I believe a generous free trial paired with a subscription model is currently the best way to go about MMO monetization when it comes to ethics and financial viability.
I take monthly cost over aggressive fomo advertisements of dumber and dumber immersion breaking skins and performance hogging flashy effects any day. Even worse if there is also pay to win. Most of those mtx monetization models prey on wales who fall for this type of addiction easily.
Yeah I spent 60€ to get the avenger titan much later.
The bright side is, it is about as finished as No Man’s sky was. That is, buggy as hell game, but playable. It is fun to go in and fuck around in, but I definitely pity the people who have sunk hundreds or thousands into it.
That’s not an accurate comparison, The game breaking bugs in NMS on release were patched a day or two after release (I stupidly preorderd and experienced the hyperdrive blueprint issue). But the issue with NMS wasn’t really bugs, just over promises by the developers that didn’t match the final product. At least there was a few hundred hours of gameplay and complete gameplay loops.
Star Citizen, another game I stupidly preordered / Kickstarted (I’ma sucker for space games; kickstarted Elite Dangerous too) is a totally different kettle of fish. A decade later, there still isn’t a single, non-buggy / non-broken game loop in the entire game.
I so desperately want to like Star Citizen but for $600mil, having a few hours of “mucking about” with no real purpose nor way to achieve anything meaningful without experiencing migraine-inducing bugs, it’s pretty much unforgivable.
For the same money, I’ve been able to play Elite Dangerous for almost a decade and sink 1000s of hours, build a massive fleet of ships, and hang out with my buddies without screaming at the game. Sure, it’s shallower, but at least the loops are complete and the management were able to regularly make meaningful feature additions to the game over the years (although Odyssey was an utter shitshow at launch and took a year to patch into something stable and fun).
I’ve been playing it on the Steam Deck (haven’t had a chance to play on the desktop yet as it’s currently extremely hot where I live so I’m huddled next to the aircon). And yes, it actually plays. Low frames in big cities but otherwise seemingly playable!
I love it. It’s more Skyrim than No Man’s Sky but I’ I’ve been playing Bethesda games since Redguard so I’m biased and a fan of their jank.
Nice! That’s good to know. I was actually waiting for feedback on how it runs on the steam deck before taking the plunge (since that’s where I’m planning to play it most of the time). As long as it’s playable, I think it should be good.
You’ll be playing it on low settings for everything and there are major frame drops in the big cities. But I’ve sunk around 8h in on the Deck and so has my partner. So far, so good. Only crash to desktop happened after resuming the Deck from sleep mid play.
I kickstarted it 11 years ago, I'm sure squadron 42 will be out any day now, right?
Luckily, I really wanted a space sim, so I kickstarted elite too. It was far less hyped and star citizen fans always big up how they're not the same scope (which is true if you ignore everything else about SC), but at least it was released and very enjoyable.
I usually try star citizen out every time I get a new PC to see if it's any better just to make myself happy that I never sunk money into ship preorders etc
Need to develop a system that doesn’t serve up cancerous ads and relaxes on the rules so uploaders don’t feel the need to do dumb, unnecessary shit like censor a car crash.
This was such a hopeful game at one point. The re-emerging of the space sim genre in a way that would be more approachable than EVE or the X series. It’s kind of sad to see it go the way it has; on the one hand there are hints of what could be a great product and on the other most likely through fault of poor management and prioritising revenue raising, it will probably never be fully completed.
I’m still interested in seeing where Star Citizen goes but I think it’s already a far cry from the product that was pitched in the original Kickstarter.
It will never be even half completed. The list of features they'd promised for "release" versus what they are on track to complete in the next several years is astounding.
They don't even have the foundations set for 75% of the features to be done. After 12 years.
I bought the game in 2013, refunded it in 2017. When i bought the game was because i wanted a spacesim and star citizen was basically my perfect game. I expected the game to be out by late 2016 or 2017, at least the singleplayer story.
Even now, i am still hopeful. I refunded because at that point they didnt need my money and it was ridiculous how the game was still nowhere near release. Also the game run like shit and the fun factor was too low, it was too much of a simulator.
I dont think it is a complete scam. It is obvious there has been an insane amount of effort gone into this game. Maybe part of the funds have been abused but they have been developing this game for over 10 years with 500+ devs and that is really expensive.
The Matrix Awakens ran on the console presented by Nintendo with “graphics comparable to current generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft” , citing that medium. The demo included “advanced” ray tracing and used Nvidia’s artificial intelligence upscaling technology, the well-known DLSS .
So Nintendo didn't share specs. And they saw a handheld Unreal 5 demo that they thought looked as good as ps5/xbsx. But it was also running DLSS so it might have running at significantly lower resolutions.
But on a handheld screen that's harder to tell. And Nintendo are masters of making games running at low resolutions and levels of detail look like they are a lot better. So there's zero chance it's actually as capable as a PS5 but there is a decent chance they can run Nintendo games that would appear to be. So maybe TOTK at 4k@60 with higher resolution textures? Honestly that'd be plenty.
I really, really doubt that we will see an F-Zero game on the (current) Switch. The series has always been used to test/prove out some new tech that Nintendo wants to build into other, bigger games (mostly Mario Kart but not exclusively). We’re too far into the Switch’s lifecyle for that, unless maybe Nintendo wants to learn more into something like online functionality (yeah, right).
I've been enjoying the game quite a bit, honestly. There are some shortcomings, namely the menu navigation can be cumbersome to learn since hotkeys bring you between some menus but not all. But after a couple days I've gotten most of them sorted - in space you can select the objective marker and fly to it in space, no menu required and it's not full fast travel.
Right now, my biggest persisting issue is simply that quests aren't categorized by planet and so it's a lot of menu swapping to get between them and plot out a the most efficient route between galaxies. However, technically that doesn't matter very much because grav-jumping has a lenient distance for the quests but it still feels nice and so I'd appreciate a better sorting system.
Quests are visible through the mission menu (hotkey L) and on the planetary map's (hotkey M) settlement/outpost locations in small subtext when you go to the planet in the map. For the mission menu, there's a key to show on map but it's a little time consuming, and for the planetary map it's nice to see there's a quest there but it's not optimal for planning out the order of your quests.
Aside from all that map/menu shenanigans though, which again by now (~4 days with 2d 10h in save time) I've honestly gotten mostly used to, the game feels pretty solid. With RayTracing on a 5800x3D and a 10GB 3080 with a variable refresh rate I've found the framerate to be acceptable, large areas will slow down the framerate but responsiveness is still fine. I've yet to come across a combat scenario where frames dip. Smaller to medium areas all run phenomenally.
In the total time I've played I've come across 1 quest with somewhat bugged logic. Without spoilers, there's a hidden-ish settlement that has a leader and residents who can turn against you. If you kill any of the residents, the rest of the friendly AI will eventually turn on you, making the quest on console likely to be completely bugged. However on PC this is solved with console command to turn that faction's bounty ID reset to 0. I believe in efforts to solve this I also caused some crashing, as a couple times the game crashed around the remedies. But, I completed the quest as I wanted to with overall less than 30 minutes of bug-troubleshooting. This could very well be fixed as part of the day 1 patch as well, we shall see.
Other than that instance of the quest bugging and the game crashing, the game entirely before then was bug free. An AI pathing issue here and there, one instance of an NPC I was talking to starting to float to the ceiling mid conversation. And since the completion of that semi-bugged quest there have been no lingering effects so far it seems, no crashing and the remaining people and area seems fine.
All in all, I've been pleasantly surprised with the game. The quests are interesting and pretty well varied, the faction interactions are abundant and not very limiting but lots of potential for alternative style playthoughs regardless of what you level into. Not sure if there's a level cap but theoretically you can fill out your perk skills quite far. However the traits and factions you align yourself with give you a lot of different options and could bring lots of replay value. (Brief example, there is a religious group that attacks non-sensically. You can start as one of these, and I'm assuming learn the sense of their attacks.) I am a space scoundrel who is wanted with parents, I'm a corporate espionage agent, undercover CIA agent who is tasked with taking down a space pirate faction, and I became a space ranger amidst all this. Honestly, it's sick.
There's a few varied actions that are locked behind perks, similarly you could go the entire game without building an outpost or using the ship builder. I'd suggest seeing which locked skills you may be interested in, but otherwise the outposts feels like a decent iteration of FO4 (which I wasn't huge on). So far, outposts are OK, I don't need them but I can see value in them. The idea of building a home is more fun which can also be done. Ship building is actually tons of fun, but that's something I'm also interested in. I found a ship that I love, I upgraded it and then expanded upon it and damn, it's rewarding. It did take some time to build, but it was time I enjoyed and on PC there were some quirks but they were minimal and I adapted to them quickly.
It's a fun game with some a few minor menu-flow that can add up to feel more annoying than they might actually be. I've gotten used to it by now though.
P.S. thoroughly inspect your first housing situation, you can't miss the residence at the Lodge but you can miss the infinite storage space safe tucked away in the far left corner. Anyone complaining about storage didn't quite look hard enough! I also am a collector but I've been adamantly avoiding the misc. items in this game, only going for everything else. Inventory management really isn't that bad. Plethora of 150kg followers who are affected by equipped items (say, +50kg -40% resource weight modifiers) plus ship cargo and upgrades and weapon/armor displays... Overencumberment also scales, so if you're +5 over it's almost nothing if you're +100 or more over your stamina drains quickly. As someone who was genuinely annoyed in FO4 and set inv weight often in Skyrim, I genuinely haven't felt the need to in Starfield. It gives you every opportunity to hoard so you can sell store and display to your hearts content. I should probably start leaving weapons behind, I have 300k credits...
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