Having the game streamed by all these huge channels before it’s even officially announced is kinda crazy. Everyone wants to play Valve’s “secret game” of course, so it’s free marketing. Pretty clever.
My immediate emotional reaction is to dunk on you. Boo hoo, a company won’t make a game you want. But you’re missing the valve you grew up with, and gaming is worse off now. Multiplayer games with subscription models and microtransactions have become the default, and we all feel it.
For me Deadlock has great characters, lore, new interesting mechanics, and only surface level similarities with DOTA. I’m not upset about it really. Just happy Valve is making anything again. Maybe I’m worn down, but so many big companies take but shits everyday I’m just happy to see one building good shit. (And it’s free!)
So you said “boo hoo” to people that don’t like how microstransactions, subscription models, and the like? You are not upset that the state of gaming in AAA landscape have degraded?
There was a very direct terms of service “Don’t share info”. But The Verge are notoriously awful journalists. It’s like they have no clue of what basic decent journalism entails and confuse good reporting with being trolling assholes. There’s a reason they were the only idiots who broke it and got rightly burned at the stake for it. I bet the guy wasn’t even looking at the screen when he spammed the ESC key at the game. Just because it wasn’t 100 pages of legalese doesn’t mean they weren’t bound by it, clicking ESC instead of the button OK means nothing in legal terms. And just using the software means you agree to the explicit and implicit terms of service that come with the software as long as it isn’t something blatantly illegal. They were assholes and received the consequences of their actions. And that’s that.
Simplify the situation to lol defending the EULA all you want, but “I’m not bound by your NDA because I pressed ESC instead of clicking okay” is the kind of thing I expect a spoiled 14 year old to say while wearing a shit eating grin.
Act unprofessionally in a professional industry and you get dragged by professionals. And rightly so.
If someone ask you for a ride and you tell them not to roll down the window and they say “lol, nope” and still get on the car. They can’t be mad if you stop the car and tell them to get out when they roll down the window laughing hysterically at your face. Pressing escape means nothing in this case. The Verge’s writer was acting stupid on purpose. This is like kids who think that crossing their fingers behind their back means they aren’t bound to a promise. It is wishful thinking.
Add: oh, and BTW, there’s a reason almost all terms of service start with “By using this software you agree to…” the legal fact is using the service not clicking on the agree button. That’s just legal ammunition that companies use to prove on court that the user was aware of the legal contract. EULAs uset to be sheets of paper on a cardboard box along side CDs. No one had to click on an agree button. By buying and using the software, those were the terms you agreed to. Almost all contracts include that sort of language because the use is the fact that supports the legal contract. Law is just leaving facts and agreements on paper, facts overrule legalese, that is actually the basis used by courts to dismiss enforcement of EULAs. Like how signers aren’t legally bound to fulfill irrational or unachievable agreements, or language intentionally obtuse or ambiguous.
To ride this special car, you must agree to not open the windows.
Expectation: No? Okay, then I cannot allow you to ride this special car.
Valve: nope? Okay well get in anyway... Whaaat you opened the windows? Wtf?
Not saying the verge writer was or wasn't behaving like an entitled child. In fact, I'm inclined to think he was, but It's irrelevant. Valve made a goof. (Gasp!)
I could care less what valve does in response. They could blacklist the verge entirely and I probably wouldn't even know. I just wonder if people only care because it's valve.
So people need to be bound by EULAs that they don’t click to agree?
People…? No. And whether they clicked to agree or not should be irrelevant; EULAs should be unenforceable.
Journalists and their employers…? Neither… but then developers don’t have any obligation to provide them with review copies in the future either.
In an industry that depends on mutual goodwill, trust, and agreement, bypassing the implied NDA was completely legal… but profoundly stupid, disingenuous, and unprofessional.
The Verge decided to burn bridges it had probably taken decades to build, for the sake of one single article. It was their right and prerogative to do it, nothing illegal about it, they had no obligation to follow the EULA.
But Valve has no obligation to let them play their invite-only beta either, or to provide them with review copies in the future, and neither has any other developer.
We’ll see how it works out for the Verge in the future.
He hit esc to avoid clicking accept on the nda bit, then bragged about it in the article. There have been other articles about the game, but afaik he’s the only one that was banned for being a smartass.
From what I remember there was no NDA but no EULA either. It was a simple “please don’t share anything about this”, the journo ignored it and their account was banned. As far as I’m aware there’s no legal action going on, the Verge have just lost any goodwill they ever had with Valve.
Like the a character will remember that type of thing and thus might actually bring it up or hold it against another character. Like Until Dawn there’s a part where the gun has blanks and if you don’t sacrifice the character the character the character tried to shoot won’t open the door when he needs it. Which yeah that whole scene was unrealistic because blanks can still kill.
Yeah I’m for new games and hopefully people love it but “hero shooter” and “moba” definitely aren’t categories I’m looking for in new games, the market is flooded with them. Hopefully valve can stand out
I really wanted battleborn to succeed on release even though it was just kind of flawed from a design standpoint. I kind of gave up on competitive fps games since then though.
With how chaotic the fights look like and how high the ttk looks to be, is the game still fun at lower-mid skill levels?
I’d say yes. But you do have to figure out how to apply the MOBA way of thinking. How to stack the stats of items, abilities and leveling up, into doing a shitload of damage without dying.
That applied to Battelborn, and it does in Deadlock, too.
I’ve played quite a bit of MOBA’s before, coincidentally the other big third person ones Smite and Paragon, so I’ve got a decent feel for builds and macroplay and I’m not necessarily worried about those aspects.
I grew up as a console gamer but exclusively play on PC now so I’ve found for fps games I have trouble competing because my aim isn’t as great.
It’s dota 2 if it were a very competitive 3rd person shooter. More of a MOBA than a hero shooter, and it’s very complex. Also I’ve been playing it for a month, AMA I guess
There’s already some toxic muppets getting banned from matchmaking as well as rage quiters…not a whole lot but I have come across them in the week or so that I’ve played.
There are a few people who do want to coordinate or even use VC, more than the above, but not a whole lot
Everyone calling it a shooter MOBA is right, but more basically: It’s Smite. It’s just Smite, but good. I played the Smite 2 alpha and it was very lame, no verticality, gunplay felt bad. Deadlock has an original theme, gunplay feels tight, and there is clearly a huge skill ceiling. I don’t know if it’s 100% yet, which tracks cuz it’s an alpha, but it’s already better than Smite and I have faith they’ll make it better.
Yeah, OP wasn’t very inclusive. PoE is Path of Exile, an ARPG. The second title which has been in development for a few years now just got an early access date (November 15th).
It was originally just to see how things had changed, but a lot changed and it’s very different. Not that it answered all of my personal issues with it, but I resigned myself to using a build guide. I’ve been enjoying it, surprisingly. Enough that, when I haven’t been out of the house, I usually play it daily.
Progress is going really slow because I’m not that good at the game anymore. But I also made loot filter sounds that spark joy, and I’ve been managing even if I’d like to be at endgame. I’m on act 6 out of 10.
My partner is also playing but doesn’t have a lot of experience. So I’ve been trying to help, which makes it more enjoyable to me because I like to teach.
Not sure if I’m fully going back yet. But I like the league mechanic and am having a good time.
There may be more people watching Deadlock than there are watching and playing Concord today based on available data and reasonable extrapolation. Valve continues to market in a unique way that works.
Concord is dead on arrival. Kind of a shame, the game looked a bit interesting but being $40 and having very generic art this was bound to happen. Deadlock is in a whole other league.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
Honestly, paying for a (primarily) multiplayer game isn’t a problem for me. I actually might prefer it when you look at Overwatch vs Overwatch 2. But I wasn’t about to sign up for a playstation account to play my Steam game.
I think that’s what makes it such a good point of comparison though. It’s titled differently and we were promised it would be different, but all that really happened was they changed their monetization tactics. And maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I remember liking Overwatch when it came out, but now I have almost zero interest in playing Overwatch 2, even though I’ve gone back to it a few times just to give it a try.
And DOTA2 has the worst matchmaking I’ve ever seen in casual too. My third game I was placed with the sweatiest sweats and it completely turned me off the game.
I’m pretty sure you can still join servers like that. I haven’t played in years, but last time I did, the server browser was still there. A lot less lively because it was hidden compared to the matchmaking button, but it was still there.
Hah, sorry everyone jumped down your throat on the choice of words. Stardew Valley would be good for anyone old enough to read who would enjoy taking care of their own farm and building a relationship with villagers. I would call the graphics “cute”, but not gratuitously so (which might be preferred). Cooking Mama is another one that has a good reputation on non-mobile platforms, and it looks like they made an Android version. (Haven’t played the Android version, hopefully it’s not full of micro transactions).
There are definitely games where the primary/target demographic is boys or girls though.
The arcade classic “Centipede” is a good example of this. It was designed to try to attract women to play it. The colors were pastel shades and its sequel Millipede took it further by having a “story” about an elf archer protecting a mushroom forest from a bug invasion. Centipede was partially programmed by a woman (one of four people who made the game), Donna Bailey, who was also responsible for choosing the games vibrant pastel color palette.
Now, is Centipede or Millipede only for girls? No of course not. No video game is only for a single demographic. But real world data showed that girls/ women generally played Centipede and Millipede more than boys/men did. Some things just have a general appeal to some demographics more than others. So typically when a person asks for “girl games,” they just means games that will have a high appeal to girls or games that were designed with girls as the primary demographic.
Otome visual novels are this way as well. They target a female playerbase with a story-based romance game and generally feature a female protagonist who romances male characters in the game.
I’d love to get another singleplayer game as well, but I’ve accepted that Valve is just unpredictable. I’m sure they haven’t given up on Singleplayer and we’ll get another singleplayer game… at some point. Their previous game was the fantastic Half-life Alyx after all.
Stuff has been leaking about the next Half Life game since Episode 2 came out, and not much of it had anything to do with what we ended up getting with Alyx. Don’t get your hopes up newbie.
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