ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I haven't found a noble, king, or count 20 hours in yet, but there was a quest that said I had to go fight Lord Raedric, and then I'm warned by both an NPC and a quest description that this is something I should do later because it's going to be very difficult. Is it possible that you missed the warning and went to do something late game earlier than you should have?

Right, that's my point. Those things are keeping you from finishing the game, not your reaction times. Those tend to not drop off until far later in life.

Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.

Maybe a few more ads in the middle of the thing I'm trying to watch, with no way to pause or rewind to catch what I missed, will do the trick.

I definitely had that experience with Baldur's Gate 2, but I'm about 20 hours into Pillars of Eternity so far and very much not having that experience. Pillars seems to give me all the information I need to know to get through an encounter while BG2 will just say "weapon had no effect" without telling you that this monster can only be defeated by a +3 weapon.

In the fighting game scene, reaction time is studied, and the 40+ year olds can hang with the kids at the highest level. Your reaction time is a function of your focus. If you put your mind to it, yadda yadda yadda. Then it's just up to you to decide if it's worth sticking to it or getting to bed so you're well-rested for work in the morning, because that's what will separate you from beating Hollow Knight in your 40s.

If they want to put out poor quality products in pursuit of short term profit, they can deal with long-term consequences as they lose their customers' trust. This game is reviewing quite well at the moment, and most of the ways we're fearing AI will be used will result in poor quality products. I'd argue Ubisoft has been putting out poor quality products for a long time, and even this game won't be available in a form that I can consume it due to the short-term deal they made with Epic.

Those two things are linked. I'm a frequent Economics Explained viewer, and the old comparison is that 1 accountant with a spreadsheet program can do what 5 accounts could do without one. If you only need the amount of productivity that that one accountant with a spreadsheet can output, that means you don't need four of your accountants anymore.

Not servers offered by the developers/publishers (as far as I know, with the one exception of Knockout City), which makes it an unreliable option at best. You can't exactly spin up a private server for Rumbleverse.

I'm not fluent in Diablo parlance, but essentially it makes it harder to work toward the gear you want because they don't give you as much storage for the items you can't fit on your person?

I'd be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it's a very, very low number.

007 Agent Under Fire came out in 2001, and you can still play it in multiplayer as long as you have a single friend handy. Same goes for Quake, even older. Live service games offer you no way to play them once their servers are turned off.

All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.

A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious.

Which are those? I've heard that they nerfed fun builds to make the grind as long as they intended, but not whatever you're talking about.

Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?

There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.

"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.

This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.

The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.

Plenty of games still rely on procedural generation to different degrees. It's a huge selling point in many cases, and in others, it's a pillar of their genre.

No Civilization on your strategy game list? Civ V and VI are both great picks.

Also, Factorio is a ton of fun and will literally let you play with hundreds of players in the same game if you so choose. The cap is 255.

And I just started diving into loot games with Titan Quest. Allegedly that game supports up to 6 players.

You don't detect it (at least not very well), and cheat hardware isn't new.

I've got a friend who waits for a sale and then buys games like this for White Elephant parties at the end of the year. Often times he buys them for himself because he just has a burning curiosity for bad games.