Wow, it's really been a year for consoles. Dad of War, Spiderman & RDR2 all denied to PC gamers.
I can wait for Red Dead to come to PC but I really need to get my hands on a PS4. There are so many good exclusives.
Meanwhile, I've pretty much just been playing Warframe all year. Most AAA games just aren't grabbing me anymore - they're just a bloated checklist of features, not a streamlined experience. I'd really love to get into some of these indie games but I'm a bit of a graphics snob. I played plenty of pixel art platformers in the 90's but I just don't find those compelling anymore either.
FC5 was already a re-skin of FC4, which was a re-skin of FC3. If you've played all those games, the formula is getting pretty old by now.
There could be something interesting with the story here but I fear it's ground that's been trodden too much recently. It's stuff we've seen before in The Walking Dead, The Last Of Us, Fallout, Mad Max & more. It's going to be tough to tell a new story without just repeating all the tropes we've seen before.
Valve have been sitting on their laurels for too long. Steam is a pretty decent platform now with a lot of good features & there is definitely the "I want everything in one place" factor but their sales aren't as good as they used to be & they haven't exactly innovated a lot with their service. The Steam Workshop is nice to have but many mods require the Nexus Mods launcher anyway.
Between Origin, Uplay, Battle.Net & GOG, many people's games are getting split between different platforms anyway, the "everything in one place" excuse is already disappearing so perhaps consumers will be willing to give a new platform a try. They're going to have to give some good incentives to buy somewhere other than Steam though & pricing will be a big factor.
Whether this succeeds or fails, hopefully it will introduce a bit more competition to the market & consumers will win out in the end.
Loot boxes make games actively worse. They often cut content out of the game to sell as microtransactions, but what is worse is that they remove customer choice. Rather than letting people buy what they want, they implement a gambling system. They exploit "whales" who are weak to these tactics, while making the game more grindy for everyone else.
There is literally nothing good about loot boxes unless you're a shareholder who doesn't care who you exploit to keep making more profits than the last quarter.
Fallout 76, a buggy mess; Black Ops 4, a game that dropped the single player component & still charged full price; Red Dead 2 a game that was actually good - is it really surprising which one sole well?
It's nice when the market actually rewards good game development & not trash.
@Barighm: Fair enough, but my main point is that there are years worth of Souls-like games so you had better make a good one if you want to compete. If you're early to jump on the bandwagon, you can get away with something that's not great (it's my firm opinion that Dark Souls is not actually a great game but I won't get into that here), if you're going to join the trend in 2018, you better have something good to offer.
Darksiders was a good B-tier God of War-style game. If they were going to switch the series to being Dark Souls inspired, they missed the trend by about a decade.
This game looks like it hasn't progressed since the PS3 era - graphics or gameplay wise. It's a shame it still runs so poorly despite looking so dated.
I played the previous entries in the series but I think I'll give this one a miss. Even if goes on sale, is it worth 12 hours of my time?
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