Sly Reflex

First of all I can't ever see consoles/PC parts ever getting cheaper. Unless Sony/MS/Nintendo are like "Here's a side thing, the graphics aren't as good, but you can use it for 30 hours off a single charge" then we'll never ever see anything that's cheaper than the current crop, even when adjusted for inflation. Subscriptions are only going to get more expensive. I think they will become more complex as well. Gone will be the days where you can buy Gold and do everything. I'm talking even more fragmenting of the experience. Want to have more friends? More money. Want to use party chat? More money. Want a nicer codec to hear more clarity? More money. Want to go advertless on the dashboard? More money. We're already straying or have strayed into this territory, but they will always be looking to degrade the free experience if they think they can cut part of it off and sell it back to you. Even game adjacent things are doing this right now, Discord has been a mess for a bit and I think it will only get worse, if it's even about then in the form we see it now. I think AAA games as we know them are done. I don't see how it's feasible to spend so much money on something and stuff like GTA will be an anomaly. There will still be games that push the boat out, but I think the spend will be reined in a touch. Not that they will be cheaper, but I believe that the cost of making a game will plateau somewhat. The choke point being saturation and cost to the consumer to play more than doing more and more just because of some sort of Moore's law for gaming software. It wouldn't surprise me if they went in knowing a game was going to be a trilogy and make it similar to how they made the LotR's films where they just to the lions share of the work first and then release the first one and use the revenues to tick the next two over to release, altering anything on feedback It wouldn't surprise me of cloud stuff becomes more commonplace to play, maybe not in the first world, but when you look at what India or wherever pays for subscriptions compared to the West, I'm thinking we might end up seeing an influx of users from the poorer countries that will game through tablets and phones. Maybe it'll be one of those things they throw onto a phone sub like apple tv or Netflix now in the west to get people used to it. I am not sure. I think as far as online subs go it's the final frontier for delivering media to the end user, albeit a more complicated and expensive one to get right. There's a wide gulf between giving you the entirety of the Beatles direct to your pocket compared to doing that with sending Stranger things, or even a live feed. When you start requiring inputs that effect what you're seeing on screen, it gets mad fucky. Maybe tech will solve this so it's a non issue in the coming decade? Actually, this is something I can talk about further on now I think about it. Digital only has always been on the cards. I don't think it's a problem myself, but I do see that there's issues with it. My main concern is they can remove or alter your game at any point. Better consumer protection is needed on that front, one that can't be circumvented by them making you sign a document before you even start playing. Will it happen by the end of next gen? I am unsure. Handhelds are only going to get more powerful as showcases. Not entirely sure how affordable and usable they will be though. I feel like there's a big leap in battery tech and also energy consumption from electronics before they become super ingrained. It's really hard to see what will get better, because ultimately I don't really see a way out for the games industry as it is going now. The golden age is far behind us and I'm not really sure where then next one comes from, even if there is one. When you look at any other market, cars, food, retail, industry, whatever you care to examine, it all starts out small, then gets bought up and bought up and folded and folded and merged and restructured. Each time it goes through one of those phases it gradually becomes a bigger more bastardised versions of itself, disconnecting from the original mission statement. Some of us were lucky enough to see the growth of this industry from the 8 bit era through to where we are now, with all the ups and downs in between. It very much feels like everything has gotten worse, with only a few shafts of light beaming through now and again. I think we also need to really face that a lot of the people that built the industry are starting to knock on. It totally wouldn't surprise me if we start losing some industry legends or figureheads. Despite all that I have typed, it might be moot. Politically and economically the globe is shaky. There's no easy way around it, but I believe that we will see proper war in our lifetimes. Games might take a significant back seat then. Depends where the theatres are and who sides with who. Not saying it will be along the lines of "We have no banana's" with tech, if anything they will use games to propagandise just like they do now. It might just be that print, film and music are much easier things to distribute. The only upside of war being the good guys winning (hopefully) and the tech explosion that tends to stem from conflict filtering down into the common populace for consumer use. This is really the only good thing I can think about on that front. If you want someone to effectively fly a drone into someone on the other side of the planet, then you're going to need really good tech for that. As for things we look at now we will probably reminisce about having a wealth of relatively cheap games at our fingertips, being able to load and emulator and play 99% of all the stuff you had as a kid with little to no technical ability. I've seen people work this out that are dumb as rocks on PoS PC's that are one power cycle from being e waste. You can experience a lot from very little. Also for as maligned as they are, Early access games when done right can be beautiful things if the drive and user base is there to support them. Sure, there's smash and grabs as part of that, but I think as a concept people will be more willing to nurture something from proven outlets that stick with it thorough to a finished and supported end product.

I'm going for Claudia Black as well. But instead of the DA game, I'm going for GoW3's Sam. Broad range, going from caring friend, smart mouthed clown, striding across solemn reflection and running right into full blown psychopath. Excellent work. Above an beyond for a game about guns with chainsaws. For someone that's not a famous actor, I'm going Fred Tatasciore. The man has a voice that a Swiss army knife and it's a real shame he's not ranked as high as some of the more famous VA since this guy is prolific. He must never stop working because he's in 100's of games and I think he does cartoons and anime dubs as well. My favourite part of his was Saren, because although he was the main antagonist for Mass Effect, you could see his characters reasoning through his performance and his doubts because even he doesn't know if he's doing the right thing. Shows some real development when he goes from an Op, to an untouchable that nobody is willing to deal with and then doubting his actions as Shepard understand what Saren's acts are committing the galaxy to. From his cocksure arrogance to the pregnant pauses when he's thinking about what he's going to say, it's just a stellar performance from top to bottom.

When I worked for a very well known gambling website we had all this info on the back end. It was even broken down to who it was directed at, as well as the type of abuse used. Biggest toss pots were USA, Russia, all the Arab states, Australia and Italy. Each and every one of these countries were racist, sexist and homophobic. Extremely so in a lot of cases. Most bans I handed out were to these countries. Surprising amount of racism coming out of the Nordics as well. Generally it boiled down to different countries using a specific type of abuse. UK really only argued with itself and the USA, and mostly used homophobic and ableist slurs. The Japanese were the politest and never really got banned for misconduct. Used to gamble like crazy though, big spenders.

If Scotland did anime.

I think it depends on the cost of delivering that amount of data vs cost of hosting that data for download and letting the end user run it if they are able to. Also it's sort of about control as well. The whole you will own nothing and be happy about it thing. The cost of hardware is only going up currently and some people might not have the ability to consume if there's no plateau to it. Maybe we're not seeing the end of it, more a case of them shifting the goalposts because it's massively expensive. Mainly because the tech industry is shooting itself in the foot, at least this is how I am viewing it with not having consumer grade tech be available for those that want to buy a reasonably proceed console or home PC. You can't expect people to consume when the pool they are expected to draw from is too expensive. All this takes me back to when the internet was new and you would buy 200h of time or whatever. Maybe we're witnessing a return to that now they've got us all streaming everything.

Question suggested by @shinymcshine.

Never ever had an issue with CDkeys (now Loaded). Everything has been cheap, fast and legit. Games cheap enough that on the occasion I'll buy multiple copies to hand out to friends so we can all play together.

Fit the game theme as well, given schools generally have some sort of Latin motto. Keeping with R*, I think it would be impossible to do Manhunt now. Which is weird because I feel like Manhunt would be tame as far as violence goes when you compare it to game kills/deaths now. Games now are way more gratuitous in their depictions of violence compared to then. I think it's more to do with the presentation and framing? It's quite alright for you to impale someone in Watch Dogs, or drop a car engine on someone in HITMAN, but hitting someone with a claw hammer in Manhunt is really morbid. Not that this is fair comparison, but it's like watching someone shot someone in a film and then watch someone do it on Liveleak. One feels like it's cartoon and played for laughs and the other feels like a fragment of your soul just chipped off.

The Lantern of the Laughless Saint is one Morrowind people might want to keep an eye on. I just lost 4 hours to it. It's that thought and design process bound to modern, if unconventional controls. I've not even gone in the main part yet, I saw it was a huge drop and didn't ant to risk never getting out again.

One of the few fighting games I actually enjoyed.

Scrubs too. I forgot about that.

Both? I'm looking at the last few games they've done among my friends. Kiln has literally nobody interested in it. This game must have pissed money for them. Keeper has several people wishlisted, but nobody owns it. I really want to play this and each month I expect it to show up in the humble monthly. I am part of the problem. Psychonauts 2 has an even split between people wanting and owning it at 4 each. Full Throttle Remastered is one where quite a few people own it. The remasters will have been some easy money since the game is there already, you're hanging new clothes on stuff like Grim Fandango, Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle. I watched someone play Psychonauts 2 through recently and there's no way that games budget wasn't the biggest one they've ever used, everything in that game was a step up from what I've seen them do before. Aside from maybe Keeper and Kiln, possibly? I feel like they sort of lost their arse on Brutal Legend as well when it turned out to not be what people were expecting? All that music will have cost them a bomb. I'm just realising that I like the idea of Double Fine more than I enjoy their games. I mostly liked Psychonauts back in the day, but it was one of those games that hit the bargain bucket quickly. I loved Costume Quest, but I wouldn't care if I never played it. It's alright for one of those 10 hour games you never think about again. I low key hated Stacking. I know it was meant to be charming but it was like a nightmare you have when you're ill. Iron Brigade was awesome, I wish we'd get a sequel to this. Don't know much about The Cave. Put off of playing Brutal Legend. Despite owning Broken Age, I've never played it. No idea what Hack n Slash is. Spacebase is the same, I had no idea it existed either. Grim Fandango I played when it originally came out. It was a huge flop back then despite being well reviewed. Loved it. Never heard of Massive Chalice. Played Day of the Tentacle back in the day. Liked it. Never heard of Headlander. Played Full Throttle back in the day. Didn't mind it. That brings us up to date. I would consider myself a pretty clued in person when it comes to games. Maybe I overestimated myself there as well. Their overheads have to be tiny if they're breaking even on these titles. Maybe I should at least boot the Double Fine games I own up and see if they are any good.

It's mental that some companies will be like "Here's a Hyundai, make your series bout zombies with it and we will give you lots of money to feature our car." but when it comes to Gran Turismo it will be like "We require licensing for this content."

I never really thought about it before, but music games where you have expensive peripherals, but also up to 100 or more licensed tracks must be a legal nightmare for putting together. In an age where people are playing games for the longest time I don't get when they are drawing up the licensing that deals expire. Like why? Why would you fuck a bit of media like that because the Honda NSX is in the game or whatever?You already got you money and I don't ever remember hearing or seeing movies being pulled because the main character drinks a Pepsi or whatever. I wonder why games are treated like this in regards of licensing. Maybe films are as well, I am just oblivious to it?

I've been thinking about this after a conversation about films in work about "You couldn't make that today" and I wonder if it applied to games as well. Give me your best examples.

I feel like there would be mad lament if Double Fine went under, despite barely anyone playing their games. I'm not really sure how they manage to keep the lights on considering each game they make seems to undersell. I hope that the hit of that pottery game they made was on MS's books and not their own. Same with Keeper as well. At least I want to play one of those and will eventually buy it.

"Strategic Racism" sounds like the title of a Taskmaster episode.

Get really good at typing Russian slurs if that's the game you're going to get into

Yeah, some cryto person has been playing and leaking stuff. Quite a lot of it. Lets just say if you like RDR2 and wanted that with a more modern setting, you have it. Since a huge part of this topic went out the window because of the leaks, I'll just go with the story beats. The person that is doing time wasn't the one that did the crime. They went away to cover for the other. At some point in the game, one of the main characters dies. Might be a case of redemption from the one that was in prison, or the other way around for burying loose ends. Someone from GTAV will feature, even if it's just a cameo. There will be lots of jokes at MAGA's expense.

Might be able to make some really accurate predictions given what happened today.

The way that it deals with updates is mental. Me and some friends used to play a game that was cross plat on PC. Almost everyone owned it on PC, but one guy was playing via gamepass. Each update we'd get on steam would be like a gig or something, but his were always 70, 80, 100gb or whatever. Turns out steam patches the game, whereas MS just make you download the whole game again. Also, guess who had the slowest internet connection of all of us? In the end I just bought him the game on steam, because it took the piss. He didn't miss as many sessions this way as when he booted his PC it just used to start the download in the background and be done by the time we were ready to play, instead of him wondering why his internet was shit all day because the MS Store app was trundling a few hundred gb down his pipe. How the fuck MS became the main infrastructure for anything is amazing when you think about it. They've been awful for so many years now.

Really it depends on the cannon ending for V. The Aldmeri Dominion and Thalmor will be even bigger nazis than they were in V if they won. I suspect the cannon ending would be the Stormcloaks win and boot the Aldmeri led Empire out the door since the whole Talos thing of Man beating Mer being a running theme in TES. I am wondering if for the first time we see ESO being the lead for mainline games in showing places. In this instance the Aliki'r desert (Home of aforementioned Sentinel), Bangkorai, Wrothgar, Stormhaven, Rivenspire and Glenumbra all being represented with their capitals? It's pretty interesting how a lot of the cities in ESO are in the mainline games, some of them are almost 1:1 while others are still taking shape. Riften is a good example of that. Just realised what colour the races are in these area as well if it's true. A lot of people are going to be very very mad. The more I think about the story in V and how check and balances were abused to snatch power under the guise of puritanical ethic, the more prophetic it seems?