent to manipulate matchmaking? That would specifically match players to reward those who buy microtransactions and create pressure on those who don’t?
Yeah, totally trusting those manipulative snakes with my private data with a big “do not watch” sticker on it.
Difference I can see with traditional gambling (e.g. Texas Hold’em) is that it’s not in the instant, they actually want you to speculate on virtual “ownership” and spend now while it’s “cheap” to earn later in a totally happening glorious metaverse future. Yes, it’s very pyramid-y in nature.
Some of these “games” are empty shells of of a virtual world where you buy plots of land and then expect it to become more valuable, maybe build a virtual store or boring asset-flipped “resort” on it, rent part of it to someone to do the same, etc. They’re landlord fantasy. Except some may really believe in it.
If you’ve got the time, Dan Olson made a pretty good video about that stuff :
A bunch of cryptobros who don’t really have an interest in playing video games started to think “what if everything in a game was a cryptocurrency, and what if instead of playing for fun, you invested in the game to earn more money?”
Seriously, “play-to-earn” is the thing they want to make happen. They took all those boring trends that make shitty microtransaction-fests feel like a job, and they saw a future where stuff like this would actually be your job.
It was either in the first two or in the second one.
I am not sure because I know I got it from the second bundle, but that one included the games from the first humble bundle too.
Though I already had it on the Wii for quite some time at that point. I knew the original flash game, Tower of Goo, and I’d spent so much time messing around with that thing, I was pretty excited that they made a whole game around it.
I don’t think you need to. The series is turning to something else entirely, with a completely different focus. I already think any previous episode is more fun than 4.
The folks who loved the old games probably won’t think 5 is a free replacement for these. They’ll just think, it’s okay, I’m going to spend a dozen hours trying to make the old one kinda run.
To be confirmed, but this sounds a bit like how Disney decided they didn’t need to pay any more royalties to people who wrote Star Wars novelizations and original novels.
Like, “you don’t have a contract with us, you had one with George Lucas before we bought Star Wars, it didn’t transfer.” Very shady, and probably a lot easier to pull when you’re a huge corporation against a small creator.
Slight tangent.
Maximum score (4 stars, 5 stars, 10/10, 100%, whatever they’re calling it) not meaning the game is perfect is not at all a problem to me. There are games I absolutely love and would recommend to just about anyone and even then I don’t think they’re “perfect”.
The thing that bothers me most is how average scores specifically for games are basically never used, and below average scores are just a handful of the most broken things ever.
It’s so absurd that on metacritic for games, “average” goes from 50 to 74%. In movies it goes from 40 to 64. I don’t know for everyone else, but I don’t consider 7 out of 10 an “average” mark. And a game so broken it almost doesn’t run at all doesn’t deserve 5/10 (really, I’ve seen some).
Anyway, review scores are silly. Read the guys’ opinions, see why they like it and why they don’t. Someone’s absolute favorite masterpiece is someone else’s most unplayable shit.
Hoopa : “Just gonna drop a bunch of those legendary idiots for shits and giggles. Catch, trainer!”