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.

And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck

I don’t think I’ve ever had more great new game releases, personally.

They tried. They can’t sell movies that the rights holders won’t allow them to, and the studios all kind of unanimously decided not to do this.

We all want things to cost less, but as adults, there are realities to acknowledge as to why they can’t. I never said they’re not making profit on their hardware, but their actions (announcing prices and then raising them above their competitors after tariffs were revealed) indicate that their margins are probably not very high; marketing one price and then changing it is a tangible expense that companies don’t like to do if they don’t have to. This report that we’re commenting on shows that even being the only new console this year is not enough to make it a hot holiday item.

The market was just way smaller back then. Video games weren’t a mainstream hobby yet.