I don’t like when they remake a game I loved but they add a bunch to it like new gameplay mechanics, or make changes to stories or characters. That being said not all remakes are bad, probably most are just fine, but really not my cup of tea.
I greatly prefer a straight remaster. Just update the graphics, remaster the sound, maybe add a little more details to the game world, and I’m a happy dude.
I doubt a patch nor mod support will motivate me to play this game. This is the most empty Bethesda game they've released when they could've had something special if they had any ambition.
Haha, o god, no. Bit a guy like him would probably not even for a second think about working for them even of they would give him 100% of the funding they receive now (50k?)
It's in the top ten most played games on Steam and had sold at least 5 million; even that number is two months old and doesn't include PlayStation. If I were to wager a guess, which you can often extrapolate from the number of reviews on Steam, it's much closer to 10 million, which is how many copies a typical Assassin's Creed or FIFA game will sell. Baldur's Gate 3 is mainstream.
Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I’m curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.
I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren’t already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren’t really tutorialized well, etc.
I had no understanding of 5e, and there were a couple of things I didn't understand, but so much of that game, especially at the beginning, is choosing an option with a high chance of success and shoving or throwing things that most games wouldn't let you shove or throw. The way the game lets you verb any feasible noun, coupled with higher production value, is probably why this one hit. It's going to continue to make other RPGs with even higher budgets stand out as dinosaurs; not just Starfield but especially BioWare's next couple of efforts, given their Baldur's Gate lineage.
It's because people aren't idiots like developers have thought for years. People don't mind a game where you need to read and learn as long as there is a payoff for reading and learning. We have been paying the price for devs thinking everyone is braindead for over a decade now as more and more mechanics and features are removed to please people who were never going to give the genre a chance anyway. By way of example, Dragon Age II didn't get the Call of Duty audience to play Dragon Age, it just convinced most who liked Dragon Age that EA only accidentally published one of the best RPGs of its decade.
Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.
Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
I very much think games like Balatro DO need to be assessed and probably have an increased rating because they are unabashedly designed to be as addictive as possible. Same as ARPGs that have been built around skinner boxes basically since Diablo.
But this was never that. It was just “oh, cards and poker theming? GAMBLING!!!”
I can’t speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
But Civ is more just “addictive” because the gameplay is fun. That is not to downplay that but it is generally closer to “escapism” than not when you get into that “one more turn” cycle and realize it is 3 am.
ARPGs were very much designed around skinner boxes/operant conditioning chambers which are one of the core tenets of how things like slot machines are designed. We can see similar (and it was outright acknowledged by many reviewers/influencers) with games like Vampire Survivors.
At the end of the day, the reality is that the “This is fine if you are 13” system is idiotic and what we actually need is fine grain warnings… which will go down great in an era of “Eww, trigger warnings are woke”. But, like, I have a cousin who is well aware that he is incredibly prone to addiction when it comes to gambling and on many occasions he has texted family and friends to ask if it is “safe” for him to play a new game. And… it is kind of concerning how often the answer is “no”.
Link for context…he didn’t know statutory rape stood for sex with children as he is not a native speaker. This does not excuse other things he has said that may be terrible, but cancel culture is a cancer.
Til both that he’s trash and that Uncle Bob is trash. It makes sense honestly, Uncle Bob was always hyped to no end with his mediocre contributions to software. Also the agile manifesto sucks ass.
He wrote some hyped up programming books and he was involved in the creation of extreme programming (a bust), cucumber (an almost completely useless waste of time), and agile (an ok idea but in reality it’s a huge bust, it’s biggest effect is that management tells everyone “we need to be agile” all the time).
Agile just means that you don’t have a project plan, but you see that’s okay because you planned not to have a project plan, and therefore it’s totally fine.
Extreme programming is basically pair programming. It sucks and doesn’t work. Cucumber is also known as “behavioral driven (design/development)” or BDD. It manifests as test documents written in “plain English” that are executed via code. It inevitably becomes unit tests but worse because it’s based mainly around regex matches to bits of text within the steps.
Civ is a bit exploitative in that they deliberately release a half-arsed base product with glaring flaws, charging big $$$ for it; and then release a chain of expansion packs to flesh it out and make it complete.
I was on the beta team for Civ 5; and it was a real eye-opener to see that this is a deliberate strategy. It isn’t just that games are hard to get right. They deliberately hold back to squeeze more cash out. I haven’t bought any civ game since then.
But yeah, I agree that it isn’t the same type of exploitation as gambling.
My issue with the ruling wasn’t the ruling itself, cause I can understand the argument. It was the non-equal enforcement of it. Games with actual gambling in it were rated lower than a game with the similar aspects but no actual monetary aspects. That’s ridiculous. If you want to make poker 18+, then just do it across the board instead of picking and choosing your ratings.
While the game can be “addicting”, it is mostly because it is fun to play. Not all “addicting” forms of entertainment need elevated ratings because they are fun to consume. We don’t increase the ratings for binge worthy TV shows and we don’t restrict books if they are page turners, so why should we with a video game. At some point people need to regulate the use of their time themselves.
How many millennial/genx gamers have stories about staying up all night playing Diablo 2 or WoW? Hell, it was almost a requirement for any games media person to have an “I almost flunked out of college because of WoW” story.
It was hard to care TOO much with D2 because any additional monetization was mostly illegal gold farmers (and let’s ignore the various former devs who have acknowledged they were involved in those…). But starting with WoW? That was a subscription model. That “I need to run this raid 500 times to get the drop I want” equated to increased subscriptions which was profit. Again, there were limits-ish in that very few people ran multiple accounts so it was a fixed cost per year. But it was still there.
Fast forward again and we have the same concepts going into loot boxes and, eventually, gacha games where it is 100% predatory and basically what the majority of successful live service games are built around.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to. But it is also important to actually think critically and wonder if you REALLY like the gameplay of that game or if you just like the flashing lights and sparkles of a good drop?
To make it clear (to the people who have read beyond just getting pissy and smacking the go away button): I love Balatro and Vampire Survivors and play the ever loving hell out of them. But any time “Oh god… they have a mobile port. This will be the end of me” is even jokingly uttered… that is when you take a look at what you are doing and add some restrictions.
Because, at the end of the day ,time is not just money: it is life. Yeah, there is the aspect of “I stayed up all night and performed worse at work/school and got fired/expelled”. But there is also just “I spent all night locked in a room and didn’t interact with a single human being or spend any time improving myself” to worry about.
Ugh, I remember those days well. I saw personally what MMOs did to two friends of mine (one from high school and one from college), and how the high school friend was able to really pull himself together and make a good life for himself after we helped pull him out of MMO addiction, and how the college friend we couldn’t help just wallowed in a sea of empty energy drink cans and turned EVERYTHING into WoW during that time. I don’t know if he was able to build a solid life/career after college, but I could imagine him looking back at that time and wanting more from it. Either way, I saw both their situations and vowed to never pick up an MMO because I didn’t want the same to happen to me. Just because an addicting game isn’t extractive of one’s money doesn’t mean it’s not harmful if you have a hard time with self-control and moderation. You either lose your money directly or your time, which may cost you money in other ways in addition to other indirect costs. Ultimately you’ll end up losing something of great value you will unlikely get back, if ever.
In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.
I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.
A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to.
Hard agree. I get sucked hard into good stories and know I’d lose a lot of time to them, so I refused to let myself start anything over 30,000 words for a period of time.
It should be a cost/benefit evaluation of “how much enjoyment will I gain from this game and is the time spent enjoying worth it compared to all the other things I could be doing?” Sadly some things hijack this decision-making, and with some things you really only get to try once before you get hooked. “Try everything once” shouldn’t include heroin. I think that’s part of why knowing if a game is addictive is helpful for some people, so they know if they can try it or have to stay away forever. I have heard enough stories of MMO addiction that I’ve decided that I should never play one. Reviews are also really helpful, because what takes one person in might not interest another. As much as I fear MMO addiction, I know I am good at not getting addicted to gacha.
Factorio has extracted £60 from me for the base game and new DLC! I’ve only played 2100 hours, that’s almost £0.03 per hour. Complete bullshit how expensive everything is now…
I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?
I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.
Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.
Like I said in this and the branch below it, many games, balatro included, include game and visual design that evoke psychological experiments and concepts that are basically the foundation of slot machines and the like.
And these are the same concepts people deride when we call them loot boxes (but not gacha for some reason).
I don't understand what you're talking about. Balatro does not contain loot boxes/gacha. In a world where so many modern AAA games are exploiting all kinds of shady dark patterns, Balatro took off by not doing any of that shit. It's just a sincerely fun game, and it sounds like you're literally just complaining that it's too fun and that should somehow be policed.
The guy is clearly an idiot. He made this stupid comment and he can’t justify it but rather than admit that it’s a stupid comment and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s trying to back it up in some bizarre way with this mumbo jumbo non-logic.
The difference is one is manipulating a continuous flow of money out of your wallet and you pay once for Balatro to get the same rush without getting psychofinancially milked for the CHANCE at a hit of dopamine before you pay again for the privilege.
Hmm. At least in my experience, the people decrying loot boxes also condemn gacha for the exact same reasons, but we could have had separate experiences.
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