Pre-ordering existed for the customer’s benefit back when all games were physical and you wanted to guarantee you’d have a copy available for you at launch. At some point, companies realized that they could use it to forecast success or, more nefariously, entice you to buy a stinker of a game before you’ve had time to hear that it sucks. I haven’t bought physical games in a while now, but when I did, the last time I had a hard time acquiring one at launch was more than 20 years ago (I remember Halo 2 being the mile marker for when companies got to be pretty good at meeting demand). In the digital space, it makes even less sense. They still do pre-order incentives sometimes, for the same reason as above, even when the game is good, but the bonuses are so throwaway anyway that it usually doesn’t matter. Digital storefronts on PC have a pretty good refund policy, so if you’re diligent enough, you can pre-order the day before it comes out, get the bonus, let the dust settle on review scores, and decide if you want to keep the game with the pre-order bonus or just refund it. There’s very little risk in that. Without a pre-order bonus, there’s absolutely no reason to bother, and quite frankly, I don’t feel good about supporting those bonuses in the first place.

I have no issue with early access games, especially if the game lends itself to the model, which would be anything sufficiently sandboxy that can be heavily modified by changing some variables or adding a single mechanic. Larian’s RPGs are very freeform in the ways they let you solve problems and can be upended by different powerful abilities and whatnot; roguelikes are perfect for this model, because you’re replaying them a lot anyway; regardless of genre, the ones that would catch my eye are the ones that are looking for gameplay feedback and not outsourcing QA for finding bugs to a bunch of paid customers. The real problem with early access for me now is that there are so many finished games coming out all the time that look interesting that it’s difficult to justify playing one that’s not done.

Pillars of Eternity II is one of my favorites, if you haven’t played it, and I loved Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 this year. I do consider Avowed to be more of an action game than an RPG though.

It’s probably easier if I just list the titles. I’ve already got them ranked. I enjoyed all of these games, and none of them were stinkers.

1. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
2. Avowed
3. Split Fiction
4. The Outer Worlds 2
5. The Alters
6. Dispatch
7. Borderlands 4
8. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
9. Blue Prince
10. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
11. StarVaders
12. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants DLC
13. Knights in Tight Spaces
14. Rift of the NecroDancer
15. Mafia: The Old Country
16. Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
17. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
18. Keep Driving

If it’s anything at all like the recommendation algorithm that Netflix popularized, it’s that they have tags in common (maybe even as simple as “online multiplayer” if they set a threshold on some value too low) and that people who played one had a decent enough overlap with people who played the other.

They have an incentive to put games in front of you that they think you’ll like, so I figure it really just is tough. Their hit rate isn’t so bad for me, and what I hear about console storefronts is that the recommendations are even worse. Regardless of platform, relying on a recommendation engine to get word out about your game strikes me as a bad idea. But speaking for myself, I played 18 games that came out this year and easily left at least that many others behind just because there isn’t enough time to play through them all.

People see Avowed and wish it was Elder Scrolls, or they see Outer Worlds 2 and wish it was bigger or something. I’m not really sure why these people come away with the criticisms they do, but in my opinion, Obsidian made two of the best games this year, and those games were rated in the low 80s on average on Open Critic.

They’re also one of the few studios out there that can manage California salaries, remain a multi-project studio, and not scale up so fast that they’re trying to build games they can’t afford to make.

He’s arguably the best investigative journalist (of a very short list) in video games.

I disagree with your criticism of my comment.

Sounds the same to me. You do lose nuance in brevity, but I didn’t expect someone to see that and think I don’t like video games.

Looks like you put words in my mouth when I was keeping it short.

No, it doesn’t. My problem is that missing a parry, on an animation I haven’t seen before and haven’t been able to learn the tells of yet, which are purposely full of misdirection to make it tricky, was overly punishing during the learning process. Succinctly, it’s that there’s not enough fault tolerance later in the game. The parries feel great. The road up to learning the timings was frustrating the further into the game I went.

If whenever a game says “this is how you play the game” and your response to that is “it shouldn’t be”

That response is what a critique is. Metroid Prime 4 says, “you play the game by collecting these green crystals,” and many critics said, “it shouldn’t be.”

I beat the game on normal difficulty. Believe it or not, you can be good a thing and still dislike it. And I like the game, for the record, but my criticisms of how much weight they give to certain parts of the combat, which changed somewhere around the back half of act 2, mind you, hampered my desire to do more of it in act 3.

My experience was my experience. I’m glad for that person that they found that build. I did not, and I’ll wager most others didn’t either. The last third of my game was spent pumping points into defense and vitality to alleviate the issue, but it was a drop in the bucket. This is like when I vented frustrations with RE2 remake’s scaling difficulty, and someone pulled up, “Well, speedrunners don’t run into this issue, because…” I’m not a speedrunner. I’m a guy playing the game for the first time, and I used the information in front of me to make the best choices I could, and I still came away with criticisms. In CO:E33, it led to situations where the damage was so high and the action economy so constrained that it was faster to throw the fight and reload than it was to take a hit on the first turn and recover from it, and that sucked.

I have a criticism or two about one video game, and you leapt to “gaming isn’t for you”.

Sure do. I got good and still have this criticism.

Good for them. Did they do it without dodging too?

Like that the story is bifurcated and that the combat in the late game is parry or die?

Because the new ones are great. There has been no shortage of bangers for the last few years.