And then automatically download it to everybody's iTunes and watch the world have a melt down. :p

^^^^^Seconded.

I think a Skies of Arcadia remake or a sequel/reboot would translate very well to a real-time action-RPG format.

EA didn't kill the series, Respawn's focus shifted.

The Apex team is the Titanfall team. Apex originally planned to have mechs in the multiplayer, but they found the battle royal format was completely invalidated by giving a handful of players mechs and it trivialized most of the experience.

And Titanfall is not primarily a single-player game. The campaign from Titanfall 2 was the result of a studio-wide game jam where they broke into smaller teams and rapid-fire prototyped ideas for a single-player Titanfall campaign. The best ideas made it into the final product. But the focus for Titanfall has always been multiplayer first, and that's where Apex came from.

I would love it if they made another single-player Titanfall campaign, but their PVE devs have almost exclusively shifted to what they refer to as the Star Wars Jedi teams.

Fear not, though, they're working on a single-player Star Wars FPS right now, and a lot of the Titanfall campaign ideas will likely show up, at least in spirit, in that project.

It's only a benefit for the devs. There's currently a huge push against working devs to the bone, but the publishers have shown zero interest in allowing games to be delayed more than they already are.

The work culture for devs 10 years ago was not sustainable, and I'm glad many studios are actually putting an effort into taking better care of the humans who work on their games. But the unfortunate result of that are games that take longer to finish.

The publishers won't bend on this until gamers start voting with their wallets. It hasn't happened. In fact, the opposite is happening. Games are making more money than ever, which gives publishers very little reason to care.

Deus Ex is one of the greatest games ever made. But it's not the greatest game ever made in 2023 because it's never been the greatest game ever made.

Dear god I hope so. I don't love him as a candidate, but I can't deal with Donny anymore. It's just too exhausting.

@davillain: I wouldn't say I hated it, but it did not capture my attention.

I found the story almost nonsensical in how it communicated information to the player. After playing for roughly 10 hours, I still had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on, who I was in the context of this story, and why any of it mattered.

The story worked in vague metaphors, almost. I knew I was Jesse Faden, I knew this building was called the Oldest House and had weird sci fi magic powers of some sort, and I knew that I was able to channel them in some way, but the story seemed to expect me to care about that purely by their existence without giving me any tangible reason for why any of this was so important.

In a lot of ways, it felt like a sequel to a game that nobody ever played and was made with the expectation that you'd already experienced the first story and didn't need context for what was going on.

It seems like they followed the narrative rule of avoiding exposition to such a degree that they forgot their audience didn't develop this universe alongside them.

The level design is something I found absolutely infuriating. There is a certain level of feeling lost in a Metroidvania that's an expected part of the genre, but it's clear that the environment artist and level designers did not work closely enough with each other to develop a visual language for guidance in the game. It was far too often I was just wandering aimlessly hoping to accidentally find what I needed.

The systems design was... overly complicated for what the game was. There were too many instances of "This upgrade adds .035 damage to your weapons" and other systemic modifications for your arsenal that were borderline trivial.

I love Remedy, but overall my biggest problem with Control was that it just didn't fit together as nicely as a big budget game should, and after dealing with these frustrations playing the game for awhile, I finally just stopped caring and never turned it on again. It was a game that I wanted to like far more than I actually liked.

Substance. Depth. Forward-thinking ideas. The sense that the people making it actually understand what Halo is and why people care about it.

@BassMan said:

Take a look at this forest scene running on UE5 max settings on my system (no OC). Only 1440p and the frame rate is brutal. Sure, I can scale it to run better on my hardware and it will probably still look decent, but imagine trying to scale that to run on the much weaker console hardware. It is going to look and run like shit. The Matrix Awakens demo was already a disaster on consoles. It was blurry as fuk and couldn't even run at 30fps. This is why we need powerful hardware like the RTX 4090 to take advantage of the latest game engines. Advanced UE5 games are going to be shit on consoles. The mid-gen consoles can't come soon enough.

Our current project is in Unreal 5, and it is without question a demanding, punishing beast of an engine.

This is where programmers do, in my opinion, some of their most impactful work in games. Whichever tech department can figure out how to whittle down what's being rendered, processed, etc, on screen with the smallest amount of overhead will be the dev team that's able to capitalize on what Unreal 5 can do the most.

I'm optimistic this will improve over time. Right now, everybody working on Unreal projects are trying to milk every bit of juice the engine has and are, from what I've seen personally, significantly less concerned with performance, compared to achieving the highest fidelity visuals imaginable.

Once the "look how pretty it is" honeymoon phase is over and people stop turning all the dials up to 100 (a good amount of which they won't need at any level for the project they're developing), people will start to figure out how to efficiently pull this type of stuff off, and more importantly, figure out which parts of UE5 they don't need to be using/aren't worth the performance cost.

It has an 88 on Metacritic because people have different opinions about what types of games they like, and in the case of Ratchet and Clank, more people thought it was good than thought it was bad.