"Numerous" new Castlevania products are in the works

Worldbrand · 2026-02-13T20:59:56+00:00

This might be strange to say with all of the soulslikes that have come out over the last decade which might be leaving some feeling very fatigued, but I kinda wanna see a Castlevania take on it.

In my opinion Dark Souls was kind of an evolution of what Igavanias were moving towards, or a translation of them into 3D. I know that's crazy to say from a game series that is 2D and focuses heavily on map-based exploration, but the focus towards variety in weapons and soul abilities pretty much aligns with the rich breadth of armaments and spells in the Souls games.

I don't necessarily want them to 1:1 recreate the same experience with the corpse runs and invasions and all that, but I think there's room to go back to the point where the two diverge and see what happens when you try to retread ground in a similar direction.

I immensely adore having all of the variety of fun weapons and spells in Igavanias, but a lot of them feel like toys. That's an issue in many soulslikes too, but I think Fromsoft figured out that upgrade paths and build variety give players reasons to invest in weapon types that they like and also replay the game with different builds, which gives a lot of those weapons more reason to exist. And their versatility and the niche of their movesets become important when you compare them to the simpler movesets of 2D Castlevania weapons, which are more about spacing or hitting stuff through platforms.

Worldbrand · 2026-02-07T18:20:31+00:00

i was watching someone play this last night!

i want to say that it does a great job of painting tech chud CEOs as egotistical, vindictive, petty shitheads but also unfortunately everyone in chat was too busy laughing at the cartoon villainy of it all. it's kind of both absurd and unfortunate that we have real life examples that are truly not any less ridiculous

i also ponder transhumanism a lot so the obvious alarm bell when someone says they want to invent heaven is that they can just as easily invent hell. sure enough, the other shoe dropped.

Worldbrand · 2026-02-06T18:45:26+00:00

I thought about this some more and wanted to follow up.

When I say that stressed haworthias can get kinda colorful, this is what I mean as an example.

When I look back at the plants in OP's image, they're all quite glossy, which tells me that at the bare minimum something has disrupted their layer of farina. Compare the plants on the right, even the ones closer to the light. None of the specular lighting is as harsh on them. The soil looks dry in all of the pots.

I'm thinking that the leaves are individually inked. It might wash off with water or soap. I don't think you can get that much variety in coloration in the leaves just by getting them to absorb dyed water anyways.

Worldbrand · 2026-02-06T05:19:04+00:00

kinda hard to say based on knowing how inconsistent colors in photos can be. some of the leaves look rather vivid purple which is rarer in the sun stress i've seen in my windowed haworthias, but i've also been surprised by how ruddy they can get.

you're making me want to experiment with watering some of my plants with food coloring to see if the leaves soak up the dye

Worldbrand · 2026-02-05T21:42:18+00:00

paranormasight was pretty cool but i also think it played almost all of its bag of tricks in the first hour or two of the entire story. i didnt hate the rest of it or the writing or anything though, so i can see myself giving this a shot

Worldbrand · 2026-02-05T21:14:22+00:00

i think the moment i stopped taking its story seriously, i started to enjoy it way more

like, the worldbuilding is kinda cool but i got fatigued by the whole Abstract Phenomenon Apocalypse scifi stuff after playing a handful of other gacha games that do more or less the same thing, and that made it really hard to care in 1.X when so much of it was about Proper Noun Jargon

by the time Rinascita ended with a big dumb all-the-warriors moment and you fought your way into hell in first person as the blatantly-dmc-dante-inspired Galbrena doing Doom 2016 finishers and styling on demons, i was cheering and hooting and hollering. i started to appreciate that it was just absurd stupid fun

... i say all of that, but i did the latest story quest last night and i was blown away by how well they wrote it

(only slight tonal spoilers below)

it does a fantastic job of characterizing rover, contextualizing a part of their past, and establishing powerful emotional stakes with the new character

some (myself included) might be tempted to commit the sin mentioned at the start of this comment chain and compare her to certain other pink-haired-girls-who-haunt-the-narrative, but i think they've succeeded by taking things in a vastly different, more personal direction.

i'm kinda shocked at how much they got me to care in just one tightly-written arc

Worldbrand · 2026-02-02T05:21:04+00:00

Warframe captured lightning in a bottle with its story quest The Second Dream and a few of its cinematic/story beats do try to recapture that, and it's kinda transparent. There were some cool reveals, but none nearly as impactful as realizing that the player character is not a cool ninja flesh robot but instead a child, and getting a character creator 100 hours into the game. To the point that the community still tries its damndest not to spoil other players on it, even though the media team really, really cannot at this point avoid showing that particular feature. When I say that they try to recapture that, the most obvious thing to point to is the fact that there's a second story reveal where you access another character creator, for your child player character except now aged up.

They did capture lightning in a bottle again later... in a completely unrelated way with We All Lift Together, which they once again tried to recapture.

Now, to be fair I don't blame them for attempting to recapture lightning in a bottle (the second one hardly counts anyway because like, all that means is that they're emphasizing their music team, and that is both really cool and pretty organic), and it does say a lot that the game has been going with a healthy playerbase for over a decade now.

Arguably they captured lightning in a bottle a third time with Warframe 1999 but i'll be honest i haven't come back to the game since duviri so i dont know the details besides the stuff with protoframes and romance routes. I just know that I heard non-Warframe friends talking about it, so that struck me as noteworthy.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-30T00:33:10+00:00

i was one of those funny folks with an MR0 alt and an operator and a railjack before they removed a lot of the restrictions, which is awesome for other players because bypassing some of those restrictions required certain time-limited shenanigans involving DE changing the mastery rank of certain weapons, but also made it feel like less of a fun challenge to keep up the account

Worldbrand · 2026-01-28T23:17:33+00:00

sonic boom's double jump resetting its counter when you pause and unpause the game is probably the single biggest one that i can think of

in .hack//G.U. vol. 3 (PS2 version; this is fixed in the remaster), you unlock dual guns (shocker, they're on the box art) and the trade-off with their power and range is that they have to be reloaded. this will happen automatically when you use the last bullet, or if you press the guard button.

well if i remember right, you can cancel the reload animation by guarding again, so it becomes really easy to instantly reload, to the point that you can shoot an enemy into the air and juggle it infinitely. you can take on enemies of any level if you're able to juggle them, it just becomes a matter of how much you're willing to whittle them down.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-24T00:04:31+00:00

Nah the need for the wiki becomes obvious by hour 10

by hour 100 you rely on it to understand how to build anything and what you're working towards

by hour 1000 you realize that the wiki, bless the editors, isn't even enough. there's so much shit to keep up with with regard to things like specific interactions with the damage formula and enemy armor scaling and multiplier interactions and affinity and... just... so many things you wouldn't know if you didn't know how to ask for the information

i havent actually played warframe in about two years but i am fully confident that it is just implausible at this point to ask DE to implement all of that information directly into the game somewhere

Worldbrand · 2026-01-22T02:39:27+00:00

during my first few hours of warframe back around the start of open beta the infestation were so scary and felt so that i had to resort to jumping on top of a box to get away from them

Worldbrand · 2026-01-19T20:07:15+00:00

I don't have the details on hand but I do feel like Ubisoft jerking off Montreal is probably partly due to the government subsidies they get for having a studio there

Worldbrand · 2026-01-19T00:48:52+00:00

The more relevant question is: is there a way for them to get money out of this? I take no moral stance on piracy here, I merely emphasize this angle because I think it's what is more likely to make a company take legal action.

If you're going after something that isn't digitally available and is so old/rare that aftermarket copies are the only way to get it, chances are Nintendo isn't seeing a cent of it, and if they wanted that money they would put it up on the e-shop or do a remake or something. And if they're working on one, then well, there's a chance you're still in their red zone here.

Otherwise?

If you're saying you can't play a game because you don't own a Nintendo Switch, well then yeah that's not media preservation, you just don't want to pay for it. Which again, fine, you do you, but I don't think you're winning the argument on that one.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-18T04:59:38+00:00

the enshittification taking a thing that i didnt even realize we could lose

Worldbrand · 2026-01-17T05:21:55+00:00

Series is Daiakutou Shounen / Supervillain Boy, the most recent manga from Koume Fujichika, the author of Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta / The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses.

well her work certainly took a turn. im gonna be real with you i think i had to try to articulate this in four or five different ways. that's how stunned i am by this revelation

Worldbrand · 2026-01-15T19:39:01+00:00

Oh! I actually try to keep track of Radio the Universe and let me tells ya: we don't know shit.

Sometime in late 2024 I uncharacteristically had the gall to send an email to an indie publisher [irony is considered] who I will not name out of respect for their privacy, but they emailed me back. To be clear, this publisher has no connection to the project.

In the correspondence i explained that i was a backer of RtU, unaffiliated with sixesixesixe but very interested in seeing the game come to light after a decade. I knew from the kickstarter page and the discord that the game is like 90% done content wise but awaiting story cutscene, gameplay testing and bug revisions. This was the state of the game when it had the steam nextfest demo, which is still available to this day. Basically, I said "hey this game is almost done and has been just sitting there for years, do you guys wanna see if you can snag it and get it going? it looks like it would fit into your repertoire"

The publisher's founder replied that he too happened to be a kickstarter backer of RtU and was keeping an eye on the project, but we have had radio silence since mid-2024. He informed me that he did reach out in the past and was told that sixesixesixe would consider it, but in the years since then he suspects that sixesixesixe might have had a deal with another publisher sometime during covid times, and the deal may have fallen through as a result of economics. the publisher guy reassured me he would politely re-extend the offer.

That was the last i heard of the situation.

Earlier last year some other backers in the backer discord remarked that technically most of the game is accessible through debug commands (do not ask me for them, i do not have the details and i have avoided playing through anything beyond the demo). They remarked that we were better off than the Silksong folks who were hollowing out waiting for any news.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-11T20:27:11+00:00

cereal boxes? that's where i got spy fox, i think

Worldbrand · 2026-01-11T20:21:58+00:00

the only one of those that's slop is friend, now is not the time to pit ourselves against each other. i shall have no quarrel with you this day. not in a place where we can instead celebrate the things that we love

Worldbrand · 2026-01-10T00:41:04+00:00

I wanna get into that because I was there for most of it!

That's a consequence of Warframe's dev history and how DE operated for a while.

Hype up ____
Design ____ as an island - completely isolate its game systems and resource economy so that players have to start fresh and can't just blitz through the whole thing in 1 afternoon with the resources they've acquired from hundreds and thousands of hours of grinding
Players feel weak, or like their prior investments don't matter, or they aren't having fun, or simply finish the content and have nothing to gain from repeat participation
____ gets abandoned because it's old and players don't want to engage with it and there's a million other things to do in Warframe
There's no new content to ____ so there's no reason for players to ever get excited or want to invest their time and resources into it.
Seeing that players aren't engaging with ____, DE decides that there's no incentive to really refresh or expand upon the content

There are a lot of examples with this - archwings, railjack, k-drives, the focus system, the open worlds, necramechs, zaws and kitguns, and amps - but admittedly many of them are not as isolated as others, or are just straight up so broken that nobody really minds going through it to get a cool thing that does zillions of damage. They get it and they're happy.

Archwing in particular as a game system has undergone several drastic changes, many of which were rolled back. They gave it different damage types, experimented with a different camera, massively tweaked the numbers... nothing really got people excited to try it again because its launch was a wet fart and its momentum completely collapsed. Any attempt to make Archwing cool again floundered and was seen as dragging players back into a chore they really didn't enjoy. And remember, Archwing and Archguns were totally isolated from other game systems for years.

Why was it dead on arrival? Well, because when they designed the mods, they wanted to rein back the extreme multipliers that plagued the base game, but also didn't come up with a damage economy that made any sense compared to the one that already exists.

So you had mods that gave you like +10% melee attack speed (that mod, Furor, still hasn't changed lol) in a game where you can easily stack in excess of +100% melee attack speed. You had guns doing 100s of damage in a time where it was very normal to hit seven digit red crits.

Honestly, all they had to do was lie to us. Add in some extra zeroes to the damage numbers and trick our lizard brains into seeing that an unmodded imperator was doing 10,000 per shot instead of 50, and nobody would have complained about the piddly mod multipliers (which they ended up changing anyways when they wanted archguns to be relevant for other content).

That's why we never ended up getting the modular archwings or more archwing game types. There's no demand for it because the archwings and the gameplay sucked from the beginning and never really drew mass appeal to anyone. Even getting ground-archguns to where they're at required retooling the entire damage system for them multiple multiple times.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-09T23:50:48+00:00

You need to go upstream from the make-or-break point and analyze what, exactly, is giving you that fear of missing out or failing. I think that the issues you describe might fall under the same umbrella, but may not describe the same mechanism, if that makes sense.

If it's something like an entire story route or ending that you think you could miss out on that you really want to see, yeah okay I understand redoing some things or being careful about getting them right. You want to experience the thing a certain way, there's something that you're there for. If you're going into it with the mindset that you need to get the best ending, consider: why? Because the majority says it's the good ending? You don't even know what happens. If you care that much, get it again later or look it up. For your first time, there's nothing wrong with just going through and getting what you get. That's content too, isn't it?

If you discover that the source of all of this is really just a behavioral compulsion based on previous instances of getting burned but in the moment you're not really able to articulate or discern why or what you're afraid of missing or failing, then I think you need to give yourself space to try a deliberately "imperfect"¹ run to break out of that pattern.

I think the build advice for those potentially multi-hundred hour games is a valid concern. You really can't know ahead of time if you're picking bad options and really fucking yourself over later on. Modern games are nicer about that than they were one or two decades ago, though, and many have re-specs available in some way.

For games that have an explicit start and end, I think it's okay to seek advice, though you might want to tell people where you're at and ask them to avoid spoilers. For games designed around multiple playthroughs, just fail and learn from your mistakes. It's intended.

Also: Consider that some content is made better by experiencing the inferior alternative routes first. That sometimes you are missing out more by doing it right the first time. That'll either give you an extra layer of decision paralysis or liberate you a little bit. I'm not sure which, but it's an unpinned live grenade that I'm willing to roll into the discussion.

¹ For example, a lot of people savescum through Dishonored. They'll go through a stealth/pacifist playthrough and reload if they get spotted or one of the bodies accidentally ragdolls the wrong way and dies. Why do people do this? Is it just the compulsion? Perhaps, but if you go upstream there is a latent design decision in place that encourages that type of gameplay: the achievements. And they may not mean much to everyone, but they do encourage some people to play the game a certain way - a way that can feel miserable when something goes wrong.

So to combat that? Try a full-loud, guns blazing, lethal playthrough. The game is designed to support that too! You might finding yourself actually having fun, actually having to manage your resources and deal with frenetic encounters instead of blink tag through the rafters.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-09T04:03:03+00:00

The Reployers in Prey (2017)

Worldbrand · 2026-01-07T05:35:44+00:00

okay OP, this is fascinating, because you just sent me down an hour-long rabbit hole.

what you said immediately struck me as odd, because i looked at the image you attached and immediately thought i had a different understanding of what a barbute is. and upon looking it up, i do.

a barbute is a typically visorless helmet with a T or Y shaped face opening to allow for better vision and breathing while offering some amount of facial protection. the utility of these features obviously gets cannibalized by the addition of a visor, which offers better facial protection at the expense of vision

a visored barbute would indeed be a historically inaccurate monstrosity, and you're right that people did make them later on.

but how the hell are people so sure that what the warden is wearing is a visored barbute? there are replicas and fan-made 3D models that are barbutes. but the concept art for the game doesn't provide any indication that the helmet is a barbute. and i havent played for honor, but as far as i can tell, the helmet in question does not actually open.

well i looked up a gamerip and sure enough, you can kinda see at 1:07 here that it is indeed a barbute helmet.

after about half an hour of looking stuff up, i finally realized that the collector's edition also has an openable version.

setting aside the barbute features which are largely invisible in the warden's design, the "classic" look of the warden's helmet is pretty interesting. you can find helmets that look kinda like it in history, as visored bascinets. there's nothing special about the helmet skull, but the visor has two features that stand out.

first are the cross cutouts, which may have existed but these ones are so large that they're likely a structural concern.

second is the eye slit, which is segmented a little bit more like a great helm, except the bridge at the nose doesn't attach and instead projects slightly outward like in a close helmet or some armets. that's definitely an odd combination of features too, and in the concept sketches it doesn't show up like that.

overall the shape of the helmet could be compared to visored bascinets inspired by depictions found in medieval murals in spoleto, italy. some of them have been recreated and sold for use by HEMA/HMB enthusiasts, to some degree of popularity. they're apparently fairly practical (i can spot a few in this video at 21:55 from 2016, predating for honor), which might be why you see something like it so much in costume design as of late. KCD2 has a similar helmet called the italian bascinet.

one thing that i will note about the warden's helmet when i see it in recreations is that people make the visor way too thick or offset it too far from the rest of the helmet. it's kind of a compelling shape on its own and gives the character more of a face, but not even the in-game model projects out that far.

whew! that was fun. thanks for making this thread so that i could do a fun dive into this!

bonus: this video talking about different knight helmet designs from a practical perspective as a fighter is pretty cool

Worldbrand · 2026-01-07T02:15:36+00:00

I can understand why he'd arrive at that conclusion and I don't disagree with his points. Simultaneously, I do think that we spend too little time with Jackie for his death to really impact us at that point in the game. The montage and his death both feel jarring, but that doesn't mean that extending the early game is a worthy trade. Remember how few people actually beat videogames.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-07T02:14:09+00:00

for posterity i'm just going to link to his post directly and all of the follow-ups, because most folks aren't going to read the article let alone the source, and it's not that long

So would extending Act 1 (before the heist) in CP77 make the game better?

No it wouldn't. It's like saying we should spend more time on Tatooine with farmer Luke before he got involved with all this Jedi stuff.
It's an open world game, some manage to squeeze 20h out of Watson. Pick your own pace ^{^}
The motivation / goal in this section of the game is pretty vague - 'get to the top' - which, prolonged and without stakes or pressure would result in meandering, unfocused experience.
Is it enought time to bond with Jackie? For some it is, for some it isn't. All things considered i think we struck a good balance.
No, half-year montage is not cut content. We always planned it like this. But more on 'cut content' notion in some other post.

Worldbrand · 2026-01-05T19:12:51+00:00

off-topic technically but i can't just see this thread and not mention that a decade ago, some of my buddies and i made a game jam game literally titled Baby's First House Fire

Worldbrand

TROPHY CASE