Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.

And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?

That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you’re in a market dominating position like they are.

Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.

This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it’s stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can’t ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it’s doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I’m no analyst. There’s certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there’s no Blu Ray copy of it, you’re just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else’s machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.

Gen Z is coming through and they’re going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I’ve got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?

And when consoles aren’t so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it’s not like there’s a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.

I’m back into Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve never finished before. I’ve been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It’s very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I’ve got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I’m lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you’re trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I’m hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.

I’m replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I’m not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I’d enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

Now that I’ve finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I’m back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.

Some of these things really do seem to be luck of the draw. Maybe they run A/B tests. Did you get bombarded with ads on Windows 10? I did. My friends had no idea what I was talking about. I for sure got nagged over and over again to use OneDrive back when I still used Windows, and stories like this one were in the news all the time.

The case Nintendo was making, as I understand it, was that their site provided pretty clear links to sources where you could circumvent encryption, even though they weren’t doing it themselves.

Whatever their reasons, I’m glad they opted for this. It makes the game translate better to controllers, and that’s just a more comfortable way for me to play games.

Just play The Outer Worlds if you haven’t already. It’s Starfield if they threw out all the parts that didn’t work, and it’s got a sense of humor, too.

Man, this site on mobile is like psychological warfare. You read a paragraph, and it’s interesting, and you scroll down a bit to read more, and they spawn another ad that takes up ever so slightly more of the screen until the article is a postage stamp in the middle like I’m playing Quake on an old machine in 1997.

Also known as the Daisuke Ishiwatari method.

Your best bet is to just go on Steam and start filtering by tags. You can click on a search and search for both “JRPG” and “Turn-based combat” tags, and that will give you a good list of games in the ballpark of Phantasy Star.

No worries. I was not really able to deduce any more depth out of the combat, really. There were some defensive options that seem to always cancel into offense options to feel snappier, but I think it was really a matter of what the game bothered to teach me and what I needed to do in order to make it through the game. If they want to make it a priority on the sequel, I trust them to know how to do that.

I did finish it. Liked it, really enjoyed the presentation. There was a bit of abstract in the ending, which isn’t really my bag, but I’m on board for the sequel.

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’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.

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 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.

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.