Recent content by Oliver

I played Dark Souls the first time because a colleague told me it was probably too hard for 'my type of gamer' and gestured in a way I found quietly insulting. I was not very good at it and I remain not very good at it. But I played forty hours of it that month, so I suppose the strategy worked...

On my break at work. Tonight it'll be Divinity 2 -- still on the Lone Wolf playthrough and I've finally hit the stretch where the build actually starts to justify itself. Lukas -- a succession crisis caused entirely by your own poor planning sounds familiar. Half my Morrowind saves are...

I make a cup of tea at the start of a session and invariably forget to drink it. Sarah has stopped offering to make it for me at this point. Biscuits occasionally but that tends to happen more by accident than intention.

The worry is that publishers take the wrong lesson from it -- not 'design the whole experience around cooperation' but 'add a co-op toggle to what was already a single-player game'. Those aren't the same product. Hazelight actually understood the distinction and built everything around it from...

Spent most of the week on Divinity: Original Sin 2. Second playthrough, finally trying a Lone Wolf build properly rather than a full party. Slower in the early game but the scaling later makes it worthwhile. Also got about an hour of Morrowind in whilst Ellie was at her friend's on Saturday...

The vast majority are designed to extract money from people who'd be better served by not playing them at all. The free-to-play model is specifically engineered to exploit psychological pressure points. The handful of exceptions -- proper ports of genuine PC or console titles -- are worth the...

Something in the vein of Planescape but built with current technology and without the compromise. A game that treats dialogue as its central mechanic rather than decoration, and trusts the player to engage with it seriously. The problem is that type of game doesn't sell forty million copies, so...

Planescape: Torment, which is probably an obvious answer for anyone who has played it. There is a moment in the late game where the weight of what the Nameless One has done to the people around him becomes unavoidable -- not through a cutscene but through accumulated context. I sat with it for a...

Gothic II's Valley of Mines does something interesting -- technically dated by any modern measure but the geometry creates a genuine sense of place. Morrowind has the same quality in its open stretches. For modern examples RDR2 is the obvious answer and it earns it. The forests around Roanoke...

Frankly, spite. Someone in an old forum thread described Gothic II as 'unplayable without a manual' in a tone suggesting that was a criticism rather than a selling point. I went in immediately. Still one of the best RPGs I've played, which I suppose proves their point in a different way.

The commercial logic is sound, which is precisely why I'm cautious. When developers chase a successful formula the results are usually disappointing. That said, It Takes Two is a genuine design achievement — cooperative play used as a storytelling mechanism rather than bolted on for the sake of...

Just clocked off for the day so good timing. Back into Divinity: Original Sin 2 this week — left it half-finished about a year ago and finally picked it back up. The tactical side still holds up well. Sarah has been tolerating the muttering about action points with reasonable patience.

Depends entirely on the game, honestly. There are titles I'd argue are worth your time regardless of how they present themselves on the surface, and there are technically competent releases that simply have nothing to say. The market's not great at sorting those two categories reliably.

It's not even the inconvenience that bothers me, frankly. It's the implied assumption that I, having purchased the product, am a potential thief until proven otherwise. The relationship between developer and player has become rather adversarial and I'm not sure how we unwind that.

I'd argue it's mixed at best. The best thing FromSoft did was prove there's an audience for games that don't hold your hand and actually have consequences. That was genuinely refreshing. The worst thing is that every second studio now seems to think the lesson is just to make enemies hit harder...