I just felt like I ran out of things to do and there was no point to keep playing.

To each their own of course, but it sounds like you basically just “beat” the game, in the same way someone beats Animal Crossing. You just stop playing eventually. I don’t see that as a negative if you enjoyed that time.

It’s an incredible game, a love letter to all the best aspects of the Harvest Moon series. My only real gripe is the NPC characters can feel a little stale and robotic after a while, but during a first playthrough they are all full of life.

Congrats to Billy Basso and to Bigmode for the positive reviews! Always good to see a new IP, studio, and even publisher come out the gate strong.

What about this indicates AAA? Planned size of 100 employees, no projects announced yet, no mention of funding. Only thing I see is “cutting-edge” which could necessitate larger amounts of funding to develop, but that’s highly speculative and depends on the direction. I imagine after their Rocksteady experience, the people hired on from that company were looking for something different, not another “AAA” studio with shareholder oversight.

Also started seeing this today while browsing on my work computer, which I believe utilizes a VPN.

Did you play the original? Most complaints I saw seemed to focus on that comparison. Itself in a vacuum, it sounded like it was fine.

I seem to recall Xbox making claims they wanted this console generation to be “the last” because they wanted to make frequent iterative upgrades instead. I feel like they changed to the opposite mentality now, if the lowest common denominator can’t handle it, nobody gets to play.

Exactly. They recognize that defederation is the nuclear option, but it’s the only effective tool they have at the moment.