Depends how full it is, how interesting is it (note this is not the same as full), how fast you can travel, and how fun movement is.

There’s a lot of elements to open world and a lot of devs get the balance very wrong. You end up playing in a map rather than the world.

Come on everybody, we need to make a…

Platform game

Doom clone

Command and Conquer clone

MMO

Open world game

MOBA

PUBG clone

Extraction Shooter

Coming soon: Fortnite Extractimum. Eleventy billion players in two days.

In fairness, I have never played any other game like Death Stranding.

I think game patches were even charged to the developers, which is why a lot of them were loath to patch minor bugs.

It’s 2018 by a long way for me.

They took out most of the “rargh, Kratos smash!” angst of the previous games and gave us a heartfelt tale of a father and son. The viking setting is a great change of pace. The gameplay is obviously different, but not in a way that’s worse. And the optional post game enemies are a real challenge. Sigrun especially is on par with anything I’ve faced in the Souls games.

I did have to suffer some of the worst pronunciation of Icelandic I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s almost worth it to see my wife wince every time somebody says Niðavellir in GoW Ragnarok.

I canned Humble when it became apparent that I was just buying next months free Epic games.

Really, I think multiplayer should be free (it’s not like multiplayer games don’t nickel and dime you on top of that anyway) and the game subscription peeled out of it. I’m only interested in the “free” games anyway.

Well, it got you a better experience than whatever it was Sony were doing at the time, which was a weird ethernet adapter, and seemingly every game reinventing the idea of how online should work.

I don’t think it ever needed to be charged for, it just needed to be designed.

I only ever paid for it once they started giving away games with it. Multiplayer alone wasn’t worth it to me.

Yeah, if the Xbox Series S/X could have played my Steam library at that price, I’d have bought one in a heartbeat just to use as a gaming box.

But they’ve already hinted that the next one will be a lot more expensive, and at that point you might as well just buy a PC…

No thanks, we don’t want it.

Because they’re pretentious twats who can’t even use it correctly.

You wouldn’t. You’d buy Titanfall 2 for a whopping £2.49, and play a great (if short) single player campaign and then delete it.

If only for Effect and Cause, which is right up there with the best levels in any game.

Tell that to the guy who drives a 3 ton pickup truck to work every day, because of that one time 4 years ago he had to transport a fridge rather than pay £20 to have it delivered.

A lot more lost it.

Do you not have a pension saving scheme that gives a tax break when employers pay into it direct from your wages?

In the UK it’s pretty standard. I think it’s even a legal requirement for employers to offer it, even if the amount they put in is paltry.

What did you do in 2020, when everything shut for COVID?

What did you do in 2008, when the arse fell out of the housing market?

What did you do in 2000, when the dotcom bubble popped?

Chances are the answer was “just shuffle on as normal, carry on living paycheck to paycheck, possibly get a new job if you work for somebody badly affected”. Odds are your pension pot will recover by the time you need it.

What do rich people do? They gamble. Watch The Big Short. You could try that, but chances are you’ll lose money. “The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, as the old saying goes.

I had mine re-hung outwards because most UK bathrooms are tiny.

Yeah, somebody of influence built one, and the rest of the city that could afford to just followed.

The TikTok Stanley Cup craze of the 1100s.

Only drunker.

Article next year: how 20 million unsold Switch 2 consoles finally killed the world oldest videogaming company.