@dorog1995: Nope. It has a 2 in the end. That's a "don't buy me" as far as any sort of new audiences are concerned. If this does well, they'll maybe do 2 next.

@so_hai: Aside from popping a lot of people's cherries when it comes to "pre-2007, the game is pushing against you, not pushing you forward" style of video games, it attracted lots of excitement and attention from streamers/youtubers trying to figure the game, story & mechanics out.

The games that came after focused more around fixing or iterating on what was already there (which is also true for DkS1, when compared to Demon's Souls) and are objectively superior and more balanced when it comes to the vast majority of mechanics and styles of play (try to use a whip or cesti in the original, haha, might as well stop playing) but also feel more "gamey", "guided" or "manufactured", unlike DkS1 that feels like someone created a realistically interconnected world, and then went around meticulously locking doors in such a way that your mind is blown whenever you realize how each area connects to another after you unlock them.

It generally feels more open and exploratory, especially in the beginning segments, and the fact that you can begin the game with a key that breaks the game even more open makes it way more interesting to revisit or mess around with than its more "optimized" brethren.

Having all these failures who wanted to be in the movie industry but ended up in video games instead can only be detrimental for the integrity of the medium as far as I'm concerned.

With Sony's western studios shifting towards dumbed-down interactive movies, Telltale games and walking simulators becoming more of a thing, it seems as if video games have become this vessel for movie industry drop-outs to use as their creative outlet. For the last decade or so, I've been growing more and more disappointed with the output of bigger western studios, what with them placing "performance capture" and "set pieces" above actual game design and settling for bare-bones, rudimentary game structure.

Personally, I thought I would never see the day when I would start veering towards the output of companies like Nintendo, but here it is, slowly creeping in.

@Xristophoros: Because the industry itself uses them interchangeably. The Crash Bandicoot remakes are officially a "remaster" for instance.

@redhedjack: Half-Life 3 is a meme, no one actually cares that much.

So after Valve tried desperately to veer PC gaming and their platform in a more open direction with Linux support/Steam OS and Steam machines, trying to ensure Steam's survival in the face of the impending closed garden policies of Microsoft that will slowly but surely push Steam and any other non-Microsoft DRM services off Windows, they decide to quit and play by the rules of the big boys.

It only took them 15 or so years to see the same light that western publishers saw when Microsoft convinced them to abandon development on PC as a main platform. It is folly to design around a platform of variable hardware and software unless you are willing to compromise. If Gabe Newell actually means what he is saying, we can expect Valve to focus their development around their own hardware, or fixed hardware configurations (aka consoles) in the future.

Yeah, all five people in the west that care for a 5 year-old MMO installment to a washed-up franchise that looked dodgy even by 2012's standards are totally wishing for it.

@Thanatos2k: It was discussed way back then that Valve isn't in a position to make such a "promise". As long as a clause describing such a situation is absent from Steam's distribution agreement on the publisher side of things, Steam is as good of a ticking time-bomb as any other DRM platform. What some random Steam Support employee who may not be with Valve anymore "promised" almost a decade ago has no value whatsoever.

If Steam ever goes down, your games will go down with it. Though realistically speaking, whoever owns Steam at that point in time will just sell the service to a different company (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) who will gradually ingrain Steam into their extant distribution service, and Steam users will be forced to agree with whatever new ToS or abandon their games. That's a pretty funny hostage situation for people to get themselves into. Corporations win, consumers lose, no exceptions.

@realityshift:

Review Scores: 1 person. That's why they don't matter.

This stuff: The entire GS editorial team, most likely.

He should have played Final Fantasy XIII instead. No handicap whatsoever.