Paperclyp

No, for sure not. The masquerade was absolutely happening and the guy was like hey come on in bro welcome to the masquerade and then I was cut down haha. There was also a guard on the perimeter who would attack me randomly. Waited probably 2 in game days and went back in, nothing different other than time passing, and it was fine.

This happened to me. I had to wait a couple days and try again, then was able to go in with no problems. Annoyed the hell out of me too.

Because these are piece of shit sites who know exactly what they’re doing.

This game has been nicely paced / or I’ve been accidentally advancing things at the proper rate. I would echo @best3444 that if anything starts to feel too stale to progress to the other country… they change things up in a few ways that make the game feel fresh again.

I was finding the quests to be a bit sparse and just started trying to open up more of the west part of the map… that helped a lot once you get to the checkpoint town. Did a really cool fight at night vs a ghost like boss with a few health bars. This game is holding my attention as well as anything has since ER.

I’m not sure I follow you exactly, I will just take it as I should have gone the other way.

yeah back up those stairs. Didn’t realize there was another option.

I saw some archer hate but I think it's one of the cooler classes. It was really fun to play in 1.

I maxed fighter last night and I'm playing around with the mystic whatever. Jedi class basically. I like it. I think I want to try archer too.

Some of my favorite moments in the game have been me telling my pawn to go somewhere to like float up and get a chest or something, he's like oh yeah yeah yeah I got you, he floats up misses the ledge and falls to his death. So maybe I can't have it both ways.

@Keyser_Soze I’m not explaining myself very well. I knew the place with the books was what I needed to find and I knew I had found it. I just didn’t know if the game realized I found it if that makes sense, so that I could trigger the next part. As for the prisoner I am telling you guys he did not follow lol. He wasn’t moving slow and I wasn’t doing anything weird. He was completely stationary for several minutes at a time. I tried using the d pad commands and all that. The man was not moving.

I didn’t need a guide but what I’m saying is the game isn’t consistent in how it manages major steps of a given quest. In that one’s case, it didn’t check mark “find a place” when I found a place, leaving me unsure if I should go back to him or not and causing a little uncertainly / frustration. Again not a big deal overall but imo sloppy design.

Yes @Biggie He would not follow me haha

I think there’s a lot of people not meeting the game on its own terms, but it has a lot of annoying design quirks that aren’t like shirking genre norms but just kinda bad / inconsistent design. The stealth, if you can even call it that, is just objectively bad imo. It doesn’t give you enough information and it doesn’t react consistently and it doesn’t give you any feedback on why something worked one day and not the next. There’s a mission where you get a guy out of prison and you’re supposed to “lead” him, and I assume he will actually follow you but in mine he fuckin wouldn’t so I just carried his ass out. And it took a while cuz he’d break out of the hold and just tell me to lead him out and then wouldn’t follow. Was that pretty damn funny? Yes, but it’s annoying too when you’re also not sure if when the guards see you they’ll cut you to pieces. An earlier part of that same quest required me to find a certain type of place for him… and like the checklist un checked was “find a place with blank” and I found said place. But it didn’t check the box and say like “ok now go back to the guy.” Which if the game was more consistent about leaving things like that more vague it wouldn’t have bothered me, but there are just enough quests where it DOES take you through each thing step by step that I’m like shit did I miss some interactible thing in the place or not talk to the right guy or what. All that being said I LOVE this game. I am more than happy to look past those frustrating moments, but they’re certainly there.

I would just reiterate that I think two things can be true: Phil could have done a less than optimal job (though I think some of the dispersions cast on him in this thread are extremely hyperbolic) and a large part of the decisions he’s made have been made out of pressure outside his control - call it capitalism or whatever you want.

Yeah but name me a single game that is better than vague categories I’ve stated?

@crispy4000 well said

I like BOTW and TOTK just fine but I wouldn’t consider anything they did to be particularly radical. Nor has the switch platform been a particularly interesting showcase for Nintendo’s creativity. They’ve had some good ones, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not blown away by anything Nintendo has done in terms of like breaking the AAA mold.

Is he the whipping boy or are internet aggregation sites writing lazy stories about single quotes that get like a day of attention and then it’s fine?

It’s a weird thing to me, capitalism, because video games are so popular and the thirst for more content and eventually more powerful hardware is gonna be there, and yet because of the need to constantly “grow,” the industry is like at once in crisis and at the same time more of a juggernaut than it’s ever been. It’s so stupid. In sports, when a president or a GM of a team feels pressure to make the playoffs or be fired they’ll start making rash, sacrifice the long term for an outside shot at success for the short term, and it kind of reminds me of the position of MS and Sony right now. Don’t do something real dumb just cuz you are trying to protect yourself in the short term.

Where does he blame the industry for not reaching new audiences? I’m not sure who what would even be blamed at. He’s laying out the facts that his job is to make the shareholders happy and the industry isn’t currently growing. So costs gotta be cut somewhere. His plans haven’t worked as well as he hoped, I think, but Jesus I don’t think the move is do something like the Wii. Also the article author itself is either kinda being purposely obtuse or doesn’t know what they’re talking about maybe with like the “MS has 200 million in profit of course they can pay them.” That’s not the gaming division and that’s not how this works. If you want to write a serious critique about Phil or MS then let’s not cherry pick quotes and write silly headlines and then not do due diligence in the article.

It’s not a commentary on his success or failure. They didn’t do those things trying to ruin the industry. They did them to attempt to grow the brand.

I don’t see a lot of wrong in what Phil said. He’s giving an honest pragmatic answer. Would people prefer he lie?

This is a great topic idea. Sadly I think BOTW and TOTK have a little bit of this effect on me. I’m trying to wipe up a bunch of stuff late ish game TOTK and it’s a bit of a slog. I should probably just finish it and be done with it. Persona 5 was (is?) like this for me too.

Want / are awesome at it