Are you saving the games manually? I’ve never had that issue.
And for the record, I love RDR 2 almost as much as GTA. 
I’m not a huge fan of cut-scenes or heavy dialog. They’re fine at milestones, but I don’t like to keep transitioning between playing and watching. Or at least I want to control when I have to sit and watch something. I played through GTA V for the first time recently and enjoyed it (especially since it was 12 years old), but I liked the sandbox mode much more than story mode because there are no interruptions.
FWIW, I drive with K&M and am pretty terrible. Every now and then I get a streak where I start to think I know what I am doing, then I make a turn and drive right into the side of a building.
Never play a Metal Gear Solid game. Particularly MGS4.
(Weirdly enough, MGS3 seemed to dial back the cutscene length after MGS2, but that trend would not continue with MGS4 where one cutscene is almost half-an-hour.)
Horizon Zero Dawn.
Dear Horizon Zero Dawn, can we move the camera to where my fucking eyeballs are? You ever look up at a flying machine and discover that you are looking up from beneath a blade of grass that is entirely obscuring your view?
Fuck You, Horizon Zero Dawn.
Many new games and some release dates were announced today.
Persona 6 - the most anticipated and biggest game announcement today. However, its trailer showed zero footage and no release date. I was disappointed. Hoped for Fall of this year…now I’m thinking 2028.
Persona 4 Revival - a remake of Persona 4? I won’t buy unless it is hugely different from the PS2 version I played upon release.
There were many others, even a new Spyro the Dragon game.
I think many games are giving GTA VI a wide berth. Like, 2-4 months of time.
I have been playing Minecraft for almost a year now. all versions are great.
I installed snake game on my calculator around half an hour ago. It’s fun but kinda hard
The Assassin’s Creed games usually have real historical figures acting in a villainous manner and getting assassinated (even if the people died peacefully in real life).
I’ve been playing Starfield for the last three weeks (limited hours ya know) and for the life of me, I want to like it (being a huge Outer Worlds / Fallout 3-NV-4) fan but it does not grip me.
One of my friends described it as miles wide, but inches deep, and that strikes true to me. The NPCs don’t inspire much interest, the storyline is… fine… the quests tend to the very formulaic, and all the interesting crafting bits are under-documented and require you planning around making your own fun basically.
It’s shooting for the stars (heh) but the actual gameplay drags it down with endless loading screens and it’s so CPU heavy that it brings my system to it’s knees.
The same system that runs Cyberpunk 2077 at high settings and 75 fps, runs Starfield at low + settings and 35-45.
It’s ridiculously unoptimized, and the creaky creation engine variant that was stiff and underwhelming for FO4 is a rotting zombie of an engine here.
I’ll finish. I -may- try the NG+, but it’s at best a B- for me. Still, I haven’t come close to finishing, it may redeem itself, but the crashes, the stuttering… I doubt it.
I’m sure it has its fans, but that response seems like it has been has been damn near universal by the more hardcore gaming community. One internet meme I’ve noticed on gamer sites has been to compare independent studio Larian’s efforts with Baldur’s Gate 3 or CD Projekt Red with Witcher 3 against Starfield to chart just how far Bethesda has fallen off as an innovative game studio.
When the head of Bethesda described it as “Skyrim, but in space” I was pretty excited.
I never bought it or played it. It doesn’t run on Steam Deck, while many other games of equal specs do.
And, I heard exactly what you said. Huge, but also thin.
The one amazing thing people do mention is that the New Game + has a cool mechanism in it, but I won’t spoil it.
We could have had Elder Scrolls VI and maybe even Fallout 5. Instead, we got Starfield.
I bet a lot of content was also trimmed or cut out. Reminds me of the initial release of Cyberpunk. It was clearly big, but I swear Cyberpunk 2077 had 20% of its main game cut out.
Starfield is a pretty good game when you strip it of the expectation of being the next huge Gaming Experience that Changes Everything and is as exciting to play the tenth time as the first time.
It’s serviceable, a solid 7/10 all the way through with a number of 9/10 “oh cool!” moments.
I’ve been playing the free-to-play Wuxia game “Where Winds Meet” and I’m totally obsessed.
It’s like living in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon world. It’s beautiful and the combat is exciting and varied despite being extremely intuitive. The character creation options are so detailed and flexible, I’ve seen people who made characters that look like (exactly like) Keanu Reeves and Marilyn Manson (creepy eye and all) among others.
It has this weird hybrid solo/MMO feature. You can run around completely alone with just NPCs, and then whenever you feel like it, swap over to an online mode filled with other players and guilds and PVP. You can swap back and forth whenever you want. It just came out a week ago on Xbox but has been on PC for a long time. You can even play it on a mobile device like a phone or tablet (though I haven’t tried).
There are a bunch of martial arts that go along with different types of weapons, and it fully embraces the “Wire Fu” aesthetic of Hong Kong martial arts films.
They also have a feature I’ve never seen before… It’s a gimmick but it feels like the start of a new trend we’ll see more of in games. Some NPCs are chatbot-enabled and you can talk to them to befriend them, and if you succeed they’ll give you gifts over time. And each one has a unique dilemma that you need to help them with; grieving for a lost child, angry at being swindled by a scammer, trying to learn to be a leader of a gang, etc. Like I said, it’s a gimmick and a novelty at best in this game, but I’ve never seen it before in a major video game.
There are also interesting professions. You can become a doctor or “scholar” (which is like being a lawyer). And they are important in the game; for example in the course of play, you can become injured, or sick, or suffer from a mental or spiritual malady. Sometimes those heal on their own, but other times they linger and will give you a major debuff, and if untreated they get worse. You can potentially seek out an NPC healer to help, but that only helps with basic stuff. Anything worse, you need to seek out another player to help.
You can ask in chat, or use a “bounty” system where you offer a bounty chip and then healers looking for work can take on your case. They will then visit you (including coming into your solo game if you aren’t playing online) and heal you. You can pay them money and/or provide “likes” which improve their reputation. The healing itself is a kind of mini-game, where you first diagnose the problem, decide on a type of treatment, then are presented with possible actions to help which you draw randomly like a deck of cards. Each “round” you use actions to “attack” the problem, and it can strike back at you, as healing takes a toll on the doctor as well. You mix offense and defense to successfully treat someone. The medicine profession is built up and leveled just as much as combat, with different abilities you learn, stats you build up, and so on. If you are playing a doctor, you can train up by wandering the world looking for suffering NPCs to treat just like treating a player character.
Scholar is similar, but it’s more of a one-on-one debate of “social combat”. It uses a similar “card” system, but instead of treatments they are arguments. And there is a kind of paper-rock-scissors process where some arguments work better against others. If you succeed, you defeat your enemy by winning the debate. When dealing with NPCs, you can get things from them. But it’s also necessary to do it for players as well, because if you are caught breaking the law, you can hire a scholar to argue on your behalf and get the charges dropped, in a format similar to the one used to hire a doctor.
If you break the law, you get a bounty on you, similar to the Assassin’s Creed or Elder Scrolls games (and countless other games). And other players might collect on that bounty as well, bringing PVP into the picture. Sometimes a scholar can help, but other times they can’t. Another interesting thing is that you can be falsely accused of a crime (and a scholar definitely can help with that).
There is just so much in this game, and like I said, I’ve just been playing it like crazy this past week. It feels like one of the most fun games I’ve ever played, and it’s crazy that it’s free. There are the usual cosmetic microtransactions, but at least so far there hasn’t been any need for me to spend a dime on anything (and the free options for character visuals are pretty nice anyway).
Sounds kind of like Path of Exile in that respect.
I’ve been splitting my time between RimWorld & Forza Horizon 6, with occasional ventures into American Truck Simulator.
Wrapped this up tonight and it was okay! Entertaining enough but I wouldn’t say anyone was depriving themselves by not playing it. Unfortunately, with me playing the original version of the game and the EA servers long offline, I can’t get the DLC to work[1] and I’m not inspired enough to buy the remaster and restart the game from scratch just to play them. Insert your own rant here about what it means to “own” digital media in the modern age.
I own them and they show as installed on the EA game client, they just won’t activate in the game any longer ↩︎
Playing the remastered Age of Empires (Definitive Edition). It’s good but gets boring quick.
Escape From Ever After
Recommended.
A third party attempt at Paper Mario. It uses the same 2D/3D style of art and you play through what is actually a really fun and surprisingly emotional story.
Not overly difficult, but also not a total cake-walk. I found some of the final bosses to be a bit annoying, though.
If you are looking for a fun, short, original JRPG, this is a good one. it took me 18 hours to finish, so definitely not an epic, massive JRPG. What it does, though, is deliver a consistent high quality game.
If you like that kind of game, you could check out Born of Bread as well.
I would also encourage looking into how the game was made. Its a fascinating story about how a retired baseball player wanted to make a WoW killer and almost bankrupted the entire state of Rhode Island.
Oh yeah, I remember all that from launch. If anything, the drama around the game being made was better known than the actual game (and had people actively rooting against its success)