I played for a lil while, trying to get into it to play with my friends. The only MMO i’ve gotten DEEP into was the original Guild Wars, and that is obviously a bit different from other MMOs, so I wasn’t sure if it would be my cup of tea. I ended up falling off before finishing the base Realm Reborn MSQ. I found the same problem I always have with MMOs - the initial loop is really fun and addicting and I’m enjoying learning the world, but then I hit a point where doing the quests just feels like a slog to endgame. I did some dungeons with my friends once that was possible, and it mostly just felt like I was struggling to keep up with something that everyone else had done 50 times over already. It stunk that I had to do story quests solo, and could only really party up for dungeons. Much preferred the GW experience of playing the MSQ together.
Idk, I’m not trying to trash on the game, I can tell it’s really well made and I’m happy for all y’all. It just didn’t resonate for me.
That’s a major pain point for a lot of new players. You have to invest at least a couple hundred hours into doing the MSQ to get to current endgame content. I know it’s more about the journey, rather than the destination, but it sucks when you have friends doing endgame stuff, and you’re still stuck behind who knows how many more quests in order to join them. I quit the game twice during the stretch of post-ARR quests. They cut the number of quests down since I went through them, but it’s still a slog.
This was also my complaint. I felt like it was missing the cooperative aspect of an MMO that I wanted. I think FFXI is closer to what I want, but it’s understandably older and less accessible for a lot of people. I’m still debating when/if i wana take the plunge and just play that for a while.
I’ve spent about 60 hours replaying the intro quests in XIV trying to get into it lol
Deus Ex is great but 55 hours of having nothing to do but Deus Ex sounds overwhelming. Grab UFO 50 as well so you have some low-commitment alternatives to fall back on.
There’s like an emotional component to it, though. Having lots of options doesn’t necessarily feel like lots of options. Deus Ex and hundreds of gigs of not Deus Ex feels like a yes or no decision, trying one of the multitude of other options being psychically equivalent just turning the machine off. At least in my experience.
Hence the suggestion of a compilation. Multiple other games but connected to each other to form a greater whole. Five minutes of Balatro and five minutes of One Way Heroics feels like ten minutes of not playing Deus Ex, whereas five minutes of Magic Garden and five minutes of Mortol feels like ten minutes of UFO 50.
It’s…not great. But it’s one of those “not great” games I can’t seem to stop playing. It’s a mech based extraction shooter. The shooting is floaty and all over the place, the loot is either materials for making things or crystals that become currency once you extract.
To be fair (and I used to like the gamepass. I recently started to change my mind on that) the PC offer for gamepass is better and less expensive than the XBOX
Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
…
I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
…
But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
…
Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
Worth noting for anyone looking to play both N64 games is that OoT Gerudo stay stunned indefinitely (until the area is reloaded) but the Pirates in Majora’s Mask who are borrowed from the Gerudo guards only stay stunned for a short time before getting back up.
This incentizes use of the Stone Mask, which can be obtained from the invisible guard by giving him a red potion. If playing the N64 version, he is located outside of Ikana Graveyard, which is a place that you can get to at that point in the game but many might not have bothered exploring yet. In the 3DS version, they moved him directly into Pirates Fortress so he’s harder to miss, but it does require just a little bit of stealth to get to where he is first.
It took me a while to figure out too lol. I never stopped to consider it until i was messing around with the bow and arrow and thought “i wonder if i can shoot them”
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