ampersandrew

400 people across multiple countries and $100M spent on development doesn't count as AAA?

They almost certainly buy fewer things when the stuff they already have is designed to be played infinitely.

Careful with the spoilers. I've only done one trial so far, and it wasn't that one.

Yeah, I haven't seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there's more depth there, the game didn't want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren't just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I'm hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.

This game also does something that I haven't seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that's a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn't be so rare, but the industry's obsession with being "bigger" made it rare.

I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.

When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.

I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.

Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.

Volition surprised me by staying open as long as it did. It hadn't made a hit since Saints Row IV, and it had several high profile flops since then. I would have loved for Free Radical to finish making a type of FPS that doesn't get made anymore, but apparently they spent two years of that studio's life chasing Fortnite.

It's getting bad press from reviewers who didn't enjoy it for 10 hours as well.

Yup. I think this is it, but you might find better scans elsewhere. It doesn't tell you everything, but it shows you most of the map and labels the first handful of dungeons. Even knowing where the first dungeon is is such a huge help, because then you get a new checkpoint when you die, and once you beat the dungeon, you get an extra heart container.

I'll give it a look. Thanks.

Gotcha. Is that in the game, or would I have to modify it externally?

It exists in at least the enhanced editions of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and I'm told the first Dragon Age had this too. Though to be honest, even with the ability to script AI behavior, I'll likely end up just setting tons of conditions for auto-pausing like I usually do in RTWP games so that I can decide what to do for each character whenever some condition in the battle changes.

I also played the original Zelda via emulation, but the physical game came with a map that makes the game much more feasible to get through on your own. Once I had that, I was golden.