Recent content by Oliver

I've never been particularly drawn to the survival genre as a whole -- most of it feels like busywork dressed up as progression. That said, the few people whose taste I trust all seem to make an exception for Subnautica, and looking at it from the outside, it does appear to be doing something...

Played through the first few hours of a recent release last night -- I won't name it specifically, but the 'choice' system was essentially pick dialogue option A for a slightly warmer tone or dialogue option B for a slightly more blunt tone, with outcomes identical regardless. Baldur's Gate 2...

Played through the first few hours of a recent release last night -- I won't name it specifically, but the 'choice' system was essentially pick dialogue option A for a slightly warmer tone or dialogue option B for a slightly more blunt tone, with outcomes identical regardless. Baldur's Gate 2...

There's a difference between a game being long because it's genuinely rich and a game being long because the designers needed to hit a certain playtime metric. Most modern open-world releases fall firmly into the second category. I was playing Gothic II again recently -- shorter than most...

Jake's point about demos is a good one. There was a real accountability to them -- the developer had to show you something worth playing before asking for your money. That model has been entirely replaced by refund windows and early access, neither of which is quite the same thing. What I miss...

I'd push back slightly on Half-Life 2 as a definitive all-time pick -- it's an extraordinary technical achievement for its era but the writing is quite thin. Planescape: Torment, Morrowind, Gothic II, Baldur's Gate 2 -- these are the games that actually had something to say. That said, Disco...