It is a couple extra presses, but when I receive an inbox message and press it to view the parent comment thread, there is usually a little toast button on the bottom of the screen to view all comments. Do you see that when you click a reply in your inbox?
TSMC hates this one easy trick!
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
But then those sorts of countries usually have law enforcement that likes taking large amounts of “financial incentives” to do whatever a company like Nintendo wants them to do.
Well…you’re not wrong.
It’s the specialized tools you’ll also need to do all of that that’ll get you, though.
Just build one, cheaper to boot.
Filed before, updated and approved after.
It definitely will. Too many games are no longer 100% offline or small enough to load it all to RAM. Even for games that can be taken offline to play, it would mean the feature would only be able to work in “offline mode” or the developers would need to find some way to align it with the design of their other systems.
Or more likely, as with other features Sony uses as selling points like their recently discontinued “Resume Activity” cards, it remains optional and no developers opt to implement it because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
I mean, sure, they have the right, insomuch as someone can buy a game on disc and use it as a coaster I guess. But it ruins the point of it, in my opinion.
I’m not saying people are wrong to enjoy media and spend money however they want, but it’s like a concert venue installing fancy couches to put in the lobby for people who buy tickets to a show but don’t want to actually watch it. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
Would be better to watch a Let’s Play, in my opinion. I don’t know why someone would want to play a game only to engage with none of its core gameplay features.
Doesn’t seem like a good sell if they do it that way, though. Let’s invest money and time into this feature that we will disincentivise people from doing by reducing their rewards if they use it.
Works for people doing these things as a hobby project and accounting for functionality that currently exists, but not great for a corporation that would need to convince devs to implement the feature into their games and design around it.
Imagine just rewinding in Elden Ring? No more consequence for death, just un-lose your souls and dodge better without actually learning the tells.
What would be the point?
Delete that, too. It was the last stranglehold Facebook had on me, but I decided to get rid of it, let friends/family know how they could contact me instead, and hell, most of them ended up following me to Signal (or just plain ol’ Discord) anyways.
Borderlands being on the list of “Best game adaptations” is some kind of joke
Can be a bit of both. Everything is prompted by a desire to return to the “before” times. For Trump’s supporters, that is a hypothetical, undefined time when America was “great”. For the Brexiters in the UK, that was the pre-EU period when Britain was a global empire. For the conservatives in Russia, it is the yearning for the USSR days.
The western world as a whole should be terrified. There has been a sharp dip towards conservatism that will only accelerate with Trump back at the helm in the US. Brexit didn’t occur in a vacuum.
Ah yes, because nothing says “change” like “unchecked conservatism”
I’ve seen a few valid criticisms, which I get. It’s hard to make a choice-driven narrative in the post-BG3 market and not get held to a higher standard. “Written by committee” is one such descriptor I’ve heard.
For me, as a fan of Dragon Age: Origins, I also can’t say I prefer the dip into the actiony, grindy sort of combat mechanics the game appears to have now.
He sent dick pics to an underaged girl, held a charity drive and used the proceeds to buy himself a fancier drawing tablet, and he treats his fans like garbage.
Not to mention Loss, which is now a meme of its own, because what better way to express the severity of a situation as traumatic as miscarriage than through a silly webcomic?
Microsoft had a lineup of games this year?