Never a good sign if your hot new game concept has to be defended before you describe any of its genre-redeeming features.

"You'll never have to see a server browser!"
"Don't worry, you CAN solo if you want!"

Right, but what options do I have if I want to have a peaceful co-op or PvE experience? Does 'solo' mean 'completely on a private instance', or just 'in a free-for-all game world without co-op partners'?

"You can team up with other players to launch a nuclear weapon and completely wreck another player's settlement!"

Congrats, this sounds completely horrible in every single way. If there's no way to completely isolate myself from the possibility of it happening to me, then it doesn't matter how hopeful the story/setting are supposed to be; this is a game I will never ever buy.

"You don't lose anything when you die!"

Then what's the point of including nukes to begin with?

The Prey stuff looks good, but I was seriously going to engage with the moon DLC primarily as a peaceful space to stack objects in. It being a roguelite with a corruption meter that increases over time has completely destroyed that ambition -- not that the game was designed for it in the first place, but still.

The base game does have NG+ now, though, which is good to know for when I get it on PC. I'm hoping I can just restart with Leverage and Mobility III for efficiency's sake.

I saw a take on the reaction to Anthem's multiplayer focus and lack of romance: "Oh, so you want Bioware to just repeatedly make the same game with slight reskins over and over?"

No, I only -trust- them to make story-based RPGs with strong characters/lots of dialogue. That's where their cachet comes from! I'm sure they make good multiplayer for people who want it, but God, @Iron_Spike on Twitter had it right: just let me enjoy highly masturbatory single-player content in peace.

Just Cause 4 still looks hot, though whether it'll be playable at all on consoles has yet to be seen. One of the reasons I'm building the PC to begin with is to play through JC3; when I abandoned it on XbOne I was attempting to complete it using the grappling hook as my primary weapon for everything -- turning it from a standard shooter into a destructive puzzle game. (I only stopped because the framerates were far too low, which a XbOnX hardware upgrade wouldn't appreciably fix.)

One of the most brutally unpleasant press conferences I've ever watched, just from the overabundance of deeply intense and deliberately upsetting visuals; my recollection of it feels like an actual nightmare. That said, Death Stranding looks nice; so does the RE2 remake (though not for the over-the-top gore in what they displayed). I'm sure Spider-Man will be great as well, though as with other PS4 exclusives, I'll be viewing them in hour-long chunklets as my housemate plays through.

I was waiting for them to put guns, explosions, or forced randomness into the new Trials, and I'm beyond pleased that they didn't. The Crew 2 is a day-one for me (but that was a foregone conclusion; Phen's getting it, and the closed beta was amazing). Starlink, congrats on the thirst-follows, but feel free to call me when the -actual- man of my dreams is playable.

@Lobst I mean, Trials usually has explosions alongside some of the tracks, or the silly rag-dolling of the rider at the end of tracks, but yeah, pretty glad to see it not turn into "ride tracks and do sweet flips and jumps, then hop off the bike into a sandbox open world multiplayer lane battle royale team shoot!"