I have played a lot of FFXIV, but have stopped playing for a couple years now. Spending a fair chunk of time in Street Fighter and Monster Hunter, but I have a feeling that will change over the next year with Assetto Corsa Competizione and AC Evo potentially taking the monster hunter spots.
To me this is more like, the playstation 6 will have online connectivity.
As someone who liked FF7 a lot as a kid,and a bunch of other FF games, I really like remake.
I think 1 thing you have to know going in, is it isn't FF7 just in a new engine with updated combat, and I think remake is a bit of a bad name for it.
Reimagining might be better.
You are correct that it isn't the whole game, but it takes Midgard and makes a handful of setup hours from the first game, a good 40 hours of compelling story and world building(with some side stuff as well). It is very clearly a different story with changes that are interesting, but could very easily go off the rails if it isn't properly managed.
It also has some incredible improvements to certain characters and even to areas of Midgard expanding on what was a very small part of the original games.
Combat is very good at mixing turn based actions(skills and spells and items), with action based combos. Dodging is a bit of a bait and is more positioning because you don't get i-frames to actually dodge, blocking is important but doesn't feel great(I heard it is improved in rebirth). The ability to switch characters and how unique they all feel is really enjoyable to me as well.
I am eagerly looking forward to Rebirth on PC cause I ain't buying a PS5.
Remake in my opinion is significantly better than 16 which I think is pretty mid, and I would recommend it as long as you don't expect a 1 to 1 of the original.
This will always be funny to me. In no other aspect of my life do I even know the charge of distributors or shops is, and I dont give a fuck. I still don't know why I as a consumer should give a fuck because that aint my problem.
I go where the best service and the best options for me are. In terms of digital games stores, Steam is easily that platform. In terms of phone platforms, for me it is easily not apple, I coule not care how much people charge to sell in their stores.
I do care about dumb monopolistic limitations though, things like apple forcing browsers to use webkit. That would be like steam forcing all games to use the source engine. Apple not allowing people to install their own store fronts, Google making that more difficult, Steam not allowing you to install Epic... oh wait.
I have recently got into sum racing, and have been having a bunch of fun in the Honda NSX Evo in Assetto Corsa Competizione. It is an absolute death trap and tries to murder me on every corner,, but it is very good fun.
I have also had a lot of fun in the Nissan GTR as well, but not spent too much time in it.
They adjusted the rules this year I believe, they now allow DLCs in GOTY, and also things like new seasons to games. It is dumb, and I personally think it removes what little credibility the game awards had(which wasn't a lot to me).
Will catch up on all the adverts that are if interest the next day.
I don't think you can compare the deadlock and concord mechanics. The concord one is more like, congratulations you won a round with the M4 in CS... You can no longer use the M4 for the rest of the game.
FFXIV released on Xbox earlier this year.
I don't know if Blizzard ever did an official controller interface for WoW though, that will definitely be the first hurdle.
I don't think point 3 is quite fair. There were some new ideas thrown into the game.
The issue is those ideas were not fun, or very badly implemented. I believe it was the ranked mode, where if you won the round you were then locked out of playing that character again. They also had you build out a collection of characters to pick from before the game started.
There were some new ideas, I just don't know of any that were good and added to the game. The only ones I know of seemed bad(or at least badly implemented) and took away from what enjoyment people had with the game.
I think calling this pc heavy is really really generous.
The War Within is an expansion for an MMO, yeah it is pc only, but there is also no expectations for it to be released on console. Maybe WoW will see some port now MS owns it?
Towerborne is coming to Xbox. I am pretty sure the only reason it isn't yet, is because of early access, and the Xbox having stricter rules for pushing updates? It is coming to Xbox, when it isn't a paid beta
And finally, I am surprised Ara didn't get a console launch. A quick search shows one is coming after launch, but no dates or anything outside of sometime after PC.
Outside of the WoW expansion, these are only temporary exclusives, and one of them is early access. I will admit, I actually thought Ara released on Xbox, so was genuinely surprised to find it wasn't(yet).
I think there are enough people interested, but those people probably have to make a choice. Cinema tickets arent cheap, and everything else is becoming more and more expensive. So you choose between taking a risk on something or seeing a sequel to something you already enjoyed.
I know what I would choose... and honestly it is neither these days, I will wait for another way to watch it.