Vince was great at his job for two reasons:

1. He knew how to make great games
2. He knew how to say NO to his corporate overlords

These are qualities that are damn rare in the AAA space. His absence will be felt and it's a darker day for gaming enthusiasts everywhere.

RIP Vince

This is such a tired argument... "Where do we draw the line?"

If anything AI generated ends up in the final product, it needs to be flagged for AI content. Nobody gives a shit if developers are using AI to massage their balls in the office. I'm not paying for design docs, schedules, or budgets.

Almost as if Copilot is a unwanted solution looking for a problem, forced upon users that are vehemently against it, at the direction of drug-addled executives at Microsoft who are failing upward and destroying an absurd amount of money by chasing trends... again.

It's crazy that the best era for Xbox is when they were shipping defective consoles that had a 70% mortality rate from the red ring of death. It was an incredibly scandalous shit show... and that's what we're fondly looking back on?

Things are definitely BAD for Xbox now.

Tried the Pillars 1 beta and the UI had me confused for a moment, but after that initial hiccup-- It's a great way to play! I love how the encounters are tuned to match the turn-based mode (preventing glacially-slow fights).

I was going to play BG3 again for the 100x time but plans have changed 😎

I just watched the 13-minute gameplay video and honestly... it looks great. Yes, I can nitpick the weapons sounding weak and the magnum sprint animation looking like it belongs in the Oblivion remaster. But otherwise it looks and feels like Halo CE plus added content from the future Bungie games.

Rather Microsoft give us an OS that isn't hot garbage 🙏

Throw in a Dead Space 2 remake and I'll personally door-knock for you like a messenger of god.

It was an absolute breeze until the tier 3 enemies show up and deal crazy damage. On my second playthrough, I found that Rage is quite good because the ranged attack can nuke+stun enemies before they spawn the lymbic blobs.

On top of that, the area and bosses following the Last Judge are more consistent with the rest of the game up to that point. So you have a difficult boss encounter gatekeeping an area that is comparatively easy. It makes no sense.

People here trying to justify this are 100% full of crap. 130 people can be hosted via VMs on a single aging server on a single rack, a fraction of a fraction of a low annual cost. And that same server would absolutely be hosting Splitgate 2 on a parallel VM partition.

I wouldn't call S2 "super bad" but it was absolutely a step down from S1. For me to call a season "super bad" it has to suck so much that I spend more time watching video essays about how bad it is.

Like, for example, Arcane S2.

Every business decision that Xbox makes is done out of desperation to fill a giant financial hole caused by gambling on market trends and losing.

Game pass, cloud streaming, buying Zenimax and Activision. These are all huge net losses for Xbox... and Microsoft is tired of burning money for nada.

I loved Doom 2016 but hated Eternal.

Dark Ages seems to be ditching many things I disliked about Eternal... which would entice me but its replacing them with other things I also don't like.

I don't want absurdly fast nor lumbering slow gameplay. I don't want platforming, and I don't want lore.

I'd rather Obsidian try new things and fumble a bit rather than giving us barely iterative products without passion or imagination.

FNV was not a slam dunk at launch. It was panned by critics and fans alike for numerous bugs and too much departure from Bethesda's FO3. FNV famously failed to meet metrics outlined by Bethesda. It wasn't until much, much later that general sentiment about the game shifted.

FNV is GOATED though.

It brings me a special joy to know Josh Sawyer is also a fan of XCOM. I have an absurd amount of hours in FNV and both Firaxis XCOM games. It remains true that the people who make great games also enjoy great games.