This article isn’t entirely accurate. Trials will still require playing with other characters, and the three 24-person Crystal Tower raids that are a requirement for progressing the story also must be played with other people.
What’s wrong with what I wrote? A football simulation that’s trying to accurately reflect players’ skills for men, gives an unrealistically boosted skills to women players. Why?
Because what does it even matter? We should be encouraging women’s football to continue to grow, part of that is making sure it’s fun to play in games as well as competitive on the pitch.
It’s come so far in recent years, and when we’re talking about a game which is designed primarily for fun, being unhappy that women’s stats aren’t an apples and apples comparison to the men’s stats is just silly.
It says that you have an issue with the women’s game being treated in the same way as the men’s game. Video games are designed for fun, not for simulation, and there are plenty of good reasons to have women be comparable with men in a computer game.
You’d have been upset when Tony hawk games had women skaters that could ollie as high as the men too huh? Or got upset when Chun Li won in street fighter games?
You’re stating your subjective opinions about topics unrelated to the game and comparing a simulation game to some unrelated arcade games.
It says that you have an issue with the women’s game being treated in the same way as the men’s game.
This is the exact opposite of what I’m saying. Men’s stats have been reflected with due diligence while women’s stats have been artificially upscaled - how is that being treated the same way?
If a core system of the game “doesn’t matter” to you then why do you even play the game?
They're right that retail prices of AAA games are too low to make a profit. Which is why they've turned to microtransactions and dlc. However, the price of such games is too high, which means the budgets and profit expectations are too high. With the quality of games coming out lately, even $60 is too high. I can't imagine spending $70 or even $80 on a game.
To be fair to Capcom, I think that an ideal world for them would be not having to compete against games whose expectations and ideations are out-of-wack with the price point and requires huge sales numbers to even be profitable.
For example, SF6 has a full single player mode that exceeds any of the output of previous games. While the quality of this single player mode is sub-par, it's still very ambitious compared to their old method of releasing fighting games (Arcade mode and Versus mode, with some mini games -- that's all!) and it finds itself having to compete with other 60 dollar titles whose scope is often outlandish while knowing full well that a fighting game can never move FPS game figures, for example.
The 60 dollar game made a lot more sense in the era of the PS2 where games were often linear experiences, sometimes lightly to heavily cinematic. A game that was made like MGS2 could be sold today for 60 dollars and it would have a very hard time competing against huge blockbusters like Starfield, with some probably scoffing at the idea of paying 60 dollars for that experience. (See Armored Core 6 -- a good example of this that actually happened.)
They should just get rid of the expectations of sales numbers like what current AAA get. If we want better games, less people will buy them, because a good game isn't for everyone.
“They say the old caretaker of this place went absolutely crazy. Chopped up his entire staff. Of robots. All of them robots. They say at night you can still hear the screams. Of their replicas. All of them functionally indistinguishable from the originals. No memory of the incident. Nobody knows what they’re screaming about. Absolutely terrifying. Though obviously not paranormal in any meaningful way.”
Ive only seen the haunted police car once in my game, and it was after someone complained about it with a post on here. It made me crack a smile. I hope it stays.
I booted up 2.0 Sunday night and had a nice laugh when I called my car to my location. It wedged itself under a car in traffic and threw that car violently into pedestrians on the sidewalk. The jank is still there, it’s just at a tolerable level.
No shit a Final Fantasy 14 player was the first to earn all achievements in Final Fantasy 14. Wake me up when an Everybody’s Golf player is the first to earn all achievements in White Knight Chronicles 2.
<span style="color:#323232;">Name omitted to respect privacy but if you really want to know they're easy to find on both Lalachievements and FFXIVcollect. Here's a picture of what this insanity includes:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Completed all five ultimate raids.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Cleared all three Deep Dungeons solo.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Discovered at least 20000 hoards from said Deep Dungeons.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 2000 successfully completed mentor roulettes.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 3000 victories in Frontline.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 1000 victories in Rival Wings.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> At least 5000 victories in Crystalline Conflict or The Feast.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Completed every levequest achievement, which due to time-gating takes a minimum of SEVEN years.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Fully cleared all treasure dungeons at least 20 times, including the Hidden Canals of Uznair, which was a notoriously impossible achievement for many years and requires about 2000 Thief's Maps on average.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Obtained every single relic weapon from ARR to EW.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> All extreme trials and final savage raid bosses from ARR to ShB cleared as BLU.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Killed at least 5000 rank S marks and at least 10000 rank A marks and obtained every Hunt mount.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> All Firmament/Diadem achievements including 500,000 skyward score as every DoH/L for the Pteranodon mount.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Obtained all ocean fishing bonuses and caught every fish.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>
Can confirm most of these are mind numbingly boring and mundane. I could barely get through the slog of ONE ARR and HW relic for starters. I’m also not ashamed to admit I’ve paid for bot programs to avoid doing a few of these tasks because of how tedious they can be. (Even just normally. I never went out of my way to try and complete any of these achievements.)
What a sad story. This person is no doubt now facing feelings of intense emptiness as well as a realization that a substantial part of their life has been wasted on something utterly meaningless and without value. I hope they make it through that darkness to find something else to occupy themselves with soon—hopefully something that results in happiness, knowledge and expertise this time around.
Frostpunk was an amazing game, but I honestly don’t know that I ever want to play the sequel. The first one was so stressful. It was the game equivalent of Requiem for a Dream, ie the best game I never want to play again.
Worse (at least back then), the replayability plummeted a lot. Once the fear was gone, you played a couple times to see all the branches and min-max a bit. Once you did an extreme deathless run, it was as solved-problem as any puzzler (which in a way, it was).
I’m curious what a sequel would look like. If it’s a totally different puzzle to work out, it might be interesting.
From the images, though, it looks like it might be a bit more seamless an experience, where expanding beyond the initial burner is possible. That could change everything.
Even the most terrible AAA games sell millions of copies these days. They more than make their money back with each one, the margins are slimmer but the volume is magnitudes higher than ever. Cry me a river.
This exact thought (volume) occurred to me when I saw the headline. They like to say that the price of games hasn’t increased in line with inflation, but I’d be interested to know how big the market was in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. I’d bet the market is orders of magnitude bigger today.
I’d be curious comparing these prices to median income or median disposable income. I’m guessing it tracks those numbers much closer than inflation, which wages haven’t kept pace with.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
This drives me crazy every time I see it so I’m glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn’t matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.
When the creator of Stardew Valley can charge $14 for his awesome game, and put it on multiple platforms and release updates for jo extra cost, and not charge subscription fees, and everyone can mod it and be happy, and the creator has made multimillions by now … Other companies need to take note.
From someone who worked at a company who wasted tons of money and had too many parties, excess staff and ceos who made excessive salaries, if these gaming companies are charging too much they need to look internally instead of asking their customers to fuel their greed.
He said “because of ballooning development costs”. Stardew valley is famously a one man labor of love, the opposite of ballooning development costs.
$14 pr sold copy is ridiculously high in this context, because development costs is only for one dude.
You’re comparing this guys runaway success with a company with several development teams, office spaces, marketing teams, accountants, probably janitors, security, etc, etc.
I’m not saying he is in the right, just pointing out that it is apples to oranges.
You’re comparing this guys runaway success with a company with several development teams, office spaces, marketing teams, accountants, probably janitors, security, etc, etc.
That’s sorta the point tho, isn’t it. Not saying Capcom should be one guy in a bedroom, but maybe there’s alot of bloat not related to actual game development that could be streamlined/cut. Esp. When it comes to executives.
I agree with this. I find myself regularly missing the middle of the road games with lower development costs because those are the games that often dares to try new things.
Last one I remember like that was Ubisoft’s “Grow Home” which was utterly charming and had me hooked from beginning to end. Didn’t need to be big. Didn’t need amazing graphics. Just needed a little idea that (pardon the pun) grew to become a really engaging game.
More games like that please! Maybe the development costs didn’t have to balloon that much.
These “development costs” are creating beta-level games and you don’t even just pay $60 for a game anyway.
Street Fighter 6 is $60. Street Fighter 6’s TMNT content alone (not including the base game) is $100. They have more than made up for any development costs with the ridiculous amount of “DLC” and MTX.
ign.com
Aktywne