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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
As a casual user who refuses to get on the daily F2P "treadmill’ or the trading economy (I just want to play it like Diablo) is it still worth playing?
You can easily get through PoE1’s main campaign without paying a dime
Someone also posted a video of them essentially getting through the “midgame” of path of exile in 24 hours without paying as well youtu.be/JeIDCxQhZM4
However, during that midgame he shows that he really starts having trouble with the lack of stash tabs for trading. It’s doable, but that’s kind of where you start hitting your limits
All in all, if you play for the main campaign it’s essentially just a free game, and if you play without trading the game is still designed to be somewhat doable. Really the only thing you miss out on is trading
Yeah if you play ssf you sidestep these problems entirely and then the only problem you might have is simply just inventory management (which also only comes up in the lategame)
and if you play without trading the game is still designed to be somewhat doable. Really the only thing you miss out on is trading
I don’t agree with this at all. Even if you don’t want to trade (which only really requires a single premium stash tab anyway) you’ll struggle in the endgame if you don’t have at least a currency, fragment and map tab. I actually think you need even more tabs in SSF (solo self-found) than in trade league. Because you can’t just buy something if you need it you’ll probably want to keep way more items. And with the four default tabs you pretty quickly run out of space (in the endgame).
But yes, for the campaign it’s not really an issue and I would definitely consider that as perfectly playable for free. And by the time you’re done with it you’ll probably know whether you want to buy some tabs and keep playing or not.
Tip for people who do want to buy stash tabs: there’s a sale every three weeks where all tabs are around 20-25% off.
PoE2 early access is still months away, so I assume you’re talking about PoE1.
In my opinion it’s definitely worth playing if you’re into that type of game. The monetisation is still very fair in my opinion. It’s perfectly playable for free until you reach the endgame, where you’ll probably want to spend around 30-40€ on stash tabs. But you’ve probably played for at least 20 hours before you even get to that point. And it’s a one time purchase which costs about as much as Last Epoch. And less than Diablo 4.
Personally I’m not a huge fan of SSF (solo self-found), it does make the game somewhat harder since parts of the game are not designed around this mode. It’s supposed to be a limitation. If that’s how you want to play and you’re a more casual player then Last Epoch might be the better choice, they have a mode that caters specifically to people who want to play like that (Circle of Fortune). But lots of people play SSF so it’s not like it’s not a viable way to play the game or anything. Playing trade league but only trading for a few things you need (like build defining uniques) is also an option. And in the current league they also introduced an automated currency exchange market which makes trading certain items a lot easier.
I’ve only played the most recent Cycle in Last Epoch so I can’t tell you how the game “now” compares to previous states, but I’ve enjoyed it. The story is a bit convoluted and there’s certainly room for improvement, but I enjoyed the gameplay. Both building your character and the crafting system are way more approachable than in Path of Exile, but still interesting.
Overall I’d probably recommend Last Epoch to a casual player unless you’re drawn to PoE’s more complicated systems or abundance of content, especially in the endgame.
I am getting excited for it! They’ve been making some great QoL improvements for PoE lately, I’m looking forward to seeing what everything they’ve done with 2.
Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.
You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
It’s a simplified version of animal crossing for mobile, with some microtransactions to speed things up. I played it on release and it’s pretty decent.
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