ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Really looking forward to Avowed, and the other three ain't half bad either.

This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds.

Interesting comparison, because I'd argue that that switch has, lately, been worse more often than it's been better, and that a lot of games would have been far better off if they stuck to the more limited equivalent.

I enjoy Cyberpunk quite a lot too, but if you're going to criticize the depth of the game, it's not necessarily because the writing is subpar or anything. It would just be a reflection of how differently the game can play out with different builds. It's a little better now with the 2.0 update, but the designers still very explicitly allowed for a hacking option here, a strength option there, and so on. Compare that against something like Baldur's Gate 3 where you're free to break all sorts of rules by just casting flight or invisibility on your party and solving a problem in a way that you came up with that the designers didn't go out of their way to plan for. The latter is real depth. A deep RPG should probably feel like your experience was pretty different from others' experience.

To be fair, we've seen very little of the 2024 slate. We've only got release dates for about the first few months of the year.

I wish I could get into it. I'm into games that are inspired by Monster Hunter but not so much Monster Hunter itself. The monsters are too tanky, and you and the monster trade turns rendering each other unable to attack rather than having the proper push and pull of a boss fight. Plus MHW in particular (the only one I spent I any real time with) waits until you're in "the end game" before it lets you start setting your objectives by hunting something because you want its parts. Before that point, the latest thing you found is always objectively better than any other thing you found, regardless of weaknesses.

What I suggested is not ignoring the problem. Ignoring bad products makes bad products less financially viable. Buying good products instead creates more supply of good products, because producers want the money coming from consumers who only buy good products. This is not a binary boycott vs. no boycott. There is every minute step along the way. Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.

Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company.

Nor does it need to. It just shows that they don't think the live service business model they made was going to work; so much so that they flushed their most expensive game to date down the toilet.

Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.

There is zero information on their nostalgic franchises play regarding business model. Many of which came from a different era of predatory monetization that came to an end without legislation (the arcades).

There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’

There is when you stop buying their games in the first place.

The fact that you call it ever-shrinking when there is too much to play that doesn't fit into that bucket is exactly what I was talking about. Plus you must have missed the bottom falling out of live service games this past year, perhaps due to a lack of consumer trust in the product lasting long enough to justify their time or money. Sega just spent $70M on a game that they decided was better to never even launch. Sony shrunk their live service portfolio forecast from a dozen down to half of that. These are the microtransaction-driven games.

If the only games you acknowledge are the big games committing the offense, that's why the market is taking us there. You're part of the market. Reward the other games.

Don't play big games using it then. That's how you shop your way out of it. If you think every game is full of bad monetization practices, you're not looking very hard for your video games. There's an asterisk there on the addiction that a lot of them prey on, but if you're sick of playing a game where they keep asking you for money instead of letting you enjoy the game, play a different game. There are too many great games that don't bother with that nonsense.

A victory isn't the totality of Netflix as a company sinking in the ground. It's every step along the way, including directing your money toward those that respect you as a customer. Pretty much unanimously the best game of last year went to a game that's sold DRM-free, with no DLC, with the ability to play mulitplayer without some stupid live service strings attached, and it sold about 10M copies. Rewarding those games is the other side of the coin of voting with your wallet.

My fiance and I just finished the DLC for The Case of the Golden Idol, and not only is that game awesome, but the story hooks for the DLC were a pleasant surprise. We can't wait for the sequel.

I've been playing a lot of Pillars of Eternity, and I made it to Act 2. It's impressive how insanely good this game is. And then on top of that, it's impressive that I think everything I like about it is done better in Baldur's Gate 3.

I finally made it to Master rank in Street Fighter 6! Still some input frustrations until the game can get a season 2 patch, but I'm just happy to finally have something like an Elo rather than the superficial league system, even though my master rating settled slightly below the default 1500 value.

Unsubscribing from Netflix fixes this.

I'd imagine it would make sense for them to make a publisher or large development studio to make the types of games that their shows have benefited from, like an inverse Warner Bros. WB has always been allergic to making any video game that isn't based off of DC or one of their big movies, but imagine if they did that in reverse and made a game with a movie in mind that could be made out of the same premise? That's the crossover that's worked so well for Netflix shows (and The Last of Us and Mario).

There's a lot of reward for experimenting with what you think your customers want if you're correct. Mobile games probably aren't the right avenue for them to go down, but things like Cyberpunk, The Witcher, and Arcane have proven extremely lucrative for not just Netflix but in generating interest in the properties they're attached to, so it would stand to reason that having a gaming arm would mean they could attain that success and not have to share it with a business partner. Again, I don't think mobile games will accomplish this, but I get the line of reasoning.

Yeah, it's on my to-do list. "Seamless" co-op was never really my problem with FromSoft's mulitplayer design, as they implemented really cool mechanics to make strangers want to help each other. The unfortunate part is that they put in additional mechanics to deter them from helping each other (invasions). The summon sign system is also neat but is prone to race conditions where the sign disappears before you can summon the person because someone else got there first. Things like that are why menus may not only be simpler but also better.

There are, but the incentives put in place by public companies tend to favor short-term results when they're releasing quarterly earnings, something that some big investors have pushed back against for that very reason. Public investors may not be more corrupt either, but they may be less knowledgeable about the harm they're doing when they make changes to the product to get more revenue, like that infamous investor call where someone suggested charging $1 to make Mario jump higher. Microtransactions are clearly a business model that customers are willing to pay for, so it makes sense that person would raise the question, but I doubt that guy plays Mario games in his spare time, because no one who does would suggest that.

Public shareholders are no more corrupt nor less moral than private shareholders, but all of their incentives and information end up being based on more short-term results. Valve is every bit as driven by money as any other company, but they're thinking long-term, and they believe that there's more money to be made long-term by treating customers better than their competitors do. That means they release open hardware that isn't locked down, unlike what their competitors do. They want to mitigate business risk by decoupling PC gaming from a dependency on Microsoft, and all sorts of very capitalist entities mutually benefit from a healthy, usable Linux ecosystem that they can each make work for their own needs.

I don't think the OP was really looking for a review of the game, and given the accolades it received for writing, calling the game "badly written" likely makes your review an outlier.

I just remedied the Starfield blues by starting up The Outer Worlds.