Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.
In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.
Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.
Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?
300 different pokemon shiny or 300 shinies including dupes? While getting a shiny during an event is easy actually being committed and grind out every shiny event is crazy dedication. I can’t bother with the game because the core gameplay loop is just so incredibly boring, and as you say is nothing like Pokemon should be. I’m slowly transferring everything to Pokemon Home and in that regard it has been pretty nice in terms of getting legendaries and mythicals that are really tough in the main series games to get. I’ve never catched the original 151 before and when I combine Let’s Go Pikachu with Pokemon Go into Pokemon Home I’ll actually tick that childhood goal off, which feels nice.
Definitely including dupes, I got rid of tons of dupes from events but the spawn pool was so limited you were bound go get more. I was dedicated enough to grind out wild shinies, but if it was locked behind incubators or raids, forget about it.
Well, no. Rates are higher at different times of day, near bodies of water, in different weather, closer to high-foot-traffic zones, in forests, from eggs and from raids.
Not to mention continents.
Personally I just find it to be a location data collecting app with a light video game skin over top of it. I love Pokemon and wore out of the game when I realized player fun isn’t niantic’s priority in the slightest, it’s how to squeeze more and more data to sell out of the player. If it wasn’t for the blue chip IP they landed the company would be gone already. Literally every other game they’ve launched has been a flop
I tried it for the first time a few months ago. It was bad. The in-game tutorial does not cover half of it and the game play that I could figure out was super shallow. I could probably look up third party getting started guides, but I did not think it was worth the bother.
I’ve been playing since launch, although admittedly not much the past few weeks, and I think it’s fun depending on what you find fun.
I’ve never been big on the Battling (PvP or Raiding) but I’ve enjoyed the “Catch 'em All”.
I do however agree that even the “catch” part of the game is poorly put together. For example while the game may contain 800+ Pokemon, realistically you can only ever catch ~30 different species at a given time. If you started a new account today and did ALL the activities available, really grinding for a month, you’d probably only have ~200 or so Pokemon. If you played for a year, maybe double that.
For this reason why isn’t Pokemon HOME considered the game with the most Pokemon?
I lost a bunch of legendaries when my Pokébank subscription lapsed.
I’ve been collecting legendaries in Go for ages to rebuild my stable, and I’ve only just realized that Go legendaries don’t count until you’ve had one in the destination game. Which means that Go legendaries are totally without value in terms of collecting a first of anything.
Seems like a coin toss on whether or not your mons got wiped when your subscription ended.
If you can dig up a 3DS with Pokébank and whatever the intermediary app was, you might still be able to pull them all out, now that Bank (the service) is now free.
Well now it’s free forever, you just need to sideload the application itself.
Some stuff got wiped. It was never clear why it happened to some people and not others.
I lost interest in catching them all when I got to the point where the main pokemon I don’t have are behind ridiculously low egg rates. Add in the few pokemon where I’d ether have to buy plane tickets to Alaska and Greece or violate the TOS by spoofing my GPS signal and I just decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.
I understand that Beth delayed the review codes, but I don’t quite understand why. The subtext of this article seems to suggest that they expect higher reviews from other outlets. Is that the case?
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
. . . it’s about to venture into even stranger, darker territory with Horses, an unsettling first-person narrative horror adventure set on a farm whose livestock consists of naked masked humans.
“While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us,” Steam’s automated response read, “we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute. Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor. While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation—even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area’—it will be rejected by Steam.”
. . . the studio now suspects a work-in-progress scene from day six of Horses’ narrative (the game follows the player across 14 days as they work as a hired hand on the farm where the “horses” are held) might be the culprit. In the early build reviewed by Valve, day six featured a scene in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, resulting in an interactive dialogue sequence where the girl rides on the shoulders of a naked “horse” while it’s led by the player. “The scene is not sexual in any way,” the studio notes in its FAQ, “but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag.”
. . . notably, the final version of Horses has been reviewed and approved for distribution across numerous other PC storefronts, including the Epic Games Store, GOG, the Humble Store, and Itch.io. And while Horses won’t be launching on consoles due to porting costs, Pietro says the console makers who’ve seen Horses have said they’d be “happy to have the game on [their] platform”.
From the description of the scene which seems to have triggered the refusal to platform the game, the studio probably pushed the envelope too far.
to me it feels more like the other shoe has dropped on the censorship stuff that was hitting Steam a few months ago. I understand how that scene is controversial, and even in a film context I think that one might be too much for most studios. But if this was November 2024, I think Steam would have greenlit this game without a second thought.
The article details how the refusal to platform the game was before the calls for games to be pulled by that weirdo conservative Christian group whose name I can’t remember.
Valve is in a position where it has to weigh if a game will be deemed too unsavory and cause a response from payment processors. If this game becomes the tipping point then steam as a platform can no longer exist.
Getting the word out about games like this is probably the best thing that can happen at this point. It will put it on the radar of the people that are interested and it will let the art exist in a way that isnt totally ephemeral.
The refusal to sell the game on Steam was apparently before all the champing and gnashing of teeth which lead to a bunch of games being pulled; having a young child ride around on a naked masked person who is forced to comply would be contentious either way.
Even rating it X/AO/Whatever, calling a sequence where a young child rides around on a naked masked person who is forced to comply “contentious” is putting it mildly.
yeah but thats the point of X. its not R. I mean clock work orange is all kinds of effed up but its a great movie. X means graphic sex, or violence, or worse. I think they had another designation at some point that was like super X but I think folks never really paid attention to it.
Sure but you must realise that if Steam were to platform a game featuring a child riding a naked adult in a horse mask, a sequence that the devs have removed in order to have the game on any platform for sale at all, Steam would face a significant amount of backlash and potential legal action for doing so. Why should Steam be obligated to publish a game?
I don’t think obligated as much as they should not be concerned and there should be no backlash to them for stocking it as long as its separated appropriately. Video storms had porn rooms in the back of the store with some signage and people seemed to be able to handle it and get its an adult thing. Heck maybe even have a second but related steam.XXX site where you have to do bullshit verification to peruse. Then require any game that goes over some threshold of whatever to only be visible there. people can login with their steam accounts and have them connected provided they jump the additional hoops. these things are not impossible to work with.
Whether you believe a platform should get backlash for platforming something in questionable taste and legality is entirely separate to whether they actually will.
The majority of countries where Steam sells games have strict laws regarding the depiction of minors in any kind of situation which could be considered sexual, whether it’s a real child or not. It’s a very strange hill to die on when the devs clearly identified that was the issue and removed it from their game.
Im pretty much always against censorship. As described it does not sound sexual as its just nudity and this riding thing. I mean nobody talks about lady gadiva like she fucked a horse. The hill to die on is weird to me to use in this situation. Its one conversation about something that neither of us has any ability to effect.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically inconvenient, or morally questionable by an authority or group.
In this case the group is steam. Government censorship is not the only kind. You can have corporate and even self.
They were common enough in movie stores when I was in high school and college. I feel our society has gotten just that much more prudish in the new millenia.
I don’t think society is actually more prudish; you couldn’t have had 80% of the shows that are made now, 50 years ago. I think there are just several things that combine to make it appear otherwise (note that these are all 100% my opinion):
Corporatism has run rampant, and corporations detest liability. Independent movie stores didn’t have to worry about being noticed by political groups, but big chains did, and big corporations’ shareholders only care about stock prices are much more reactive to ‘threats’. And big corporations killed most independent stores, even before digital took over. Digital is all big corps.
The US has sanitized violence in media to such an extent (e.g. superhero movies where logically thousands of people die, or where all violence is ‘bloodless’ but not cartoonish) that I think sex has become the only metric by which to delineate ‘kid’ vs ‘adult’ media for a lot of people. That has a feedback effect on large media creators, who will be less likely to depict sex in anything not squarely targeted for adult consumption, which in turn makes any sexual content in e.g. young-adult media stand out even more, which will get it outsize attention by the wannabe morality police types.
Prudish political groups made a lot of strategic inroads into positions of policy influence by using “protect the children” rhetoric, with sex being the #1 thing they actively demonized. It’s much less common to see pro-sex groups making any kind of public messaging or policy impacts, so it can seem like the prudes are the majority.
WRT the current thread: Steam doesn’t ban sexual games at all; at this point it’s one of if not the largest adult games distributor just thanks to its user base. They even implemented a ‘private’ feature for games so people could buy adult games on their Steam account but hide them from others, to encourage people to buy adult games. This particular game is really just an unfortunate case of edgy content accidentally running up against a legitimate guardrail. I won’t be surprised if Valve does walk back the ban soon based on the amount of media coverage.
I’m pretty sure it’ll turn out to be illegal in the UK too, it’s just that the UK isn’t in Europe anymore so these things always end up having to get hashed out in the courts and then it always turns out that the UK basically just follows the EU standard anyway.
I don’t really think it’s a problem at all. It’s on the level of game mechanics being taken too seriously like “why does a sword in my backpack weigh enough to slow me down but not a sword in my belt?” or “how come these vegetable merchants are willing to buy random crap I found in a cave?”
Fallout 1 has a hard timer you have to obey before it is too late to do your main objective and you lose the game. That shit stressed me out so much I just didn’t continue playing.
For me it becomes an issue when I try to make decisions from my character’s perspective. If I try to lean into the RP part of RPG then I often feel like I have to leave a load of content behind because it just wouldn’t be a high priority.
I agree with the FO1 timer though. I ended up beelining to the necropolis and got trapped in an endgame bunker because I didn’t want that timer hanging over me.
i was honestly bummed when Hyrule Historia came out and codified the timeline, because half of the fun of the series for me was trying to imagine where all these games that didn't quite fit together fit together. that, and the third branch essentially being a what-if and relegating the original games to it felt like a dismissive cop-out. i appreciate how BotW was full of enough contradictory evidence to not be placed in any one timeline and then TotK doubled down by contradicting the original Imprisoning War, and now Nintendo has given up on placing them anywhere. we are so back
I know, but its better than messing up everything into one soup that does not fit anymore. Zelda is a long running series and many more will come. So I at least appreciate that they do respect the history and not ruin everything by putting it into one noodle soup. The new Breath of the Wild era games have barely anything to do with the old games and stand on their own.
The people who actually make these games have said that the timeline in Hyrule Historia is little no more than elevated fanfiction, because they don’t follow it when making their games. It’s all retcon and forced connections.
People who want them to have some shared continuity as if they’re a real history might as well make a timeline for Mario too. It’s silly, and misses the point
I get the sentiment. But to me personally, “redundancy” is pretty clear and doesn’t mask the pain that comes with being let go. There’s also generally a difference between being “fired” and being “made redundant”. Redundancy suggests that their job doesn’t need to be done anymore b/c of a restructure, bankruptcy, merger, and the company needs to meet certain obligations for that redundancy not to be considered an “unfair dismissal”.
It’s not the same thing so I’m not sure why you’re taking umbrage with commonly use and understood vocabulary. Being fired means there was a fault on the employees’ part, which isn’t true.
I feel like we’re maybe getting confused about terminology here? “Redundancy” is a specific term for a specific form of dismissal. It’s not a euphemism for “firing” because firing someone is a different kind of dismissal. Terms like rightsizing, reset, re-allocating resources, trimming the fat – these are certainly euphemisms for redundancy that should be called out.
That distinction means jack shit to the people that are “made redundant” and everything to the people that have an interest in marketing this as anything other than someone losing their job.
The article states the layoffs will affect the UK division and EU division, I am assuming you are basing your statement on US laws. www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/notice-periods states that you will get paid for X number of weeks depending on how long you have been in your job.
Redundancy is very different to being fired though. When you’re fired you just lose your job and that’s it. If you get made redundant, you lose your job but get paid X amount of months worth of wages to make up for the fact you may be jobless for a while, while you look for a new one. X being different depending on both the countries laws and the company’s policies. But usually it increases the longer you’ve been with the company.
They can't raise the price too much, or people quickly find out that it's cheaper to just buy the games outright. Their sweet spot seems to have stuck right at 1/4th the price of a new AAA game per month. Believe me, I was surprised to find out from all kinds of failed products and services over the past few years that people can actually do math.
If you ask me, I'd say that's exactly why they won't rise further, or much further. They're measuring all of this before and after they take action, and if the price increase sees a trend line go in the wrong direction, it'll be a while before they bump it again. I wasn't angry at Netflix for raising their prices such that you could call it a backlash; it just became too expensive to justify having it around when there isn't anything I know I want to watch on it.
Netflix also made a killing by creating the ad-supported tier, because the ads more than cover the cost of lowering the subscription. My folks pay for Netflix with ads but you can block them with a DNS sink like AdGuard or a Pi-Hole.
I think it’s a scam honestly. Netflix’s library has shrunk with all the other streaming services coming into the market. It was convenient when it was the only game in town but now it’s just one of a dozen services feeling more like cable than streaming.
I just saw an article where Apple TV+ was going to bundle with Paramount+ for a lower rate.
It makes 3 Billy a year according to them. Sounds like a tidy profit but you’re probably right that hikes will continue, especially if they start getting some better games out at a better cadence.
Probably just less experienced writers that can be paid less and pushed around more. Thus leading to the continual quality reduction of all modern media.
Not only is that headline’s grammar exceptional(ly bad), for a moment I thought the developer of Control was named Alan Wake. Like, how did they manage to butcher that so badly?
News headlines aren’t limited by space on physical paper anymore. If your headline is confusing because of traditions based on outdated limitations it’s not a good headline imo.
It kind of is, now that I’m thinking about it. It has vehicle sections, tight quarters on-foot sections, big weapons, snipers… It has a sampling of just about everything.
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