u/WrongLander

For those unaware, a clip of a review of the new Wolverine game has been making the rounds online. I don't appear to be allowed to post it as it's on X, but essentially it just highlights the ridiculous lengths the game goes to in order to keep you moving down its designated story path (multiple varieties of glowing lines, map markers, voice lines), that all seem unnecessary given that it is a linear corridor-based beat-'em-up.

The reviewer sums up by saying: "I would argue that the defining characteristic of Marvel's Wolverine is a design philosophy that assumes the player is extremely stupid." Indeed, we can see this elsewhere both within this game (QTEs that autocomplete, automated running sections) and other games (the famous yellow paint debate).

My question is: when did this happen? When did this become such a dominant trend in AAA games? Have the demographics of modern gaming shifted sufficiently that developers genuinely find this level of guidance necessary? Are games now being designed with the assumption that a significant proportion of players will become frustrated or disengaged if they aren't constantly told exactly what to do? Or is this less about the player demographic and more about something happening behind the scenes during development and testing?

I'd be particularly interested to hear from anyone who's worked in game development, QA/UX or playtesting. Is there actually data behind this? For example, do internal playtests show that players regularly get lost in situations where experienced gamers would consider the intended route completely obvious? Do focus testers complain about not knowing where to go, resulting in designers progressively adding more guidance? Or is there some other metric execs pay attention to (completion rates, abandonment, accessibility, time-to-objective, etc.) that encourages this sort of design?

Because it feels quite different from the way a lot of older games approached the player. There was certainly hand-holding in older games, but there was also much more willingness to simply give you a space, explain the basic mechanics and let you figure things out yourself. Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, Resident Evil, Zelda, Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, etc. could give you objectives and environmental clues without necessarily putting a giant glowing arrow or line over the exact thing you're supposed to interact with. Hell, even one of my examples, Tomb Raider, fell prey to this trend itself in the newer reboot games with Lara's dumbass 'hunter vision' that highlights the intended solution. And in the Ocarina of Time remake there is going to be a quest log and explicit map instructions.

To be clear I'm not knocking accessibility. There's a difference between making a game accessible and making it impossible for the player to experience uncertainty. Accessibility options, difficulty settings and similar features are great. What I'm questioning is why the most aggressive version of these systems increasingly seems to be the default experience.

There's something particularly strange about playing a game where the developers have spent millions of dollars creating an environment, filling it with visual details and designing encounters around that environment, only for the game to essentially say: FOLLOW THE LINE. It calls to mind the Stanley Parable Adventure Line, which was supposed to be satire!

I'd actually love to hear from developers about this. Is modern AAA gaming actually responding to players becoming less willing to explore and experiment, or have developers simply become much more afraid of letting players get stuck?

Don't get me wrong, I like Nightmare Before Christmas, and I have absolutely nothing against adding characters from it. But why does it feel like Halloween has essentially become the Nightmare Before Christmas rep almost every year since launch?

We already had Jack and Sally two years in a row, and now we are getting Oogie Boogie. Do we really need to keep going back to the same movie whenever Halloween rolls around?

There are so many other Disney villains and spooky characters they could use for Halloween. Dr. Facilier, the Evil Queen, Madam Mim, Frollo, Chernabog, the Sanderson sisters, the Horned King; even some more obscure Disney villains would be fun.

Point is, I'd much rather see Halloween updates rotate through different villains and spooky Disney properties instead of Nightmare Before Christmas being the default every single year.

I just think the game has a huge Disney catalogue to draw from, and it'd be nice to see Halloween showcase some of it.

After years of hearing horror stories about the DS version of The Complete Saga, and left with a hankering for more TT goodness after having beaten the console one a billion times, I finally broke down, got it for a fiver, gave it a proper go and… this is actually pretty damn cute.

Obviously, it is heavily downsized compared to the console versions, but considering this is a Nintendo DS game from 2007, I'm kind of impressed by how much they managed to squeeze onto the thing. You still have the basic structure of The Complete Saga, loads of characters, levels, collectibles, Free Play, etc. Obviously everything is simplified, but it still feels recognisably like a LEGO Star Wars game rather than some completely unrelated handheld adaptation.

The gameplay is surprisingly solid too. It's obviously not going to compete with the PS3/360/Wii versions, but as a portable version you can just pick up and play, it does the job really well. There's something charming about seeing these tiny DS versions of all the characters and levels. I like doing Force Push on the touchscreen with my thumb.

I think a lot of the negativity probably comes from comparing it directly to the console game rather than judging it as a DS game. Of course it's worse than the console version. It's a bloody DS game, it has about the processing power of a calculator by modern standards.

But then there's the cutscenes. Good lord. I wasn't prepared for how terrible some of them are. The already-minimalist LEGO storytelling has been compressed even further, and some of the animations look like they're being performed by characters who have just discovered they have bones. I could make a PowerPoint smoother than these in all likelihood.

All told, it's not a good version of The Complete Saga if you're expecting the full console experience, but it's a really good downsized version of that game for what the DS hardware could actually do. I'm curious whether I'm massively overrating it though, because my expectations were so low.

Serious question to which I desire a serious answer please, and I'm asking this in good faith as a centrist because I genuinely don't understand how the narrative around Jason Arday has developed.

From what I understand, the central issue was that serious questions were raised about plagiarism and the credibility of uncorroborated claims he had made about his own life and academic background. Indeed, since his death some of his prior students have come forward to confirm his teachings were often suspect. Those questions were ultimately investigated over the course of his career, and Arday responded to people who looked into his past with legal threats and other attempts to shut down scrutiny by calling them "racist".

None of that seems particularly complicated to me: if an academic has built a career on claims that turn out to be false or misleading, and there are questions about plagiarism in their work, those claims should be investigated and reported on. Being a prominent black academic doesn't make someone exempt from that standard. Surely it should strike everyone as obvious that Cambridge were more interested in banking progressive-friendly headlines than performing due diligence.

Yet the discussion seems to have shifted dramatically from "what did Arday actually do, and who was responsible for allowing this to happen at Cambridge?" towards a much broader discussion about racial dynamics, institutional prejudice and, this week, surreal reverent candlelit vigils and comparisons that make this look almost like a George Floyd-style racial justice story. A speaker at the vigil said, verbatim: "this is a time for white people to listen and not speak." Excuse me? What do white people have anything to do with Arday choosing, of his own volition, to fib his way up the pedagogical ladder?

I find this shift bonkers. It seems entirely possible to acknowledge that racism exists in Britain, that black academics can face particular barriers, and that an individual black academic can be responsible for serious wrongdoing. Those positions aren't contradictory.

In fact, I worry that turning this into an explicitly racialised story risks being rather infantilising towards black people. If the argument is effectively that criticism of a black academic must primarily be understood through the lens of racism, doesn't that imply that black people are somehow uniquely incapable of wrongdoing, dishonesty or professional misconduct? Why can't Arday simply be treated by the same standards as anyone else?

And I think there's an uncomfortable question here about the media as well. If journalists investigated claims made by a public academic and discovered evidence that those claims were false, misleading or plagiarised, why would reporting that be considered inherently suspect because the subject was black? Surely the proper response is to examine whether the reporting was accurate, not to assume that the reporting itself was racially motivated.

None of this is intended to diminish the tragedy of what Arday ultimately elected to do rather than face the music. I don't think suicide should ever be treated as some kind of punishment or justification for everything that came before it. But his death doesn't retrospectively make the allegations against him disappear, nor does it mean people who investigated or reported on those allegations were wrong to do so.

Again, I'm coming at this as someone broadly centrist who is honestly struggling to understand the narrative here. Why has a story that appears, at its core, to be about academic integrity and institutional failure become predominantly framed as a story about race? What good does this serve anyone (apart from being another opportunity for social media users to score brownie points)?

And perhaps more importantly: is there a danger that we're actually doing more harm than good by treating scrutiny of a black public figure as inherently racialised, rather than allowing black people the same moral and professional accountability we expect from everyone else?

I only ask this because in recent weeks I have seen many people despairing that the game is, pretty openly, going to be a Trojan horse to usher in an all-digital, higher priced, MTX-based future for gaming; and that there's nothing that anyone (who cares, that is) can do about it because they have purposely chosen a locked success to do it with.

As in, too many consumers will just buy the game without thinking, it will be a cultural touchstone no matter what, and it can't be stopped.

How true is this? Is the game really going to be as damaging to the industry as some suspect?

Whenever people talk about Omniverse's strengths (to be clear I am not knocking the show overall, it has some great stories), the huge number of new transformations always comes up. But I think it's quantity over quality. The OS kept its 20 aliens diverse and unique, and while we started to see some repetition of movesets in AF and UA, those shows each only introduced 10 or so new ones so they all got a bit of airtime.

The OV roster of newbies is a whopping 17 (yes I am counting Shocksquatch, no I don't care he was in the goddamn Generator Rex crossover, that special was boring as hell and his OV version is basically a total reintroduction of the character anyway):

• Feedback
• Bloxx
• Shocksquatch
• Gravattack
• Crashhopper
• Ball Weevil
• Walkatrout
• Pesky Dust
• Mole-Stache
• The Worst
• Kickin' Hawk
• Toepick
• Astrodactyl
• Bullfrag
• Atomix
• Gutrot
• Whampire.

The biggest issue for me is that right off the bat, five of these are basically joke aliens just to pad the Omnitrix roster. Walkatrout, Mole-Stache, The Worst, Ball Weevil and Pesky Dust all lean heavily into a single gag gimmick. "Look, he's small and cute and useless." Some have situational uses, I guess, but they're largely remembered as comedy transformations. It makes the lineup feel much less substantial than it first appears.

Then, looking at the rest, a large number fall into the category of "big green guy with poison/gross-out powers." Gutrot, Toepick, Bullfrag, Atomix, all very visually similar and bleed together for me; I often get Atomix and Gutrot confused in particular.

Some of the others also don't feel especially original. Feedback is another goddamn electricity alien after Buzzshock/Brainstorm/AmpFibian/Frankenstrike/Shocksquatch and even repeats Chromastone's energy absorption niche. Why did they give him specifically the emotional tragic backstory? Were they trying to push his toys? On that subject, Bloxx is... just LEGO. I know some people love him, but I've never been able to get past how out of place he feels.

Astrodactyl is "Jetray at home." Kickin' Hawk is just another martial artist brawler, a la Four Arms or Humungousaur or Rath, but a bird this time. Crashhopper is the guy that jumps with a daft Hanna Barbera sound effect.

That only leaves the few that I think are neat. Gravattack is fantastic and probably one of the best aliens introduced after Alien Force. Him being a walking planet is rad. I'd also argue Whampire has a unique aesthetic despite my criticisms above.

Compare that with earlier series, where new aliens constantly felt like they were introducing powers or concepts we'd never really seen before, Omniverse's additions just don't stand out as much to me.

What do you think, is there an OV alien I'm massively underselling?

Title. The Ralph update is the buggiest in ages, coming hot on the heels of Honeyglow Woods which was also a mess at launch. Why does this keep happening?

Much credit to the post here, https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamlightValley/comments/1v85fpf/please_read_the_patch_notes/, but I still don't think this has enough visibility as it relies on a screencap of the patch notes and a title people might scroll past. So I am putting this here, in explicit text:

>The Pixel Perfect update was originally meant to include a "Clear Biome" feature in Furniture mode. Unfortunately, we discovered a critical bug in this feature last week, and have patched it out of the Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and Epic versions of the Pixel Perfect update. However, the feature will still be present in the Nintendo and Apple versions of the update. Please note that using it could impact various quests' progress. We recommend that our Nintendo and Apple players avoid using this feature for the time being. A hotfix will be deployed to patch the incompatible Clear Biome feature out of the Pixel Perfect update on Nintendo and Apple in the coming days. The feature will return in a later update.

I can't believe Gameloft so casually slipped this into a webpage not everyone will read that might lead to people's games breaking. Frankly, I'm on Switch 2 and wouldn't mind a delay of the update by a couple days or so on that platform to ensure the problem doesn't befall anyone!

Maybe this take won't be popular, but Dreamlight Valley keeps returning to the goddamn exact same emotional well.

The main story already revolved around our character's forgotten childhood/loneliness, as manifested by The Forgotten. Then we got the Inside Out content with the bear, which I found oddly infantilising given how it frames the player in a sort of 'goo-goo ga-ga' kind of way needing to cuddle their teddy. More recently, Wishblossom Ranch leans into similar themes again throughout its story, and there have been plenty of individual character quests that circle back to childhood wounds or emotional healing. There was the mementos stuff, and now the Realmweaver looks to be doing it again.

On their own, none of these stories are necessarily bad. I actually thought parts of the original Forgotten storyline were well done. You know, as a one-off. The problem is that it feels like almost every major arc in the game now boils down to, "remember that your childhood wasn't perfect?" After a while it starts to feel repetitive rather than meaningful.

For me, Dreamlight Valley is a cozy Disney life sim. I enjoy collecting, fishing, farming and going on lighthearted adventures with Disney characters. I don't really need every other update to encourage me to unpack my suppressed angst.

Sometimes it feels like the writing is aimed at a very specific audience of 'arrested development' (for want of a better term) adult players who strongly identify with those themes, rather than a broader sense of Disney escapism.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm always shocked by how many posts I see on here where people are like, "feeling overwhelmed, should I just restart?" or "I wiped my save and started over."

As a seasoned gamer of many years, this is one of the last games I'd ever want to restart. My valley from 2022 is sitting at around 400 goddamn hours, and losing all of that progress would be an absolute nightmare. Even if I had half that playtime, I still don't think I could bring myself to do it.

The game now has so many characters, friendship levels, quests, event tasks, furniture, Dreamlight tasks, crafting materials, all the biomes to unlock... the thought of doing all of that grindy crap from scratch again sounds miserable. Let alone as a solution to 'feeling overwhelmed', surely this would have the opposite effect?!

At least with something like Animal Crossing there's a genuine incentive, you get a different island layout/fruit and so on, and you can build something completely new. Dreamlight Valley's map is the same every time. The biome layout is fixed, the story is the same, the quest progression is the same, you'll always be repeating the exact same tasks.

Unless you actively want to replay hundreds of hours of questing and resource grinding, I genuinely don't understand the appeal. I'd much rather keep improving my existing valley than erase it all.

I imagine a lot of us saw the report yesterday of Pixar being hit hard with layoffs, with a major reason cited being the perceived 'underperformance' of Hoppers earlier this year.

The sentiment on this sub around the film's run ($390m on a $150m budget, though the report described the film as 'missing break even') was a positive one so I am wondering what people's thoughts are on this and whether it was sufficient grounds to let people go.

Part of me is thinking this is a delayed reaction paying for the sins of Elio, and that Hoppers needed to really sing theatrically, rather than turn only a slight profit, to prove that Pixar originals are still viable. Of course, when you're dealing with Hollywood exec logic, all bets are off.

Title, in a nutshell.

It seems you hear about far more live-service shooter failures than you do successes anymore. It feels like there is a general sense of fatigue around the space, and even those who still play them have essentially settled into their personal favourites (Marvel Rivals, Arc Raiders, Fortnite etc.) and are not receptive, nor financially able, to accept the idea of any newcomers.

Is it throwing good money after bad trying to break into this market now?