There’s a comments section on most videos, and even the nature of users uploading videos, often in response to each other, is social media as much as it is making art and entertainment.

Always has been.

I’ve been playing little else besides Divinity: Original Sin II for the past few months, and before I get into a list of criticisms of it, I want to stress that I still think the game is good; it’s just that everything about Baldur’s Gate 3 is better by comparison. Like Original Sin 1, D:OS2 is becoming a slog toward the end of the game. The solutions to so many quests are either unintuitive or purposely hidden. I don’t like to play with a walkthrough open while I play games, so there are a lot of quests left undone, and every quest matters in this game, because each level scales so hard. I’m frequently one level under where I ought to be, and that’s the difference between a fight being a cake walk or being just challenging enough that it takes me 3 or 4 tries to get through it, which is lengthening this playthrough substantially. Even things I initially liked about their RPG systems, like the action point system in D:OS2, are starting to wear on me, as I’m now finding it doesn’t solve problems as well as D&D5e. In fact, after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3, I was confident that Larian’s next game will also be just as great regardless of the D&D license, but now I’m wondering how much of BG3’s brilliance was Larian getting better at their craft after D:OS2 and how much of it was D&D rules doing a lot of heavy lifting. Surely Larian got better at writing, both characters and plot, after D:OS2 when building BG3, but will they still fall back on so many tedious RPG systems when left to their own devices, like the D:OS2 armor, cooldown, and source point systems? Will they still make each level scale so hard, and have so many of them that it incentivizes you to kill every NPC you can? I hope not. Hopefully they come up with something better for their next game.

They’ve been showing it for a while now, but it’s going to require Vanguard anti cheat, so that’s a deal-breaker for me.

They set up a new couple of threads in Alyx.

Now you’re not reading what I wrote.

There are multiple things to get out of Elden Ring besides a challenge, and as further proof of that, the DLC retained the challenge but not some of the other fine points I really enjoyed about the base game.

That is engaging with them, just in a way that they’d like to engage with them. From the time they bought the game, it ought to be theirs to do with as they like.

I don’t know how I could have written what I did without reading what you wrote. I think it’s just more of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing. And no positive review would have those words in them, because they’re not qualities that a fan of the game would notice (or even be able to define).

I did read what you wrote. I don’t know how metacritic solves the problem without proof of ownership like Steam has, but there’s a huge disparity between metacritic brigades and people who own the game. Searching for a few of those key words is going to be a quick way to filter for them, generally.

What good do a lot of user ratings do anyone if it’s just brigaded by people who haven’t played the game and were told to be upset about it by some influencer who has far more of a political agenda than the thing they’re upset about?

I suspect this is why some prominent indie games have shut up about release dates as well. Mina the Hollower, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Rift of the NecroDancer; I’m guessing there’s a marketing deal tied up with one or more of these games, where they expected to release this year and then got pushed back with the Switch 2’s launch. I have no intention of getting a Switch 2 at all, but to the uninitiated who doesn’t realize how many of those games are going to be multiplatform, I suspect it’ll have one of the best launch lineups ever.

Didn’t they retain LAN in the demo for D2:R and then remove it in the full release?

It’s close enough to doing everything or else you’ll be under leveled. I’m doing whatever I can find, and it frequently leaves me about one level lower than the lowest level baddies I can find.

I’d certainly appreciate it if the PC version had controller support.

You can co-op Vagante and Streets of Rogue as well. Both are fantastic in single player and multiplayer, and both allow offline local multiplayer; Streets of Rogue even has LAN.

They need to wait for that contract to expire.

Because Sony had previously paid them not to.

This one in particular may not have been dumb considering the studio they closed wasn’t the same one they built. Previous reporting said that they had about 70% turnover of employees due to Redfall not being the game that anyone wanted to make when they got a job at Arkane. So mandating Redfall in the first place was the dumb move.

You don’t need to slash a AAA studio down to the size of an indie; you can just spin off a small team from your larger one and roll resources on and off of that project as needed.