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.

That’s a lot of money for any game, let alone one that will also be launching on Game Pass and, like its progenitor, is smaller scale than other open world RPGs of this ilk.

It’s this thinking that led to Starfield and Redfall being priced at $70 and Hi-Fi Rush priced at $30.

I could bitterly rationalise it if this were the release date trailer for the next Fable and I discovered Playground Games was charging me $80

Why? Playground hasn’t even made a game in this genre before. Why do you expect that to be more worth $80 than the company that’s been making acclaimed RPGs since its inception?

We very much do need GOG to be competitive with the market leader but with the primary selling point of DRM-free, yes. And is it a coincidence that the beginning of your username is the same as that awful YouTuber?

For the fighting game nerds out there: an interview on IGN confirmed that there are KI breakers during active tags, and combos will be limited in similar ways to Killer Instinct, meaning a combo meter rather than hitstun decay. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; this comment wasn’t for you. These were the answers I was looking for, and now this is my most anticipated fighting game despite having no familiarity with the source material.