@stealthyoctopus: A familiar IP sells more copies. Big publishers are afraid to take a chance on anything that doesn't already have name recognition.

Hopefully they won't spend too much time trying to convince us that these worlds somehow fit together & just get on with telling a new & interesting story.

I'm all for this kind of service in principle but I don't think the technology's there yet. You really need to be close to the servers to get low enough latency. Don't think that won't stop your ISP from charging you extra for a "fast lane", even if it doesn't actually get you the speed you need though.

@filipers: Even in the base game, The Witcher 3 offers more costume options than most of these games charging $5 for a single outfit.

I find it difficult to say what value this stuff holds because I don't really play multiplayer games. I understand that servers cost money to run & that keeping development active helps in keeping players around. I don't think these cosmetic items are worth the prices they charge but I do understand that they have to support the game somehow.

I'm mostly a single-player gamer & that's where CD Projekt really sets the standard. A game should have everything a player wants for the purchase price. An RPG should have shiny armour options, a shooter should have a range of cool looking weapons, players shouldn't have to pay extra for that stuff. They definitely shouldn't have to pay to skip hours of grinding gameplay to get to the good stuff. CD Projekt seems to be making a healthy profit without getting greedy, I'm sure the big publishers could do the same if they made games for gamers instead of shareholders.

@moonco: Not likely but yeah, that's a pretty insensitive joke. If anyone from the victim's family watched the clip, they'd probably be pretty upset.

If you make it a real word, you ruin the joke.

Imagine future generations not even understanding that it's a made up word because Merriam Webster thought they were being clever.

Um... good?

It's sad that they even have to say it. We should be able to just expect that a single player game will have every the player needs for the price they pay up front.

@waelse1: I shot a lot of San Franciscans in Watch Dogs 2. But I was black in that game so I guess it was OK.

Jokes aside, this game was always going to step on a few people's toes. I'll be interested to see how the game handles faith rather than race. I think a story about how a cult takes hold of a community could be interesting if it's done well but it's usually handled pretty poorly in media.

It's amazing how many people just really don't want to engage with any kind of political discussion. I guess it's everywhere now & many just want to escape it for a while. This was always going to be a political game though, if you're complaining about political articles written about it, you must be blind.

That said, the author of this article seems like he's trying to bring something to the game that's not really there. If there's no recorded dialogue acknowledging your skin colour, then any sense of racial empowerment is purely imagined. A game like Divinity: Original Sin 2 makes huge efforts to ensure NPCs recognise the player's race. It sounds like Far Cry 5 gives you a slider in character creation but that's the extent of it. Let's look at the game for what it is & discuss that, not just try to impress our own politics onto it & expect everyone else to see it the same way.

@scottyp360: I think the problem was the lack of time put in to world building, not the lack of time on screen. Look at Shadowrun, it doesn't take long to see that they've actually thought about how the world would change with these fantastical creatures affecting society.

The movie depicts orcs as gangsta rappers & then describes metal as "orc music". It's world building isn't missing, it's there but contradicts itself at every turn! It looks like a victim of far too many rewrites & no consistent vision.

Ugh... I started out liking this movie but the more I think about it, the more problems there are.

I thought it was a fun movie but it really had problems with the world building. So orcs are black people, but black people are also black people? So history diverged from what we know 2000 years ago but everything is basically the same? We still had the Alamo, Shrek & the slave trade in exactly the same way as out own history? The enjoyment of the film starts to disappear as soon as you ask literally any questions.