Looks interesting, but I gotta be honest: when I click on the Steam page and the first thing I see is a cash shop to buy “Epoch Points” for this early access game? That’s an instant turn-off for me. I’m sure it’s not as predatory as what Blizzard did with D4’s monetization, but I don’t want it in my games, period.

Re-Logic (Terraria’s developers) have already gone on record saying, "even if Unity were to recant their policy and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired.” That’s the stance I think every developer should be taking. Unless you have a Unity game that can be released by the end of the year, all devs need to seriously consider switching engines.

I hadn’t heard about those changes, but that’s quite a relief. I hated traveling to individual ripperdoc clinics to snag all the best upgrades. Especially because the best cyberware for your frontal cortex can only be bought from a VDB ripper in Pacifica, and I didn’t want to give those assholes any of my eddies.

The base game has improved considerably since launch, though it still lacks some promised content and performance will vary depending on your hardware. I have a PC with a Ryzen 7 and a RTX 2070, which can run the game well enough, but have not tried it on a machine with an AMD video card.

I think the base game might still be on sale and now might be a good time to pick it up for 50% off. Major updates will still be coming to the base game even if you don’t buy Phantom Liberty… including vehicle combat, I believe.

Considering how well the Super Mario movie worked out for Illumination, I’m expecting to hear something about a new movie or short TV series. Maybe more Mario, maybe Legend of Zelda. In any case, there’s no way Nintendo won’t be going hard in that direction now that they see what a gold mine it is.

I agree, BioWare does not need to be devoting its resources to SW:TOR at this point. It’s been out for a good, long while and the fact is, MMORPGs are not big money-makers these days. There was a huge wave of them in the wake of WoW’s success but none of them were able to achieve the kind of market success, player base or staying power of WoW. That ship has sailed, and it’s only appropriate to let the BioWare devs get back to doing what they do best.

I don’t have high hopes for the next Dragon Age game, but would love to be pleasantly surprised. They’ve changed directions so many times during the development of that game, so I’m expecting the end result to be a mess. Mass Effect gives me slightly more hope as a possible return to form for BioWare though, if they learn from Andromeda’s missteps and focus on what made the original trilogy (particularly the first two games) great.