Ronnie

Nominees announced yesterday Most nominated games Six nominations: - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Super Mario Odyssey - Horizon Zero Dawn - Destiny 2 Five nominations: - Cuphead Four nominations: - Persona 5 - Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Three nominations: - PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - NieR: Automata - Uncharted: The Lost Legacy - Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

So Mii racing costumes in Mario Kart 8 should be bundled in with all the shitty stuff in Battlefront 2 that actually holds back progression? That's a very ignorant way of looking at things.

I'd completely forgotten about Splatoon, mostly because I can barely remember what the amiibo offered. But ok, Splatoon. I can mention another dozen games that barely offered anything apart from cosmetic stuff. My point is the MAJORITY of amiibo unlocks are for minor things. Witcher 3 is a single player game, and had two big DLC expansions. I absolutely do think they need to do it. It's a very simple concept and I can't quite understand why you fail to grasp it. AAA game RRP is the cheapest it's ever been, and development costs are the highest they've ever been. Publishers need to charge more to pay for games, but instead of raising the RRP they find alternate ways to make money: DLC and microtransactions. Gamers either play a game once then trade it so the publisher loses any additional sales, or they wait a couple of months for a big PS4 game to be sold at a bargain price, thus losing even more money.

So never mind actually taking a moment to assess context, degree and implementation and then form an opinion based on those things, you just apply a one size fits all verdict. Interesting.

AC is a parkour-based game, obviously climbing plays a part in it.

The climbing/gliding traversal + barebones map + physics/chemistry engine combine beautifully.

Yes, that's exactly my point? I didn't mean specifically the push for 4K, more Playstation and Xbox pushing power with each gen. And I'm not blaming them, obviously graphics will increase with each gen and costs will rocket because of it. Great, so you're advocating my third option then, lower budgets and scope for AAA games to make them profitable again and cut out the need for microtransactions and games as service taking over. No, amiibo are plastic figurines for a tenner, that just so happen to unlock (mostly cosmetic) minor content in a huge number of games, collectively. I suspect if you ask a hundred amiibo owners why they by them, ninety will tell you "to have a cool little figurine on my shelf". I'm not saying Nintendo don't do industry wise things like season passes or DLC, but they're a footnote in the conversation.

Locking content with day 1 paywalls like racing costumes in MK8 and chests with fish in them in Zelda? More people game as a hobby, are you sure? The PS2 sold 150 million. Mario 64 sold 12 million units. The market isn't that much bigger, especially with the advent of mobile gaming. Witcher 3 sold an insane number of copies, making up it's huge development cost. You hear all the time about how a game needs to sell X million copies or else it's considered a failure. That's incredibly naive. I'm not sure how you can't accept that high fidelity games like AC: Origins or Battlefront II with hundreds of people working on them and eye watering budgets don't mesh with spending the same amount of money we did for NES games. £40 which by the way, will be knocked down to £20 after a few months. Publishers needs to get more money from people to fund these massive games, and ways to do that include microtransactions.

The main problems is, in Playstation 4 and Xbox One's manic push to high fidelity 4K gaming, games have just become insanely expensive to make. All the while, the RRP of games is the cheapest they've ever been. It makes no sense and it's the reason we're seeing big publishers hamper games in such an egregious way. The way I see it there are three options: 1) Make games more expensive 2) Embrace lootboxes, season passes, DLC, the games as service formula 3) Lower the visual fidelity and scope of games Option 2 is a less in your face way of doing option 1. Option 3 will never happen. Jason Schreirer over at Kotaku wrote a great piece about how the AAA industry is unsustainable in its current form, and it's hard to disagree. amiibo are physical objects that you can own forever, and even if they didn't have any in-game unlocks would be worth the £12 or whatever they're selling for. The fact that one amiibo can be used in 20-30 different games is also a huge factor to consider. So no, Nintendo are most certainly not almost as bad.

AAA gaming seems to be in a bit of hole atm. I'm starting to see what Jason Schreier at Kotaku meant when he said the industry is unsustainable in its current form.

A brilliant read, couldn't agree more. The check-list formula for openworld games is broken, a perfect illustration of how developers build a world, and then tack on gameplay to it as a secondary concern. Was Zelda's version of an openworld perfect? No but it was far more compelling, at least imo. Never before has the game given me such a feeling of adventure. So many openworld games have you doing pointless busywork and just going through the motions, not BOTW. This is one of my favourite parts of the game... Also being able to climb anything is literally a game changer. Horizon's invisible walls and waist high barriers feel archaic in comparison.

Still only just finished the Sand Kingdom (with another 30 moons to find!), moving on to the next Kingdom tonight though Absolutely love just running around each world. The theme of the Cascade Kingdom is beautiful

"utterly pathetic" is a bit much for a UI ?? No comments about how incredibly fast the OS is? Personally I love it. Could it have more personality, sure, but it's clean, easy to use, no bloat and as mentioned, so quick.

Wow 30 million next FY seems a bit of a reach, but anything close to that would be mighty impressive https://www.wsj.com/articles/nintendos-game-plan-to-level-up-switch-production-1510291065

Not sure, haven't read that. I'd be amazed if my bits of microfiber fabric ever even got close to melting though!

I put a couple of strips of microfiber cloth on the sides of my dock, works really well and so haven't felt the need to use a screen protector.

IGN, specifically their new Nintendo guy, gave it a great review

For the second time, spoilers please.

+ Rime, Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, Batman Telltale, VVVVVV, Rive and a few more indie games all coming within the next 7 days. November is third party month for Nintendo, December is Xenoblade and Zelda Champions Ballad.

That looks really good, will definitely pick this up.

According to Nintendo a couple of weeks ago:

I could be wrong but I think they always do a conference at PSX, since it started a few years ago. This year is the first time without one.

I wanted folders on PS4 because they mix their bloatware apps with the games from the start, so on Switch I've not particularly missed such a basic feature. Now that media apps are starting to pop up though, different story...

Thanks for that. Are four story moons the norm/average for the rest of the Kingdoms? Sorry, I tend to overthink these things, but I just like to know what I'm getting into

I think it's just a case of how fast these services can build apps for the Switch? Hulu's must be ready for release and Netflix are still working on theirs. A bit gutted if that means themes aren't around the corner