I don't have any Christmas-related game in mind, but I think we have to be careful with Christmas trees so I'll go with... well, Firewatch :)

I think Awards tell more about the industry than about the games. I have nothing pro or con, it doesn't really matter to me. But the DLC debate is interesting. My opinion is that they're missing the point. I haven't played Shadow yet, but I think its very nature of DLC has a lot to do with the praise it received. Maybe it's big enough to be a whole game, but I don't think it would be so popular if it was. Giving it the award (I'm pretty sure it's gonna be Astro, but let's say it's Shadow) would be a terrible signal to the other studios. Having a DLC category, on the other hand, could make the industry be a little less self indulgent with future DLCs, which can't be a bad thing.

I'm retiring Doom Eternal. I was the one nominating it this month because I got it for free and I wanted to try it out, see if I enjoy the genre. I gave it 40 minutes and I disliked every minute of it. It's just not for me. Constantly being very low on or even fully out of ammo, even for the chainsaw, how's that fun in this type of game? But who am I to judge? I guess I just dislike shooters.

Thanks for pleading guilty :)

Well, I voted for the game (I always vote for games on my backlog, that's an opportunity to clean it). So I think I only get what I deserve haha.

I'll try to beat it, I don't feel it to be that hard, just tedious.

Considering the guy I responded to also missed it and how many were complaining about how challenging it is compared to 2016, I wasn't the only one who missed did. It was in 2020 around the time of release, I don't remember 100% how my playthrough went.

Oh, I was aware of the chainsaw, I'm just not very comfortable with it.

There is indeed a tutorial, but I certainly won't blame anyone for trying to help :)

281 and that's way too much.

I'm generally around 250 (which are already too much, obviously), but I haven't been able to play as much as the usual in october... while still being very able to buy new games.

Now I don't even want to look at the expected run times, it's a little scary :)

Okay, I'm five hours through and not having the time of my life. Doom 2016 was more straight-to-the-point and beginner friendly in my memory (although pretty tough at first). I find Eternal a little tiring for now... Will I constantly be short on ammo til the end? Don't answer that if the answer is 'yes', you'd make me drop the game right away :-/

I'm one day late but I'm done with RE7 (review here). The game unfortunately didn't live up to my expectations after its super-strong opening, but it was interesting anyway and since I probably wouldn't have play it by myself, thanks to the community for introducing me to the lovely Baker family!

Well, this sure wasn't my first pick since I totally suck at FPS, but it's on my backlog and I have a thing with the Doom series so... might be fun :)

Enjoy everyone!

I'll go with a game I've been waiting to play for years and nominate Ico.

Hi everyone,
October's been a tough month for me so I haven't contributed as much as I expected.
I'm done with Inside = the second playthrough unfortunately didn't change my mind. I just don't click with this kind of game.
I'm on RE7 right now. Very strong first hours and best RE I've played in years so far. Hopefully I'll complete it before Halloween.
Pleased to see Death's Door is well received overall. I wasn't sure with that suggestion.

Very interesting selection, with three very different games.

I think I'll go with Inside first. It's been on my 'I should replay this' list for a while now. I didn't really like it at the time, but I might have missed something.

Like I said in the main topic, I've completed Death's Door only a few months back, it's too soon for a replay but I'm glad it's here, pretty underestimated game imo.

I've backlogged RE7 for the occasion but not sure I'll find the time in october.

Have fun everyone :)

Done (and reviewed).

I'm not sure nominating Bully was the best idea, but this was decent fun.

This time I think I'll nominate a game I won't play if it wins, since I've done it only a few month ago : Death's Door.

I didn't takes the games industry into account when I made my post. The number of layoffs is horrific, the acquisitions are concerning, and the ballooning budgets of AAA games is not sustainable. I have no interest in multiplayer games or games-as-a-service so I just ignore that whole aspect of modern gaming. I was just saying that there are plenty of great games still coming out today and if none of them appeal to me, I have enough games in my backlog to last me a lifetime.

Neither did I. I thought about this, actually, but I wasn't sure the original question really was about the "state of the industry", more about "our personal views about gaming nowadays". Obviously, Le_Don made a lot of good points and, obviously, I will never, ever say I don't care about people losing their jobs.

As for the open-world debate (which is actually a standardization debate), this is something I've talked earlier in the thread about indies. I don't have a lot more to say about it since I don't play most modern AAA, or only years after their release, but I'm afraid this is something we can notice in almost every mass media (and for the exact same reasons : production and marketing costs, lack of true competion - how many majors companies are still standing in cinema or music?, etc.) Being a creator has always been hard and it's especially tough nowadays, I don't think this is inherent in gaming.

I'm actually quite glad. I really worry sometimes I sound like a fool but I'm glad I at least had someone think I made some great points. And yeah, another problem is that there's no competition really. Nintendo is not competing with anyone, Sony isn't competing with Xbox, I don't know what Xbox is doing and... yeah. It feels like we're a bit stagnant right now in terms of anything like that. The only real competition I feel if it's competition at all is with VR Headsets like the Valve Index and whatever the next Meta Quest model is. But that's not saying much right?

I was always wondering why I felt like this about Indies and your comparisons made a great point. There's just too many coming out and too much money being invested and a huge chunk of games that wouldn't have a single chance of making it onto the front page of the Nintendo E-Shop or Steam's New and Trending. Yeah, I'm not really excited about any indie games right now, but maybe that can change next game generation.

I totally forgot about Metroidvanias as well! The only ones I'm interested really in playing are some of the Metroid games and the Castlevania GBA and DS titles (and of course Symphony of the Night) I played a bit of Metroid: Zero Mission and had a great time with it, so I'll have to complete that eventually. But yeesh, if what you're saying about Metroidvanias adding soulslike elements, that's disappointing to here since it seems like something I could get into but I just wish there were more accessible titles. Again, as I've said there have been times in the history of gaming where these trends/bubbles burst, so we'll have to see when those bubbles burst sometimes. I am still having hope that Action RPGs, Platformers and Metroidvanias will go back to the roots of what made them so appealing in the first place.

I think the biggest issue in the metroidvania/soulslike debate is how both definitions remain vague. People put a lot of different things under these labels (I mean, the word 'metroidvania' is not even accurate regarding the number of Metroid and Castlevania games that are not 'metroidvanias'). In my opinion (but really just mine since everyone seems to have its own ^^), metroidvania shouldn't be regarded as a genre or even a subgenre, it's more of a game-design 'language', action/adventure games with non-linear progress through inter-connected areas, involving backtracking. The original Dark Souls totally fits this definition so I can see how its influence became so prominent in metroidvanias. As for soulslikes, I'm not sure I've played a lot of them but they seem to reduce the Dark Souls experience to the lowest common denominators (difficulty, parry/roll, boss patterns... all things that it didn't invent at all) I'm not the biggest Dark Souls fan in the world but it's a very reductive way to carry its legacy.

You named Valve and I think they could compete with Sony. They have the experience, the money, a well installed brand and a bottomless pit of potential customers. But they just don't want to and that's probably the thing people should really be worry about. Even Sony, actually. I'm not specialized in economics but as far as I know, the lack of competitors is as unhealthy for a brand as losing to one of them. In the 90s, the war between Nintendo and Sega (then Sony and not to mention Atari and a few minor others) pushed everyone to surpass themselves in both creativity and research. A world without any competition between consoles gives you... well, a PS5 Pro, I guess?

P.S. : Exophobia just landed on my whishlist, thanks Civilwarfare101 :)

I'm someone who is EXTREMELY uncynical about this type of stuff. And since I play games from so many different generations whether it be from PC, modern consoles, legacy consoles, emulation. PS Plus Premium or Nintendo Switch Online, I feel I'm not qualified to answer that question. Especially since I don't play every single new release ever and have nothing to say when a game launches in a bad state since I'm not there.

But I will admit I'm mixed. I usually don't like making these types of posts because I worry people will think I'm stupid or something (which I know never happens here, but even then it's a great fear of mine) but I thought I'd might as well jump in on the discussion because I certainly don't think the world of gaming is in the dumps right now, but I do have some complaints.

My main issue is that that a lot of the games I played this generation were kind of unsatisfying or unappealing to me. Well, let me rephrase it. It sometimes feels unsatisfying and unappealing but the feeling is creeping up a bit more than usual nowadays. AAA takes too long to make nowadays and the Indies I've played especially in the Boomer Shooter and sometimes the 3D Platformer market feel like copycats of better games I could be playing right now. Even though it feels like so much comes out nowadays I can't help but feel with AAA they're too expensive to make back a profit and take too long for anyone to care at that point when the sequel eventually comes out and yeah, I just don't see a lot of appeal in the Indie market right now. The only thing that's really keeping me interested is the AA stuff. I find that's the perfect balance of not only time and budget, but also giving players the most interesting titles and overall, I feel AA games will keep me continuously interested in the 9th Generation up till the 10th.

To talk about the PS5 Pro for a sec, I was never going to get one anyway but when I went to Gamestop, they said it would be around CDN $959.99 and if they did decide to sell it with a disc drive, it would have been $1200-1250 including tax which would have already made Sony look even worse. To me, with the games I play we really don't need a Pro model imo. A lot of the games I play run perfectly fine on my PS5. Don't have much to say about this subject but it's crazy that Sony went from releasing a giant flop, to releasing a giant success, to releasing a system that again will probably be giant flop and only for dedicated PS users. And that was in the span of like 2-3 weeks! Insanity.

I'm not one who is loyal to one system or another and I honestly don't care if one system is underperforming compared to another. I have a PS5, I have an Xbox Series X, I have a Nintendo Switch OLED, I have a pretty decent gaming PC and tons of legacy consoles. I have them because I would like choice. And yes, I can go to my subscriptions on all modern console platforms and play games that are easily accessible and I can still play my backwards compatible titles that I've missed during the last console gen. In fact, I'm mainly playing a lot of 8th Gen games since those are the most interesting to me atm. My advice to anyone is play on whatever you like and also think about what your friends play on the most if you're into multiplayer sessions.

To be honest I've become extremely disillusioned with a great deal of people who do nothing but trash gaming eras and in general modern gaming because like Civilwarfare101 said, it's be overdone to death for years and even decades now. I'm just sick and tired of all the negative clickbaity articles and thumbnails calling everything TRASH or STUPID or AWFUL or *INSERT NEGATIVE CLICKBAIT WORD HERE*. I agree that Modern Gaming isn't perfect and I highly see some big problems as I've stated (eventually they're going to have to do something about aging discs, but the quality of the discs and carts for legacy consoles are so different from one another that would be really hard to figure out a solution for all of them), but it's become borderline parody now. I don't know, I just like being here on HowLongToBeat because pretty much everyone is so uncynical and nice and friendly, something I find lacking in places like Youtube, X/Twitter, Facebook, Steam, GOG, that stuff. I can't stand to be anywhere else. Again, I don't want to say everything is perfect in the world of gaming but I feel at least to me there's more things better than there are worse.

My main issue with a lot of games today is the overindulgence in genres like Soulslikes and Roguelikes. I find the concepts of those genres extremely unappealing and there are people who certainly do not like one or the other or both. You can't just make a simple Action RPG anymore, it has to be a Soulslike. You can't even just make a regular Indie/Boomer Shooter anymore. Nor a Platformer, or a Deck Building Game, or a Action Game, it HAS to be a roguelike. It's disappointing to see such an obsession of game genres not a lot of people are going to get into. Japan seems to be the only one making Action RPGs the way they were. One of my favorite stories of the gaming industry gives me hope though that we will go back to simpler times. Back in the day, there was the obsession of Gritty Military FPS Games and Science Fiction Hi-Concept FPS Games that were FLOODING the mid 2000's to the mid 2010's and then when Doom and Wolfenstein: The New Order and DUSK came out, the gaming world realized we needed to go back to being simple about FPS Games and what made them so fun in the first place, and even then FPS Games were trying new and incredible things. The bubble essentially burst one Gritty Military Shooters and Sci Fi FPS games. So I'm thinking the bubble will eventually burst on the Soulslike and Roguelike trend and hopefully, we can see why those games were so good in the first place. I'm not saying don't make roguelikes or soulslikes anymore, I just want devs to see why those Action RPGs were great in the first place and why they influenced games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring.

And if we're talking about Exclusivity to me I honestly don't care. I don't buy a specific consoles for specific games because as I said I like choice. I can lean forward more favorably to someone like Nintendo, but that doesn't mean I'm going to always play exclusives. There's so many different games coming out right now that are not first party titles. Like, that new Dynasty Warriors game coming out? That looks insane! And some of the third party ones are even more interesting than the first party ones. But that's just me.

This took a lot out of me, but I feel I have had a burden lifted off my shoulders. The world of gaming rn isn't perfect, but it could be A HELL of a lot worse at least to me. There's always something coming out that I'm interested in and there's always great legacy games that I still would love to play. And there's just so many things I can play from all these generations that gives me so much more choice. In the end, choice matters for me. And when you're living in a present day where there are tons of amazing (although sometimes not so amazing) choices to be made of what game to jump in next, then I'm mostly happy. I just wish some types of genres weren't overflooded and I wish some games would stop being copycats of better games and if they're going to use mechanics from other games, give them a new spin that makes it refreshing.

Not only you don't sound stupid but you're making a very good point about indies and genres. You can add 'metroidvania' (even if it often goes with soulslikes since there is now an unwritten rule commanding any metroidvania to be tough and combined with soulslikes tropes). I was looking at my Top 20 games completed in 2024 and was surprised to notice that for the first time in years, I didn't have any platformer in the first half. Just like you, I don't play games right after their release, so I could blame it on bad luck, but the truth is it's harder and harder to fine to a great 'pure' platformer - not a so-called 'metroidvania', not a high concept game including randomization, not a puzzle-platformer : just a simple (and effecient) platformer.

I'm afraid indie gaming is going through the same thing as indie music did in the late 90s/early 2Ks : too much money, too many titles, too many trends, and too many uninspired designers that wouldn't have made the cut few years earlier. I think it's quite natural to be more lenient with indies (although there are more and more 'fake indies'... again as in indie-music back then), but I have the feeling that their production tends to standardize around a few tropes and therefore reproduce the same pattern as AAA.

As for Sony... well, I think the very fact that almost every post ends up talking about them when the original question wasn't this specific says a lot about how they rule the industry. Only a few days before PS5 Pro announcement I was telling a friend that Sony was acting like a lazy king because of the lack of true competitor. I couldn't have imagined a better example. Who's the biggest PS5 challenger nowadays? Actually, I think it's probably... PS4.

Totally agree with nibilly. The PC/Switch combo is perfect for me (+ I have a bunch of older hardwares still working), so I don't feel the need to buy a PS5. I'm considering buying a Steam Deck but I'm not sure it would worth it. I'm not even excited by the next Nintendo console, I'm just perfectly happy with gaming these days and I tend to think that it reaches a peak.

That being said, I have to admit that it's been a long time now since a console really did change my (our) way of playing games. That might be the point where I'm a little worry. Not about the tech, but about the gaming experience itself. Even Nintendo stopped bothering with concepts and designing consoles in order to offer something different (Switch is a great idea but it can't compare with their previous hardwares that had a lot of specifications, and a lot of games designed to match them). So yes, buying a new console nowadays basically means paying for an upgrade, but there's no news here and hopefully this won't last.

Finished my Main+Extras playthrough with about 12ish hours.

Bully was a mediocre experience, with a few laughs, and some great nostalgia moments.

The gameplay is subpar, feels like a collection of quick time events and simple mini games. It hasn't aged well.

The characters, writing and missions were really creative - that was the most enjoyable part.

7/10

Yep, I'm far from the credits but it sounds like a 6/6,5/7 to me (at best). There's a lot of things I like about this game but gameplay-wise, it really shows its age. I'm not an autosave fanatic but this specific type of game with this specific save system can be really tedious.

OK, so after a few hours, I can only agree with @Civilwarfare101 about the lack of checkpoints. A lot of things aged like, a lot. To be honest, I wasn't really aware how old was the game when naming it. I think I'm aging myself and have a hard time admitting 2006 was a long time ago now :)

That being said, I'm having fun and I'm pleasantly surprised by the story and characters. The game's not as cliché as I thought it would be.

FYI for people I link to the first game if there are remasters so things like the scholarship edition will not be displayed in your post but the original Bully will be. I can change this in the future if people would be prefer to invert it (i.e. link to the latest)

Thanks for the answer (and thanks to abatage too). As far as I'm concerned it doesn't really matter, I was just surprised.

Her Story and I cede my turn if I'm right :)

Wow, very first nomination for GotM and bam! It wins. And I have no idea why since I know almost nothing about the game except it's been on my backlog for a while. Hope this wasn't a terrible choice. Have fun everyone!

[EDIT : shouldn't it be listed under my post or is it because the thread is linked to 'Bully' and not to 'Scholarship Edition'?]

Well, september is the start of new school year in France, as in other countries I guess, so I'll nominate Bully. No idea how good or bad it is but it's on my backlog so... why not?

Thanks for the answer.

Actually, my point wasn't really about menuing itself, but about playing with only two buttons. But to be honest, I was only a few hours through my replay of the OG when I asked, and now that I'm close to the endgame, I have to admit I'm tired with menuing :)

[EDIT : forgot to press 'quote', sorry]

Having more buttons was probably the biggest and most relieving benefits of the Switch remake

I have mixed feelings about this. Don't you think it tends to trivialize a lot of things and makes the game a little too easy? Not that I'm a menuing addict :)