Camacho

Well, if I were writing it and wanted to extrapolate a story out of what's established, there's the whole Belmont family legacy thing with their eternal struggle against Dracula, training to fight vampires, facing the inevitability that Dracula will return, Shaft's life shaping him to want destruction, Shaft raising cult who wants to destroy humanity, their efforts in procuring Dracula's remains and figuring out how to resurrect him, the struggle and failure to prevent said cult from reviving Dracula, Dracula's subsequent rampage and targeting of Richter's friends and family, Richter's journey to and through Castlevania, the rescuing of villagers, his sister in law, and his fiancé (smart twist would be to have her die and be turned into a creature like when you fail to save her in SNES Dracula X), ongoing struggles with the necromancer Shaft and Shaft's ghost, encounters with the powerful overlords (bosses) along the way, the battle with Dracula himself, and following events that leave Richter feeling without purpose and susceptible to Shaft's corruption and setting the stage for SotN.
 
Instead, from what I've seen so far, we get almost nothing about the Belmonts, the little backstory we do get involves Richter being in revolutionary period America (??) before being shipped to France, a whole lot of story about  Caribbean slavery (but with vampires)  jammed into a comic book level take on the French revolution (also now with vampires), the expected Netflix-isms with gay stuff, the catholic church, and what I'm expecting to be some non binary thrown in for extra diversity points. No signs of anything to do with Dracula, more crappy magic that has no rules to play by (superman level writing laziness), and almost no focus on Richter. Only a single villain character has any sign of being more than a one dimensional 80's cartoon character, and it looks like the main reason for that is so he can commence some backdoor action later in the show. Basically, it seems like the point of the story is to lift up Netflix favored groups and slap the Castlevania label on it. There's a part where characters are talking about the revolution and Richter says something along the lines of  "I don't know anything about what you're talking about, but my job is to support you". Which is exactly what I'd expect from a Netflix writer when they have to paint someone from an unfavored group as anything other than a 2d villain.  

I watched 3 episodes of it today- doesn't seem to have much in common with the source material. Not that there was a lot to work with, but this really feels like someone just shoehorned some CV characters into an unrelated story they wanted to create, and of course it seems like Kendi signed off on it. I didn't think the first CV Netflix series was that great either, but at least it stayed somewhat in line with the established story and characters. But to be fair, I don't like anime or this image comics anime-ish style in general. 
 
Honestly, I'm surprised Netflix didn't use the bolshevik revolution and frame Lenin and Stalin as heroes fighting vampires- shit, let's make them black too. Maybe they'll do a Bloodlines series one day and run with that.

Depends on your sibling man. Outside of when were really young, my brother and I basically never fought. We always covered for each other, so we rarely ever got in trouble. I've had friends with siblings and they'd rat each other out and stay in trouble. I never understood it. It's suppose to be kids vs parents. They didn't understand the assignment at all. I still remember the combination of mad and proud on my dad's face when he'd ask us who did something and we'd both answer "I don't know."  A) We were lying but, B) We were doing exactly what he told us to do. "You are brothers. You are supposed to stick together, look out for each other." I was 5 and my bro was 3 when he sat us down to tell us that. We'd be getting each other into trouble at the time and my dad wasn't having it. He'd whip us both. One for doing wrong and the other for snitching. I'm 43 the last time my brother and I fought was 38 years ago. Dads are important.....unintended rant over 😅

Rockstar, whose games sell Big Mac type numbers, complaining about the cost of development is completely absurd. And I agree completely about the need for different budget class titles- a lot of my favorites over the last 8-10 years have been low budget indie stuff. Midrange "A and "AA" titles with a laser focus on what they're good at should be a bigger part of publisher's offerings.  

These are fair points, however, I think it's also worth pointing out that modern AAA games take an enormously higher amount of people than they did in the PS2 and earlier gens. Inflation and labor costs have also gone through the roof over the same period. How many of you remember SNES and N64 games going for $60-$80, back when $60 was a hell of a lot more money than it is now? 

But back to the other side of the coin, digital distribution has to help their margins tremendously. You're not sinking all that cost into massive print runs that may or may not sell through, used resale is eating less and less of your business, and your game can keep earning for years. I think the pros outweigh the cons if your game picks up steam- and now your game succeeding isn't tied so tightly to that release window sales number.
 
..All this said, I never pay full price even at $60- there's always a deal somewhere if you're playing on PC. And of course if you're willing to wait, the price drops pretty quickly- and again, those are earnings that publishers rarely saw previously.

Rockstar, whose games sell Big Mac type numbers, complaining about the cost of development is completely absurd. And I agree completely about the need for different budget class titles- a lot of my favorites over the last 8-10 years have been low budget indie stuff. Midrange "A and "AA" titles with a laser focus on what they're good at should be a bigger part of publisher's offerings.  

Rockstar, whose games sell Big Mac type numbers, complaining about the cost of development is completely absurd. And I agree completely about the need for different budget class titles- a lot of my favorites over the last 8-10 years have been low budget indie stuff. Midrange "A and "AA" titles with a laser focus on what they're good at should be a bigger part of publisher's offerings.  

It's one of the reasons why said it's not quite 1 to 1  admittedly but you still have games that are selling way more if they're actually good and have longer tails on then they did previously.   There's way more people playing games not that potentially offset the cost of development alone just because you're selling more of it.  That's not going to be the case for every game but if saw a publisher like Rockstar complaining about the rising costs of development and games needing to be more expensive I'd be giving them a look.
 
And then this also comes back to what I said earlier in a different post that not every games needs to have a AAA budget.  If they had more of range of different titles from budgets then the smaller successful ones can actually help take the edge off of the bigger budget higher risk titles.  Capcom's complaining about prices need to be higher?  Well they could also put out a /$40/$50 solid Megaman title that wouldn't take nearly as long to make as something like Dragon's Dogma to help take the risk off the higher budget.    Megaman 11 came out 10/2/2018 and thus far as of June this year has sold 1.7 mill.  I'm pretty sure this game was successful so kinda wondering why it's taken them this long to do another title around the same budget and do another solid game.

These are fair points, however, I think it's also worth pointing out that modern AAA games take an enormously higher amount of people than they did in the PS2 and earlier gens. Inflation and labor costs have also gone through the roof over the same period. How many of you remember SNES and N64 games going for $60-$80, back when $60 was a hell of a lot more money than it is now? 

But back to the other side of the coin, digital distribution has to help their margins tremendously. You're not sinking all that cost into massive print runs that may or may not sell through, used resale is eating less and less of your business, and your game can keep earning for years. I think the pros outweigh the cons if your game picks up steam- and now your game succeeding isn't tied so tightly to that release window sales number.
 
..All this said, I never pay full price even at $60- there's always a deal somewhere if you're playing on PC. And of course if you're willing to wait, the price drops pretty quickly- and again, those are earnings that publishers rarely saw previously.

Separate ways in re4 remake is $10 well spent.  Just finished my first playthrough and really enjoyed it. 

Separate ways in re4 remake is $10 well spent.  Just finished my first playthrough and really enjoyed it. 

I'm playing the separate ways DLC. I'm liking all the attention to detail this campaign has. You can hear Leon fighting the villagers when you get to village, if grapple to the roof of the church you can hear Ashley sobbing, Ada has an actual cutscene with the merchant,
 
 
The parts that were cut from the original game made its way here.

Itsuno interview on DD2: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/interviews/interview-capcom-explains-why-dragons-dogma-2-has-taken-so-long/

Itsuno interview on DD2: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/interviews/interview-capcom-explains-why-dragons-dogma-2-has-taken-so-long/

I finished it on Casual today. Pretty amazing game although parts of it were pretty tough even in Casual so I guess we'll see how it shakes out on higher difficulty. Looking forward to digging into Episode 2 and tbh, id like to run the game with a couple of the characters by themselves.

VGMF: 
 
 

6 was the Sarcophagus boss, correct? That one's really tough on veteran difficulty. There are 8 stages on the first run- there are additional runs with different characters/endings with different final bosses and a couple new levels in the final run. Then there's boss rush and solo modes if you're still up for more. 

VGMF: 
 
 

Completely ignored the lore and inserted "diversity" in a setting where just about everyone should be Caucasian. There are darker skinned people in The Witcher universe, they reside in Zerrikania and the story doesn't take place there. It's far to the South IIRC. Like Africa is from Poland.  All the sorceresses are supposed be gorgeous. They magically enhance their looks. That's not really the case in the show. The former annoys me because they couldn't even been bothered to have an offhand remark about how a character is from Zerrikania. Or they couldn't be smart enough to do what House of the Dragon did and have an entire foreign family be "black". Them not being from area and being different from everyone else makes sense. The latter is just par for the course these days and unsurprising given the casting directors comments about Yennefer's casting. I can't imagine Anya Chalotra was pleased by them.
 
Side note: I watched a show on Netflix a while back, Barbarians is the title IIRC. it's clearly a European show dubbed into English. Based on the setting everyone should be Caucasian. There is one black character in that show but it makes sense. She was enslaved when the Romans sacked Carthage. They took like 2 minutes for a flashback and her being in middle of Gaul instantly made sense.

I'll be incredibly blunt. I'm fucking tired of these talentless assholes using established IP as a Trojan Horse to push our their shitty pet projects under the guise of "adapting an IP for modern audiences." The Witcher is a prime example of this. Hell they literally featured Yennefer as primary character in an arc  she wasn't even present for in the books. While the character that was supposed to be the focus of the story arc had already been introduced an established in their "adaptation" of the story.

Finally picked up and started COTM2 and man this game gets real tough on a dime. I breezed through the first 4 stages but stage 5 is crazy, especially the parts with all the Gradius references.