Gaming video Catch-All

ACG is sooo good. Love him as a reviewer.

Halo: Combat Evolved’s Silent Cartographer Mission is Still A Gem Today | The Joy of Gaming

It really is. I've been replaying all the old Halo games with my son and while some of it really doesn't hold up most of it is still fun and there are some moments that are still awesome all these years later.

Wait, Yahtzee actually liked something?

Only thing keeping The Escapist afloat, I reckon.

Digital Foundry analysis of Black Myth Wukong gameplay trailer

How Much Does Multiplayer Population Matter?

My primary multiplayer game Rocket League has been called dead by many people for years despite never dropping its population much over the years, always being in the top played lists on Steam and consoles, and it never being hard to find matches. Now with free to play we have more players than ever (over 1 million concurrent sometimes). The developer has done a great job of automatically grouping players by skill level so new players coming in don’t get destroyed by experienced players every game and everyone can win matches. If they just did random matchmaking no new player would have fun because the skill curve is so very huge. I’m really curious to see whether this influx of new players sticks around for long but regardless I still see myself playing RL for years to come.

We notice a big difference in Uncharted’s multiplayer between a health population and not. It’s dwindled from release. It went from having fun close matches to often finding ourselves pitted against teams who’d make us feel Like we didn’t even stand a chance of fighting back. A little while ago the game was given away free and we were back to having fun matches (and honestly running rings around newbies in some matches.) It was very obvious after a while that the population had, again, been distilled down to the hardcore.

It could be that Rocket League’s matchmaking is more sophisticated than Uncharted’s. It could also be that Uncharted lost way more players that Rocket League and so has an incredibly small player pool to work with. I also suspect that some of the players I play with are way better than me and so, at times, send us up into brackets where I’m out classed.