ampersandrew

If this were still two years ago, I might even hope for a GOG release. I have a hard time trusting Sony now since they started requiring PSN logins.

You may as well compare mechanics in Armored Core 6 against Dark Souls.

There are very different goals between these games. This is an action RPG where your whole character sheet is focused on combat, not unlike Dark Souls even in level design. The systems of Bethesda's games have sounded good to me on paper in the past, but in execution, they've always felt like they aspired to be what Larian is doing now and had very few actual benefits. They let you steal anything you want in this game because it was more relevant to this game's loop.

Will of the Wisps fell through the cracks for me. It came out at a time after I had switched to Linux and before Proton was a thing. I ought to make time to get around to it someday.

We know they sold 1.5M copies in only a few months at an MSRP of $70. We know that very few games cost more than $100M to make, and last I heard, this one barely squeaked over that line. You can do the math there. It won't take long for this game to become profitable if it isn't already.

Concord reviews being semi-positive don't matter when the audience knows that their purchase is worthless without a critical mass of other people purchasing it. Veilguard actually did do well; probably profitable already or will get there in the next few years on the game's "long tail", and it does have its fans. It was just under EA's projections/expectations, but we also understand from reporting what that game was rescued from. What we know about Shadows is that its pre-order numbers are tracking with Odyssey, the second-best-selling game in the franchise, and people have been dying for this series to go to feudal Japan for a long time. It would take extremely negative reviews to truly sink this game financially.

The intrigue that they set up in AC1 and 2 in the future story had me hooked. Then, as good as Brotherhood was as a video game, it jumped the shark at the end of that game as they realized they could no longer afford to get Kristen Bell in the VO booth every year. I never even played AC3, but I heard the story spoiled on a GOTY podcast at the time, and I basically facepalmed when I heard it described.

The 1+2 remake comes with an online requirement (unless you tell the game it's running on a Steam Deck via launch options, which is stupid), so hopefully they remove that nonsense when this announcement happens.

Even if this game functioned worse than Unity at launch, there's basically no world where it's a "colossal" flop, but it would affect sales of the next game. Plenty of previews are positive, so even if this entry is less well-regarded than its predecessors, it will still have its fans and likely do better than Outlaws.

We have to get THPS3 before that, surely. It's widely considered to be the best one.

For the longest time, they couldn't undercut physical MSRP with digital MSRP because they didn't want to upset Walmart and have them stop stocking their wares.

But that's what I'm saying. It's so unlikely you'll make it out of it that when you walk into the room and the EMMI is already occupying the space you walked into blindly, it's a frustrating unavoidable fail state.