Can't say I am shocked since Shinji Makami left Tango Gameworks shortly after Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda/ZeniMax. Still painful to see nevertheless. With Tango gone, MachineGames is probably the last ZeniMax studio that has a consistent and strong track record.
Brothers Sun was fun for the most part. But, I am not surprised it was cancelled since there was very little promotion for the series. Our Flag Means Death was another fun one.
Nah, no thanks. I believe Gameloft, primarily a mobile developer, has never once set out to make a great game; their mission loop is to make a cash shop disguised as a game, which is often mediocre or atrocious. I bought my wife Dreamlight Valley. The game is a microtransaction hellscape that would make King mobile games and 2K games proud.
2K24 is one of the worst entries of an already mediocre grind-fest. How 2K, in the last 10 years, mutated this once beloved basketball series into a live service game with irrationally slow incremental progress and unnecessary online-gated and time-gated content needs to be studied.
Just to change your body type requires players to wait a minimum of 3 weeks (average is 4 weeks). In previous iterations, you simply change your body type upon your myPlayer creation screen for free. There's also progress decay this year, meaning if you don't use your badges, it downgrades. The speed of degradation is far too fast compared to how slow you gain progress on a badge. This encourages micro-transaction purchases to "floor set" the badge from degrading. Drills still feel like a chore, but you do them anyways because the gameplay loop demands it for badge progress. On top of this, 2K is offering a game pass system and card purchases to advance through the season faster.
At this point, 2K did not make a video game at all, they made a dreadfully dull platform where you just feed it real money so that it would be less boring.
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