Invincible Vs shot to the top of my list as I learned more about it, as it combines some of my favorite fighting game mechanics and design philosophies. Clockwork Revolution looked better and larger in scope than I thought it would be. The Outer Worlds 2 continues to look great, and this showcase didn’t change my mind. Super Meat Boy 3D was a big surprise, and it looks like the right way to move that game into 3D.

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are both on consoles.

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0346-CUSA15671_00-BGANDBGIICONSOLE/

I can’t say I follow you. I would call it satire rather than “totally random”, but if you didn’t care for the writing, you didn’t care for the writing.

I wouldn’t categorize it that way at all. It extrapolated nationality to one’s employer and religion to the law. It was unsubtle in its views of classism and such, in a way that I appreciated, but it wasn’t just doing zany things “just because”, unless you’ve got a good example that’s slipping my mind.

Is this where we bring up the old Mega Man X Sequelitis video again? Chances are the best tutorial is the one you don’t even realize is a tutorial. There was also a trend that I first noticed around the time of Gears of War where the tutorial would not only be built into the story so that you wouldn’t feel like it was chore, but they’d also give you the opportunity to just skip it.

You’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose.

The conversation is about Switch 2 compared to a Steam Deck. Defending an open marketplace without outdated concepts like console exclusives doesn’t make me a fanboy for one of the two subjects in this conversation, nor does it make me a hypocrite.

It’s quite nice, actually. Not all work on a game is equally worthwhile. Lots of my favorite franchises have devolved into games that grew larger to their own detriment. It doesn’t often happen that one of these types of games scales back down. And it’s not like there are zero big games that I like; Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 are both 100+ hour games that are some of my favorites of all time! But unlike a lot of big games, they actually felt like there was something interesting to see for that full runtime, whereas a lot of big games actively harm their pacing by filling it with uninteresting bloat.

Hard disagree. I like Fallout 4 quite a bit, but I don’t think there’s any part of it I liked better than The Outer Worlds.

You have a fanboy perspective here. The Steam Deck’s ecosystem is hardware agnostic, and to a large extent, Steam agnostic. No one game needs to “stand out” on the Steam Deck when it plays almost every video game that exists besides the ones Nintendo makes. Out of the sample size of “almost every video game”, there’s a high chance that there are many that are important to you and not made by Nintendo.

I spent a few grand on my gaming PC. I can play those games on other hardware, but the hardware I bought plays those games the way I want to play them. The same goes for a Steam Deck compared to any other handheld gaming device.

There are actually thousands of games that run on Steam Deck with no additional configuration that aren’t even available on Switch, and conservatively, hundreds of those are extremely popular. Plus a lot of Switch’s library is on Steam Deck, where it tends to be a better version of the game for one reason or another, not the least of which is free online play.

But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn’t usually make; etc.

A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they’re granted though. I’m not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. “Knowing how to negotiate” can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn’t really something the developers are responsible for.

Looking through each series’ Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who’ve played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I’ve never played Dragon Age myself.

How do you figure? That’s not what I got out of this article.

Often times you do, but plenty of other times there’s nothing left, and I think that’s where the frustration sets in.

Matt Piscatella pointed out on Bluesky that a launch like this is only a function of how much inventory they made available. The Xbox One had the third most successful US launch of a console.

Nah, I loved The Outer Worlds. It gave me exactly what I wanted from the setting, it made me laugh, and it wasn’t bogged down in bloat by trying to be any bigger than it ought to have been.

The Outer Worlds 1 was a fantastic palate cleanser after Starfield.