I think a lot of the hating on Gamepass is justified, but I’ve just gotta say as a partially blind gamer it has been a godsend for me.
I used to struggle with whether or not to buy a game every single time because in most cases there is no way from descriptions and reviews for me to know how any given game will work with my vision and fine/gross motor impairment.
With gamepass I can try things and if I can’t play it? I move on and try something else.
Kinda sad that we can’t find some middle ground between making games accessible for disabled folks without bankrupting developers and ultimately hurting consumers.
Tacit Collusion: a type of collusive behavior where firms coordinate their actions without explicitly communicating or reaching an agreement. Instead, firms may signal their intentions through various actions, such as pricing behavior or output levels, in order to coordinate their behavior and achieve higher profits.
If that were the case, companies would go down left right and center. What do you think the gas stations are doing? Landlords? Companies hiring devs? Everything is becoming lockstepped and thats why we are losing.
We need to break up businesses above 999 mil in assets (including other companies) and break up entry barriers for new businesses. Amend the laws to exclude large companies from any securities so it is actually too risky to become this big.
Its not really hard to do but people need to stop working for a day every month to push this. Take to the streets and unionize en masse.
Everyone who is not part of a union is part of the problem at this point.
No recorded direct link of communication. The CEOs and half the board will individually go to company paid lunches with competition, members of the board are straight up members of a competing board. Or even lobbyists and lawyers of competing companies going to events together that happens daily.
“But I pinky promise we don’t talk about our competing business plans while we eat lunch and golf together”
I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. Especially things that require mass government, academic, and/or inter-industry coordination just cannot happen easily due to the fact that large scale coordination of people is very very difficult.
But in a market with 2-4 long-standing players in an oligopoly with offices right by each other, you bet your ass there is in-person collusion… it has been caught many times and likely the extreme vast majority of cases are not caught. Price adjustment is extremely easy to collude on and has mountains of excuses of plausible deniability and “just following the market” bs. So far, there has yet to be a market that has remained competitive and hasn’t turned into an oligopoly. Monopoly is the steady state of a capitalist system without strict anti-competitive regulations.
Save you all the read, games won’t be discounted or even sold for that matter. They are just being removed from shelves.
" An internal memo has surfaced online stating that all copies will be reduced to 3 cents and sales will be blocked by the store’s system and then removed from the store. As of right now, it appears this is only for Xbox games, but this move was reported last October and it seems to be coming to fruition. It was noted that Microsoft is funding this move for Walmart in the memo, suggesting it may be Microsoft’s decision and not Walmart’s. "
Ubisoft *** said the quiet part out loud and Microsoft decided just to speed run it. I do love all the one piece memes of a great pirate era beginning though.
It could be that Walmart was planning to start winding down physical game sales and made that clear to Microsoft, but Microsoft made a deal to foot the bill for extra inventory to keep supply available during the holidays. Even with packaging and distribution, the actual cost per game to Microsoft isn't really that high.
This might mean it’s true that the upcoming Xbox Series X refresh won’t have a hard drive. Microsoft wouldn’t want Xbox games to be on store shelves when they’re no longer selling consoles that can play them.
Sounds like the price reduction will be only in Walmart accounting system, so they can justify throwing them all away and write off the lost sales. I doubt they will actually sell all of those games.
Per the article, Microsoft is paying them not to sell any of the physical games and take them off the shelves. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they end up buried in a landfill next to ET.
Is this going to be another ET situation where we find hundreds of Xbox games in a random desert 40 years from now because Microsoft wanted to kill physical copies?
Something about the new games that really bothered me was how it handled puzzle rooms. You’d walk into a room and start to look around then your kid would yell out “hey I think we should shoot that target up there which should knock down this bridge for us”. Golly thanks, guess I won’t get to attempt to figure things out myself then. I pretty much fell off about 10 hours into the first one because I found that so frustrating. Does that go away after a while?
I can’t think of any times he did that when I played. Most things I either figured out right away or missed quickly. I went backtracking while he was in his rebellious phase and he was mostly useless as a tutorial prompt. Any scenes out of order that required him to be cheery made him seem mentally unstable too.
Yeah, while I personally really enjoyed both new games, I can understand not liking the way the gameplay went. However, I think Kratos’ story is a perfect evolution for the character, so I cannot really understand his opinion there
I can understand him. God of War 2018 and Ragnarok have basically nothing to do anymore with the original games. They could have made a new IP but they had to take the name and characters for brand recognition.
His public presentation skills could get better, but I agree and support the essence of the idea. An art piece has an idea, a form, an ethos, and a character has a personality and is driven by specific world visions. To take an art piece, and just sh*t on the original spirit and forms to produce a derivative piece that fits someone else’s vision while also using the familiarity to market it better is just cynical. Corporate media is just too cynical and hypocritical to not do exactly that: twist a art piece again and again to get better market outcomes.
He is right. God of War was created as a violent dynamical hack and slash with a Greek tragedy as background . It is not shallow, revenge stories after tragical events are a common trope. Kratos was a Greek tragic revengeful character that had a purpose and a vision , and he fulfilled his destiny. End of story. Call it pro revenge or whatever, its the spirit of the work.
The absurd was the newer artists not caring at all about fidelity or having the courage to create something new. Want to continue god of war ? Don’t disrespect the original character and spirit and mechanic of the game, build upon it. Maybe a hack and slash about a Japanese kratos battling against shinto gods. Want to create a story with the opposite message, a completely different character and completely different gameplay ? Create a new game, new characters, and be happy.
I already find it hard to swallow when the original artist itself radically shifts the art piece, like what happened with Dragon Ball (compare the first episodes or chapters with Dragon Ball Z, and tell me its the same thing, its not). To see corporations being cynical about art, and being praised for it is even worse.
I guess it’s mostly old fellows that are way past their teenage years of angst and thus had lots of time to reflect, rather than pretentious gamers. But hey, I’m just an internet rando
There were innumerable opportunities for kratos to develop character beyond raging angry guy of rancorous fury. Every betrayal and every reconciliation was so bland after a while. The originals were one long soap opera.
Worked for the first two games then went steadily downhill. It’s honestly incredible how they managed to ressurect that franchise as GoW was just a boring crappy series of sequels by 2017.
What made them successful was marketing and copying and simplifying devil may cry. GOW’s voice acting and tactility of gameplay were far above the norm, which brought people back for a sequel. Its story was par for ps2, which is to say tolerable.
Meh. Not everything need to be deep. It’s a video games. Nobody is asking what the DOOM character backstory is. He’s there to shoot some hellspawns and that’s fun.
Sure, but when someone whines “Why did they give this character depth? They could have made them shallow and boring!” I’m not going to give that person much credit.
Also, DOOM guy does have some backstory for those that care to look for it in the games. Easily ignored for those that don’t.
Like they don’t need any deep lore dumps or in depth explainations. The simple and casual disregard of Samuel Hayden for the lives of his employees and everyone else on Mars is in direct contrast to how deeply it’s immediately obvious that Doomguy DOES care about those same dead scientists and colonists just from a few simple actions.
No long-winded explanation necessary. Those 10 seconds were a masterpiece of visual storytelling.
Really? I enjoy the lore very much, but it seems more than easy enough to ignore - most is told through collectibles, so you can just breeze through everything without reading pretty much anything.
Not every franchise needs to be deep
I kind of disagree - I like it when a lot of thought has been put into things. I’d rather have it available and be able to ignore it than not have it available at all.
Like they don’t need any deep lore dumps or in depth explainations. The simple and casual disregard of Samuel Hayden for the lives of his employees and everyone else on Mars is in direct contrast to how deeply it’s immediately obvious that Doomguy DOES care about those same dead scientists and colonists just from a few simple actions.
No long-winded explanation necessary. Those 10 seconds were a masterpiece of visual storytelling. It lets us know the stakes, it shows us that Doomguy cares about the lives lost far more than any ostensible greater good or Hayden’s justifications.
100% my biggest issue with modern games right now is there’s too much damn lore. I need to know a hundred different things to understand the game, and I generally don’t know those things.
I’m a huge fan of Doom Eternal, and it’s one of the few single player games I’ve finished in the last few years. Too many games now end up needing to spend half my play session in conversations or cut scenes, and I realized I don’t have fun playing games like that.
A buddy of mine got me to play Dark Tides and I had fun, but he kept telling me I needed to look into the lore of the Warhammer universe.
Looked into it and realized I don’t have the time or interest to get into such a fictional universe that feels like it has more depth than most religions. I feel like there could be a degree track for Warhammer historians…
Not hating on people who are into it. But it’s too overwhelming for someone like me who just wants to play games to clear my mind and distract myself. Also socialize.
I have friends that are deep in the tabletop 40k universe and know all the lore. I couldn’t give two shits about the story and have still enjoyed many sessions, plus the computer games: vermintide, darktide, etc.
Oh yeah, I was doing just that. I wasn’t saying the lore interfered with the gameplay at all. I was just relating to feeling like I can’t be bothered by extended universes.
Modern Kratos wouldn’t be nearly as impactful or enthralling if we didn’t intimately know his past and what he is capable of. Replacing him with another character who acts identical and had a similar background revealed in flashbacks would just undercut how Kratos acts now.
We see him show restraint his younger self was incapable of, and how when hes holding back, its not for his benefit, but for those who are antagonizing him and his friends. HE knows he is a monster, doesn’t view himself as redeemable in the slightest, but has no intention of returing to his old ways while he has the ability to help those he’s come to care for, and also show his son a better a path than the one laid out for him.
So while yes, ps2/ps3 kratos had all the depth and bredth of a puddle, modern Kratos is built entirely off that puddle and wouldn’t hold its own weight without the previous foundations.
As someone who has played from the beginning, and seen the entire storyline unfold through the multiple directors, I was so disappointed…in nothing absolutely at all whatsoever about the new games.
I thought it was really cool how they stitched the story back to GoW3 and developed the new character so thoughtfully. Christopher Judge seemed to take the character much further while adding depth, and being thoughtful too.
If Jaffe doesn’t like that Kratos isn’t a mindless rage machine, different strokes I guess. He’s definitely in the minority and I think every subsequent game director did an overall better job than he did in GoW 1. *shrug
Parts of 2018 and Ragnarok and the ending of both actually had me tear up a bit, not many games accomplish that. It was very heartfelt and emotional I enjoyed seeing a proper character arc for Kratos and his kid and watching them develop.
I also really liked the themes of redemption and trying to be better not just for yourself, but for the people around you, I liked that Kratos has to reflect on his actions and actually come to terms with how he was for all intents and purposes, a monster.
I liked that even enemies where made more complex and given good character arcs. 2018 and Ragnarok are so well done and I love them. The old GoW trilogy was also fun and had good writing in it’s own merit and direction, but the new games are something else entirely in a good way and I vastly prefer the character and relationship focused writing in the newer games.
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Aktywne