Honestly, I think Resident Evil 4 has the perfect combat/control system for a horror-action game - an elegant balance of gunplay being tight & responsive, but also somewhat slow & limited, because combat in horror should make you feel like you're in a tense & difficult situation. I am 90% confident (or, rather, scared) they'll disregard this critical mechanical balance, modernise the controls, make shooting much smoother and easier, turning Resi 4 into a much more generic & less interesting shooter, and thereby completely undermine the atmosphere.

Has any Star Wars book/show/novel ever tried to explain the actual military logistics of the transition from Republic to Empire?

Like, how do you go from 'We're very slowly winning a grinding civil war' to 'We control literally everything with an iron fist' in a few years? I know the Clone Wars were manipulated, but the combatants were real. Some of the biggest corporate, trade, and financial entities in the Galaxy built robot armies and waged war. And then they all just sort of go missing.

The Hitman 3 2022 Roadmap reveal is about to happen, and if it's anything short of a DLC campaign with at least 4 full new levels, I'm going to be furious.

Ok, PC VR imminently, that sounds like a laugh.

Interesting to see Stellaris is planning a rework that broadly will make unity a currency for internal Empire management, and influence much more aligned with external force projection and expansion.

HOWEVER-

https://twitter.com/StellarisGame/status/1481597128422182920

The bigger issue with playing tall/internal-Empire-focus is Stellaris is ultimately about big military crises - great Khans, awakened Empires, the Crisis.

You have a big fleet or you lose.

Until that changes, whatever playstyle gets you the biggest fleet is the only viable one.

Just imagine this for a second.

What if Trump were never seen in public again? Not even if he wins the election. Executive orders emerge with 'his' signature, and Republican senators swear that they met him in person just yesterday. But he's never seen again. Over the next 4 years, video and audio are released, which are heavily questioned, but nobody can prove definitively that they're deep-fakes.

The tweets keep coming. Speeches are livestreamed.

And nobody ever knows for certain who's actually President.

The strangest The Last of Us take I've repeatedly seen is that Joel is 100% morally ok because the Fireflies were terrorists.

Which is strange thing to say without the context that what they were resisting is a military dictatorship that abolished democracy & civilian Government Like, the game doesn't hide this fact. It's in the prologue. The US is under permanent military rule. And not even competent rule. 90% of the Quarantine Zones we see have failed and fallen. Boston's probably the most successful we see, and it's still a mess.

Hmmm. Hold up. Just did a bit of Fallout 76 maths.

So there are 100 Legendary Run spaces. First space costs 1,000 SCORE. Each step is 25 more than the last. If my maths is right, that's ~224,000 SCORE needed for the whole thing. The Season is 10 weeks. Weekly challenges provided ~1,000 SCORE each, there are about 6 of them. Over 10 weeks, that's 60,000 SCORE.

In Elder Scrolls VI, I want to start the game as a guard, with my guarding duties as the tutorial, culminating in my first quest being to capture a mysterious silent character of randomised race/appearance, who then escapes in a staggeringly unlikely accident. For the rest of the game, every town you get to, every character is talking about the exploits of this mysterious stranger. Many of your quests involve helping those who got screwed over when the stranger chose to help an opposing faction in town.

It'll also take a long time to verify whether it is consumer-unfriendly or not.

So let me just put my Former-Marketer hat on for a second. If I wanted to make this as profitable as possible, here's what I'd do; Step 1 - Start it off like the early levels of an MMO. Levelling up is fast and easy. Make the challenges simple for the first week or so. Put some decent rewards early in the progression. Make sure people feel like they're making fast progress, and getting rewarded for it.

I have the craziest game of Warhammer 2 Mortal Empires going on right now.

Playing as Snikch, I made friends with Grimgor and Khalida, all normal, and then I saw what was happening in the rest of the world.

Where bloody TILEA had decided to reform the Roman Empire. I realised something was wrong when Tilea kicked Ikit out of Skavenblight. And then they just sort of kept going. With 4 full stacks. Expanding faster than anybody else in the world. Luckily, I confederated Ikit just before all Skaven were eliminated from that bit of the world.

So Tony Stark's big Thing is that he used to build weapons, but saw how terribly they could be misused in the wrong hands, so built the Iron Man tech instead...

Which immediately was terribly misused after falling into the wrong hands, but he just sort of went with it anyway...? At which point Nick Fury asked him to build a fleet of flying death fortresses, specifically designed to commit mass murder.

Stark built these, and they immediately were terribly misused after falling into the wrong hands...

That #2009vs2019 is kind of crazy when I think about.

You see, I was part of the hilariously lucky cohort who graduated from university in 2008, meaning I started my first full-time job in September 2008.

Y'know, that same month when the financial crisis properly hit. The company I worked at just managed to hang on for a while, but by December 2009, the time for mass redundancies had arrived. Obviously, I was among them.

So I started the decade unemployed, having spent the last year stressed out from trying to cling to a precarious position.

I'd love a more interesting foreign-character-visibility system - in CK2, it's too easy to just go to characters, select people with amazing stats/genetic traits and invite them over.

How would you know that some guy in a country you've never spoken to is genetically clever...?

https://twitter.com/deathscoming5/status/1185515984754364416

It would make more sense if you had excellent information about your immediate neighbours, with less accurate information as you went further away - a bit like diplomatic range in Imperator.

Scouting for talent could be a spymaster action, or trade/diplomacy could increase it.

Ok, hang on, we need to talk about Achilleus.

So, the big thing everybody knows about him is that he pretty much uniquely has two fates, and he can choose between them.

Fight in Troy, die young, be remembered forever.

Go home, live a long, happy life, that's it.

BUT People just sort of assume that means Achilleus chooses the former, because, y'know, he does die in Troy, and is remembered.

But he doesn't.

He chooses the exact opposite. In the Iliad, he decides he's done with somebody else's war. He chooses the second fate.

Ok, I'm horrified that some of you have never even HEARD of Diomedes.

So the Iliad is made up of 24 books, telling the story of a few weeks of a war that lasted a decade. Everything I'm about to say happens IN A SINGLE BOOK. So Athena - one of the strongest Gods - is picking out her favourite warriors in Book 5. And who's top of the list?

Diomedes.

So she decides to give him Batman-Arkham-detective vision to see Gods, and tells him to go stab Aphrodite.

In fact, let's do some thinking here.

Assuming the starting circle is the same as the Forest, Morgantown and Grafton are confirmed, and they likely won't want to overlap with the existing forest areas, we're likely looking at something like this. This makes Clarksberg almost a sure thing - to not include it, you'd have to have the starting area go so deep into the forest, you'd hit the lighthouse and Arktos - and they're both in the existing map.

Just... it's a story that's so far been primarily been about the importance of family, and suddenly Karen appears, confirms she walked out on her family with no justification beyond pure selfishness, but now she wants back in, but only if the people she abandoned do all the work. Everything we see and hear about her indicates she has no interest in doing any of the work that rebuilding the relationships that she broke takes.

You might hope that she'd want to be putting in the effort here, but nope.

Here's a big question I've been musing over.

The biggest issue that's constantly raised against Fallout 4 is that it isn't an RPG.

But I'm not sure why it supposedly isn't.

There's no concrete definition for an RPG, of course, but Fallout 4 does seem to fit those I've found. Is Fallout 4 based around building up a persistent character, whereby choices you make exclude other possibilities (ie, you specialise, so being able to do everything is effectively impossible)?

Yes, Fallout 4's SPECIAL/perk system does operate like that.

I've been watching eSports for over a decade at this point (back when pro StarCraft 1 started appearing on YouTube from Korea, so out of interest, I watched the full final game of the Fortnite World Cup, and... I'm not 100% sure why it's so huge as a spectator sport. It just seems a very odd format for viewers.

Absolutely, if you're following one streamer in their game, yep, that works, but in a World Cup setting, all 100 players are well-known folks, all with their own fans, but the coverage and the commentary can't acknowledge everyone.

One day I would love to make a video on why The Notebook is the worst romantic film ever made.

Because Noah is just the worst person ever. If you've never seen it, Noah sees Allie for the first time, decides he loves her (despite knowing literally nothing about her), and asks her out.

She says no. Very clearly. And then walks off.

But Noah's not having any of that.

I think the people mad about the Epic store maybe haven't realised just how bad Steam has become, and how it would be a huge risk for mid-sized game with no marketing budget.

Let me give a really simple example. How many games do you think are launching on Steam tomorrow? Because by my count on the Steam store's upcoming tab, it's 64.

SIXTY FLIPPING FOUR.

You have to get FIVE pages in before you hit the July 26th releases.