Oh my goodness, the exact same thing happened with me and Guild Wars 2!!! 😱
I was a teenager at the time and my family burned logs to keep the house warm in winter. My Dad upgraded the smoke detectors so that they were all linked. In other words, if one alarm went off in the basement (where the wood burner was) then every detector in the house would go off.
This sounds great in theory, but in reality it turns out that the detectors would go off on a near weekly basis. Whenever someone tossed logs in the burner and smoke escaped. We got desensitized to the beeping and it became second nature to just cancel the alarm when it happened.
Fast forward to the closed beta for Guild Wars 2 and I was up late, trying to play every possible minute that I could before the weekend was over. My door was closed, headphones on, and I was REALLY immersed.
The smoke detector started beeping. And it kept beeping over and over and over. Normally, at this point my parents would’ve cancelled it. That kind of struck me as odd, so I opened my door.
Ruh roah, raggy.
A wall of smoke was on the other side of the door. And the smell was NOTHING like the usual wood burner smell. It really hurt to breathe and my eyes were not having a good time either.
After shaking my Dad awake, we called the fire department, got all the animals out, and nobody got hurt. The damage was serious, but the entire house didn’t go up. The upstairs needed rebuilt and there was a fair bit of smoke damage.
I don’t want to think about what would’ve happened if I wasn’t up playing that closed beta 😅
The shift in mobile gaming in how developers / publishers could nickel & dime different features seeped into paid content. The separation was most of these games were free-to-play or at least ad-supported.
Now, it’s just a double-dip. The filthy casuals will wait while the dedicated fans will pony up their wallets if they want a better product. The one that infuriates me most is exclusive or pre-order content that becomes available to everyone a few months after launch.
So the game is done and could be released earlier. But just let people give some FOMO and pay extra so they can play “sooner”.
Sometimes I just wish games were like in the past. They released a full game, get some patches to improve. Throw in some extras for free if you’re lucky. And DLC were actual expansion packs that could practically be a whole new game.
A Starfield player has credited the sci-fi game with saving their life after they stayed up late to play it and was awake when their apartment complex caught fire.
u/Tidyckilla took to Starfield’s subreddit over the weekend to report their amazing escape, saying that if they hadn’t been awake “bingeing” the game when the fire broke out, the player and their wife would likely have “died to smoke inhalation”.
I may be going crazy, but wasn’t this game in development hell by another company, then changed companies mid-development and has stayed in dev-hell since?
Yeah, it was almost close to release and apparently it was a tire fire. Who knows how much of the original they kept. I really hope it’s good, the first bloodlines was a blast if you ignored or modded out the bugs.
“Co-op was the most requested feature and we had it in our prior games, but we decided screw you, we arent going to put in couch co-op. We’ll make up something about tension being lost, and how it’s not a party game. Oh, but we’ll still have online co-op where the tension will be there because you are sitting alone from each other I guess.”
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