Do you think this occurs equally across all big budget games?

Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I’m not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.

For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.

The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.

Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.

Battle Royales: there are pros and cons to the format over traditional FPS. The real story here is that Fortnite in particular also frequently comes out with tons of fun and ridiculous weapons and items which is something that other companies don’t really do.

Ie: chrome that lets you turn into a fast moving blob, a katana with a charge dash range so big that it’s considered a mobility item, a handheld napalm cannon

Really? I guess you could consider the game’s visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn’t have microtransactions

I’m the CEO of ExxonMobil but thanks anyway

If a company ever puts ads in my group chats I will jump in a volcano

True

People keep saying this but this kind of naming convention contributed to the confusion around the Wii U and its poor sales

We deserve as much mecha as possible

I think the insinuation of the gigantic brain is that it’s not

I’m excited for how much it looks like they’re mixing up the existing characters!