Camera movement and perspective can have a huge impact on selling the images as “real”. You can have a drone hover over a race car, and it will look fake, because your brain tells you it’s a video game; “Here’s to You” from the beginning of MGSV: Ground Zeroes still looks better than most cut-scenes because it emulates a person holding a camera.

I’d also like to see them expand on crafted items, improve the experience of playing with a bow and arrow, and maybe rethink a few other systems that an expansion could tackle.

I’d recommend playing them in release order. You can skip the MSX games and go right to Metal Gear Solid, but these games do build on each other. MGSV is probably the best-playing game in the series, but it has the least of the story bits that the series is known for.

Metal Gear is a series that will turn on a dime from being deathly serious into breaking the fourth wall for a joke or gameplay reasons. They’re amazing.

Not just pausing; it’s poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won’t be there forever.

I’d say if you’re buying it now, you should be doing so based on what it is as though it never gets another patch, because sometimes they don’t.

That’s the best part. It doesn’t matter. (But the real answer is still like top 5 on Steam.)

Funny, but no, this is really on that pace, and unlike gestation, these kinds of things follow more traditional sales curves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

This feels like the moment that people should be using to come to the conclusion that video game budgets and development timelines are unsustainable.

15M copies in a month puts it on pace to be one of the best-selling games ever made.

Terrible name, likely online-only and with that kernel-level anti-cheat that makes it both intrusive and Windows-only, and it’s got hitstun decay. It’s like they’re trying to tell me not to play it.

They used to have purchases of “streaming copies” of movies, which is the same thing as setting your money on fire, but they don’t do that anymore.

or whatever Netflix charges every month to serve up mundane low quality streaming video

Netflix isn’t the service I’d point the finger at for low quality streaming video. That would be Amazon. They don’t even have the problem that Max has where it always starts low and then evens out by the time the recap is done.

We’ve seen games sold on Epic for less, and people wait to buy them until they’re on Steam. I do it myself, even.

This interview does not refute the rumor that there’s a work stoppage on Bloodborne due to a contract dispute between them and Sony. Anything new about Bloodborne is dismissed as “unable to say more”, so it sounds like FromSoft is going to make Sony pay up if they want to do anything new with Bloodborne.

GameSpy is patched out of the game now, and I’m pretty sure you can play over LAN regardless. Plus the games are available on GOG. If you don’t want to put up with microtransaction nonsense in these games, there’s for sure a route to avoid it.

I thought that was clear from the start. They haven’t really been shy about it. There haven’t been exceptions to games appearing on Game Pass day 1 when Microsoft owns it; not that I can think of, anyway.

Because if you have to play on their servers, they have more opportunities to upsell you on microtransactions.

It is planned obsolescence. I’m quite familiar with software development and its realities. They knowingly built a game that won’t continue to function in multiplayer after the plug is pulled.

In any case, you and I aren’t going to agree, but I take issue with their definition of “full offline” for the reasons we’ve already discussed, and I’m disappointed that the answer I found in this thread is that they’re not interested in adding LAN to this mode.

Then they can’t blame me when I buy from their competitors instead, who prioritized a critical feature in the development of their game. (And also, building the game this way is a larger drain on their resources than if they built it without the server requirement. They just want microtransaction dollars.)