I think that one (HUGE) part of BG3’s success is that it was in Early Access for, what, 2-3 years? During which it grew a dedicated modding scene, received a metric fuck-ton of feedback, and regularly dropped large content patches. This wasn’t an average dev cycle, and I think it shows. In some ways, the Dev. Feedback and interactivity reminded me a lot of the way Warframe does dev interactions.
Yeah, I agree with that similarity to Warframe’s level of developer interaction.
Sure, in the past they’ve been slower to respond to feedback about problems, and often times old things have fallen out of relevance because something else just outright does the same thing, and more, but better.
But as it is now, DE really seems to be prioritizing listening to feedback, almost exponentially so, and as an example, bringing things up to par with what they should be at the current level of the game, a concept that much more rarely got the implementation it deserved in years before.
And warframe has been rewarded with a practically methusalian lifespan for a game in its genre, I hope we see the same for baldurs gate 3 with a similar level of ongoing support and improvement.
Long story short: Sony decided (after sales!) to make it impossible for players to get into their already purchased copy of Helldivers 2 without a PlayStation Network account. Originally, players could just use their Steam accounts.
The problem, aside from bloating and privacy concerns, is that there are many regions in which PlayStation Network isn’t even available, meaning hundreds of thousands of gamers would just be locked out of the game they bought.
Now, after immense pressure (players immediately dumped game reviews into oblivion, and bombarded the developers, forcing them to renegotiate with Sony) it was decided not to make PlayStation Network linking mandatory.
This is good, but I think there needs to be some regulations. Companies keep introducing all sorts of anti-consumer practices to fuck over users (not only in gaming land). Now it got (for the time being) reverted, but the trust has (again) been broken.
Consumers (should) buy something based on what has been presented at the point of time. If that changes in the future with negative effects for consumers, than this should get investigated and ultimately penalized. Companies have become too big and too powerful, which can lead to shit like this
This. I’ll forever be mad at Rockstar for removing songs from their games, because their licenses expired. But it’s cheaper to just “update” the game so they can continue selling it without the songs, instead of renewing contracts. Oh, you bought the game before that? Too bad, update to continue playing
I’ve heard that this happened with Scrubs (and possibly other TV shows) leading to the original box set of DVDs having different songs playing in the background than the streaming versions.
I used so much printer paper and ink printing a bunch of those out. They were indeed saviors. Also another great example, along with open source, of people helping each other out for free, and beyond their local tribe, too.
When i was browsing the Gemini web one time, I ran across someone who had uploaded the whole archive to Gopher! I love the idea of real cyber punks keeping these precious old text files alive in the backwater sub-webs.
If you can manage to find a place that has one, they’re usually selling for $200+ now. I’m pretty sure I can get ebay chinese replicas for like $50 though, but there are some games they won’t play.
The N64 had a $200 launch price, which is pretty much $400 now. So nobody is making money from holding onto their N64. Hrm, maybe I should pick one up.
Prices have come down in the last year. I see several on eBay listed tested/working for around $60. One even comes with a controller. Shopgoodwill.com has similar prices when they’re available. Prices for auction items with less than 10hrs look very reasonable.
Wait, what? I just bought my younger brother an n64 with an expansion pack, rumble pack, and Majora’s Mask and OoT for Christmas, and all together that only cost 180$. All legit copies and hardware. Made double and triple sure.
Are people just not hitting the “sort lowest to highest” option on auction sites? Or is this a new development in the last few months?
Ah, that makes sense. Consoles do tend to spike in price at the height of their nostalgia wave. Probably got boosted up for a while by the rumors of an N64 mini not panning out, and instead being presented with the sub par switch online expansion. Probably created a lot of demand for the real thing.
I regret selling mine when I was 17 cause I wanted to buy a paintball gun and gear. At the time, it was a great call cause I didn't play any N64 games at the time, and I got to have a blast playing paintball with my friends.
But man I wish I'd sold something else back then so I could still have my original N64 and games. Still got the ol' NES and Sega Genesis at least.
If you don’t like the jank of emulation or the risks of going to pirate sites: An Xbox Series S, Game Pass, and a few controllers is an okay replacement. There’s a bunch of Rare games on Game Pass, classic Goldeneye, and they even have stuff like Timesplitters in the store.
Yea, back in the day I dreamt about a Minecraft that didn’t run on Java and thus better on the low end hardware I had. In my dreams it just still had all the benefits of the Java edition which is why I now dream of old Java Minecraft
Yeah the infuriating part is not the mere existence of bedrock, but the fact that they purposefully made it suck. It could have been much better than the java version if they did it right.
So just fuck everyone who doesn’t play on Pc? There are aspects about bedrock that should be gotten rid of, but it’s existence is for the ability for cross play to exist. I play both versions but bedrock made making a cross platform server for my friends and I (who all play on different consoles) possible.
I will not touch Bedrock edition,
especially not since it requires you to sign in on your Windows with a M$ account, while my Windows KVM is Ameliorated, which strips the ability to do so, nor would I want to if I could.
you don’t need to sign in, you can just sideload the appx package (it’s likely to fail due to license verification, there are ways around it tho, like stopping the licensing service)
Many of us preordered because at least for me day 1 performance issues don’t bother me. I loved dragons dogma and knew pretty much no matter what I wanted to play this.
Hiding that you have micro transactions until release day is just bullshit. I don’t know if that knowledge would have kept me from buying it though. Fast travel so far is pretty much non-existent as the ferry stones are super rare…
I get what you mean, but 99.9% of the time I’m buying it day one anyway
Well, no one is saying you can’t buy it on day one, just don’t buy it on day minus one.
On the day it comes out you can just check some reviews first and then reaffirm your decision to buy, or you may hear about something you weren’t aware of, and then decide not to buy.
Also by doing this, you help all your other fellow gamers, by diminishing the importance of the pre-order and the shenanigans that go with it.
I don’t think that’s true. I remember seeing some of this stuff on store description at the very least and as far as I’m aware, some reviews mentioned the DLC could not be reviewed because it wasn’t live which inferred it was known. I’ll have to research this tomorrow because I keep hearing both sides but this aligns with the fact they were available day one unlike RE4Make
A lot of “downloadable content” for a game that requires an internet connection to play. A lot of “downloadable content” that allegedly already exists in-game. Studio execs need to be fired for this shit
Only thing actually rare are the fast travel items. Everything else on the list you can get within the first four hours of playing the game. The real dumb shit is the new game decision, the character creator demo gave you five save slots so why does the game only have one?!
The teleport stones called “ferrystones” are 10k gold each which is a lot.
In Dragon’s Dogma 1 they give you a reusable one for free after feedback that they were too hard to find in the base game.
Looks like Capcom saw a quick buck instead this time around, with a map 4 times as big this is a much bigger issue than in the original and it seems to have been done on purpose to drive MTX sales.
This is also probably the real reason they’re taking a harder stance against mods. Within 24 hours, there’s already a mod on Nexus that adds one of the items you can buy with real money to an early vendor for like 1 coin.
There’s also another mod that just makes all items 1 coin, so it shouldn’t be too hard for modders to just completely circumvent the bullshit mtx.
im still on that boat that believes the rumor that older management took back power from the younger management (reminder that capcom is a family ran business) after the Chun Li incident. Capcom wants to get into the business of selling game engine use but it being moddable (thus regular people can potentially stain an image of a game) may hurt its adoption.
10k is not a lot. Maybe in the first couple hours when you have zero need of them but by the time you need them you’ll have 100k+ in like half an hour easily. They are also given out often and easily found, I had 12 sitting in storage having bought none before I needed one. The amount of misinformation in this thread by people who never actually played this one or the first one is pathetically laughable. “DAE NEW POPULAR THING SUX IM COOL FOR NOT LIKING POPULAR THING”
Adding this edit to the top because what the FUCK you only get one save file EVER? There’s no new game? And it costs $2 to change your character’s appearance ONE TIME? Words fail me
Rift crystals? Is there in-game currency for this single player game?
Edit: they have an arcade game style “insert a dollar to continue” option I’m dying
Get out of jail free for a dollar card? The more I read the worse it gets. I’m glad I saw this before sinking more time into the first game. Good to know it’s safe to skip.
Rift Crystals are in DD1 also, without MTX. They’re just the currency for your pawn stuff basically IIRC. You’ll get them passively while playing the game, assuming it still works like 1 which I think it does.
One save file has been a thing since the first one. There is a new game plus and you can obviously delete your save and start again. The character edit things are in game and fairly common, already have a few without looking. RC are also earned extremely easily in game and the only purpose there beyond some cosmetic glasses is to add allies into your party that are high above your level. Its just another type of gold. I have no idea what you’re talking about with the “insert dollar to continue” thing. Also the jail keys are incredibly easy to get, you can buy them for like 3000g which is very cheap (early game starter weapons are triple that). All the mtx just seem like incredibly easy and quick to get shit for people who have more money than sense.
One save file has been a thing since the first one.
And it was stupid then too. No modern single player RPG should limit players to a single save file. I understand there are many great RPGs that do, and I still think they shouldn’t.
There is a new game plus
Making players play through tens of hours of campaign as a character that they want to delete is a pretty bad decision on capcom’s part.
and you can obviously delete your save and start again.
No you cannot. There is no option to delete your save data within the game. There is a workaround if you play on PC that involves turning off cloud saves, opening the game’s files and deleting your save data from the file explorer, starting a new game, then turning cloud saves back on, but that is a hack, not a feature.
I’ve seen plenty of people say that the character customization stuff is super cheap and super available in the game. I just don’t get why it costs an in-game currency in the first place on this single player, offline rpg. Seems like it should cost nothing within the game to change your hairstyle or whatever. Like, this doesn’t even fit in with the hardcore, no fast travel stuff. It’s just a pointless in-game currency sink. Virtually every other game that allows post-creation character customization allows it for free. I just don’t see the point in making it cost something that you can pay for with real life dollars.
This is the way it’s been since the beginning. Way more people are going to try making something good than people are going to succeed at it. Whether it’s greed, incompetence, laziness, they ran out of time, whatever.
You don’t have to give a bad product any attention at all just because it’s “big”. The box says “Suicide Squad” not “guaranteed to be good” 😅
The issue this is touching on isn’t that the big companies try to make something good, it’s that they try to make something profitable. It’s designed by the suits, not the designers. There’s no passion in them. However, they have the budget to market them and control what most casual gamers hear about. It’s rare that a team without the marketing budget the size of EA can break into the mainstream, even if they’re great.
Great resource and explains so much with pretty solid examples. Thanks for sharing! I used to PC game on my Dell (Sony), flat CRT for years, and then an IBM Trinitron too until I moved to a pure laptop for a bit (17" Vostro) and eventually on to LCD.
Until 2013 I used to play Wii on a 36" Philips CRT, even though the other room had a larger plasma.
One thing they show but don’t mention is image persistence for transparency. If you toggle a sprite on and off every frame, the persistence between frames on CRTs and LCDs means it looks partially transparent. That effect was commonly used for character shadows.
Now that we have 4k HDR displays, tools are starting to popup to accurately emulate the CRT look and feel. 1080p wasn’t enough to catch all the subtle details, but we are finally there. Kinda cool to see the age of CRT never fully died.
I wonder if there’s a way to emulate the old CRT displays. My brother built an arcade cabinet, but it’s got a modern monitor in it so the graphics don’t quite look right.
There are some hardware scalers that work really well. But most that offer good compatibility with a wide range of older consoles cost about as much as a complete high end pc to run an emulator on.
There are some very convincing shaders that work really well to emulate the look. I sold my consoles long ago and may have a faulty memory but the right shader looks just like I remember.
Titanfall 2 is one of the greatest games of all time (I would say it is easily a top 50, maybe even a top 20). The singleplayer campaign is just ridiculously well designed and even has a surprising amount of pathos in the narrative.
But if you are likely to be regularly interrupted? Horizon Zero Dawn. most of the story quests are 10-15 minutes each and you can just do the checklist open world the rest of the time.
I love the way Fallout 2 (maybe also 1, it’s been forever and I can’t recall) changes your dialogue options if you have low intelligence. It’s like a whole other game.
Fallout 1 absolutely does it as well. Even the animated dialog the Overseer gives is different, as he gets frustrated with the dumb player character.
One of the more famous Fallout 1 dumb events is that the first super mutant in the game, who is guarding the water chip, will grunt back and forth with the player and then step aside allowing the player to pass by.
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