Half-Life: Alyx
AMA on Reddit right now for those interested:
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Reviews are in
And don’t miss @MacForADay covering the game here
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It has been so long since I played the original, this is going to be the highlight of the year for me.
4.10.20
Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Official Theme Song Trai…: Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Official Theme Song Trailer - YouTube
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That looks amazing! Love the story idea and the art. Too bad puzzle_jumpers are beyond my visual capacity. I’d love to read about it though. 
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SPOILER!
The entire opening sequence for the FFVII Remake. 
FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE - Opening Movie: FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE - Opening Movie - YouTube
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So we’re finally getting that advent’s children prequel? 
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Firmament R&D by Cyan
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Speaking of Cyan, here’s an Interview with Rand Miller about HyperCard and 3D asset creation and Myst and his first game dev experience.
Of course they went the other way from NMS and hand-crafted everything. 
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Oh, the…
The whole AAA-industry can just go die in a fire, they’ve become worse than sports.
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I’ve been looking through the offerings from Pax East.
In my view. it’s wall-to-wall cheap, poorly made trash. There’s absolutely nothing I would buy. Most of what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t install if it was free.
Something’s gone horribly wrong in the world of games.
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It is called Fortnite…seriously, money money money, add ons, DLC…etc…
HG really stands out as different right now. Even the recent good games, like Outer Worlds, Jedi Fallen Order, have been very short. Some people are actually happy about that and are calling for the end of longer gameplay…are they crazy? $60 and I am done in 10-30 hours? No thanks. Red Dead Redemption was the best bang for my bucks last year.
There is a bigger reason we are still playing NMS. It has filled a huge gap in my gaming world. There is just nothing else out there. Or maybe HG has spoiled me?
I admit that I am a huge Animal Crossing fan. Don’t hate me, please. Nintendo has the best booth. (The new AC will have terraforming, )
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I was wondering about that too. Is the market over-saturated?
When you come out with a new game idea nowadays, you need top-tier visuals and innovative gameplay plus distinguish yourself from 20 years worth of competition, or you go under.
Games have practically become interactive movies in which we role-play and show off our achievements. Development of games with all bells and whistles takes longer every year and requires hundreds of developers, storywriters, designers, musicians and motion-captured actors, and the publishers need to get this investment back in sales numbers. (Compared to Deus Ex 1 and Half-Life 1 which were created by 20 developers each, and still sell today.)
Today people expect to live in games, multiplayer has become where you hang out with friends, from the parent’s WOW guild to the kid’s school’s Minecraft server. When a multiplayer game winds down and players stop coming regularly, the remaining invested players react emotionally like their friends&family move to another city, and the resulting outcry is another thing publishers have to deal with. Even though longevity is a compliment to the dev team, there are only so many “seasons” (DLCs) that they can produce before a game becomes repetitive and the engine outdated.
So as game dev, either you plan 10 years ahead, or make a cheap trash which gains you money this year…
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There definitely was a dearth of space games! And several publishers over the last decade tried to fill it: Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, Star Citizen, NMS, EVE, each of them finding its niche somewhere on the scale between PvP and Exploration. PvP is way easier to program than Exploration, because competitive players provide stimulating content for each other. Whereas PvE and exploration are difficult to mass-generate.
Recently I’ve been watching Star Citizen streamers, their alpha/demo game has received many updates. Still miles away from finishing, but not cancled yet. I decided against kickstarting SC because I personally don’t like their dead-serious style, but it will definitely fill another gap.
(Well, I hope it will, they are alas stuck with a director who has not published any game in 20 years, and his 2003 game was even finished by someone else. He sees what other producers do with dev teams of their size and how long it takes others to produce games with certain features – and he promises thrice the features in a third of the time, really strange.)
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There have been a number of games that I wanted to try but, then I see that you either must play with others or the players actually prey on one another…not going there. The world is full of enough bullies and would-be-emperors. Why would I want to spend my relaxation time defending myself and my stuff?
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Agreed. I don’t mind the existence of PvP games – as long as there are also others available. I like that the PvPers can go have fun… elsewhere… and leave me explore in peace. 
You know Raph Koster’s book on “fun in games”? There is not one answer (quoting from memory):
- Killers enjoy competition and strategy, but only humans are challenging opponents. They want to beat other players.
- Achievers enjoy levelling, objective success measurements, spreadsheets, and trophies. They want to beat themselves (their own highscores).
- Explorers enjoy aimlessly poking around, solving puzzles, and finding easter eggs. They play to master the little details, levelling up is secondary. They want to beat the level-maker.
- Socializers enjoy the community. They don’t want to “beat” anyone – but they’ll support their guild in whatever they want to beat.
When you attract these four personalities into one game, they will invariably clash:
- Socializer “helpfully” (accidentally) spoils the solution to the Explorer’s puzzle by chatting about it.
- Socializer does not understand why Explorer keeps running off alone, and why Killer scares away all the chill peeps.
- Killer sees everyone else as fun interactive game elements. Socialiser and Explorer see the Killer as killjoy.
- Achiever enjoys beating the same raid 100 nights. Socializer enjoys being part of the guild 100 nights. Explorer gets bored after the second raid. Killer gets bored by the NPCs and starts griefing players instead.
Optimally, you want your game to only attract compatible player types.
It’s easy to offer trophies and highscore lists that satisfy Achievers, it’s easy to offer a chat and a marketsquare where the Socializers can play dance animations, and it’s easy to offer an arena or “competitive mode” that rewards Killers. We’re still working on procedurally generating the perfect content for Explorers though.
PS: Sorry for writing so much, I’m just really into this topic. 
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So that would make me part Achiever and part Explorer. That is why the Uncharted series is one of my favorites. I have played through them multiple times.
Excellent story.
Lots of exploring.
Nice little treasures hidden away to look for and thus achieve a 100% goal.
And I can play it alone and therefore move at my own pace, which by my kids accounts, is an excruciating crawl. I gotta poke my nose in every nook and cranny. 
Red Dead Redemption 2 fulfilled my needs as well.
I love looking for little ‘bits’ every place I go. Standing in a room and digging through every cabinet and looking for scraps of paper with clues to interesting things etc…I love that kind of thing.
That is the one thing that NMS lacks. If they could somehow work that in, I would be in heaven.
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Release date has been adjusted
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Just played the FFVII Demo and I love it! I played on the Normal setting with full control over the battles. There was a little bit of an issue when fighting multiple targets. The camera does not swing around behind me the way I would prefer and caused me to have to manually tap the camera around so I could clearly see my target. It was not much of an issue and perhaps camera can be set in the full version. With a free-range approach to battle, that might be too much camera swinging though. Perhaps it is better the way it is in the demo.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed what there was of it. The final Boss was challenging but not too much. If you remember the strategy from the original, it still works. This is not a complete button masher. There is a strategy involved including knowing when to block and evade and when to take cover. When to heal and when to fill up your gauge for your characters special attacks.
There is enough divergence from the original to make this worth playing through again. I am glad because I never see the point in re-making a game exactly as it was before.
I took lots of time to just look around and admire the detail put into this game. Very nice.
This version of the game looks like it will add so much depth to the characters as you can now really experience their personalities fully.
This is my most anticipated game of the year. 
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