Yes, and all of those things are terrible.

“Let’s not have a story, let’s instead have a backstory novel written in tiny text whose font size cannot be increased.”

I don’t think so, is Final Fantasy particularly highly regarded these days?

It would need some huge changes in order to work on the fly. You need the model to produce information that is

• consistent with each individual NPC’s role in the game word
• consistent across different NPC’s
• consistent with the actual game.

The third is the biggest hurdle now: you can’t have an NPC making up a bunch of lore about the city they came from and telling the player how to get there, only for them to find that the city isn’t actually in the game. Or telling the player about abilities they have but don’t actually exist in the game.

It would also be bad to have NPC’s just spill reveals the player isn’t supposed to know about yet.

The more likely use case is to speed up dialogue creation, with human writers editing and curating ChatGPT’s output to make sure it is consistent with the intended lore and gameplay.

Smash Bros.

This gets a big fat no from me.

I want the least possible number of graphics settings and the least amount of detail about what the settings do.

Balancing performance with other considerations is the developer’s job and I don’t want them offloading that work on me.

The Final Fantasy VII remake.

Never played the original, but I thought I’d play the remake after it was finished.

Then they split it into three parts.

This game was announced eight years ago. Only one of the three parts has been released.

I think the main thing that sets it apart is that the visual novel portion is very well-written and well-acted, similar to Mass Effect.

I love it when games have a story integrated into the game, like Celeste or Stray.

I do not like it when they have a huge backstory text dump, like the Skyrim books or the Elden Ring item descriptions.

The influence of Dark Souls is a plague on single player video games. Crossing anything with Dark Souls always makes it worse.

“Lore” is terrible. “Lore” is a deliberately obscure mediocre backstory novel, usually in tiny text whose font size cannot be increased. If I wanted to read a deliberately obscure novel I’d read Joyce on my Kindle.

If you want to tell a story, use the actual mechanics of a video game to do it.

The problem the PS4 load times were enormous compared to the number of times you die in that game.

It was particularly awful when fighting bosses, where each iteration of the fight could be less than ten seconds. It literally meant a majority of my time “playing” the game while fighting a boss was spent waiting to respawn.

As I said, I don’t mind this sort of wait in a game where respawning is very infrequent, but in a game where you do it all the time it’s awful.

As a consumer, I am all in favor of less choices. The work of balancing optimization with other considerations should be handled by the developers and should not be handed off to consumers.

The PS4 version on PS4 is practically unplayable. The load times are well in excess of 20 seconds, so when you add in the death animation and the “you died” animation, you’re looking at almost 30 seconds between when you lose control of the character and when you regain control.

This is OK in games where respawning is rare, but in a game like Elden Ring where you die constantly it’s completely intolerable. Boss fights became literally a majority of my playtime on a loading screen.

It’s hard to overemphasize how much better the game became when I switched to playing the PS5 version on PS5.

Is that first one the Game That Shall Not Be Named or a different one?

• Xenoblade Chronicles 3
• Hades
• Elden Ring (I had very mixed feelings about this one but the high points were really good even though the low points sucked a lot.)

And some older ones I picked up again that still hold up:

• FTL
• Portal 2

Elden Ring.

Kept waiting for the magic that turns Dark Souls skeptics into converts to hit me, but it never did.

It seemed like Breath of the Wild, if Breath of the Wild was vastly more tedious, repetitive, and frustrating.

Any amount of manual saving is too much now, the game should handle it all for you.

But if you are playing in a game with manual saves, do it whenever you can.

I highly recommend the classic puzzle game Portal, which has held up phenomenally well for a game from 2007.

It uses a control scheme similar to what you’ll find in a lot of games, where you move around with one hand and aim and use a camera with the other, but it doesn’t rely on precise timing, aiming, or movement. The challenge is purely intellectual.

So it will be a good opportunity to get used to common control schemes.

It’s also hilarious.

Lootboxes.

Good grief, just say “I didn’t like [game]” and you get downvoted into oblivion. Unless you’re complaining about Breath of the Wild’s breakable weapons.

Because when you’re going to the place you see some weird looking tree and stop to inspect it. And then you see something strange in the distance and you start going towards that. And then you see a shrine so you detour over to collect that. And before you know it you’re halfway across the map from wherever you were originally planning to go.

In the six years since that game was released I have never found a game that successfully replicated this “keep getting distracted by things you see in the distance” gameplay loop. Closest was Elden Ring.

So it’s like those old arcade games where you had to keep pumping quarters in to continue? No thanks.

So if I die, I get sent back to some checkpoint, but if I want to restart the run from scratch I have to pay? Why would I do that rather than just continuing?

Trap to avoid: Elden Ring.

The load times are atrocious, over 20 seconds, which does not work well in a game where you die all the time.

If you’re interested, hold off until you get a current-gen device.

Making it through Quick Man’s stage without the Flash Stopper in Mega Man 2.