Kind of a nothing article, but I say just let them cook. Baldur’s Gate 3 was the game that pushed them into the spotlight better than any game they’ve made. And now people are going back to play their old games and realizing they are great games in their own right. They opened up a genre of gaming to people that would have never even considered it. You can’t accomplish all that without feeling an immense amount of pressure. Even if the next game isn’t on par with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m just glad they are still doing what they do.

Gross.

It’s because the games are mid or worse. Took me one google search to find a plethora of games released in the last few years that had high budgets and sold very well. God of War: Ragnarok, Ghost of Tsushima, Elden Ring, Horizon: Forbidden West, Doom Eternal, Hogwarts Legacy, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, The Last Of Us Part II, and so many more. These are just the ones I played. Just because the only game you guys make is Fortnite after abandoning all your IPs and that your Epic Games Store money isn’t as high as you thought it would be doesn’t mean other people aren’t making amazing games. It’s just you, my guy. I consider myself a patient gamer and I’ve bought more full price games over the last 5 years than I ever have.

Not the same person, but I do a credit card. It’s a lot easier to figure out a dispute with my card holder over PayPal. Plus I can cancel my credit card instantly instead of risking my personal information getting leaked as PayPal has done before. And if my PayPal got hacked they’d have access to more than just my credit card number.

Without reading, my guess is something convoluted like sending physical mail under a certain weight or sending an email within a certain date that has already passed. Imma go read it really quick and let you know how accurate I was.

Edit: Apparently you can just do it in the settings. But they will still do it “as necessary for transactions.” Which means they’ll probably still do it and just stretch what “necessary” means as far as they take it. Which is equally as shitty.

Also, that’s what difficulty settings are for… Which the game has.

After Starfield my expectations are so low that the only way I’d be disappointed is if it’s worse than Skyrim. And Skyrim wasn’t even that amazing in hindsight.

I just wanna blow shit up and have a good time. I like a challenge for sure, but what they did was just silly. I remember getting back online a couple months back and realizing all my favorite guns had half the ammo and felt like I was shooting bugs with a nerf gun (pun intended). I played one mission and got so frustrated I quit and haven’t played since. Instead of buffing the weapons nobody was using to make them more fun, they nerfed all the fun weapons so all the weapons felt like ass.

I remember reading a while back that they nerfed the grenade pistol so it only had like 2 or 3 shots per resupply. As the only guy that probably ever used it, my only thought was “well why the fuck would I even bring it than?! What the fuck do you expect me to do with two fucking shots in my gun?”

The only thing that would make me not want to play games made by EA more than I already do is if they started making games with AI. Besides a select few games, most of what they make is already soulless cash grabs. This would make it literally a soulless cash grab in every way.

Also the technology they talked about is either none existent or not nearly as great as they “showed.” Hence why they had to fake it.

I wish. That’d be sick

Fuck Elon Musk, but don’t discourage human curiosity and stupidity. There’s nothing humans love more than conquering an impossible task. Humanity would have never made it as far as we did without people doing stupid and crazy shit. Humanity is the kinda species that just says “fuck it, we ball” and then proceeds to just do exactly what they shouldn’t do. Shit like walking across ice sheets to new continents because why not and go to the fucking moon.

Someone will figure it out eventually. Might take a couple hundred years (if we don’t kill ourselves first) but we’ll get there.

Well, let’s hope they can do something with it. I played the beta and was so disappointed I just downloaded Payday 2 and never even bought 3.

There’s only so many times you can get fucked over before you just call it quits. And if you wanna work at a big studio you’d probably just lose your job within a year again anyway. They could go solo but that’s not a guaranteed success, especially if you’re not financially stable. I don’t blame these people for going with something else. Plus with years of this bullshit I’m sure a bunch have had the life sucked out of the work they used to love.

Every game they’ve released in the past 5+ years has been mid or worse. They’re too big of a company to keep releasing mediocre games. Not only that but every game they’ve been coming out with has been hyped with stupid bullshit like NFTs and AAAA quality games. They’re trying to survive on gimmicks while betting on all the wrong things.

They’re just gonna lay off a bunch of people, make another assassin’s creed game, and then call it a day.

It’s just the new trend. One person starts it and has a successful video, and then everyone else follows it regardless of whether or not that was the reason for success. But I’ll take it over constantly using jump cuts every 5 seconds. That shit has been obnoxious for years. Most of the things I watch on YouTube these days are educational stuff so I don’t see either of these things that often. The only time I’m okay with the multiple angles is if they use it as like a “tangent camera” for when you know they are going off script or just expressing their opinions on what they are talking about. You know, an actual reason for two cameras instead of just “oooo look at me.”

The YouTube trend that’s been pissing me off are the YouTubers that change the thumbnail and title an hour after it’s posted because it’s not getting enough views and then make a community post talking about how it’s the best video they ever made.

Kids are gonna find ways to vape. It’s just the way it is. Just like when I was a kid we all found ways to smoke. Making it more difficult just gives them more drive to “get away with it.” Sometimes I feel like all these preventative measures that people come up with were by people that were never even a kid. Like banning fruity flavors. I started smoking when I was 14 and it wasn’t because it tasted good.

Just a heads up, this opinion is also based on the fact that I find the Far Cry games extremely boring and exhausting with side “quests”:

Handsome Jack was definitively an amazing antagonist. Seemed like a believable character. I think that’s where they fell off, honestly. The only good characters in Borderlands 3 were the ones from the previous games. The only thing keeping me interested through the tedium on my recent playthroughs were the characters. The constant back and forth within the same areas between NPC’s and bounty boards for fetch quests would be unbearable without the characters. Unsurprisingly, Borderlands 3 was the only one I didn’t finish upon replaying.

If they don’t do anything new or crazy, it’ll probably be a hard pass for me. Borderlands 3 was pretty mid and I’m pretty exhausted with the whole “looter shooter” genre. Plus my only memories of the previous Borderlands games are shooting the same enemies for hours while [insert NPC] is constantly talking into my ear. I honestly don’t even remember the gameplay of those games without someone always talking over everything. Besides major plot points and memorable cutscenes, I think 80% of the dialogue just went in one ear and right out the other.

I have nothing against the games and I have nothing against people who like the games. People like what they like. I tried going back and playing through them all again a couple years ago and everything just felt tedious and boring. But if they can pull out all the stops and put in the effort, I might give it a try if my friends want me to get it.

My point is that regardless of what kind of agreement they will come to, these companies are going to find a way around it if they can. They’ll just stop hiring them altogether. I really feel for these people and I wish they didn’t have to deal with this. But I also know that the people in charge don’t really care.

Honestly, let them use AI for voice over. That way we can all see how emotionless and uninspired games will become. It’s gonna be hard to relate to video game characters when they are stripped of their humanity even more than they already are being fictional to begin with. Sure it’s cheap and they can churn shit out at a quicker pace, but when they try to make a game like The Last of Us with AI voice over let me know how much people will give a shit about the characters. Add AI writing into it and you’ve got yourself something so soulless you’ll look back on Nazeem asking you about The Cloud District with fondness.