High enough regard to be very profitable, which makes the job cuts even more ridiculous.

Alicesoft is one of the major dev studios in this exact space, but their games range from having some non-con to outright featuring it. Not for everyone.

Honkai: Star Rail. I love turn-based RPGs, and it continues to have the best turn-based combat I’ve ever played. The main story also has my favorite fiction trope (a shake-up of a pantheon) and it’s got amazing music, so it just hits a lot of really good spots for me.

Having played a chunk of the demo with Japanese audio, this hasn’t been a literal translation situation. It’s a standard JRPG localization, closer to NISA’s work with the series than XSEED’s that was on the loose side.

Yeah, was a solid move to echo the series opening with the in-game engine.

A roguelite structure seems like a natural fit for the premise, too.

Best gaming news I’ve heard in a while. This was a fantastic new IP and really shows a lot of promise for future games. Really excited to see where they take this world.

I still see the fifth generation as a lost one for pixel art. The games that do it really well in that era are few and far between (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Suikoden, Breath of Fire IV) and even those still had 3D elements in them that have aged like milk.

I too grew up more on pixel art, but the problem I always had with 3D in the 90’s was that–on an objective, technical level–it was already being done so much better elsewhere than it was on PlayStation and the others. Both PC and arcades were consistently driving much higher framerates, and by the late 90’s, far better picture quality. It wasn’t even four years after the PSX that the Dreamcast launched and completely outclassed it in graphics potential. I feel the move to 3D in the console market was just too early. I guess I can sort of see why some would be nostalgic for it, but to me this trend is the equivalent of being nostalgic for 19th century movies.

What I don’t get is why this trend is happening now. The tech’s been there for indies and the like to do this for a while. The demo for people old enough to grow up with these games has also long been in disposable income territory. Maybe we’re just oversaturated with pixel art at this point?

Impossible to rank, so I’ll pull from at random from a top 25 I did not long ago:

• Trails to Azure - This one had a massive impact on me, from musings on depression and self-worth to love for a city, a community, and the hard choices that come from that love. Incredible story and character writing. All boosted by a well-developed world with a lot of moving parts and a crazy good soundtrack.
• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames - Endlessly replayable. Holds up even to this day. Every time I think about it, I’m amazed at how they got lightning in a bottle with this new idea.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Just one of those games where every single facet clicked for me. Visuals, writing, setting, soundtrack, gameplay, meta-gameplay, decision points. All of it.

Unfortunately it’s a thing when going back to older games after being living in the map marker era for so long. This is a big part of why games back then came with annotated maps so you’d at least have a reference for all the locations.

I’d say at the minimum, don’t be afraid to pull up maps and take notes.

Setting aside how unusual it is for overall spend to decrease in this age cohort (I encourage people to read the WSJ report linked in this article), this is the only comment here that hits on the most newsworthy part of this. Video games have been recession-resistant for decades, but now we’re seeing it as a leading category for cutbacks. Even though gaming is a low-cost hobby, zoomers have found alternatives, and that surely includes F2P games.

While trends haven’t been great for a while now, this is the most alarming data I’ve seen yet for the traditional gaming market. I feel like I’m gonna blink and there’s going to be a generational divide like there is with baseball.

Improved ray tracing is key. We’re at a point where hardware improvements aren’t for selling games to end users, they’re for cutting costs for developers. Project managers don’t want to spend time and resources handcrafting lighting anymore.

We saw it before where making SSDs baseline didn’t necessarily always lead to a change in world design but certainly led to cuts in asset streaming optimization. Same with framerates.

The domestic market can be, and even that depends on your perspective. For example, China doesn’t have the insane Disney copyright regime the West has that artificially suppresses competition.

Competing in the domestic Chinese market is another conversation entirely, as right now, for video games, China has to come to us. The remnants of insular, planned economy only get you so far when you’re trying to build soft power and expand into foreign markets.

Mario & Luigi games are still JRPGs, which is a genre that’s more of a vibe than something easily defined. Here it’s a little easier because the series traces back to a major JRPG developer in the 1990s.

Even Expedition 33, another one with timed gameplay, is frequently getting lumped into the category (though that might change in coming years). That’s why I prefer the term Japanese-style role-playing games, as the genre is increasingly seeing game dev outside of Japan.

depends how much chinese influence you want in the gaming market.

There’s no stopping that train now, Tencent or no.

Traditional devs need to be ready to compete, and breaking up monopolies makes for a market more prepared to do so.

Worth it just to get your socks blown off by the opening theme, if nothing else.

It’s not the best Civ has ever been, but RomanHoliday’s AI rework seemed to mostly resolve the biggest problem I had with it, which was the AI falling apart by the Renaissance.

Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.

Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can’t have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!

That’s the thing, for the big publishers, the end user (consumer) is only part of the puzzle. Investors and business partners (such as licensees) are more important, and have been for years. They bring in the wealth.

End users are neither organized nor informed enough to have a seat at the table. The masses will gravitate towards their big properties and marketing will be shaped to that effect. Acquire said big properties if you don’t have them, and make sure all the potential investors know you did.

David Wise’s twitter would have been wild 😂

Damn, you must have a beefy rig. Even setting aside the weird texture issues, FPS was all over the place for me. Knew it was a hard pass pretty quick.

Still amazed how well Wilds sold after that dumpster fire of a demo.

I’d also recommend they open up the co-op more, but common sense multiplayer seems a bridge too far 🙄