I’m a former player, but played continuously from release for 11 years. This is undoubtedly ridiculously expensive, but the convenience of having your mail and auction house anywhere in the world - the value to certain players is immense. I think if I played still today, it would probably be a struggle deciding whether this limited time offering was worth jumping on - I certainly don’t need it even a little bit, but when I want it, this thing would be incredibly convenient to have. Maybe that would just be the addiction talking. But when you spend all your free time with one game, you do feel a sense of good value relative to things like drinks at the bar or a movie or buying 1 or 2 full priced games a month.
But truly, the utility this provides for you and your guild is immense and impossible to replicate. They definitely shouldn’t be selling mounts on the shop for $90. That’s fucked. But compared to some of the video game devs selling weapon or character skins for as much or more, there IS at least a unique value proposition to the player. I guarantee there will be people with it the second it releases, for better or worse.
yeah, but that’s a whole generation after this. most games were colorful by then. especially once hdr started to come around.
games like crysis 3 and far cry 4 really helped break the trend.
I’d say crysis is almost the exact inflection point. look at it, it still has a lot of that brown aesthetic, but it’s colorful and has bright skies and giant lens flairs. the lens flairs especially became part of the norm moving forward.
I would say at this point it’s much better. the recent updates have helped to mitigate the issue of planets looking the same a ton. For the gameplay loop, At least for me, is very similar too launch (Go to new planet, do your preferred task to earn money. For me i use my freighter and my crew too collect goods and trade them in different systems and i also Archive animals and flora. And then I move to another system).
But they have also added more to do in that cycle too. For example, I typically break up the gameplay loop by returning to my base i built and tending to the NPCs that live there and also to use the facilities i constructed. I also manage a fleet from my freighter to send them on missions. On top of that there is the Anomaly which now has a ton of community things to do. There’s also different factions to join and get your rank up with.
It’s definitely improved a ton, i would say with it’s nature though it may not be for everyone
Some people believe the Sega Dreamcast was a superior console but that it failed to appeal to the mass market because the Playstation and the xBox also had the ability to play DVDs.
At the time DVD players were very popular and a standalone unit could cost in the ballpark of £100, so the ability to get a 2in1 unit that played games and DVDs was very attractive.
Or the weirdly anachronistic mess that is the Dreamcast in general. I mean, it's not easy to visualize today because a lot of the "just a tiny underpowered PC thing" approach ended up winning the day, but the Dreamcast made no sense whatsoever at the time and produced entirely absurd looking games.
Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.
Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.
Which 480p thing? GameCube, PS2 and Dreamcast all output at 480p. Some games on the PS2 can upscale. But they render at that resolution.
Specifically the VGA 480p output, which was a big deal for most use cases.
I imagine there is some regional differentiation here based on HDTV adoption and SCART vs component, but for reference VGA out was still the sole way I had to get any progressive signal for gaming all the way down to my day one Xbox 360 in 2005, which did not have an HDMI out (not that I had any displays with an HDMI in, for that matter).
Yeah, that's the thing about it, right? It has all the pieces of the architecture of a modern console in a world where none of them make sense. Even with the 360 I was probably an outlier, and the reward you got by being able to access 720p video on a CRT PC monitor was much higher compared to a SDTV.
That’s a normal architecture though, all consoles of that generation and at least the one before create the image digitally and just in the last step convert to analog so that the TVs from that time can display an image. The Dreamcast isn’t an outlier in that regard. It made sense to use these components; the strength of the Dreamcast from my point of view was that it was a very complete package at the time. Sure it couldn’t play DVDs, but it was quite earlier than the PlayStation 2, which came in more expensive with subsidies from Sony who as a member of the DVD Consortium (later DVD Forum) and movie studio had a vested interest in broadening the install base for DVD players. Plus Sony manufactured the drives themselves, which have them the numbers, there was no such option for Sega at that point in time.
Anyhow, I liked the Dreamcast for having 4 controller ports like the N64 instead of 2, and I also liked the selection of games because it was very arcade-y, but I had no arcades close by. But I also enjoyed the Sonic Adventures back then (not sure I still would though), Shenmue and Headhunter.
Personally I wouldn’t call the Dreamcast revolutionary, even though it’s my favorite console is all time. My biggest gripe with it isn’t the lack of a DVD drive, this is completely irrelevant nowadays with SD card loaders, but the rarity of Ethernet adapters because of the piracy issue. But it was a good package (I still can’t believe how good SoulCalibur looked back then, it agreed really well which is rare for 3D games from that time) for a fair price and a library that I really enjoyed.
Dreamcast’s strength was the hardware. Adding a DVD player would have just increased the price out of realistic range. The problem was the software and 3rd party support. The library just could not compete with PS1 and N64 and then the greatest console of all time came out and put it out of it’s misery, the PS2.
There's not really any one reason the Dreamcast failed, but the library being larger doesn't necessarily map to the library being better. The Dreamcast didn't have any heavy hitters on the level of a Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye or Ocarina of Time. In terms of games that are still in the mainstream consciousness, it's probably Sonic Adventure and Shenmue.
The library also had another thing that I think held it back from greater success: ports. Releasing so early, basically in the middle of the lifespan of the PS1 and N64, meant that a lot of the games were cross-platform with one or more previous-generation consoles. It's hard to demonstrate the power of a next-gen console when so many of the exact same games also worked fine on the consoles people already owned.
The other big source of ports in the Dreamcast library were arcade games. Sega was offering the ultimate in home ports of arcade games at exactly the time in the games industry when arcades were collapsing. The Dreamcast was the best way to play basically any cross-platform game that came out in that period, whether it was ported from arcade or lesser consoles, but ultimately they were games you could already play or that you specifically didn't want to.
I don't want to give the impression that the Dreamcast didn't have good or original games, it had both, just not "I must upgrade my console mid-gen"-quality games. It's a library that's aged very well but at the time, not enough people wanted what they were selling.
And part of the PS2’s success was the built-in DVD player which was cheaper than non-console DVD players at the time. So if you were going to buy a DVD player anyway, you were better off buying a PS2, saving some money and getting a console at the same time.
Yeah I feel too many people overlook that in 2000 it was next to impossible to find a DVD player under $500 and then PS2 came out, lots if people who didn’t even game bought them because it was known for being better than anything even close to its price range.
N64 and PS1 have not aged well. I’d absolutely take a dreamcast over the N64 and the PS1 really only beats it on RPGs. If you don’t have nostalgia for the 5th gen consoles, most of the games just aren’t very fun anymore.
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