I think for a visual novel, you’re probably better off buying it near release for full price. Maybe even get the more expensive version that comes with the soundtrack if you like the game.
For other types of games, especially more mass market games, they’re more complex and prone to bugs. Visual novels, not so much. So being patient in this particular case would certainly hurt the small creator making the game more than it will hurt your bank account. Visual novels aren’t usually $60.
The question can be asked for most things in life really so just do both options. Generally I’m a “value for money” gamer now but If something catches my eye I will make an effort to support it.
Patient gaming is a budgeting technique, not a strict law you must always adhere to.
I separate upcoming releases into two categories: games I'm so excited for that I would gladly pay full price at launch, and games I'm willing to wait on. Which games go in which category depend entirely on you and your budget.
Buying isn’t supporting. Capitalism is not a social support network.
Companies have spent millions and taken years to convince people that going shopping is a kind of activism.
If I suggested you donate money directly to a video game company, or volunteer your time to help them you’d see right away how fucking weird that whole concept is.
I think that, if you have the resources to support that niche, which the savings from cheap offers hopefully allowed for, and you want to see it grow, it’s worth paying more.
The question is moot from both sides of the deal, but understanding why is important.
For something like a game, you will only ever pay approximately what you think a game is “worth”. How you determine that value is entirely up to you and should be based on your own opinions and beliefs. Therefore, if you derive value from supporting niche developers, that’s great for you and you should continue to do so as you wish. If you don’t value that quite as much, then wait for a sale price that does.
Your individual decisions will not affect the decisions of publishers and developers.
Their decisions will take into account the total profit that they think a game can provide over its lifetime. This is determined by the initial price and sales as well as future discount prices and sales. The way they estimate the potential profit of a new project is based on past data. If they see most of their sales at launch time, they will price the game accordingly. If they see more revenue over time from sales, then they will price the game accordingly. As long as they continue to hit those goals, then they will continue making products for those audiences.
Therefore, the best way to support the projects you like is to buy the game when the price justifies the value to you. That is buy it whenever you want. The only way to not support (I am purposefully avoiding the word hurt) the publisher and developer is to pirate the games.
Yes, not only many people still play the same games for 10 years, but also spend most of their gaming time in them. There’s a reason why a new live service game is both a gold mine and also incredibly difficult to stick.
Sometimes I wonder whether Starfield truly deserves all the bad publicity or whether people are also still upset because it became an Xbox exclusive and that is clouding their judgement. I know it does affect me for one. I got a ps5 for gaming and I’m automatically much less interested in anything that isn’t on the platform. And I was of course very disappointed when Microsoft outright bought all these huge IPs and made them exclusive to Xbox.
If you take any major gaming publications scores as at all legitimate then I have a bridge to sell you
Major publications give it a passable score because “lol glitches are Bethesdas thing”, ignoring objective critique because of reputation, as well as our of fear that they won’t be given access to the next product released by the or Microsoft because they give games “bad publicity”
Starfield is a broken, poorly written, dumpster fire of a game. It objectively doesn’t function correctly often, like many Bethesda products, and was designed by a team lead by a man allergic to basic game design ethos (seriously fuck Emil, my dog could do game design better than me "fuck design docs). It has moments of being interesting and, much like Skyrim, could be the base for some cool mods, but people hated it so much it won’t ever even get that
I was on Windows at the time and had GamePass, so I pleasantly had access included with what I was already paying for. I ended up pirating it so I could mod it (that is prevented on GamePass), because it needed mods.
No, it’s not negative because it’s MS owned. It’s a very bad game. I love older Bethesda games and I love sci-fi. This should have been an easy win for me. Wow, it was disappointing. The actual combat gameplay is fine, but everything between combat sucks. Too many loading screens taking you out of the gameplay.
The writing sucks. They make use of established sci-fi tropes, but then they don’t understand how to make them work in a story. They give you very few choices, often not including the most obvious ones.
Despite this being the “exploration” game, exploration is essentially non-existent. Every planet pretty much has the same stuff. There’s like five bases that spawn everywhere identically, and a handful of “natural” points-of-interest, which appear all over the planet identically, as well as being the same as every other planet with the same ones. You might see some benefit to explore if you’re building bases, but that system is incredibly clunky and frustrating to make operational. Even once you have things running, it’ll still require managing storages from overflowing and blocking incoming supplies. It’s really bad.
The universe is incredibly unreactive too. If you thought this was true for their previous games, it’s worse in Starfield. There’s no ships bringing supplies to colonies. No colonies being built that weren’t there at the start. No fighting between factions, besides pirates randomly and it’s the same random event that happens when you warp into a place, not something that happened because pirates are raiding a supply line or something. It just doesn’t change ever.
Basically, no. Starfield actually sucks. I really wanted to like it, but there’s nothing to like in my opinion. I’ve seen some people say they like it, but I honestly don’t get it. Every aspect seems like a downgrade from FO4, which had its own issues but had reasons to like it too.
Thanks for the review. Disappointing to be sure. I was hoping to play it at some point and that it wouldn’t suck as much as people say it does. Or that they would turn it around in time.
Still give a try, it’s not for everyone and it’s not to the same quality as their previous games but it’s honestly not a bad game. At worst I’d say it’s aggressively average. But I still have a great time with ship combat and exploration, the loading doesn’t bother me as much and people act like the quests and writing are BAD, They are not, it’s just not to the level of their previous games. But there are still a few quests I absolutely love.
I would say most of the writing is bad. There are a handful of interesting quests, but most aren’t. Then there’s things like the generation ship, which they don’t do anything interesting with, it uses the same technology as the modern ships, and also the quest path to end it is stupid. There’s also so many things that just don’t make sense in the universe it’s set in, and it’s overall just boring.
I agree overall the game is just aggressively average though. It plays fine enough, but it gives no reason to want to play it. It’s not actively painful to play, but it gives no feedback to make anything feel worth doing.
I really enjoyed the Ryujin quest line, the quest where the world was shifting, and there’s tons of great smaller quests and interactions, but I agree the generation ship was a big miss, the main quest flounders and flops hard about half way through and overall they didn’t do enough with universe building.
I was holding out hope that the modding scene would help support the game, because traditionally speaking Bethesda modders have done some incredibly amazing work on other titles. But no, alas, Starfield is such a fuckin’ trash fire that not even the modders are willing to put in the work to unfuck this heap of shit. Somebody might release a killer overhaul for it after they’ve had a couple more years to basically rewrite the entire engine, but frankly I don’t see anyone caring that much about this game to make it happen. I know of at least one guy who rather than getting involved in the mod scene, instead got on Steam and said fuck you, I’ll make my own fuckin’ Starfield, and started whipping up Spacebourne 2, and even this half-baked early access alpha jank has clear signs of being the seed of a better game than Starfield was. I’m sure that others have had similar ideas.
I feel like starfield is an experiment in user driven content (mods) to sell a game. The issue with Skyrim is that there is really only one map, and before any map extension mod came out, there were so many mods out there that competed for space on the map. Even today, large world overhaul mods are constantly stepping on the toes of other mods. City redesigns are also a problem unless you’re really good at load orders and merging.
Starfield feels like each world is an open map, ready for people to start designing content: either a colony, a cave, or anything really. The story seems loose and open ended so that it won’t interfere with large collaborative content. It’s not a game they are selling, but a modding storefront. It’s like Skyrim Creations, but putting the horse (armor sold separately) before the cart.
The UI and perk system is actively hostile to playing the game. It was one thing when you could always try to pick the lock in Skyrim and the more locks you picked the better you got. Now you must take the perk and it’s a requirement to pick locks before the next perk.
You cannot even craft or use core gameplay mechanics without perks. Booster pack? Perks. Targeting sub systems? Perk. (Which is hilarious because it’s in the tutorial mission and they just hard coded the event ship not to blow up. So until you visit the Internet you don’t actually know how to board other ships)
Out post building is ridiculously complex, resources take up a bajillion spaces in your inventories, there’s no guidance on production chains, and basic resources aren’t even on the same planet. So you’re back to just buying resources to get it off the ground and why are we even building an outpost again?
To be fair, the story, the fly here, shoot this, listen to story parts of the game are fine. But literally everything else around it is made as obtuse as possible because yes I want to go through a loading screen every time I need to access my main stash.
As some one said when it released. It’s Fallout 4 in space. But if all the ancillary stuff was made 100 percent more inconvenient.
It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.
Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.
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