ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I can't think of a game that I've played and enjoyed that had an "end game" except rolling credits, and that's totally fine. Flashes in the pan are totally fine. The game can't "die" as long as a single person wants to play it, because it's playable regardless of the presence of the company's servers.

It's hard for me to take it that way when the author is citing player count numbers in the headline as though that matters at all in a game with finite content and a low cost of entry. Even you using the word "engagement" in what's meant to be an innocent way just has me thinking about how live service games have poisoned the way people speak and think about video games.

I finally finished Pillars of Eternity. I've got lots of criticisms for it, but mostly I really enjoyed it. I do wish there was less combat and that there were more opportunities to talk your way out of combat, for instance. The combat is very good, but there's so much of it that you can easily get decision fatigue. I'm going to take a slight break from Pillars of Eternity before I start the sequel.

So I moved on to replaying Planescape: Torment instead. I last played it about 12 years ago, and there's a good amount of it I've forgotten since then, but at the time I felt it was the best writing I'd seen in games to date. As poorly aged as it was then, even on the enhanced edition now, it's perhaps aged even worse now, so I'm not sure if I'll finish replaying it this time, but we'll see. At least it's not particularly long.

My friends and I are continuing our co-op playthrough of Quake II since we don't live in a timeline where we've got a plethora of modern FPS games to play instead; not the traditional campaign variety, at the very least. The indie scene is mostly replicating Doom/Quake 1 sorts of games, and Quake II is surprisingly much more modern in its design...at least when you use the compass built in to the remaster.

EDIT: Changed my mind. Moved on to Pillars 2. There are already a lot of great improvements.

Yeah, you're prone to having one of the biggest drops when you've got one of the biggest peaks. What a garbage article.

Palworld’s next update and early access roadmap are already on the cards, so it’s now up to Pocketpair to keep supporting the game and listening to players to keep them hooked.

NO IT'S NOT. The only thing it's on them to do is to finish it. They sell the game for $30, and this is not a live service game. They don't need to keep anyone hooked.

You can play offline and host your own servers.

I know. And while it's not surprising that an Arkham game has more people playing already, I'm still surprised it's not one of the others.

I am a bit, because I thought it was rare for this to be people's favorite Arkham game. It's probably my least favorite of the four.

In 1987, we were much shorter on legal precedent for video games. You'd be here all day listing games similar to Metroid, let alone Mario since 1987.

People always talk about this being physical versus digital, but I'd say this is about DRM. Physical media decays. DRM-free games can be perfectly copied over and over again, and it comes with the bonus of not taking up space in my apartment. If a game requires a server to connect to or stream from, that's often just a fancy form of DRM.

If they were, we probably would have seen it by now.

The one that tons of people are enjoying?

The distinction is that they're making a decision that will likely result in not making consoles anymore. It's like how governments don't decide to increase traffic; they decide to expand freeways to more lanes, but the only thing that can come from that is that they increased traffic. They think they're solving a problem, but they're actually, usually, making it worse by those actions that we have a historical record for how they play out.

Sony will hold on to that kicking and screaming, because once they're just selling a PC, they lose money for each third party game sold, and they lose PS+ revenue.

Latency is enough of a thing that even a child raised on it will recognize the benefits of running the game locally, not to mention mods and other privileges that come with having a local copy of a game.

If Xbox disappears and leaves only PlayStation at that tier, I think it's more likely we're looking at the end of consoles altogether in as little as 15 years.

I thought they were both delightful, but neither's storyline had the emotional payoff that something like Shadowheart's or Karlach's had.

To be fair, the rumor isn't that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they're making decisions that will, in a handful of years' time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.

When the profits plateau, you look for the next thing the market wants. Sometimes those bets are right, and sometimes they're wrong. In the meantime, people were paid salaries out of investors' pockets while they worked on providing the next potential answer. That's what happened here.

Very true, and Microsoft in particular could have just shouldered the cost of those employees and likely found more work for a lot of them. Some of what I've heard from Jeff Grubb in the past week or two is that ABK expanded by 3000 employees in the past two years while interest rates were cheap, so it was unlikely they did so sustainably; and hundreds of those who were laid off were basically the entirety of Microsoft's physical distribution department, which we'll probably hear in this upcoming business update no longer exists for Xbox going forward.

I mean...they actually released this one on PC at the same time as PlayStation, so...