You’ll fix every complaint and be able to make every man in the game into a waifu once mods are officially added. It’s gonna be a game I play for the next 5-10 years for sure.
Oh yeah. It definitely has that classic Bethesda jank in many of the normal places, but it still feels good in all the ways that matter. Like you’re finally awake.
Yeah, OP’s videos in the posts were the exact ones I would have linked. Go watch those.
Haelian’s reaction is more informative than just being an average reaction video, because he describes the decision making in the choices Angel1c made.
If you have to buy it, you own it. Make it free to play but have in game purchases. Everyone knows free games can shut down any time. I play lot of mobile apps until I get tired of playing it, then delete.
I avoid buying games that requires online connection. It means the game is unplayable without it.
It’s sickening what companies can get away with just because it’s legal. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
There’s a beta test branch on Steam that was uploaded 5 months ago, and the game has been age rated in South Korea. Yes, that game is coming. For good reason, it’s also the belle of the ball when it comes to marketing deals, so as much as it’s a meme to say maybe it’s at the next Nintendo Direct, it might be at the next Nintendo Direct. For everyone’s sake, I hope it gets its release date soon so that we can stop talking about it.
I would encourage you to support GoG before you have to rely on them, otherwise if everyone does like you they may not be able to sustain their business.
It’s a bit akin to waiting for a crash before putting your seatbelt on.
If GOG benefitted Linux users as much as steam does then Yea, I’d be throwing cash at them every payday. I love GOG and what they do, but I also need to show support for what valve is doing for Linux too.
Honestly “it’s this game but with that.” could be a pretty good way to innovate unless you’re totally phoning it in IMO.
Metroid was created when people at Nintendo wanted to combine the skill-based platforming of Super Mario Bros with the exploration of a Zelda game. That ended up being one of the two founding games in the Metroidvania genre.
System Shock was created by people who wanted to make a game with the same “emergent gameplay systems as a puzzle/playground” aspect of dungeon crawling RPGs like Ultima, but in a SciFi rather than fantasy setting. What we ended up with was something that combined fast paced shooter gameplay and a tight narrative presentation on the one hand, with letting the player make their own solutions to levels by manipulating open-ended gameplay systems on the other. This is very similar to the situation with metroid IMO, in how it tried to combine two very differnt styles of gameplay. Today we have an entire genre of games inspired by System Shock called immersive sims (though its more of a design ethos than a genre IMO).
The famous level design and exploration of Dark Souls was inspired by the 3D Zelda games, and while I don’t have a source for this its hard for me to believe that the lock-on mechanics and basic idea for the movement weren’t at least a little inspired by Zelda too. Or, in other words, Dark Souls is basically a 3D Zelda game but with the tone and difficulty of their earlier King’s Field series.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that combing two good things is a guaranteed way to get something good. Or even that, if you do hit upon a good combination, that that’s the only thing you need to put into your work. The games I’ve just talked about are all absolute classics and obviously a lot went into that. For example, the genesis of the iconic multiplayer aspect of Fromsoft’s games came about during the development of Demon’s Souls, when Miyazaki was trying to drive up hill in a bad snow storm. There was a line of cars, and when one began to spin it’s tires then ones behind it would intentionly push on it to help it up. This all happened without the drivers being able to talk to each other, and, seeing this, Miyazaki wondered what became of the last car in the line, but knew he would never get an answer since he would never see these people again. It was this experience that inspired the creation of phantoms.
However, what I am trying to say is that taking something you like and understanding what makes it tick, then making it work in a new context, can end up creating something that then seems wildly innovative in that context.
As an aside, both Zelda and King’s Field were inspired by a dungeon crawling game called “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord”. Both Wizardry and Ultima were derived from earlier games that were basically “Dungeons and Dragons, but on a computer”. Some of them were even named “DND” on the early computer systems they ran on.
DnD itself was created when people wanted to do wargames with a greater emphasis on unconventional warfare (such as spying, diplomacy/intrigue, propaganda, etc) that by necessity required roleplay. After one of these kinds of games was set in a half Conan the Barbarian half Gothic horror medieval fantasy setting with a spooky underground labyrinth beneath a town we got the trope of dungeon delving and returning with treasure to a (relatively) safe town just outside the dungeon entrance.
if you think a 30% cut doesn’t reflect on the cost a player is paying, you’re out of your mind. This is business 101.
Isn’t business 101 charging as much as possible and not passing on savings to customers, and trying to capture as much high paying consumers as possible before being forced to start capturing price sensitive consumers with discounts?
Price of games that didn’t release on Steam seem to reflect that. Even games released by platform owners like Sony or Nintendo first party exclusives and the beloved Blizzard. Isn’t that pricing strategy business 101 as opposed to this belief that savings pass onto consumers? Lowering price right away doesn’t seem like good price maximizing strategy when goal would be to increase retail price consumers are willing to pay over time.
As far as I know, they do - for Steam keys. If you’re selling your game through other stores, not just a Steam key, there aren’t any demands placed upon you. The OC might’ve been talking about that.
I’ve bought most of games through other sites because the games would be discounted lower and sooner than Steam. So it’s more personal experience than theory in my case.
Humble bundles on the even more extreme end of like 8 games sometimes being cheaper than a single title has ever been discounted.
Huh, interesting… You know, I’ve never really wondered about Humble Bundle specifically, but you’re right, they seem to be selling your run-of-the-mill Steam keys, or at least you can activate them effortlessly in Steam. Maybe it’s a case of Steam themselves handing out keys (instead of the publishers) to increase user retention? I honestly don’t know, this is all just speculation.
I actually didn’t click on your link at first, because I assumed it would just show other stores where you could purchase the whole game instead of a key, so I’m sorry that you had to clarify that.
Isthereanydeals is a great resource. I always make sure to look up a game there before buying to check what the lowest price it was ever sold was.
That link was for helldivers 2 which is only available on steam on pc. From what I understand the keys are actually provided by the devs/publishers and steam doesn’t get a cut of key sales.
No it doesn’t. The price parity thing is only if you are selling the game on Steam platform, i.e. selling a steam key, it’s essentially a way to allow publishers to sell the game on their own website, without paying the 30% to steam, but don’t allow them to undercut steam entirely while still taking advantage of their platform.
Games on GoG, itch, Epic store, etc, can have any price they want, as long as they don’t give away a steam key valve doesn’t care what price you sell your game elsewhere.
This is one of the most annoying fake news out there, Valve are going above and beyond what any other store is doing, and they get bad rep from people who have never read their policy, published a game there, or talked to anyone who has.
They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don't provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.
How it works on Steam:
User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they've refunded it or not. That transaction doesn't actually contain any information about what they bought though.
You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.
For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it's stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don't come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.
If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.
I know how Valve’s publisher API works, others are similar in case you didn’t know. But that is only true for games that need online validation of some sort, DLCs for offline games don’t need to implement this.
Valve is hosting the game, providing the storefront and bringing in a lot of customers. If you didn’t think those 30% were worth it you would not have put your game on steam.
Plus all of this is irrelevant to the point that Valve doesn’t enforce price parity.
For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense.
Because they're providing a complete solution.
For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn't complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they're doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I'd consider that fair.
Yeah, inflation is a thing. But so is increasing volumes in sales with low cost distribution of the product.
After a game is made now, the only cost is distribution now, and games sell in larger volumes than ever before, making more money than ever before. A game like BL4? Even if they spent $300,000,000 making the game they only need to sell 6,000,000 copies to recoup costs at $70. BL3 has sold 18,000,000 copies. A huge profit, even if most of those sales were on sale prices. BL3 was made and advertised with a 140 million dollar budget.
Not to mention, all of the dlc that’ll inevitably be released, following every other borderlands game pattern. Wonder what they’ll try to set the prices of those at
That’s why I boycott video games from Ubisoft. I loved and am nostalgic of their previous outstanding games from when it was great - think of Beyond Good and Evil, the original 3 Prince of Persia games and the assassin’s creed games until odyssey(I’m hesitant to include Valhalla, but I’m at witt’s end here as Einar Selvik sang and composed the ost of the game for goodness’ sake). I even paid a (🤮) connect+ subscription that they threatened at some point that some accounts may be lost as per a number of days of innactivity.
But enough is enough, Ubisoft be better prepared to not own a company and be manned by Tencent. As much as I hate even the latter, Ubisoft is a scummy company and needs to be properly grouped in the scummy companies even by allegiance.
I hope the European Citizen’s innitiative for video games passes, in the end. The source code/maintenance of discontinued/stopped projects ought to be maintained by the players and its community.
I didn’t play the new Prince of Persia because they wanted you to be logged in to play. It looked good, but there are just too many options for me to put up with shit like Ubisoft.
Ubi used to have some neat stuff but post far cry 3 it is just the most generic, worst gameplay slop possible. And avarage person just loves repetetive slop.
“Nobody reads those EULAs, and the Defendant knows that. Therefore, the Defendant cannot hide behind the EULA as a shield because the Prosecution, having clicked Agree without being required to confirm that they read through the terms, could not have possibly known what they were agreeing to.”
“If you are what you agree to, your Honor, then my clients are an unknown spaghetti of legal mumbo jumbo.”
I would relish a lawsuit against EULAs where the defendant somehow sends the prosecutor a EULA in a software package that declares that they automatically lose the lawsuit by clicking Agree.
It would really hammer in the point that fucking NOBODY reads this shit.
I think someone calculated the time it would take to read every single one you’re expected to agree with in normal every day life, and it worked out to needing 76 work days to read everything you “agree” to in a typical year.
There was a video game store that once, for April Fools Day, included in its sale terms:
By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorized minions.
Only 12% of people that purchased that day responded, essentially confirming only 12% of people actually read the terms.
I think one could successfully argue in a court of law that people tend to be hyper aware on April 1st, and so may have read the terms suspecting something amiss when they otherwise would not have.
The judge would tell you you’re an idiot who said nothing worthwhile and that ignorance of the things you agree to doesn’t make them void when they’re used against you.
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