Some games I replay a lot, but always on a fresh save. I think I’ve finished Dark Souls about 10 times without ever touching NG+.

Notable exceptions are:

• Nier Automata, although you kind of have to if you want the whole game and it still brought down the experience for me.
• Chrono Trigger, for the quick kill on Lavos. I did not play much of the NG+.

Who cares? Just like most things your average programmer relies on, they are written by smarter or at least more specialised people to make your job easier. They have learned to write memory-safe code so you don’t have to.

Become a bad programmer and be thankful you won’t have to further maintain your code instead!

I don’t play actual shooter myself, however, both Pokemon Snap games fit your description - might be worth a shot.

It’s a pet peeve of mine, I hate stealth sections. Waiting around just isn’t fun and most stealth sections are just that.

However, that was years ago. I haven’t encountered one in a long time since I mostly stopped playing AAA games - by now these games are an amalgamation of so many worse design decisions, I almost miss the time stealth sections were my biggest issue.

First, it’s NEVER right for a person or group of people, regardless of position or occupation, to wish for a company’s death.

I disagree on a fundamental level. I stopped reading shortly after that.

It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.

Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.

Because people liked the idea so much with FF7? /s

For the sake of adding something new, X is pareto optimal in terms of having both the best and the fewest games.

• Xenogears
• Xenosaga (maybe, haven’t played it yet)
• Xenoblade anything
• X-COM anything

I’d probably be content with only playing games from the Xeno- meta-series alone.

Anything Dragon Quest needs to be on the list!

Despite loving the genre overall, I bounced off KoA multiple times. Maybe it’s time to give it yet another go. I just wasn’t in the mood for MMORPGs - which the IP should have become iirc -, I guess.

I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.

Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.

Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.

If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.

I think the second FF7 part isn’t on steam yet? But personally speaking, while I’m slightly interested, I not to eager on these games. FF16 semms to have cut back on too many RPG mechanics for my liking and FF7 just isn’t complete yet. I’ll have another look once the ‘full game’ is out.

FF16 and FF7 are the only PS5 exclusives I would consider, but two games aren’t enough to buy a new generation - one that’s almost over even. Maybe release some graphically worse PS4 versions like almost everyone else? Oh, and PC ports of course if they haven’t.

I honestly don’t even think vanilla Skyrim was that good of a game. It had nice world building, but the combat sucked, the main story was kinda whatever, it was glitchy and a lot of systems were poorly thought out. It’s only ever been the promise of a good game which was mostly found in mods.

I’m still waiting for a reason to get a PS5 at all, everything I’ve been interested still got released on PS4 too - except for one single game.

I really don’t care for better specs anymore, I probably couldn’t even tell PS4 and PS5 games apart without a side-by-side comparison. Not to mention, to see a difference at all I’d need a new TV on top of the console. Not gonna happen anytime soon.

They very much are for a lot of people. Lines goes up, you can give yourself a nice bonus payout and if things come crashing down you leave. With your golden parachute of course.

Maybe, but I think it will remain more popular than before. Let’s say there are 10% of people in any given group who would theoretically believe bullshit - the number is chosen randomly. Thanks to stuff like TikTok they are way more likely to come into contact with lots of different bullshit to believe in than ever before.

Kind of like how Republicans would be more popular if everyone would watch Fox News every day.

That was fast. We might as well start doing the lettuce thing for any given live service game at this point.

Kind of? I remember a statistic about pseudo-science being more popular with younger generations. Energy healing, healing stones and all that other homeopathic bullshit. Assuming that is indeed correct, Flat Earth is likely more popular too.

It probably does okay simply by virtue of being so stupid, there aren’t many people in their right mind producing videos about the earth being round to drown them out.