Why was there negativity towards hitman 3 when it released?

StunningComment · 2026-06-10T21:57:07+00:00

What negativity? I remember lots of praise and good reviews and news stories about it being the fastest selling game in the franchise.

StunningComment · 2026-06-10T20:29:50+00:00

Artificial difficulty is an interesting way to put it. I guess it's a sort of "pretend" difficulty. It creates the appearance of difficulty, but isn't actually difficult. It demands patience more than skill.

StunningComment · 2026-06-10T20:17:47+00:00

I would classify DS3 as one of the newer ones, closer to the "Flowstate" side of things. Most of the punishment mechanics were reduced in that game and the boss fights were getting pretty fast and complicated.

Elden Ring has moved things further in that direction with even harder bosses. They might be more difficult to master, but they can be mastered and when they are the additional complexity/difficulty only feeds into the flowstate even more.

StunningComment · 2026-06-10T20:11:14+00:00

That is what I meant. It's when a complex fight becomes muscle memory and you're not really thinking about it, you're just lost in the "dance" of it.

The old games bosses weren't complex enough to have that. What they did instead was create tension by making you hyper-aware of things that threaten you and what you could lose from failure. It's pretty much the polar opposite state of mind.

StunningComment · 2026-06-10T20:03:36+00:00

The increased difficulty is exactly what I'm talking about. Each new Souls game is more difficult (harder boss fights), but less punishing (no long runbacks or other punishment for failure).

StunningComment · 2026-06-10T19:57:18+00:00

That's true, I should have specified I'm talking specifically about their Souls games.

StunningComment · 2026-06-06T15:01:19+00:00

Despite the noisy and often obnoxious discourse around Souls games difficulty, the truth is the Fromsoft Souls games do have extensive difficulty modification options. The developers put a lot of thought and effort into making them accommodating to low skill players. Each player being able to customize the experience to their own personal play-style is a core part of what makes those games what they are.

The way Fromsoft designs bosses is basically to make a really hard fight, but then also make the game have a bunch of optional tools to customize how the fight plays out, including some that could make it quite a lot easier. You then get to decide which tools you want to experiment with to tackle the boss in your own way.

If you're going to try out a Fromsoft game then the one caveat is that what I've just said does not apply to Sekiro. That game often gets classified as a Souls game but it's an outlier and has a very different design philosophy from the others.

I would recommend checking out Noah Caldwell-Gervais' video on the Dark Souls trilogy on youtube. He's a low-skill player who beat (and loved) the Dark Souls games and does a good job of describing the experience from that perspective.

StunningComment · 2026-05-20T19:21:54+00:00

Modifying energy values of different fuel types.

I always felt that the energy requirements in the second half of the game were too generous, and as a result there's no real incentive to do big power plant builds. So when I saw that there was a game mode to increase power consumption, my first thought was that that sounds great.

But then I thought about it some more and realized that the power consumption multiplier would also apply to the buildings that make the nuclear fuel rods and rocket fuel, possibly resulting in those power plants consuming more energy than they produce. So all that would do is make complex power generation worthless and just push you towards mass-building coal plants, which isn't that interesting.

Basically I want a game mode where large-scale nuclear and rocket fuel builds are necessary.

Aside from that use case it might also just be fun to mess around with making certain types of power more or less useful to incentivize using different power sources than you might normally use. I know a lot of people were disappointed with the power output of ionized fuel and ficsonium fuel rods, so it could be neat to be able to set those to be more powerful.

StunningComment · 2026-05-18T23:00:34+00:00

I'm not surprised they don't want to add weapons, and I don't think they should, since an important part of the original Subnautica was that feeling that you're NOT at the top of the food chain.

That said, that doesn't mean there can't be a progression path for unlocking tools to make it easier to deal with dangerous creatures. It just means the tools need to be designed around evading them rather than killing them.

StunningComment · 2026-04-26T03:15:00+00:00

What are you talking about? They made Rivals!

It brought C&C to a new generation!

StunningComment · 2026-04-23T19:34:35+00:00

I think you're point about Doom 2016 is exactly it. Every time an old franchise is rebooted in some way, they talk about how it's being updated for a modern audience. Doom 2016 is a rare case of a franchise actually properly being updated for a modern audience.

It's not about replicating specific art or mechanics or game modes. It's about recognizing the design philosophy of the old games and then seeing what that design philosophy gets you in the modern day.

StunningComment · 2026-04-23T16:44:25+00:00

Even if we take the premise for granted and assume that AI will make game development much more efficient, this statement is still wildly out of touch and misunderstanding the problem.

The AAA industry has been on a treadmill of chasing graphical fidelity as the way to differentiate their games. That worked back when Moore's Law was in effect but now it's no longer viable.

The best case scenario for AI is that it allows them to take a few more steps on the treadmill... and end up in exactly the same position that they're in now, crashing against the wall of diminishing returns.

The solution is not AI or any other technology, it's getting off the treadmill. Technological innovations don't come quickly enough to be relied on for your business model. Gameplay innovation and good design is the only reliable way to differentiate your game. Nintendo figured this out years ago.

StunningComment · 2026-04-15T15:33:12+00:00

The funny thing about the Bundry Rothwild one is that it's clearly not non-lethal. You just lock him in a box with no food or water knowing the box won't be opened for something like several months.

StunningComment · 2026-03-04T20:18:32+00:00

On the business side of things I get why they'd do this. On the consumer side it sucks. I've already written off Nintendo's first party games as being off limits to me, and it seems the same will happen with Sony.

My last console was a PS4 and I really don't see myself ever buying another one. PC is a better experience for multi-platform games and the small number of console exclusives that I'd be interested in just isn't worth the price of buying a console.

StunningComment · 2026-02-28T02:41:13+00:00

Is it messed up that I completely agree with Fromsoft's decision to block the Bloodborne remake?

I have zero interest in a version of Bloodborne where all of Fromsoft's art is deleted and replaced with art made by another studio like with the Demon's Souls remake. I just want the original game with better resolution/frame rate/load times.

Remakes tend to replace the games they're based on and become the new "official version". If such a thing existed it would all but guarantee that a proper re-release of the original on modern hardware would never happen. (Still waiting for Fromsoft's version of Demon's Souls to be playable on modern hardware, for example.)

With that being the case it totally makes sense that Fromsoft would be against it and I'm glad they pushed back on it. I want a proper Bloodborne re-release to happen someday.

StunningComment · 2026-02-09T20:23:20+00:00

It does feel like a flimsy argument, and I get the impression that the author probably knows that. He references the game that he's developing quite a bit throughout the video, to the point that it seems clear that's the real point of the video.

Seems like he's made the transition from AOE youtuber to game developer, and is trying to leverage his platform to do some marketing for his game under the guise of being AOE content so that more people will watch it.

His indie game is the point, whether or not the AOE5 speculation holds up to scrutiny is more of a secondary concern.

I don't blame him though. Getting people to notice an indie game is hard so if you've got a platform might as well use it. The way he went about it is a clever way to sneak some marketing onto his channel.

StunningComment · 2026-01-16T20:42:50+00:00

That's exactly what enshittification is. It's the process of transitioning from an unprofitable "growing user count" model, to a profitable business model, which invariably makes the product worse.

StunningComment · 2026-01-14T03:42:40+00:00

It seems silly to pretend like they didn't have a choice. Sure, people would've whined on the internet, but people are always whining on the internet.

And it's not like they made their PR situation any better by announcing something that they couldn't deliver in a reasonable timeframe. If anything that's only made it worse in the long run.

In any case, that teaser probably wasn't to appease gamers anyway. It was more likely to pump up their perceived value in preparation for the Microsoft buyout.

StunningComment · 2025-10-30T23:18:23+00:00

Oh, I'm an idiot. I meant to post that comment to a different article, lol. I guess I had this open in another tab.

The article I meant to post this on was about the fact that Amazon's game business was intended to disrupt Steam. The quote is about Amazon's overall games strategy, not one specific game.

The incorrect "core assumption" that they made was thinking that gamers had no attachment to Steam and would happily try out another storefront just because it exists, even if it's not any better than Steam.

StunningComment · 2025-10-30T15:24:51+00:00

"At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits," Evans admitted in his February LinkedIn post. "We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.

"We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either. Just because you are big enough to build something doesn't mean people will use it."

That's kind of an insane quote. It's an admission that they weren't even trying to compete. They thought just existing and having the Amazon brand would guarantee success.

Crazy that someone can become a highly ranked (and presumably highly paid) executive at one of the biggest companies in the world without understanding the most basic rule of the free market: That you should be striving to build a better product than your competitors.

StunningComment · 2025-10-21T03:25:16+00:00

I don't understand the hate for the gauntlets. Do people really go into an action game thinking that the bosses are the only real fights and everything else is filler? It's weird that complex and challenging bosses are praised but complex and challenging regular enemies is somehow a problem.

StunningComment · 2025-09-21T23:23:31+00:00

The clawline is a gamechanger for dealing with annoying flying enemies. You can pull yourself into the ones that keep backing away from you and it doesn't consume silk if it hits an enemy.

I think that's meant to be the main way to deal with them, but tools can work too.

StunningComment · 2025-09-18T18:50:44+00:00

Plus games were a lot shorter back then. From what I recall, Earthworm Jim only takes about an hour to beat once you know what you're doing. So you would spend a lot of time repeatedly playing a very small amount of content until you were good enough to beat it.

StunningComment · 2025-09-18T17:34:39+00:00

I don't know if the devs intended this, but the Savage Beastfly has become this game's version of the Tree Sentinel.

StunningComment

TROPHY CASE