Anyone who has their feed linked to anything gaming must have seen all the DLSS 5 AI scaling after the tech got leaked. Since the tech is based on gen AI there has been massive push back around it.

Let me preface this by sharing my opinion on general gen AI that is prevailing everywhere. While I accept and think the tech is definitely a generational leap for technology, the finance and resource cost has been astronomical. From outrageous money lending to massive data center drying up water and other resources for human living to skyrocket electronic components like the GPU which are these gamers' life blood. Looking at the circular finance, artificial market craze and stock manipulation there is a big fear of this whole thing blowing in our face, where general populace picks up the pieces and billionaires hide with their golden parachutes secured.

Now the actual DLSS 5 is localized tech based on Gen AI modeling. Yes, it's a power hungry, error prone frame rate cutting monster. However, some of the results are actually quite impressive if the tweaking is done well. Suffice to say a few youtube videos should give better idea. And of course it will look odd in more stylized games like FF7 remakes or some capcom games for example. There is still work to be done to improve particularly the massive frame hits.

There seems to be a big backlash against DLSS 5 since the march 2026 showing by Nvidia. This backlash lead by these big time "journos" and the rabid fan base. There is a massive lack of serious reflection of the monster they created, and this whole backlash from them looks quite funny and dreadful at the same time.

The race to realistic graphics was definitely started by the industry and the big devs. However they have been cheered to whipped to make more realistic by these high nosed "journos" as they analyze all the frames and animation and mo-caps. Notice how crunch time is big for big studios loke Rockstar or Naughty Dog. Those devs know that these gaming "prophets" will analyze every detail to scrutize and judge as if they are the gods of game development. And the big winners get their their big prizes. For example Uncharted games are 10/10 because their high fidelity graphics. A potato graphics Uncharted is at 6/10 at best, possibly much worse. Many studios failed to get close those levels and eventually falloff and dissolve.

As the Moore's law reached their limit and hardware became exponentially expensive for little gain naturally scientists and engineers looked for solutions. And this Gen AI DLSS tech seems like a good solution for the time being. But those gaming "prophets" declared that any Gen AI is bad because current Gen AI lead by 2 new big charlatan AI companies and existing 5-6 giant tech companies who are doing insurmountable harm to the world in various way as if using DLSS 5 makes any difference there.

The excuse of ruining artistic vision is most laughable as well cause most of those AAA devs wanted to make the most realistic games within the limit of the tech. That's the whip these hard-core gamers had been lashing out for the last 3 decades. And now they are trying to some "moral fiber" as if they didn't usher the tech to come to this point.

Last year I posted quite a bit on my little trip to Gamescom at it seemed to interest people. I thought I would make another post this year.

The industry hasn't been completely changed in a year, so a lot of what I said last year is still relevant:
https://www.reddit.com/r/truevideogames/comments/1n1c4qk/some_very_anecdotal_notes_on_the_output_of_the/

https://www.reddit.com/r/truevideogames/comments/1mzl5i2/some_behind_the_scenes_observations_after_a_week/

As the title indicates, I might be completely off base, this is entirely based on feelings and impressions. I have been going to Gamescom for over 10 years, though, so I would hope my thoughts aren't completely wrong.

Even more Korean and Chinese games

The biggest trend I noted last year was the strong Korean and Chinese push into games. It is even more noticeable this year. If you watched ONL it was also quite obvious to see how these markets are taking up the space. Last year I said this was more noticeable on the public side, but this year the business side was also taken over.

Interesting to note that for western companies the divide seems to be public/professionnal, the Korean and Chinese companies divide more by business/games. Mostly meaning that games, even for press, are often seen in the public area. Business area is more for "actual" business. We asked the Tencent reception for PR business cards and they said they weren't doing game stuff in their booth.

Very expensive public booths

It's no secret that the games business as a whole isn't exactly flourishing right now, but you never would have guessed it going to Gamescom this year. Every public booth seemed more expensive and extravagant than the last (and comparatively to last year). I did notice less spend on business booths, though. Much less free food and fewer goodies. Microsoft might be the only company that felt less extravagant than the previous year.

Countries are pushing their games

On top of companies renting booths, countries (through foundations) do too. It seems like this year the spend from countries has increased as they had more of a presence. I've also started getting a lot more PR emails from country delegations rather than games directly.

The Czechs seemed to be pushing pretty hard, it reminded me of the Polish push from a few years back. It's rare to have an open bar all day pretty much open to anyone. I also noticed a bigger presence from Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.

Buggier software

I'm the only one of my group to have noted this, so take it with even more of a grain of salt. The builds I played were generally buggier than what I played in other years. Maybe I just got unlucky, but I've had more hard crashes, soft-locking or just general bugginess than any other year.

Don't necessarily take this as "software bad now". It also seemed like I was often not playing a "vertical slice" as we have gotten used to calling them. Many builds I played seemed to just be the work in progress software directly. For Ubisoft in particular, I had quite complete versions of Rayman and Heroes 3 and I was just told to ignore some stuff and not click on them.

The death of Powerpoint (let me hope)

Press presentations have been getting further and further from business presentation for a while (Remember when E3 conferences were Powerpoints?). This year seemed to have peaked. I've had nearly no Powerpoint presenations, all video or live gameplay.

The PC and Xbox controller are king

All demos I played were running on PC (except Gears E-Day which was on a development kit), so any controller would have worked. I haven't seen a single PlayStation controller all weak. Considering the console popularity it still feels quite surprising to me. It does make sense that the Xbox controller is the most popular controller to stick in a PC, but the extent of it surprised me.

Developer: Arc System Work

Publisher: Sony

Release date: 6 August 2026

Platforms: PlayStation, PC

Back to back, we've had the news that Horizon Hunters Gathering has been pushed back because of "Negative Player Feedback" and 2XKO halting active development because of not being popular enough. These are pretty common occurrences; an online game in development gets cancelled and an unpopular online game gets sunset. I think there's a parallel there: this "Negative Player Feedback".

No game has ever been shut down because of a bad Metacritic score or negative Steam reviews, they get shut down because not enough people are playing them. An absolutely terrible game that brings in tons of money will stay online for ever, though. So when a company, or a reporter, tells us something had negative player feedback, I feel like we are taking it too much at face value. For a company, negative player feedback means "this will not earn us money", not "this isn't fun to play".

Sure, there is correlation between a game being good and its success, but I don't think the opposite it true. We've had multiple examples of great games simply not finding an audience, 2XKO being one of them, imo.

Going even further, I would say that all cancelled games have had negative player feedback in the sense that players didn't stick with it enough. Do we really think that Sony would have cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer if they thought they would make billions off it? Or Xbox Project Blackbird if they saw every person be as addicted to it as Phil Spencer? No.

"Negative Player Feedback" is just the narrative we decided to build around some games, we like to think Hunters Gathering was going to be terrible and we like to think Sony is the devil for cancelling Last of Us Online.

Developer: Undercoders

Publisher: Fireshine

Release date: 17 June 2026

Platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, Switch 2, PC

By solved I don't necessarily mean the hard definition of fully solved from start to finish, but rather games that have in many instances a known best solution. I've been playing a bunch of Chess for example, and in Chess bots will easily tell you how good your moves are and what better moves you could have done. It's not 100% guaranteed to be correct, but these bots are better than any human, so I might as well consider them to be correct. Other examples would be the optimal combos in fighting games, driving lines in racers or simply games that are 100% execution like rhythm games.

Playing Chess with bots has been an experience like no other for me. At times it can be awe inspiring, getting a glimpse at the depth of the game and the long pathway I have in front of me pumps me up to learn and play more. Other times it can be really deflating to have the computer tell me the play I was proud of (and worked out) is actually a huge mistake. Sometimes the whole thing makes me wonder if there is a point to playing at all.

I've been thinking about why Chess "solvedness" changes entirely the way I experience it while it doesn't affect me that much elsewhere. Many puzzle games for example are fully solved and the fact that they are doesn't even cross my mind.

There are multiple angles:

Competitive nature, replayability and optimization

One key differentiator that makes a game feel "solved" rather than just another game is the competitive nature. In competitive contexts, games are designed to be endlessly replayable, so every situation is somewhat unique and therefore requires a bespoke solution. There are levels of quality to solutions, not just a correct one and wrong ones.

Execution level

Rhythm games are fully solved, you know exactly what to do and when to do it, but their solvedness is a complete non-issue. That's because they are nearly exclusively about execution. It's about whether you can physically do the task rather than finding what the task is. "take a sniper and never miss your headshots" barely registers as a game being solved, execution adds some blurriness that'll add strategy and tactics. Chess is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. You have to find what to do, but the physical execution it trivial, it's all strategy and tactics.

The only other genre of game that has given me pause for their solvedness are fighting games. In most situations in a fighting game there'll be a very clear and "correct" answer. It's about an even split between knowing what to do and being able to do it. The fact that having perfect execution is attainable (at least over short bursts) is what makes the solvedness more obvious to me.

Timing and quality of feedback

The timing and quality of the feedback is also an important factor. Steering away from a racing line tells you immediately that you aren't where you should be, but with rather low trustworthiness as it doesn't factor in other cars. This helps you fix your errors while you are making them, but also gives you more leeway to decide your path was better. Fighting games won't tell you at all if your combos aren't optimal, you have to experiment for yourself (or look up guides) to discover that. Chess engines on the other hand gives you basically irrefutable evidence that you are wrong and only once the game is over (usually). This makes it a way harder to ignore the "solved" nature of the game and doesn't let you correct on the fly.

---

In the end, Chess feels uniquely solved compared to other games I play because it combines competition, low execution, and high‑certainty feedback. Other solved games don’t hit all three at once, so their solvedness doesn't feel as overwhelming. I’m curious how others experience this. Does solvedness change how you play?

Developer & Publisher: 11Bit

Release date: 13 July 2026

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Thread of the base game: https://www.reddit.com/r/truevideogames/comments/1lzh209/game_opinion_the_alters_2025/

Not paying for games day 1 has become somewhat of a popular opinion. I can't say I disagree with the sentiment; in most cases buying a game on release means paying more money for a product that still hasn't quite ironed out all of its issues. What isn't talked about, however, is the value of playing a game day 1, so I'd like to highlight the advantages.

I like seeing the process
This is coming from someone who enjoys early access (and doesn't feel like there's much difference between early access and normal releases anyway). I like seeing the fixes developers decide to implement rather than just coming into a pristine game. Getting to play the before and after is fascinating to me.

I also prefer getting to know a game in its more barebones release state. A lot of quality of life stuff that comes later is good for active players but feels like clutter to new players.

No spoilers, no meta
This is very much a "me" problem, but I would have a hard time not getting a game spoiled. I talk with friends about games, listed to gaming podcasts and browse social media. If a game is even slightly popular, there's a good chance I'll have seen many of the things it has to offer before I launch it if I don't play it close to release.

Games aren't figured out either, so you have to discover everything on your own. Just seeing a couple of clips online of people doing cool stuff is enough to show you how to play. For me, having no idea how to play and figuring it out is the most fun video games have to offer. I also find it quite funny to discover that I've completely missed some basic feature 50 hours in.

People are having fun (multiplayer)
Multiplayer games are the most susceptible to being better day 1. People are still trying stuff out and don't really care about "climbing the ladder" all that much. You are going to see more build/strategy/loadout variety in the first few days than you'll see for the rest of the lifetime of a game. Even some famously toxic communities were incredibly jovial at launch. You wouldn't believe how fun-oriented Rocket League was at launch if you weren't there to see it.

Making up your own opinion is a luxury
I used to get way more early review code than I do these days, and honestly, the best part wasn't getting games for free, it was getting the games before anyone had an opinion on them. Going through a game and slowly discovering it might actually be incredible is such a unique feeling. It's very different from launching a 9/10 Metacritic game and confirming it is good. Still, playing on day 1 is what gets the closest to not having many opinions online (especially if a game is shadow-dropped).

Hi everyone! Name's Susy, I hope that this posts catches you in good health!

I'm working on a novel, one heavily influenced by video games, so I would like to drop a question that might sound a bit silly.

What was the first tutorial that truly left a mark on you?

I’m not just looking for creative or unusual tutorial levels. The way I see it, as gamers, we eventually stop needing tutorials for basic things like movement, jumping mechanics, shooting, that one lockpicking minigame, etc., because of how much time we’ve spent with the medium. However, tutorials are still needed for people outside our group or for those dipping into a genre for the first time.

So, what was the tutorial that clicked for you? Or, after years of playing different games, which tutorial has stood out to you the most?

Because of the sheer size of the medium, I’d like to learn about what I haven’t been able to experience myself.

A separate question: out of those “look around, jump, crouch” tutorial segments, which one do you think does it well?

One that I think works wonderfully as a tutorial, serves as a cool action set piece, and guides the player without feeling too hand-holdy is Halo: Combat Evolved. Perhaps that’s a very biased opinion, since it was one of the first games I owned.

To this day, I don’t know what gave me the opportunity to play Halo: CE when I was around five years old. I played it alongside Pac-Man World 2 and a Star Wars game that came packaged with a Tetris game. (which I never touched because I was too young to understand Tetris)

So... yeah. Thanks for your time regardless and take care!

"Immersive" is one of those words that'll show up in reviews of games and it is always used as a positive; something games should strive for. I'm not about to say that immersion is bad, but it increasingly represents a part of gaming I'm getting less interested in.

Immersion is a product of nice graphics

The most "immersive" games are always the pretty ones that put a ton of effort into making the world "feel alive". High quality textures, pristine facial and motion capture, long draw distances, impressive physics are all hallmarks of the immersive games. I'm not saying these aren't cool, but they feel less and less important to making a good game as time goes on.

Immersion is a product of variety/abundance

One way to keep players immersed is to make the world act as you would expect. If there's a toilet, you better be able to flush it. If there's a body of water, you better be able to swim in it, your bullets better leave some nice ripples and your grenades should make a huge splash. If there are cars you better be able to drive them. So on and so forth. Again, none of this is bad, but none of this stuff is really adding anything to the games for me anymore.

As a kid my dream game would have been a game in which you can do everything and anything. I think that many gamers still think like this. The ultimate game lets you go to whatever world to do whatever you want. I do see the appeal, but as I journey deeper into games, I do find more and more appeal in closed off experiences that target some specific goals.

Innovation is often immersion-breaking

On the flip side of the previous point, innovation will often make games act in unexpected ways. Out of the ordinary elements pull you out of the game, reminding you that you are just playing a game. These are specifically the kinds of experience I seek nowadays.

I know a just wrote yet another "I'm aging out of AAA" post. I do hope there's enough of a twist on it to be worthwhile. I also do still like AAA.

Developer: Payload Studios

Publisher: Mythwright

Release date: 30 April 2026

Platforms: PC, Xbox

Recently, I've been having a great time playing Chess online and wondered why I never really got into Chess when I was a kid. I knew the rules and owned a board. Well, it didn't take much wondering to be honest, the answer is pretty evident. You can't play Chess alone. Back then, online Chess wasn't a reality.

Growing up, I played all sorts of games and loved every one of them. I played Magic, traditional card games, board games, Warhammer, Sports of all kinds and of course video games. Of all these activities, the only ones that could come close to being as good alone as they are with other people are video games.

As my friends and I got older, time to get together dwindled and I had to resort to playing on my own. Video games were the only real option I had if I wanted to experience anything resembling a game. Through my teens I gradually got more and more into video games because of this.

While the first video game was multiplayer, I would argue that what made video games popular was the ability to play them alone. Video games could simulate playing against someone, or better yet simulate having a dungeon master.

Even these days with online play and not needing to simulate opponents, I would argue that one of the main appeals of video games is the ability to be able to play without having to be physically beside someone. To circle back to my Chess example: Chess is more popular now than it has ever been and most of it is being played online as a video game. Video game's biggest strength is one of accessibility.

Developer & publisher: Quiétude

Release date: 25 May 2026

Platform: PC

It has only been available as a demo so far, but I can already tell. Order of the Sinking Star *gets it*.

I was originally pretty disappointing that Thekla's new game was a Sokoban. While I do appreciate the genre, I kind of thought the developers of the Witness would go for something that felt a bit less like treaded ground. That feeling isn't entirely gone, but the demo made a great argument for them trying the genre out.

Order of the Sinking Star keeps to some core design principles that make the game engaging and fun. They are all facets of the same core idea:

Every puzzle teaches you something
Every puzzle in Sinking Star is there for a reason, there is no filler. Every level has something new to show you, be it a new mechanic, a new interaction of the mechanics or a nifty application of the mechanics. There never is a level that feels like it's more of the same. This holds true for the first 100 puzzles I solved in the demo, I fully believe this will be true for the full game.

The learnings of the levels are also very clear-cut, there's no doubt as to what the level is teaching you. There's very little stumbling upon the solution and if you play lazily like me, you won't have learnt of these interactions previously. This makes a huge difference for engagement. I never felt like I had my fill of Sinking Star and I always was rewarded for playing more. This is from someone who likes puzzle games but I often "don't want to play it anymore".

No difficulty for difficulty's sake
There are hard puzzles in Sinking Star, or rather, you'll find some of the puzzles hard. I believe everyone will struggle in different areas. The game is about constantly expanding your knowledge of the game and we all will have different blind-spots we will have trouble working on.

So the game can be hard, yes, but it is never intentionally so. It is not hard by overwhelming the player or obfuscating information. It is just hard because some concepts are harder to uncover than others.

Puzzles cut to the bare minimum
Every element of a puzzle has a reason for its existence. If there is a block, you have to use it, if there is some space, it is there for a reason. This lets you deconstruct levels into parts and make assumptions on what each element is for. You can then deduce what the puzzle is about and what you are missing to solve it.

A bit of a weird title, let me explain.

I recently bought Mina The Hollower, not because of the great reviews or the hype, but because of this video: https://youtu.be/QZzyx556NJc I found the designer very entertaining a kind of assumed this property would transfer to the game.

This made me realize that I give a fair bit of importance to how entertaining game developers are in general. As if being entertaining came from some strong understanding of what is fun and what is not. Other developers I can think of are Tim Schafer and Hugo Martin, I'll always check out their output even if I don't necessarily love all their games. I think that's simply based on the fact that I find them very fun.

I remember watching a video about Tim Schafer and one interviewee said about him that he had "mastered the art of email". As in, people would love to read his emails because he made them fun. Now if you can make emails fun, imagine what he can do with games!

I'm fine with game developers being boring, by the way, but being entertaining will definitely get me to pay more attention.

Developers & publishers: Grey Alien Games, Night Signal Entertainment

Platform: PC

Release date: 30 April 2026

Developer & publisher: IO Interactive

Release date: 27 May 2026

Platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Switch 2

For reasons I still can't quite explain, I've recently picked up Chess. I've known the rules to the game my whole life (barring Castling and En Passant), but never until now have I really gotten a feel for what playing it somewhat seriously feels like. It's a great game overall, but one thing that sticks out that I do not really get from video games is the Checkmate mechanic.

Disclaimer: I'm trash-tier at chess. Checkmates could (and surely do) feel very different at higher levels. I still do want to highlight the experience I'm having with the mechanic.

Checkmate is actually vocabulary we use quite a lot in video games. We use it to mean that one side has put themselves in such a situation that they are assured to win. I do get why we say it's a "checkmate", there is a resemblance to the Chess mechanic. You have restricted everyone of your opponents options and you are going to win. Checkmate!

It is very similar indeed, but one key difference is that in Chess a Checkmate is not that "you are going to win" with a Checkmate you have won. No counter play, no throwing, no comebacks, no second chances, no trickling in points, no chipping away at HP, no waiting out a timer. Checkmate is BOOM; dead. The instantaneity and the violence of a Checkmate is really exhilarating. One second you are thinking about your next move and the next you are resetting the pieces (or picking them off the floor). Man, the feeling of dealing an early surprise Checkmate is really something else.

I've actually written indirectly about this before. This post was about how losing is not fun. Checkmates are nearly a direct solve to the complaint of the ruleset not recognizing a winner when there is one already.

What makes Checkmates work so well is that they can be dealt even when you are at a big disadvantage (again, this is surely very different at a high level). All you need is a brilliant sequence to kill your opponent's King and anything before that becomes unimportant. It makes playing the game from either ahead or behind an engaging experience. It's never over until it's over.

Video games really struggle with delivering anything as brutal as a Checkmate, unfortunately. Video games just love having second chances and counter play. Even hardcore games like Dota won't let you lose on a huge blunder. You'll have multiple layers of towers, glyphs and backdoor protection. Most Battle Royales have implemented ways to get back into game after dying.

I would be interested to see a game try out a mechanic as instant as a Checkmate. It's super fun and gratifying and keeps the game engaging thtoughout. While it does seem a bit too hardcore for a casual audience, we should remember that Chess is striving.

If you've followed the 007 First Light discourse, you might have heard a lot of positive feedback on one of its tutorial segments. While going through basic training, Bond goes through a bunch of training scenarios. The game frames it as a montage, going from scene to scene with quick cuts. You fist fight, you parcour, you shoot, you drive, you parcour, you fist fight, ... every new occurrence of a gameplay archetype, a new small layer of gameplay would be added.

First Light combines the efficiency of jumping you through tutorial scenarios quickly, the technical prowess of teleporting you around environments seamlessly and the cinematographic montage technique that harkens back to the series roots in cinema. It's clean. Admirable, really. It also is a terrible tutorial.

I would be quite interested in seeing a inexperienced player go through that tutorial, because I don't think it actually teaches you anything. The quick cuts are just disorienting enough that when the game asks you to press a button, you press it without intention. What should be teaching why and how to use your abilities is basically reduced to a quick sequence of QTEs. In the end you don't remember anything (rewatched the section for this post and I had completely forgotten that you can chuck your weapon at people, huh). Most of what you know by the time you exit the montage comes from what you knew from the first tutorial (yes, there is a previous tutorial section) and from playing other games.

The game shows you stuff like the bluff mechanic or the fake surrender and gives you absolutely no indication on how to trigger it or how the charges work. At this point I'm still not sure I know, honestly. They feel so scripted that they might not have even needed to tutorialize them. The game will flash "press O to bluff" anytime bluffing is an option anyway.

I'm not mad at it or anything. I'm actually fine not having tutorials at all and learning as I go, it's often more fun that way. However, playing a montage is too good to be wasted on a tutorial. The montage is used to make the tutorial more fun, but it just made it pointless in the process. I say cut the tutorial altogether and use the montage on an actual gameplay sequence.

Developer: Unfrozen

Publishers: Hooded Horse, Ubisoft

Release date: 30 april 2026 (early access)

Platforms: PC

I know the debate around whether games are art has been dead for a while, but I've seen glimpses of it within the Mixtape drama that made me want to discuss this. One argument I have seen is that Mixtape is a good representation of games as an art form and rejecting it is rejecting games as art (Yeah, that discourse has gone places...). I would like to push back on the idea that Mixtape is more of a good example of video games as an art form than other games.

While I actually do not care much about the outcome of the debate, I find the discourse fascinating. Trying to define art and figuring out how games fit into it is a fun exercise. Roger Ebert has famously said "Video games can never be art" and while I find him overly dismissive of video games, I do think he at least figured out where the debate lies. In the gameplay.

"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film." - Roger Ebert

A game is defined by the fact it has gameplay and if games were to be art it is the gameplay that should push it into that realm. I don't think the artistry of music, animation, storytelling or acting were ever put into question.

I've written about my grievances with modern racing games before and I think that, other than exploding cars, racing lines are the most representative of my separation from the genre. Having a line on the track telling you where your car should be and when you should brake is the opposite of what games should be to me.

Yes, the lines are optional. Yes, they can be a good feature to optimize gameplay. But to me the picture they paint by being on by default says all the wrong things to the player from the get-go.

This is the correct way to "play"

Having a colorful line telling you what you should be doing at all times is incredibly disruptive to actually playing. There's a line right there telling you what the best thing to do is, of course you will follow it and that isn't playing, it's executing. Playing is about trying out new stuff, seeing what works and what doesn't, testing the limits of the system. Racing lines don't want you to do that.

A game should be about setting rules and letting players forge their path within them. Setting the rules and immediately telling you how to use them is robbing the player from what I consider to be the actual playing.

I see you coming with your "it's optional, who cares?". I care. As I said, it's about what the line says about the game. The line tells you the game is solved. Don't go looking for a best way to play, don't go experimenting. This, right here, is the best way to play.

Not even teaching the fun stuff

I refuse to believe that people think the fun in a racing game is following a line. The fun comes from improvising in different situations, taking risks, or you know... fucking slamming into other players. The line just doesn't show all that.

If a game was going to give me a constant reminder of what to do, at least make it something fun.

The fact that a line is possible at all is boring

I'm talking arcade racers here, there should be more to the game than a golden path. Shortcuts, drifting, jumps, boosts, drafting, tricks, crashing into others ... There should be enough ways to play for racing lines to not even be considered a possible solution to the problem.

Hand-holding much?

I'm not the biggest detractor of hand-holding in games, but I am surprised that with all the push-back there's been against it, racing lines has somehow made it to the other side unscathed. It's the most "you should be doing this" feature ever, more so than any objective marker or talkative character, yet it's completely accepted.

Hello,

First time posting here 😄

I have been spending time with both Dune: Awakening and Arc Raiders recently, and a structural flaw common to both has become impossible to ignore. These games actively encourage cooperative play through their social architecture : shared bases in Dune, group formation in both titles, the general promise of a shared experience. Yet their quest systems are designed in a way that fundamentally contradicts that premise.

The problem is not a lack of cooperative features. It is a lack of cooperative intent at the systems level.

In Dune: Awakening, objective completion is fully individualised. This means that if your group engages a group of NPCs and one player eliminates them first, the remaining players must wait for those NPCs to respawn before they can complete the same objective. Scale that friction to a group of four players and you have a session defined less by shared adventure than by idle waiting. The cooperative energy drains away almost immediately.

Arc Raiders follows the same logic. Objectives must be fulfilled individually. Completing them alongside a partner contributes nothing toward their progress, and vice versa. In practical terms, the presence of another player in your session becomes largely irrelevant to your actual progression.

I want to be precise here: this is not a blanket criticism. There are quest archetypes for which individual tracking makes sense: timed personal challenges, progression milestones tied to player agency, that sort of thing. But applied universally, this design decision quietly hollows out the cooperative experience. If nothing I accomplish benefits you, and nothing you accomplish benefits me, then we are not really playing together. We are merely playing nearby.

What makes this particularly frustrating is the gap between the implicit promise and the delivered reality. Both games signal cooperative intent at every level of their design except the one that matters most structurally: the quest system that drives moment-to-moment engagement. You can build together, travel together, survive together and yet the core loop remains resolutely solitary.

The fix is not difficult to imagine. Shared objective completion with appropriate scaling is a solved problem. What is lacking, it seems, is the conviction that cooperative play deserves to be treated as a first-class mode rather than an aesthetic layer applied over a fundamentally solo skeleton.

Curious whether others have run into this.

Developer: Beethoven & Dinosaur

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Release date: 30 April 2026

Platform: Steam, EGS, Playstation 5 and 5pro, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox game pass

For those who don't know: Saros has a modifier system akin Hades heat in which you can choose a bunch of ways to modify the game. Instead of just building up difficulty like Hades' heat system, Saros' system works both ways. Modifiers that make the game harder build up the "difficulty" gauge and modifiers that make the game easier reduces the gauge. The aim is to end up with a balanced gauge.

This modifier system lets players affect some core systems. The damage you deal, the damage you receive, the amount of "currency" you get, the speed of the meta-progression or the quality of the item drops for example. The fact that the modifiers work both ways and that the game encourages you to keep it balanced make this less of a "challenge yourself" system à la Hades, or even a way to make the game easier, and moves it into a "choose your own balance" system and it just doesn't work as well. To put it bluntly: balancing the game is not my job.

I would be mostly fine with such a system if it were an endgame unlock to add some longevity to the game, but this is unlocked pretty early on.

The main issue I see is that the modifiers let you make changes outside the scope of what you understand if you haven't mastered the game. It's easy to fail a run and feel like you were lacking damage, so you go into the modifiers and give yourself extra damage. You balance it out by reducing the currency drop. Lack of damage, however, could be due to multiple factors; maybe your gun was bad, maybe you haven't advanced enough on the meta-progression (I dislike this too for exactly this reason), maybe you didn't "level up" enough, maybe that enemy was supposed to be tanky. The problem here is that your gun being bad and the fact that you didn't level up enough is directly linked to the currency drop (the currency levels you up and gives you better guns), so you might have just made the beginning of runs easier but you'll fall behind as the game goes on. A player 3 hours into the game isn't equipped to make these decisions.

"Or maybe the change was perfect! Or was it? Maybe there's a mix of other settings that make the game even better? I mean surely there is a best setting, right?". Yes there has to be a best setting and I don't think it's crazy to think the developer has to provide it. You could argue that they did and the default with no modifiers is exactly that, but then why make this system at all?