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The original ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 got restored, which was originally modified due to 9/11 and Konami not wanting to upset US sensibilities:
I just learned that the commercial disaster Unknown 9: Awakening was supposed to kick off an entire media franchise with games, novels, comics, podcasts, and “more”, whatever that may have been. The delusion of these people is far greater than we assumed. As a reminder, this game peaked at about 250 concurrent players on Steam, despite the publisher handing out vouchers as part of a promotion with AMD. It may have sold only between one and two thousand copies. Bandai Namco has recently laid off a lot of people so it seems there will have to lay off some more.
Hahaha, good Lord, that’s some next-level delusion! 😀 A trilogy of novels already on the go… I can only imagine the amount of effort and money sunk into this black hole.
Rule 1 of the crack commandments: never get high on your own supply.
Ubisoft recently attempted to reboot Prince of Persia. Of course, the game had to be woke, with an urban gentleman as the main character. Unfortunately, this game did not sell well, just like basically every other release of this studio in recent times.
https://archive.ph/mpToC
The Empire lost the Mandate of Heaven in 2024. 2020-2022 was the apogee. The implosion of woke media is only one of the secondary effects.
I remember the old games on PS2 being pretty fun. They were like the template for what would become early Ass Creed games, which were kind of just like a sandbox version of PoP. It makes little sense to reboot the series since, even though the gameplay is much more condensed and arguably more enjoyable, most consumers probably aren’t interested in it. It would probably more logical to just re-release the original games.
Dark Souls update: Started a new game as a warrior class. I get the sense that most classes end up rounding out however you want to build them with enough levels, but I’m having a lot more fun now that I know the game pretty well and can fight more offensively/aggressively.
I’m on the fence about starting DS2 because the community seems to almost unanimously abhor it. I think most of its issues came after the Scholar’s of the First Sin update which apparently fucked with the enemy placements in a terrible way, as well as there apparently being janky hit boxes. DS3 looks quite promising, however. I like the faster movement speed and increased mobility of later souls games. I believe I will play around with DS1 for a while, try out DS2 and if I don’t drop it then I’ll eventually get around to DS3 before finally getting to Sekiro. Finally, I’ll probably be invested enough to play Elden Ring by that point, which honestly looks pretty insane. Almost like they took the concept of BotW and made it a mature version of the Zelda, or The Witcher 3 and trimmed a lot the fat.
I brought up the topic of hit boxes in DS2 and then this clip popped up in my feed (player cringe reaction—recommend muted volume): https://youtube.com/shorts/6CxujxBdmdM?si=CgJaVq8YQ8GqS8Cc
This is a very interesting clip. I think what is going on has nothing to do with bad hit boxes but with hit-detection and graphics updates not being synchronized, i.e. internally, the game registered a hit but the renderer does not update the game fast enough visually. As a workaround for solving the problem of the player coordinates differing between the hit detection system and the graphics renderer not matching, the game uses the hit-detection coordinates to update the renderer, leading to the warping effect.
If the above sounds unclear, take a simpler example: in a 2D shmup the ship’s position is given by its x/y coordinates. In addition, all bullets have their own x/y coordinates. Now imagine the game checking collisions between the ship and bullets before updating the ship’s sprite. The visual effect is that the ship explodes a few frames after the hit. The closest comparison to the Dark Souls 2 example would be if your ship gets hit, the bullet flies through it, and a few frames later, when there is no longer any contact between ship and bullet, the ship explodes.
I have been wondering if Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls offer meaningfully different gameplay depending on the character class you chose, apart from the obvious magic vs non-magic user. My guess was that the differences are probably quite minimal. I have also, even when deliberately looking for it, rarely come across people who claimed to have beaten any of these games with all character classes, let alone made a case for it. Perhaps this is a missed opportunity. Also, if there is no potential to make the character classes meaningfully different there should arguably be fewer of them in the game.
Dark Souls 3 looks like a big step up over Dark Souls 2. I recall that there was a lot of hype surrounding the release of Dark Souls 2 but it died off pretty quickly. However, there are quite a few people online who claim that this game has the best gameplay of the entire series. I am still stuck in 16-bit heaven but I want to tackle the Dark Souls gamees, Sekiro, and also Resident Evil 2 at some point.
EDIT: Even if playthroughs of Dark Souls do not depend a lot on the chosen character class, there surely are big differences between the various weapons, similar to Monster Hunter. Still, this does not seem to invalidate the point I made above as I also cannot recall having come across people arguing for selecting particular weapons for their various playthroughs. Instead, they go through the various iterations the “new game plus” until they have reached the maximum difficulty.
Interesting observation!
I feel like class selection mostly aids in nudging you in a specific direction as far as parameters are concerned, so you’ll be more incentivized to keep investing in endurance and strength for a knight, for example, or intelligence for a sorcerer. Also, depending on what you pick will affect your starting gear and early item drops. The thief will even begin the game with the master key, so they can have two starting gifts. If you’re really willing to invest enough time in grinding for exp or if you’re on new game +, however, then you could focus on developing latent characteristics. With this warrior build I’m focusing a lot on endurance and dexterity right now, but eventually I’ll want to develop his faith statistic to be able to imbue his right hand weapon with magic intermittently.
My experience with traditional RPGs is quite limited, but from early ARPGs like Diablo I am familiar with the approach of character classes being so different from each other that certain builds are completely impossible. For instance, only the Sorcerer can wield the most potent spells, the Rogue should probably only use a bow, and the Warrior needs to become a “tank” as he is too slow to evade magic and too low in dexterity to wield bows effectively. These were simpler days, though. I know that for Souls-style games there are a various builds that the community recommends and which a lot of people simply blindly copy, thus removing the R in RPG to quite some extent.
Yeah, I feel like DS1 is only complicated from an RPG standpoint because there are no clear instructions. To save time and avoid a lot of trial and error regarding leveling up armor and weapons, I did default to community recommendations. There’s a longsword that has a 1% drop rate that I ended up settling for on this run.
Class means nothing in dark/demon souls besides starting class and gear
Don’t forget starting stats. Hence why I say it incentivizes your build. You could make a knight into a mage, but why would you do so from a fresh save unless you were doing so as to create some sort of artificial difficulty.
Remember to try tounge but hole
That only works on your mom!
Sony has shut down the studio behind Concord as well as another one of their live-service game studios:
https://archive.ph/R4cGr
Also, there were rumors about Concord having been a $400m dumpster fire. This figure seems correct. Kotaku mentioned that the “initial development” cost $200m alone. Sony also paid for completing the development, for the coveted Concord IP, and the studio. It does not seem implausible that the total sticker price for Sony was closer to $500m, without taking opportunity costs into account.
https://archive.ph/1Rhnx
The Concord developers have a great sense of humor. They write that they wanted to “bring the joy of multiplayer [gaming] to a larger audience”. In reality, it would have been possible to squeeze their entire player base into a bus, if you remove the seats.
https://archive.ph/n9xDB