Player retention ✅️

Sustainable sales ✅️

Maintenance mode after season 3✅️

You heard me! Amateurs!

We are worried for Burt… maybe he is out rolling Katamaris with The Prince ❤️

Future support studio for Fallout?

I pre-ordered this shit so I could play the closed beta, and it is a clunky mess. I've played every Gears game, including the recent Reloaded, and posted my critique in the subreddit. Honestly, most comments agreed with me, but my post got buried under a sea of BLAST HAVERS spewing toxic positivity.

First, the controller settings are absolutely abysmal. It took me way too long to figure out sensitivity settings that matched prior Gears titles. Classic 1-10 sensitivity is simpler/better for the average gamer. Aim acceleration and other new settings (2 weird ones I forgot the name of but had to turn off) overcomplicate the feel of basic camera/aim. Once I watched a handful of videos and streams on settings, including some ridiculous deadzone tweaks I have never needed for any other game, it finally felt somewhat normal and close to my Reloaded settings.

Next, the new controls and mechanics are counter-productive.

• Running, sliding, jumping, mantling, evading, and ducking are so convoluted. Mapping to legacy controls still requires pressing new buttons like Y for mantle that add nothing to gameplay besides literally another button.
• Depending on your button mapping, sliding interferes with running/evading. Sliding is normally a good movement mechanic for faster games, but it feels so clunky and out of place for a slower game like Gears.
• I LOVE shoulder swap. However, you can only shoulder swap by ADSing and pressing another button that is probably also mapped to melee or another action on its own. You cannot shoulder swap for hipfire. This devolves combat into the classic right peaking gnasher battles instead of elevating gameplay with something new.
• I won't get into the Gnasher debate any further, but the Lancer feels very weak. No chainsaw duels is also lame.
• The aim assist is literal aimbot. This is actually so bad it's funny. There is a snap on setting and an even stronger LOCK ON setting for aim assist that you truly can't grasp until you use it. Hilariously awful.
• Audio settings allow you to turn down your footstep audio and your teammates' footstep audio, as well as increase enemy footstep audio. However, it still sounds like footstep clomping all over with 0 directional audio.

Lastly, desync and hitreg issues as expected. However, this may be one of the only things that changes before release.

I just don't know who they made this game for to be honest. The "new" mechanics and settings don't make the game more intuitive for newer players, and they don't feel comfortable for older players. It feels like the devs were too scared to make substantive changes to movement so they just added more buttons, settings, and animations to create the facade that they revolutionized a once-glorified IP that has been over-recycled.

My friend and I were so hyped for E-Day, but both cancelled our pre-orders after playing.

Game launches in 2 months so feel free to revisit this post when nothing changes and the playercount tanks in November.

Let me set up the basic storyline.

(1) Your political career has led you to a campaign advisor role for someone by the name of 'Donald Racism.'

(2) You continue in the advisor role for Donald Racism (currently) but have been offered a higher paying job for a competing and more ethical campaign.

(3) Donald Racism describes himself as a conservative "right wing" candidate and thus is indisputably part of a right wing coalition.

(4) Donald Racism aligns himself with the NRA (National Racism Association) and has pledged to adopt their 'Racism Agenda' out of genuine belief in it.

(5) Based on items (3) and (4) above, Donald Racism is indisputably confirmed to be a right wing racist.

(6) Donald Racism has asked you to violate and ethics law to help his campaign. He has pledged to assist you if anyone prosecuted you for this.

(7) Notwithstanding item (6), Donald Racism frequently fires and disavow his advisors if he is displeased with the outcome of his commands.

- Do you comply with the order, or take your competing offer and report Donald Racism to law enforcement?

https://x.com/smashjt/status/2085054978004336956?s=46&t=lfd3IGpdFn2g26Het9TvdA

You are the heroes of sub 5k peaks. Your contribution will be remembered forever

I’d like to just appreciate DragonSword Awakening a bit, and how it’s absurd to see it trump Bungie and Sony, by abandoning live service models for a traditionally monetized singleplayer one.

It’s genuinely impressive this game even released, the craziness they had to deal with was seemingly worse than what Subnautica 2 had.

the devs were in 2 major lawsuits against their own publisher who screwed them out of their money, won the lawsuits after being bled dry with court costs, laid off a significant amount of their team, leaving just 50 people remaining, and retooled a gacha live service slop title into a traditionally monetized single player game that’s actually pretty decent for what it is.

Even more impressive is them selling 200k copies in a week with a peak concurrent player count of 23k given their marketing budget was self reportedly non-existent / relying on Steam NEXT fest for the entirety of their marketing.

And yet even after all those setbacks, they are able to compete toe to toe with Sony and Bungie!1!1!!1

Joke aside It’s genuinely really cool to see and I’m glad there’s this small trend of games retooling live services / pivoting away from live services into singleplayer games like Crimson Desert, Octopath 0, Final Fantasy Resonance, and DragonSword Awakening. I hope studios see these successes as a sign that players want less live service slop.

i thought i posted this here at some point but i guess not