It just wasn't that good. Not terrible, but very bland. I put 30 hours in but finally stopped when I realized I wasn't having fun, I was only chasing the idea of fun.
I don't even like DND and I thought BG3's first act put the entire story of Starfield to shame.
Now I'm playing through Phantom Liberty and loving the hell out if it.
I started liberty by accident trying to level up a bit. Figured i would take my leave and come back later only for the dlc to fail because the thing chrashed and person was not saved
Lol the same thing happened to me the first time I tried it.
I went to the assigned area, chatted with the quest NPC, then I wanted to just murder all the hostiles in the area, so I went to find a good sniping spot... and then the quest failed because I left the area. RIP that NPC, RIP Phantom Liberty.
I generally feel the same way about all Bethesda games. I’ll return after some DLC and Mods have been released.
There is some pretty cringe writing and stylistic choices this time around. Space cowboys and Freestar were conceptualized by a child and the PG pirate brigade are embarassing.
There are some bones for a pretty great empire building mod though. Can’t wait to see a sim-settlements type mod for Starfield.
The Ryujin quest line is exactly what I expected the corpo background to be like. It’s too bad the backgrounds/origins aren’t fleshed out enough beyond what is essentially the prologue of Cyberpunk.
They really turned Cyberpunk around it’s so fun. I played maybe an hour of it on launch and was like “what is this shit”, started playing with 2.0 and the story is cool, the characters are rad, the game is beautiful, combat is fun (enemies a bit too spongey for me but not awful, better combat than witcher 3).
I feel like I was so hyped for the Starfield release, but playing it wasn’t as exciting as I thought.
BG3 released and I wasn’t expecting it. But I’ve had such a blast with it that I can’t stop playing.
I want to come back to Starfield later when they have had time to get mod support goin and whatnot. but for now, I have other titles to play to keep me happy.
Part of the problem is that most of the people making these decisions have been seeing their incomes and net worth increase steadily over the past decade. They don’t truly understand their subscriber base.
What’s also kinda wild is how those plans often have 0 interest rate as long as you’re able to pay the installments on time. Which means in theory you MAKE money by using them because you can earn interest with that money in the meantime.
It ALSO means they know the people using those services are so bad with money that they can sustain themselves (and make a nice profit) purely by their clients failing to pay on time and then selling the debt to debt collectors. It’s absolutely disgusting how predatory this is, making their money mostly on the people who’d need such a system the most (and to a smaller amount, on people who don’t care).
Financing can actually be an incredibly good idea if you expect inflation to increase at a greater rate than the interest. It literally saves you effective money.
That said, it also tends to involve a credit pull (which hurts said interest rates) and becomes a monthly bill.
So if you can afford the monthly bill AND it is a meaningfully large purchase AND you have every reason to expect inflation to increase more than the interest rate? It is actually a pretty good idea.
Glad you understand. It’s great when people on the Internet understand that their backlash against a very popular thing doesn’t matter because the popular thing is still beloved by millions
But it’ll actually cost players $10 because they must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to afford it.
At first, I read this as if you needed to ingest a verification can before you’re allowed to make a purchase. But alas, it is the usual shit where you have to buy their fake money.
That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.
Sure it’s profitable, but it’s also (correctly) seen as a manipulative, and some companies have stopped using those.
As I said Nintendo and Xbox store used to do that, but they transitioned to prices in real money quite some time ago, and if they got a wallet, they let you fill it with the exact amount of what you’re buying. Same with PS store, most PC game stores, even freaking playdate catalogue and itch.io where the average payment must be like $3.
I expect that from shitty mobile games, because I know mobile gaming monetization is fucked forever, but I didn’t know major publishers still used that garbage unemptiable wallet strategy.
yep. Never underestimate how stupid the average gamer is.
Then realize half of them are even dumber than that.
Which is why gaming is in the state it is right now, cause a bunch of drooling mouth breathers keep throwing their wallets at problems because god forbid they do without or make a single sacrifice.
Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.
So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.
Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.
Which is where the whole concept of using real money, to buy fake money (and never in the exact amounts that they charge for items), so you obfuscate the actual cost, especially once people start carrying a balance of fake money due to never being able to get the exact amount of fake money for the item came from.
Like Dave and Buster’s play cards and games that cost 7.8 credits (at least right now, higher weekend evenings because of dynamic pricing) and needing to get out a fucking calculator to do the conversion from dollars to points to figure out you are spending $3.72 or whatever to play a single shitty game.
It does look like a clone, but fuck IP law. Sony winning this will only hurt games because any publisher with a genre creating / defining game could gatekeep any competitors from coming in *cough Nintendo.
The original horizon came out 8 years ago, that’s plenty of time for them to cash in on the monopoly they get for all the creativity that went into creating the genre / style.
Its not like they’re marketing it with a similar name or main character or any other identifier that could trick someone into buying it instead either.
Eh this lawsuit actually sounds like it has grounds… Tencent asked to make a spinoff, got rejected, then made it anyway.
Sony states that during the pitch meeting, Tencent did not disclose it was already working on Light of Motiram. According to the lawsuit, Sony rejected Tencent’s Horizon pitch in April 2024, stating that while it “greatly appreciated Aurora’s level of passion and the effort put into the pitch,” it would not be pursuing the partnership.
When Tencent did announce Light of Motiram in November 2024, Sony states in the lawsuit that its gameplay trailer did not feature any of the “Eastern-inspired clothing, aesthetics, and backdrops that Tencent pitched and instead copied Horizon whole cloth.”
I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.
I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.
I feel like I responded to this exact comment on Reddit years ago saying the same. The thing people don’t realize, is subscriptions give you zero control of ownership and it’s always in the best interest of the corp to bait and switch.
Yep in this thread I’ve been arguing with someone who is saying consoles have to charge for online because it is so expensive… Yet, on PC for platforms like Steam and Epic despite also hosting game downloads and having multiplayer games they don’t charge.
Just goes to show how some consumers after being so used to not having flexibility and lack of restrictions when comes to products become convinced it is necessary.
Exactly, it was great at 11.99 IMO. As soon as I got the email saying a 50% increase, I cancelled. Surely they knew there would be cancellations but I’m not sure they knew there would be that many.
I’ve been in the fuck subscriptions camp. Sony locking multiplayer behind PS+ was wha5 led me to dropping consoles as my primary gaming system, since I refused to pay for multiplayer.
Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money.you already made your money back by selling them the ownership.
Sounds like excuses when PS3 and Nintendo Wii, WiiU, and Nintendo DS had free multiplayer and it was after Sony decided to start charging Nintendo also jumped onboard because they saw peope like you were easy to take their money.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.
They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.
Yeah I don’t buy it. Nintendo does free across multiple hardware then when they saw they were the only one decided they’d start taking money too, since it is in a companies nature to maximize profits exponentially.
And then there’s Steam. Also in the hardware business and hosting games and mods and a bunch of other services even Epic with their Fortnite money hasn’t matched. Yet online is free.
You just sound like a consumer who iust accepts whatever methods companies try to exploit consumers and defend as necessary. More a stockholder than a consumer.
You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…? Buddy that shit costs literal millions a year.
Nintendos online user services were never free. They went from not having them, to having them and charging money.
And yes Steam is eating a metric shit ton of costs to give you those services for free. Because PCs are an open platform, they have to compete to keep you on their storefront. They eat all those costs because you don’t have to buy new hardware in order to switch.
These are very, very simple concepts you’re failing to grasp.
Youre failing to grasp the fact that Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online.
Steam is a perfect example, they don’t charge for anything except a #% fee or tax on the game when you buy it. As well as their market fees.
I understand your point, though I agree with OP, it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player. It’s why I left XBOX and never got a PS. PC is just free after you pay your internet bill
It’s console brain basically of just never wanting to admit the cons. How many generations and decades went by before they finally admitted 60 fps and above is ideal after years of arguing 30 fps is enough.
Difference for me was I too move over to PC after the PS4, since why would i accept paying more for what is free on another platform.
Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online
What you’re both failing to grasp here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.
As console adoption increased, so did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.
it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player
Every other console did not have free multiplayer. Xbox Live always cost money.
Company gets cut of every single game sold, gets more customers over the years, and because they are making even more money than ever they can’t stay afloat without charging for online.
Yeah… Okay… I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.
Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.
I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.
I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:
They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.
Valve literally can’t charge you for their user services because you’re not stuck on their hardware. The very moment they do, they’ll lose all the user goodwill that has made them the default in their space and everybody can just pack up and move to another storefront or even just pirate their games. Valve has to eat those costs at the expense of everything else.”, they have no choice.
It’s because it was pretty much the Netflix of video games. Pay a subscription and you get access to a collection of games.
When it was 5.99 it was a no brainer. I think I cancelled mine around 13.99, though not because of the price but because I always forgot it existed and it tied me to windows. Switched to Linux and cancelling was a part of that transition.
No doubt in my mind M$ employs obfuscated layers of (contracted) marketing to astroturf, including downvotes of your cautionary comments. The line between a fanboy and astroturfer is blurred.
Gaining subscribers/customers while bleeding money, then charging more money once your competitors are forced out of the market or investors want to cash out, is a basic strategy… I doubt Game Pass was ever profitable, it was all an illusion propped up by accounting tricks and obfuscated/discounted internal operating costs (where M$ can shift xbox costs to money-printing cloud services division).
No doubt after years of failed xbox, that Phil Spencer is just a corporate suit executing the vision of M$ as a whole (in which Games is just an inconvenient detail). Expect more of the same, bundling of other services, no actual good in-house games. Activision acquisition in part of this strategy to pump up Game Pass, since M$ internal studios have not produced anything noteworthy this generation. I expect the next xbox to have cheaper hardware to undercut ps6, but to have increased game pass incentives to make up for it. maybe a random bundle with netflix. you gotta think outside of the (x)box for whats coming next.
He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.
They're all digital only now. There's no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.
My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.
Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.
And you didn't take into consideration that it's much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.
30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)
Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn't exist for Bluray.
That doesn't account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.
Physical media will still exist, but it won't be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don't exist anymore. You don't include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10
Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, 10$ to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.
It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don't drop the drive entirely.
Nobody said it was. It's a medium to get games from a brick and mortar store to install onto the nvme on the console you can't play modern games directly from Bluray either.
You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.
You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there's no reason that games couldn't be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.
As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can't make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy's game work right out of the box. Without them, there's nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that "no game could be expected to last more than 10 years", and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there's people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.
I literally just replied to you about this and I don't know where you are getting it from. Games may ask for updates but games that are unplayable without downloads are very much the exception.
You don't need CDs for that, and CDs don't prevent that.
As the other user pointed out, most CDs don't even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn't even have a bare minimum on it)
Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won't deliver it that way.
Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
But they still couldn't be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.
This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly "played without any download" rather than "run from the disk", the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn't care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it's about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.
That’s what differentiates free games from free-to-play games. A free game gets you the entire experience for free. A FTP game gets you a barebones experience unless you spend money.
Big studios typically don’t release actual free games, obviously because there’s no money to be made that way.
There’s a spectrum among F2P games as well. There are games that are designed to coax the player into constantly spending increasing amounts of money by either inconveniencing them (wait times, slow or nonexistent progress) or by providing them with massive advantages against other players. Towards the softer side, there are titles that are solely selling cosmetic items - but they can be so incessant with it that people, especially kids, feel pressured into purchasing them, sometimes even out of peer pressure (see: Fortnite). Finally, the mildest kind are games that have a free mode that is little more than a demo, but you can make one-time purchases to permanently unlock more content, which isn’t too dissimilar to expansion packs of the olden days. Prime example for this: The Battle of Polytopia, a Civilization-lite. On mobile, you can permanently unlock more tribes and thus larger maps and multiplayer with very small one-time purchases.
To your point, Warframe is a full game with a F2P model that only offers cosmetics and in-game currency for purchase, the latter of which you can earn through grinding and selling items in the in-game market. It uses the aforementioned “wait times,” but they’re not overly lengthy, given the amount of things you can do while you wait.
So with some extra effort, you can get the paid experience, but you don’t miss out on any of the actual game by skipping that part of the grind either. Plus, in the end, even paid players can’t defeat the RNG gods.
While Warframe is a perfect example of a well done FTP model, you can buy a lot of stuff with real money in Warframe, it isn’t just cosmetics. But it has limited PVP and the community is fairly friendly, so it isn’t so much Pay-To-Win as it is Pay-To-Not-Work-Hard.
It’s just a clunky reskin of fo4 with no depth. I’ve put about 50 hrs in at this point & will probably continue for a bit because it’s a comforting loot cycle that pleases my lizard brain. It really lacks the feeling exploration possibilities that Skyrim & fallout worlds have. The bugs, UI, bland emptiness, and shit tier maps are why I wouldn’t recommend…but is a decent time kill if you’ve enjoyed their previous games
Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I'm not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you're just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain't me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead
When I say opening / beginning I don't mean the 20 minutes of prologue, I mean the first ~5 hours of game showing new mechanics and worlds to you, making the illusion that there's lot of unique fun content to do. Eventually it all started to look like same formulaic shallow crap to me and the game didn't live up to that initial impression of freedom, exploration and progression, it's half baked in everything.
The game didn't open up for me until about 8-10 hours in and felt really weird and restricted during that time. No idea what impression of freedom, exploration and progression you're talking about here because the beginning does not give you anything like that at all with how it makes you follow the very boring main quest.
Same happened to me, I pirated it to try it out and after an hour or two I got bored and called it quits. I returned to it once more but after maybe 5 hours I just uninstalled it.
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