BG2 only takes a few things from the previous game and throws out the rest. I haven’t played Dragon Age, but Mass Effect and Telltale infamously had “the choice diamond” where they respect your choices up until it has to eventually lead somewhere, so they all end up funneling back into only a few options. These are just different ways to dress up the same problem. Fallout the TV show does exactly the same thing as Fallout 2 did to Fallout 1, which is the same as your Dark Souls example: it’s set far enough in the future that you’re unlikely to run into anything contradictory.

Video games sequeling other choice-based video games run into the same issue, and you quickly forget once you’re in it that maybe you treated Shady Sands differently than the canonized decision about it. As it takes place further in the future than any of the games, it acknowledges what happened in their past, creates new events that happened since we last saw them, and also steers them in new directions, because people change, and the old leaders would have long since been replaced by new ones. That’s all just part of continuing a story. The only way to avoid having to pick a canon is to never continue it ever, but I’m happy we got this show at all.

To each their own, but I thought they completely nailed the tone, respectfully incorporated the established fiction, and even wrote some great new characters.

We’ve had a pretty good hit rate with video game adaptations lately. Fallout and Arcane are both among my favorite TV shows. I think we finally got far enough along that show runners are gamers themselves and aware of what makes these things good and what needs to change to be a good show.

Other than Jaheira, almost all of the connective tissue is found in Act 3, but that makes sense, because it takes place in the titular city. There are at least two characters in Act 3 that are not in your party that return from previous games.

Both Dauntless and Horizon are games inspired by Monster Hunter that I like more than Monster Hunter. And not only does this look worse than both of those, it’ll probably be monetized to hell.

Even after having gone through the tutorial, 2 hours is more than enough time to see the loop of Highguard several times and decide you don’t like it. 2 hours is more than enough to count as “the old college try” for any game, as it should be a goal of the designers to make your game fun and interesting right away. If I’m waiting more than how long it would take me to watch a feature length movie before I start having fun, then they screwed up.

I mean, to be clear, I never liked Overwatch. Back when it was new, my friends were so into it that playing it with them was the only way we’d spend any time together. They’re the ones who miss that launch game, lol.

I can’t say that was my experience when I played it last year, and you can see my recorded play times for the series below in this thread. In fact, I’d say I spent less time traversing empty spaces due to the game’s more relaxed rules on fast travel.

Apparently it’s doing really well in Japan and less well elsewhere, but its success in Japan was enough to more than make up for it and exceed their forecast.

This is salt in the wound for my friends who miss launch Overwatch.

If you say so. I can tell you I’ve been tracking my times pretty judiciously in the past year. For each of those Borderlands games, my times were:

• Borderlands 1: 23h17m
• Borderlands 2: 35h15m
• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: 22h21m
• Borderlands 3: 35h25m
• Borderlands 4: 28h26m

So I guess Borderlands 2 wasn’t longer, like I may have remembered it. In each case for the above, I basically just did enough side missions to keep pace with the recommended level of the next main story mission, which amounted to a few hours per game. All of those times include the DLC except for Borderlands 4, and the DLC is also very similarly sized and paced across games.

Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generate

If they’re not procedurally generated, they’re not roguelikes. It’s a defining feature. It’s also not lazy to define a set of rules that generate good, interesting levels every time you boot it up. I’m basically the only guy who didn’t enjoy Hades, and a large reason why is that their level generation is sorely lacking compared to so many others (though Hades is more lite than like) I’ve played.

Their How Long to Beat times are all a tight spread. Having just played through them all in the past year, I can tell you that the only thing that makes 2 longer than the rest is that it has more DLC.

Short? It was a similar length to the rest of the series.

I think the onboarding ramp is pretty standard across the series. If you stopped at 2, I thought the active abilities and corresponding upgrades were far more interesting in 3 and 4, even from the get go.

I really enjoyed both of them. It may just not be your cup of tea, but I get the sense that the average person just plays them sort of mindlessly. For 3 and 4 especially, I found there’s a really interesting layer in there when you start min/maxing around creating a feedback loop. In case you ever found yourself curious enough to give them another try. It makes them very memorable experiences.

Did you play it? I thought the class designs were excellent.

Having played it on PC, if they got that running acceptably on a Switch 2, I’d be shocked.

The sane reckoning that more of the industry needs to have. And both Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed were some of my favorite games from last year, so hopefully what they’re talking about with building on the work they’ve already done can speed things along.