The motion capture excuse would also hold more water if they didn’t go for an actor only two years younger than David Hayter.

He wanted out for a long time, IIRC as early as MGS 2. 4 was originally planned to end with Snake and Otacon being captured and executed for terrorism to put the final nail in the franchise’s coffin, with Kojima only dropping the idea after his entire writing staff protested.

I think you hit the nail on the head with his dissatisfaction being why 5 felt so different. It barely feels like a Metal Gear game even if the stealth is at its all-time best, but you can definitely see some proto-Death Stranding DNA in it in retrospect. He was clearly experimenting with new gameplay ideas, which might explain why the game went so far over budget and ended up unfinished.

I do, but I also know he’d been trying to get rid of Hayter for a while by then even though he was the voice of Snake, so the excuse rings hollow.

Remember when he got rid of David Hayter, the iconic long-time voice actor of Snake, main character of his most popular series, just so he could replace him with some Hollywood actor doing a generic gruff guy impression? Then said actor ended up being so expensive that there was barely any dialogue… in a Metal Gear game?

Added the new feature: looting of mutant parts.

I look forward to ignoring the main storyline and roleplaying a wandering monster hunter instead. Hopefully the new mod support can flesh this out even further!

How often do consoles get the kind of deep discounts that games get on PC, though? Or even the base price drops over time? It’s not really a great deal when a $60 title drops to $30 on PSN, but the same game costs $30 as its base price on Steam and is currently discounted to $8.

And let’s not even get into Nintendo’s pricing…

“M-O-O-N, that spells ‘sword!’”

Aquamail (when it was good)

I’m still using AquaMail, is there some news or scandal I missed? It works well enough for me, but then again I barely use email for anything other than a place for notifications so if they fucked up some other feature I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

I know their attempts at monetization have been batshit insane, but I bought it ages ago for a couple of bucks and luckily missed out on all that. Is there any reason to move to another app if I’m grandfathered into lifetime premium?

“Yeah, but neither does the damage I take!” *proceeds to do nothing but play on his phone for the session* - The Hypothetical Fighter I Now Hate

Also, you have an incredibly appropriate username for this conversation. Have you taken steps along the Path of the Muscle Wizard?

(Swipe typing autocorrect turned “steps” into “steroids” three times in a row. I think my phone is becoming sentient.)

The joke’s on you: thanks to min-maxing, the fighter can’t count in the first place!

Embracer bet it all on a multi-billion dollar deal with a Saudi investment company that fell apart at the last minute due to Embracer adding more and more demands. This deal failing also caused their stock price to tumble. They’ve been cutting everything, everywhere ever since to get out of debt.

I wish they’d do so by selling their studios whole instead of chopping them apart and leaving them hollow shells of themselves. I can only think of three major sales as opposed to the dozens of studio closures and nearly a hundred projects they’ve canceled.

Not just a black guy, but one of the most famous and popular characters in portrayals of the time period, in a franchise that shoehorns in every historical figure even remotely related to each game’s setting. But of course this time it’s suddenly too much.

Or the Oblivion cell phone port!

(Please don’t. It was awful.)

I loved Morrowind’s vague directions, they felt so authentic - like visiting a small town and getting directions from a local. Even a basic fetch quest felt like a journey since you had to check your journal and follow what the questgiver said or you’d get hopelessly lost.

Navigating by landmarks needs to be in more games. There have been a bunch of games since that let you turn off quest markers and item glows, but without any instructions all that leads to is the player wandering randomly until they stumble upon their destination.

i remember the massive interest in VR from tech enthusiasts back during the early Oculus days. Meta’s actions after purchasing them destroyed so much goodwill with the developers they needed to make VR a success that they probably set VR back as much as (if not more than) their increased funding pushed it forward.

I don’t think it’s gamers driving those hardware sales - GPU supply has been strained for over a decade due to their non-gaming uses. The introduction of cryptocurrency lead to all the high-end cards being snatched up by mining operations and scalpers, then right as crypto finally started dying down, the AI boom hit.

Anecdotally I know a ton of gamers going with low- and mid-tier GPUs like the 3060/4060 because crypto/AI speculators and scalpers have driven up the prices of the high-end cards beyond the budgets of normal people (and that’s when there are even any cards in stock).

Sometimes you need to send a message. A bunch of meteors wiping out an advancing army will make any king think twice before asking you to pay taxes again.

Kernel-level anti-cheat?

*reads article *

Kernel-level anti-cheat.

So not a real compatibility issue, just fixing an artificial one they created.

Starfield was like a child’s half-inflated balloon: let go with high hopes only to immediately disappoint, then swiftly forgotten once it drifted out of sight. Bethesda wanted to reach the stars, yet only managed to drop trash in someone’s garden.