Nah, that game’s great. The writing’s not good, especially for the villains, but people like that game because it’s good.

It’s hard to consider an 81 on OpenCritic to be a trainwreck. People tend to buy games that review well, especially when it’s a co-op shooter with basically no competition.

That would be hard to believe, because the game already conservatively made tens of millions of dollars in a few days.

Is this not the third tabloid style headline here about essentially the same thing?

Ubisoft didn’t do this. It’s a community project.

The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.

I think these online subscriptions are proving to be a major factor in why there’s been a migration of audiences from consoles to PC. People are seemingly running the long-term calculus in their heads and realizing PC is cheaper at a certain threshold.

I think that’s exactly his point.

Not the current one, no. The Steam Deck is closer to a PS4 spec, and even if there weren’t optimization problems, this is built to a PS5 spec.

That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.

Boards like these don’t talk about Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed much either, but all of these are multi billion dollar franchises.

It’s by revenue over a certain amount of time, but I don’t know what that period of time is. A $35 game has to sell twice as many copies as a $70 game to rank just as high. Since the Steam Deck is about $400, depending on SKU, it’s usually in that top sellers list despite not matching the volume of sales that certain games do.

It wasn’t out of left field. They telegraphed it frequently.

I definitely wasn’t playing Borderlands at any point for the story. I like that it has one, but if they wrote some terrible villains, it doesn’t affect how much fun I had with my build synergies in those boss fights.

Borderlands 3 was significantly better, in my opinion.

Alright, fair enough. There are two ways to interpret that sentence in English, and I guess I read it the other way, haha.

Having played through the entire series this year, they’ve constantly communicated via their actions that they’re aware of what the previous game’s shortcomings were, and they acknowledged as much for BL4 in the marketing materials as well. As for Jack, leave him be. We’ve killed him, killed his fucked up clone, killed the AI preservation of his consciousness, teamed up with him in a prequel, and allied with the Terminator 2 friendly version of him via a body double/face-off situation. We’ve had enough Jack. Come up with a new good villain, lol.

The new DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II came out, Legacy of the Forge. I’m playing it after finishing the main game, but it’s looking like it will probably be best enjoyed when slotted into the main game. It’s early goings, but it looks like it will involve a lot of crafting and then selling things to upgrade your home, your shop, and your reputation. Still, there are new quests and more backstory for Henry’s “pa”, Martin, and I’ll take any excuse to play more of this game.

I’ve been playing Mafia II: Definitive Edition. It’s a pretty good crime story that leans heavily on Goodfellas inspiration (I guess if you had to pick one, that’s the one to pick), but the gameplay often feels arbitrary, which is a weird way to put it but probably most accurate. There was one mission that was literally just drive to a place and drive back with some story in between. Most are simple setups where a firefight happens in the middle. There are mechanics from GTA IV present that don’t really fit back into Mafia II’s core loop. In other words, this game is totally fine but not exactly a masterpiece. It’s serviceable, and I miss crime stories in video games, so I’m playing through this series before I play The Old Country.

I’ll also throw in an anti-recommendation for New Tales from the Borderlands. It animates well and looks nice, but this game basically is only story, and the story is awful. I played through it because I’ve now played through the rest of the Borderlands games, except Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and I suspect this game could be canon. If you don’t have the same compulsion to see the rest of the canon story that I do, steer clear. At least I’ve got Borderlands 4 waiting for me this weekend.

For anyone curious, I politely asked a streamer to check for me, and this game seems to still have LAN, despite the lack of mention in their FAQ and the store page and the explicit removal in Borderlands 1 GOTY edition.

Through lawsuits, we did get to see what those payouts were in the past, and they’re all individually negotiated in lump sums, not determined by algorithm. And those payouts were from the good days. Reporting indicates those payouts have dropped off dramatically, which was followed by a drop-off of Xbox ports, since that seems to be the primary way Xbox players play games at all.