What does this series actually play like? I don’t think Monster Hunter is for me (though games inspired by it frequently are), and the story in World was pretty atrocious, so putting “Stories” in the title didn’t give me much confidence that I’d find a story with any value to it.

I gave it 5 hours. That’s a real shot and the point of this thread. And I also thought the story that I saw thus far had a tendency to info dump too much, which I found inelegant.

It’s good because other people thought it was bad is certainly one way to frame it, lol.

For what it’s worth, on a platform with the proper horsepower, I’d say the PvP experience makes it one of the best fighting games ever made, but if the single player content is important to you, you’re better off sticking with Street Fighter 6, the last 6 games out of NetherRealm Studios (Mortal Kombat and Injustice), or Tekken 8. Definitely do not play Mortal Kombat on Switch.

Could be, but I didn’t have the patience to see it. If that’s what they wanted me to see, I certainly felt it could have been paced better. You mostly only hear good things about this game, but my friends list on Steam has about a dozen people who stopped playing it around the same time I did. I can’t say why they put it down, as I didn’t poll them, but someone I follow on Giant Bomb had a pretty similar reaction to the front-loaded negativity of this game very recently, so I know it’s not just me.

But I wasn’t exploring failure. I was just annoyed every time I had to talk to Kuno or anyone else.

You spend far less time loading on an SSD, if you’ve upgraded since then. And it admittedly has a poor PvE experience even compared to its contemporaries.

The thing that stood out to me was that a lot of enemies would dash past you or over you, breaking lock on, making the camera more annoying than in other games.

I would like exploring those ideas, but it doesn’t change what I said above.

It was sort of like the Bethesda formula except that every quest was actually interesting and well-written. Plus there’s the part where taking down tougher monsters on harder difficulties requires appropriate prep, which made those fights more interesting.

I get that. But I consume a lot of crime fiction. The Wire, Guy Ritchie movies, etc. These stories are full of terrible people, but they don’t make me feel like I’m trudging through a story with a bunch of assholes.

I found nearly all of Disco Elysium’s characters so unlikable, (especially?) including the player character, that I could not enjoy it at all. I think I like the systems in it, and I’m happy when an RPG exposes its dice rolls; the voice performances were all very good; I just couldn’t stand it after 5 hours of trying.

The precedent is that their live service game is now preserved in a way few others are doing. Buying the game shows that there’s money to be made doing this, meaning others might have an incentive to preserve their shuttered live services, too.

And even then you’ll get the Berlin Interpretation people who would still say he’s wrong.

It’s an option available to devs, but I can’t speak to “usually”.

I don’t know the exact contract between these two companies, but often times a publisher like Sony will own the title/world/story and the developer will own the code. Sony is within their legal rights to make a remake of Demon’s Souls (also a Sony exclusive from back in the day), but it seems to have upset FromSoft, and when FromSoft is putting out bangers like Elden Ring, you don’t want them to find a reason to not put their games on your console. Other than Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, every other modern FromSoft game has a different publisher, whether it’s Bandai-Namco or Activision.

I’d say unless games get smaller, like they used to be. I don’t see AI solving problems like that.

There was a time where it did. A few other games did too. They changed the stick into a carrot, and now a PSN account just unlocks a few extras. But like I said, that hurt my trust as a consumer.

Which they can’t do without pissing off FromSoft, and they don’t want to upset FromSoft any more than they already have.

Companies make bad bets all the time, which is why Sony bought Firewalk and Haven. Even Japanese companies like Capcom can see that they make more money on PC than consoles.