General Game Chat

[Mr EliteL]

Damn, I completely forgot about Bowser's "retirement" from being the Nintendo of American President, and started reading the quote as a brand new coverage of it. Uhh, I got nothing to say about him joining Hasbro, so it's whatever really. Probably will be rather under the radar as he was as his last job. OK guess I did.

Likewise with Pritchard both myself not knowing what he's been up to like you are Moony, and being under the radar too like I thought Doug Bowser was.

[Moonface]

I don't know if anyone here has ever wanted to play Tales of Phantasia X over its released remakes, but I just saw that the game has been fully translated and patched to run at 60fps.

The time is now! Tales of Phantasia Cross Edition is now available in English and with optional 60 fps battles! This project was only made possible thanks to mziab and the people at Phantasian Productions. To celebrate, here's some art by @beltran_sadie. All relevant links below.

https://github.com/lifebottle/Tales-of-P...s/tag/v1.0

Tutorial video: https://youtu.be/55c3mG3gIEA

Mini Guide WIP by @kevan_33: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1...obilebasic

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In other fan effort related news, Bloodborne emulation on PC is apparently at a point where it can run at 4k 60fps:



Apparently there's other features such as disabling the motion blur and FXAA, and also running the game at anything above 100fps causes the game engine to start screaming like the Cleric Beast. I wonder how long it'll be before a randomizer gets made for this?

[Maniakkid25]

...So I had a pleasant surprise when I randomly stumbled upon the Legend of Dragoon page on my PS5. See, despite having complained before that it doesn't work, I apparently own Legend of Dragoon and a few other PS1 originals that are available on PS5. I bought them on PS3, but I guess the system didn't recognize them, at first? Oh well, I now have Legend of Dragoon installed on my PS5. What a time to be alive.

[ShiraNoMai]

They probably hadn't gone through the PS5 specific emulation checklist, (or, likely, some legal red tape allowing them to renew contracts for newer consoles) but it's great to hear it's working now?

[Maniakkid25]

I'd believe the contracts thing for Wild Arms, but Legend of Dragoon is wholly developed and owned by Sony. And plus, some of the games I bought on PS3 (Parasite Eve being a glaring example) aren't even available on PS5 as of the writing of this post. So, I don't know what happened, nor do I really care. All I know is I don't have to rebuy Legend of Dragoon for PS5, because I totally would have done that to aid in sending a message to remake the damn game, already!

Side note, the PSX emulator built into the PS5 has Save States, and can rewind time to earlier in gameplay. I thought that was really neat.

[Moonface]

And just like that, another example of chasing the live service dragon and being burned hard by it as Wildlight announces that Highguard's servers will be shutting down in just over a week from today:

Today we're sharing difficult news. We have made the decision to permanently shut down Highguard on March 12.

Since launch, more than 2 million players stepped into Highguard's world. You shared feedback, created content, and many believed in what we were building. For that, we are deeply grateful.

Despite the passion and hard work of our team, we have not been able to build a sustainable player base to support the game long term. Servers will remain online until March 12th. We hope you'l jump in with us one more time to show your support and get those final great matches in while we still can.

The team is excited to release one final game update to enjoy in the remaining life of the game. We'll be adding a new Warden, a new weapon, account level progression, and skil trees! Full patch notes are coming, and we're targeting tonight or tomorrow morning for patch release.

From all of us at Wildlight, thank you for playing, for supporting us, and for being part of Highguard's story.

[Maniakkid25]

Ha. Ha ha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for them. They claimed to be an indie studio when Tencent funded them, and made a corpo-schlock live service FPS. I have no sympathy for these fools. Glad to see it burn.

[Dragon Lord]

The best part about this is that the game's director said in an interview that player count doesn't matter, and now they are shutting down because they don't have the player count to sustain the game.

Absolutely deserved, another slop game from a slop dev dead as it should be.

You're up next, Marathon.

[Moonface]

The best part about this is that the game's director said in an interview that player count doesn't matter, and now they are shutting down because they don't have the player count to sustain the game.

In fairness, the comment was made in the sense of what they felt was the most important thing about making a game to them:

Whether it gets a thousand people or a hundred million people, it doesn't matter. What matters most is that the game is loved by the people who played it.

Maybe an open beta before full launch would have helped to address some of the gameplay issues that people found in the game at launch that could have allowed it to be better at launch than it was, which in turn might have encouraged players to buy cosmetics instead of holding off due to the rapidly dropping player count.


Keeping with the theme of things players aren't really receptive to, I saw that apparently AI guide books are flooding Amazon: https://frvr.com/blog/following-ai-gener...r-problem/
I know AI is low-effort slop to make a cheap buck but who is even buying game guidebooks in 2026? Prima stepped out of the game guides business in 2018 because it wasn't financially viable anymore, and surely everyone knows they can just find answers to anything about a game they're stuck in online.

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Oh, and another that broke while I was writing this post. Ballistic Moon, the developer behind the Until Dawn Remake, has officially dissolved. Not surprising, because there was no chance that game was going to sell well like it did the first time it came out. Not only did the original release come at a very good time for content creators to pick it up, but once you know the story there's nothing else to bother playing the game for since it doesn't really have much in terms of actual gameplay.

[Maniakkid25]

Maybe an open beta before full launch would have helped to address some of the gameplay issues that people found in the game at launch that could have allowed it to be better at launch than it was, which in turn might have encouraged players to buy cosmetics instead of holding off due to the rapidly dropping player count.

This was never going to happen, because the devteam were former Apex Legends devs, and they wanted to "Shadow Drop" the game like Apex Legends did, thinking it would make them gobs of money. That plan was derailed by the offer of being the final reveal trailer at the Game Awards. In short, everyone up and down the chain were idiots Chasing the Dragon, and I have absolutely no sympathy for them. Fuck 'em.

Why the hell did they remake Until Dawn, anyway? Wouldn't it have made more sense to remaster it, instead? Or was this a Persona 3 situation, where the base code is so spaghetti-fied that it's impossible to unravel, and the only sensible option is to remake it?

[Moonface]

Why the hell did they remake Until Dawn, anyway? Wouldn't it have made more sense to remaster it, instead? Or was this a Persona 3 situation, where the base code is so spaghetti-fied that it's impossible to unravel, and the only sensible option is to remake it?

I think it was remade because of the Until Dawn movie and to take advantage of Unreal Engine 5. The remake also came to PC so maybe it was easier to just remake the game than trying to port over a remaster of the PS4 version?
I also thought the movie hadn't come out yet but it actually released last year. $15 million budget with a $56 million box office apparently.

[Dragon Lord]

If it was a single-player game, I'd understand the "player count doesn't matter, only that the people who play it loved it" mentality, but you're making a live service game. Player count is everything to that type of game and not caring about how many people you have playing is just asking for your game to die immediately (which as we know, it did).

I'd actually still buy guide books if they were still made regularly. I liked buying them for collection purposes more than anything. I know Future Press still makes them, and I wanted to buy their Elden RIng ones, but I think most of them are out of print now and the only way to buy one is from an overpriced re-seller.

Also congratulations to Slay the Spire 2 for absolutely humiliating Marathon and completely taking the wind out of their sails for their launch. If rumors are true, Bungie has so much invested in Marathon that they need to sell 7 to 11 million copies of the game just to break even, so I'm sure seeing less than 100K PC players while Slay the Spire 2 more than quadrupled that at 500K+ is exactly what they want to see.

Can we call it a legit murder when a small indie dev releases their game at the same time as a big, highly marketed AAA game and then absolutely brutalizes them? Plus it's just an early access release, not even a full, finalized release. That has to be humiliating for Bungie (if we're lucky, Marathon will bleed players after the first week or two and PlayStation will axe Bungie and we'll be free of their slop forever).