toxicitizen

I honestly can't remember the last time I've seen bullshots. And Valve really don't have a history of it, either. It's always been more on the big publisher side of things.

Hints? There's clearly gameplay footage in there. And it looks so fucking gooooood! Also, it's not limited to one particular VR style, you can play standing, sitting, teleport or joystick movement, etc... Some more details about how it came to be and next year Geoff will be doing another Final Hours thing that goes more into what Valve has been doing the past few years.

Yeah, after MGSV there is no doubt in my mind that Kojima's real genius is as a game designer. He has a reputation mainly for his weird stories and being a "director" or whatever but his solid game design has always lowkey been the best part about his games, just not the flashiest. And, I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the hell out of his weird stories and I'm glad that Death Stranding sounds like it has a more prominent one than MGSV. But MGSV really opened my eyes in how it was the storytelling equivalent of someone farting in my face and yet that gameplay alone carried the entire game for me. And every single time I remember that gameplay I feel the urge to reinstall the game. I get why Death Stranding is divisive but I'm really confident that I'll love it and I can't fucking wait for summer 2020!

Lol please, not here too...

Well, I guess since the Valve was leaking pretty heavily they decided to just acknowledge it early. I don't own a VR headset but I'm really excited to see what this looks like. If it's anywhere near as revolutionary as Half-Life 1 and 2 were, then this should be a pretty serious killer app for VR. And this is the culmination of their years of R&D into VR, so if they're calling it a flagship title then I fully expect it to be.

Hahaha oh, well then I have no idea.

The Surge After a month away from it, I caved and bought the DLC so I could finish it already. It's uh... it's actually pretty good? That kinda came as a shock after the aggressively mediocre Lords of the Fallen but this might actually the biggest jump in quality from one game to the next that I've seen a developer make since Naughty Dog with Uncharted 1 -> Uncharted 2. I may be a little biased here, though, since I've wanted a Sci-fi soulslike for almost as long as the genre has existed. It's not perfect by any means but overall I really enjoyed my time with it. The main issue with it was the level design, I think. It's not bad or anything but the layout is all twisty and interconnected like you'd expect from a proper soulslike and the shortcuts usually go through these identical maintenance vents. So combined with the industrial setting and art direction, everything ends up looking super samey and makes it really hard to find your way through certain areas. The second area of the game took me forever to finally be able to navigate from memory, I would keep forgetting which shortcuts led to where. And after about a month long break from the game, having to return to early areas for achievements or collectables was basically a nightmare and I had to do a bit of "how to get to x" googling. It's really more of an annoyance than an actual problem, though, and it probably wouldn't be as big of a deal if you played the game without a break. But compared to the original Dark Souls where just thinking about it I can still make a mental map of almost the entire game, it just makes The Surge's level design stand out in a bad way. Other than that, the bosses are kind of underwhelming but that's pretty much it. The game overall is honestly super fun, the combat is fast but has this really satisfying weight to it and the story and side-quests are interesting enough (and sometimes depressingly dark lol). There's also this really cool system where if you want a specific rig, you need to find enemies that wear it and target/cut their limbs off to get parts to build it. I think the game may have gone overboard with input buffering, though. In Dark Souls it leads to this very deliberate combat where you need to commit to your button presses. But I feel like The Surge maybe buffers more presses than it should because there's been a few times where in the heat of the moment I'd mash like a dumbass and it would suddenly feel unresponsive enough that I'd go "What the FUCK is happening right now?!" Another point it gets over Lords of the Fallen is that the DLC isn't complete trash. Walk in the Park is actually one of the better areas of the entire game and even ties into the main story. The Good, the Bad and the Augmented is more like a set of challenge rooms that's fun but feels like a distraction more than a worthwhile addition to the game. And they both have "craft every single new piece of gear" achievements, so if you're an achievement hunter like me they end up padding the game out a little bit with the grinding for parts. So yeah, I went in with low expectations but I was pleasantly surprised. Sign me up for The Surge 2!

You're talking about the PC version, I assume? No idea for console but on PC I'm pretty sure even the base game comes with a key that's likely already been used and tied to a battle.net account. IIRC it came out before the battle.net launcher existed and you just typed in your key while installing but I'm not sure if you can still do that. So unless he hasn't played it since launch, the key is likely worthless now. Should probably ask to test it out first, just in case.

Good to finally have a release date, definitely gonna pre-order the full package before Reach launches. The CAD price for the full thing doesn't save you as much, though, so hopefully it'll show up on Humble or GMG for a little extra discount.

I was holding off on finishing The Surge in case the DLC went on sale around Halloween but it didn't so I ended up saying fuck it and getting it off some random site where it happened to be on sale. There's also this deal for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate that might be interesting to some. I got it because it added 3 months to my PC Game Pass sub for just 1 dollar but it also converted my existing sub to Game Pass Ultimate, which means I now have a full year of Xbox Live. I don't need Xbox Live but if you do this seems like an insanely good deal.

Alright, cool. Sounds kinda like the online feature of P4G, which was neat but ultimately pretty useless.

Tonight I decided that I'd activate that PS Now free trial and finally play Uncharted 4. Things went pretty smoothly for about 20mins until: game: "Press touchpad to open note" me: *looks at Xbox One controller* *tries every button just in case* ".........fuck" So yeah, great job Sony! Really glad you put so much thought into having your streaming service available on PC! I'll assume God of War and Bloodborne are equally fucked. To those that played Persona 5, does it require the touchpad in any way? I was gonna wait but if it's my only option then I might as well play it now, at least until I can ask my friend to borrow his ds4 or something...

I'll try to remember that if I ever own a Playstation console again. Wonder why they still don't, though. Even Steam charges me taxes now.

Has the game disc even been near your PS4 yet? Seriously dude, I worry about you sometimes...

Oh man, that's a good point. If it gets bundled, I could totally use that as an excuse to upgrade to a 1660 or something. They're already pretty cheap and it's basically an 80 bucks discount on top of that. And yeah, I always assumed people were exaggerating about SSDs. Then I got one and holy shit, it's night and day. I used to put off restarting my system after any kind of update because it took like 5mins to shut down and boot back up. Now it's basically instantaneous and what I do find to be excessively long now is waiting for my old HDD to start spinning and load up the video file I wanna watch.

Yeah, like 3 episodes in I realized that the weeklong wait just wasn't doing it for me and decided to wait until it was over. Then it ended and I just kinda forgot about it lol. I haven't even finished Demon Slayer, which I started like a month ago. Or shit, make that two months ago according to my post above. I can't stick with a show to save my life these days. The last one I managed to binge until I ran out of episodes was The Good Place and it was the first one in a while.

Trust me, you won't know the true meaning of bizarre until you get to part 3. Stands are such an insane game-changer for this series. ...fuck, I really need to watch Golden Wind already.

No but the fact that they went up simultaneously tells me this probably won't happen. They've gotten so much shit for it at this point that I think most pubs and devs should know not to have pre-orders active if they have any interest in taking an exclusivity deal. Plus, they had to have talked before today for the store page to go live at the same time and you know Epic has to have tried already. I imagine either 505 are confident the game will sell enough to not need a deal or Kojima just wasn't having any of it because he's BFF with Gabe. Seriously, how can one man have so many BFFs?!? edit: Just noticed they actually confirmed it's a simultaneous launch. I guess that rules out even a pathetic 1 month deal like RDR2 lol.

Guess not! Pre-purchase is up on Steam. Also up on EGS, which is weird because I could swear I remember them telling some indie dev that they couldn't add just any games to the EGS due to their process being long and complicated and that it wasn't worth it unless a game is exclusive. Funny how their process isn't an issue when it's a big game release they don't wanna miss out on...

@The Cowboy JRPGing Poet Yeah, calling it "three games in one" makes it clear you got the true ending. Fuck, that game was great. Really hope they'll end up patching the Switch improvements into the PC version because I'd love an excuse to give it a replay at some point. --------------- Destiny 2 Shadowkeep Man, I'm glad I knew to expect a weaker campaign and didn't buy the expansion specifically for it like Forsaken because holy shit I would've been disappointed lol. It's not bad but it sure feels like the expansion was done on a tight budget and the campaign just wasn't a priority. Which makes sense given their breakup with Activision but it's a shame because the setting is actually really cool and creepy. But after that great opening mission, you're basically given a list of filler tasks to go do until it's time for the final mission. Like, at least in Forsaken it made sense with the kind of story they were going for. Doing wanted bounties worked with the western tone of the plot and you were killing your way through the ranks to get to your real target. But here it's almost WoW-levels of "go get 12 monkey butts" shit. I mean, at one point one of your campaign objectives is literally "go do this strike". Like, some strikes are based on certain missions from the campaigns but here it wasn't a mission, it was the actual strike. Had to go through matchmaking and play with some asshole that just kept trying to rush past everything and dying because we weren't keeping up with him lol. So yeah, maybe don't get this one for the campaign. Get it if you wanna chill on a haunted moon and kill nightmares and robots. I know I do, although I kinda hope the soft relaunch was successful enough to fund development of a proper campaign next time.

Oh ok, I see how it is. I say this: and literally the next day Zachtronics just drops this on Steam out of fucking nowhere, making me a liar. I still haven't bought that A.I. visual novel they released over the summer because it honestly wasn't really what I wanted from them but I didn't expect to get a proper Zachtronics puzzle game just a few months later. Even after watching that trailer twice, I still have no idea what I'm getting into here and I wouldn't want it any other way!

Well, guess I'm all-in now. Wasn't sure if I wanted to get it right away but then I realized that, outside of Halo Reach likely launching soon-ish, there's essentially nothing coming out for the rest of the year that I want to get. So, fuck it! Got the Deluxe Edition so I'm good for the full year's worth of season passes. Looking forward to playing another story campaign but I also felt like at this point I just wanted to have access to all the content and be able to participate in limited seasonal events that are going away at the end of the seasons, like Vex Invasion.

That's the thing I don't get. They've been on their own for a while now and there's no way they're only just now underperforming on Origin. So what changed? It's hard not to look at the timing and wonder if Epic's bullshit played a part in this. Just a year ago, you had all the big publishers looking like they were getting ready to jump ship away from Steam. Then Epic started poaching games left and right and suddenly Microsoft is putting their games on Steam and Bethesda and EA are coming back. Things were starting to look pretty dire just a few months ago, so it's hard to believe the timing is just a coincidence here. It could be that Epic lit a fire under Valve's ass and forced them to reach out to publishers. Or maybe them entering the market so forcefully ended up hurting other publishers' efforts and brought them back to Steam. Another possibility could be that even with exclusives they're still not doing too hot, which could have scared the other publishers and made Steam more appealing. I mean, even when claiming a game did well Epic are still being super cagey about actual sales figures. And since we know their exclusivity deals come in the form of them essentially "pre-purchasing" a certain amount of copies, it's unclear how many of "X copies sold" are actual sales the developers benefit from since X could easily include those copies Epic "pre-purchased". The latter two scenarios would be some delicious, god-tier irony. ?

Welp, there it is and it's starting with an even bigger game than anyone actually anticipated.

It's published by 505 Games, for some fucking reason, so pirate bay I mean EGS is a distinct possibility.