I’ve seen a bunch of good games being ruined by microtransactions and battlepasses. At least I believe that they could have had so much better sales and reputation if they didn’t include it.
For example: Shadow of War. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Good games. These had microtransactions hooked on as an after-thought. It didn’t affect gameplay at all and could be completely ignored. Still they received so much hate for it. And then there are games adding microtransactions and nobody care. Most Ubisoft games for example. I think it has with who their target audience is. Though I can’t see what DX and SoW audiences has in common. Do they have less casual players than Ubisofts games? Idk.
Having played the shit out of Assassin's Creed Odyssey I can say that the game has tons of equipment skin variety without MTX, the game is balanced to not need them, even from a visual variety standpoint, there are tons and tons of equipment skins to collect and permanently unlock in that game
The original switch was a bargain too relatively speaking. My one switch outlasted about five or six phones I owned over the same time span.
It does kinda suck that it’s gone up in price in the new generation, but like… PlayStation 5 was also around the same price a couple of years ago, when money was worth more.
This article perfectly sums up the issues with this way of writing. Unfortunately people often don’t acknowledge the nuance there, and will jump down this reviewer’s throat for the take I imagine.
It’s icing on the cake that apparently there was even an in-lore term for something like a trans character of this species that they didn’t use. That makes it seem like they didn’t even study their own lore well enough. Never what you want to be thinking about a writing team. 🫤
Still the only handheld PC that doesn’t come with a dogshit OS and an abysmal battery life. The deck doesn’t do well despite its low specs and alternative OS, it does well because of them.
The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me. Then the marketing page is claiming they will make parts available for DIY repairs? Incredible.
If I am being honest, I prefer the Switch form factor with the dumb little controllers. I like it so much that I could maybe accept its lesser performance. But it is locked down, centralized store, some subscription bullshit…
I’ve found a Steam Deck fits really comfortably in the hands. I can settle for having an additional wireless controller to play it from afar.
Yeah, but idk if phones can use joycons in the double joycon mode. My understanding is that it requires either root or a physical adapter of some kind.
The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me.
And the default OS isn’t locked down and doesn’t try to prevent you from doing other stuff with it. What you want to do isn’t in the Steam interface? Switch over to desktop mode and you have full access to the underlying OS.
My only complaint with the Steamdeck is that I find using the touchpad on the right side for long gaming sessions hurts my hands. I 3d printed some grips which help; but, I think my hands just don’t like the orientation. Still love my deck though.
“Aqun-athlok” means one who was born one gender and is now living as another. So yeah that means trans. But there’s also a conversation in the trans community about if Non-Binary is technically trans. I would argue it is but some disagree and others say that while Non-binary is trans it is not a “normal” type of trans. That Non-Binary is not either gender. Sometimes Non-Binary is literally no gender. Non-Binary is it’s own umbrella term. So it’s not necessarily living as “another” gender, it can be living in between genders, without gender, or as both genders.
So i would say that “Aqun-athlok” is probably more applicable as binary trans as it was used to refer to krem who was a trans man. Now they could have just thought up a new word for Non-binary trans but Non-Binary is just kinda the perfect word for it. I’m Non-Binary and I actually think saying this is immersion breaking is just kinda bs. Plenty of words in our world also exist in Dragon Age. Not everything has to have a different word. For instance, Dwarves are a thing in our world. Sure they’re not the same, it’s a medical term, but they still exist. But the Dwarves in Dragon Age are still called Dwarves. Why are they not a different name? It’s a fantasy world, shouldn’t they have made up a new word instead of using a word from our world to describe these people? No, because Dwarves is just the word that fits best. Non-Binary here is the same.
Now whether or not it is written well is a better approach to this discussion but also, every trans person has experienced the exact thing that this writer describes, except it’s not always pushups. I’ve had people feel incredibly guilty over misgendering me and done some stupid stuff. When I hear this being described I don’t think it’s awkwardly written, I think it’s an accurate representation of what it can be like being trans and how some people will just be like that when they misgender you.
I also think calling it “preachy” is 100% playing into the narrative it’s Woke because people don’t call CoD preachy even though it’s filled with pro military propaganda. Why is this preachy just because it accurately shows an experience that trans people have all experienced in our own lives?
I haven’t gotten to this place yet in the game and I might end up finding it awkward, but I more likely expect to actually relate to Taash more because of it.
Anyway, just my thoughts from a trans dragon age fan.
interesting points, especially about the evolution in language / perceptions re: dwarves. I’ve heard dragon age being described as ‘fantasy, but more mature’; I played the first game and it didn’t click.
The 84 isn’t from people fighting console wars, though - these are the reviewer scores, not user scores. So as more actual reviewers are finishing and writing up their impressions, the scores are dipping. The scores aren’t bad by any means, but they aren’t as good as when only a handful of reviewers that got review copies had their reviews out.
Yeah it’s pretty easy to understand that the 84 is the professional reviews. I guess there aren’t just 64 people who put a comment, but 6190 who put a comment (from the image in the post).
The more professional reviews come out the more the score has a chance to go down compared to the first reviews if they were very high. And give some sort of average.
However profesional review scores don’t always align to what most users think, as people like different things, but also the users get very much bothered by a bad start. While the reviewers will give a score on the entire game.
I trust the scores that come after release over the ones that came before, because post release scores aren’t concerned with biting the hand that feeds re: getting future review copies for titles down the line. It’s telling that a lot of the earlier ones are higher but just say “great game, Bethesda’s knocked it out of the park again” with a sentence or two, and later, lower ones are a lot meatier with specific criticisms.
I think it’s worth noting that there are a lot of irrelevant low reviews from the review bombers too, as well as zeroes from the people who are upset that you can choose your pronouns. I’ve played the game. I don’t like the game - I think it’s bad on its own merits, or lack thereof. Where I think FO4 was a ‘meh’ because of the less impactful character building and stripped-down dialogue system, doubling down on the clutter looter aspects, I call Starfield bad because the same clutter looting and character building with a new coat of paint is now gated behind repetitive tasks and mostly barren procgen maps. There’s more layers of obligatory fast travel between the parts of the game that are enjoyable, and that’s in service of the parts of the game that aren’t. The game is objectively worse than FO4 for those reasons, and in the case of the leveling system, it didn’t even need to be.
And you know, while I’m airing my grievances here, I also think it’s fair to have higher standards in the eight years between the two games - Bethesda doesn’t get to hide behind their own old engine the same way Obsidian gets a pass for the issues FNV runs into - it’s their engine. They should know from the get-go whether the game they want to make can be supported with a system built over a decade ago, and if it’s not, they should be prepared to go back to square one. They had plenty of time; I don’t believe for a second they couldn’t have made this game right, but they were hell-bent on getting one more game out of the Creation engine, and by god did they, for better or (much, much) worse. So when people say “It’s Bethesda, what did you expect?” I will answer, from the top of this hill where I’m already carving my fucking epitaph, “Something more and better than what we got last decade.” And people give shit for that expectation? I’m supposed to be impressed that they plugged the random number generator that puts cartons of cigarettes in trashcans into a random planet generator? That in the eight years between FO4 and this samey, shallow, mediocre mess, two more than the development time between Daggerfall and Morrowind, that arguably set the standard for this kind of game with its masterfully crafted world, with huge setpiece cities full of bespoke characters and encounters, they’ve managed to stretch the disappointment of randomized containers full of vendor trash and blocky bases full of raiders over thousands of empty maps? Give me a break. Game bad. Emperor Todd has no clothes and I’m fucking calling it out.
I’ve played Starfield (PC) a good bit by now and I’d say that mid 80s is probably fair.
The gameplay is great fun - the combat, gear, etc. is really quite similar to Fallout 4 (though without the VATS), with a Skyrim style talent tree.
The base building and ship building is quite like Fallout 4, though much improved (thankfully!) but still a bit janky.
The worldbuilding is immersive but the world itself is just okay - it’s really predictable, they play it a bit too safe, every faction is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before, and society hasn’t advanced at all ~400 years in the future apparently.
Characters are exactly what you expect from a Bethesda game - a bit two dimensional, but nice enough.
Graphics are good, sound design is good, music is nice but a bit too similar to Skyrim IMO.
The story is also really quite safe and derivative, reminds me simultaneously of Mass Effect and Skyrim.
The exploration is cool, but does get a bit repetitive after a while. I think more interesting “random” locations would be really good - after a few abandoned, flavourless civilian bases, you’ve seen them all.
I’m a sucker for customisable bases/houses/etc. especially for space ships, giving me all those building blocks and letting me loose in the sandbox (starbox?) is honestly hours of entertainment.
Space combat is fun, but IMO the space part of the game would be way more immersive if I did all of the ship piloting stuff in-character rather than in the UI menues, seems like a big oversight - why not have something like the galaxy map from mass effect, or have everything on displays in the cockpit? It would be much more immersive, but I guess it would have delayed the game quite a bit.
A lot of the game is juggling menues and interfaces which aren’t the best designed. very similar to Skyrim - I imagine UI redesign mods will really shine once they start coming out. It’s pretty tricky trying to figure out what stuff in your inventory is junk you accidentally picked up (looking at you, Fire Extinguisher!) and which items have a surprisingly good value-to-weight ratio (like some - but not all - of the books, or the deck of cards, surprisingly)
There are occasionally little bugs and glitches, but it’s not too bad for 2023 - nothing that makes the game unplayable or breaks major things, it’s just been stuff like glitchy animations, containers placed in the wrong place/orientation, weird physics behaviour, and I’ve noticed a couple missing textures here and there.
If you’re looking for more of a story/RPG game, I’d suggest something more like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.
For exploration and space combat, I think No Man’s Sky is better, but with much less customisation.
For more customisation and sandbox style gameplay - but less action-oriented - Space Engineers is probably a better choice.
All in all, Starfield is a fun game - Skyrim in space is a good starting point for describing it, but it’s a lot closer to “Fallout 4, but the bombs didn’t drop”, though the game has a lot of cool extra systems beyond that. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who would enjoy a single player sci-fi themed looter-shooter sandbox game with some mild RPG elements and player-constructed ships and bases, and I’m sure there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment there, and, as with the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, it’s likely a game that I will return to for many, many years to come
At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a “you are here!” marker to help out.
I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop’s name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.
Yeah, I’m not happy about the Switch 2, but the amount of cope is unbelievable. I’ve seen multiple people claiming, “the Wii U sold out a launch too,” even though the Wii U sold worse than the Wii on opening weekend. The sales might still fall off a cliff in a month, but breaking the PS4’s record for launch sales is not a great sign.
I don’t even find the price too bad, i haven’t owned a console in over a decade, so i don’t really know. But paying to use their online service, and the lack of games is really off putting to me. And that aside, as far as i understand it, it was such a pain in the ass to get a ps5, that i don’t really understand why so many people bothered in the first place.
I will admit it’s not only the price that is a deterrent, even if that’s now competing with a perfectly capable gaming PC that can do significantly more, doesn’t have an additional charge to play online, doesn’t have to deal with increasingly standardised subpar controller longevity, commonly have cheaper games, better sales, and will have a longer shelf life. I already thought the PS5 was a bit pricy at launch, at a time when I was still considering buying one. That time has been and gone, I’ve spent the money on upgrading my already decent computer into an absolute beast because I figured “why not?” and I still have yet to see a reason to buy the PS5. It’s no secret that consoles are commonly loss leaders for the manufacturers while the exclusives are the money-makers. It’s a way of doing business, that’s fine, but to this day, I can only claim to have seen them release maybe 4 exclusives that I’d deem worth playing. That’s already a bad deal. No-one in their right mind can justify paying full price for a console to play 4 games. On top of that, 1 already got ported to PC, one’s got a release date, one’s already had public response from the developer to be working on the port, and the last has really strong odds of getting ported too. 4 is my number, and I don’t doubt other players would swap my own picks for something more their taste, or maybe even bolster the numbers, but I don’t think anyone could make it as high as 10 without naming a game that was also released for the PS4 and/or got ported. So unless Sony gets their shit together, the PS5 tells us that the PS6 will be a bad deal.
This patent could have a chilling effect, but there’s no way it would stand up in court. They can still use it as a bargaining chip. Court cases are expensive. And if you don’t have a legal department, they are also a personal drain. But that’s small fry. Financially, I don’t believe it makes sense for them to resort to criminality to get such a patent. Maybe they hope it will influence their court case in Japan against Palworld?
Sort of the point though. If they take a small creator to court, they can just bankrupt them through expensive legal proceedings, and because they do have the patents the judge is unlikely to throw the case out
Yes, absolutely. And there is money in patent trolling. I just don’t see the business case here. Why damage the Nintendo brand with such shenanigans when you could leave the patent trolling to some formally independent company. Maybe I just underestimate how much money can be made by shaking down small devs.
What damage? Its been known for years what a scummy company Nintendo is and people still buy their games and consoles in the millions. The fans will just say that Nintendo is in the right and move on
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