“Horse armor is not bad. I think horse armor is fine. The price point, at the time, was the issue. We felt, it’s probably worth this,” he said. “I won’t say who at Microsoft said, ‘Well, that’s less than we sell a theme for; a wallpaper is more than that. You should charge this; you can always lower it.’ We were like, ‘Okay!’”
Also it’s weird to me that Bethesda gets crap for their DLC’s. Oblivion’s horse armor was bad, but it wasn’t the worst or the first. Heck, Morrowind had expansions. MapleStory is pretty widely cited as the earliest form of micros transactions. And most of Bethesda’s DLC’s have been great- all 3 of Skyrim’s were ton of content relatively cheap.
Skyrim has plenty more than 3 DLC. Or do you mean to tell me anniversary edition and special edition are the same? Is Creation Club something you never heard of? I’m jealous
Well… Yes pretty much. I don’t count Creation Club items because they weren’t made by Bethesda.
I don’t turn them on. As far as I know you can find free alternatives for most of what is in the creation club- you’re just paying for to support the independent creators, the convenience, and I suppose the service of Bethesda filtering out some of the worst chaff of the mod scene.
Similarly, I don’t count the other big fixes and upgrades in the Special Edition or Anniversary edition as DLC. Bethesda was rolling out patches for the original game before then, and visual upgrades are more in line with what I would call mods/remaster/remake than DLC.
I think Dawnguard, Dragonborn, and Hearthfire are all very good deals and I wouldn’t mind if games went back to that business model. I didn’t really like Serana’s personality and that’s really the only reason I didn’t like Dawnguard as much as Dragonborn and Hearthfire.
Expansions are really not the same as "micro transactions" (now very much macro transactions). Expansions were typically content filled and had a fair price point, regardless if they shipped boxed on a CD or were packed into a digital download. Now we pay the price for a full sized expansion for a single cosmetic in some games.
The game doesn’t do a lot of directing new players, so you gotta be willing to ask other players and read the wiki to figure out what you should be doing.
Assuming those don’t faze you, the community is one of the best and the story is really good- once you get that far.
I've been putting a bunch of time into Battlebit, so I dig shooters, and I am an old Eve player so I'm used to 'Fuck you' level of support for newbs...
Is it something you can drop in/out of? Don't have a lot of straight blocks of time to dedicate to gaming these days (which is partially why I like battlebit so much).
On a micro level, it’s very easy to jump in and out when you feel like it. Each mission usually takes under 10 minutes even for fresh players, while a veteran can blitz through some missions in under 90 seconds. You can choose to play either solo or in up to a four-player squad, and if you are in a squad you can get a share of the xp from kills your mates get. Loot is instanced so you never have to worry about fighting to get what you see on the ground.
On a macro level, it’s a free-to-play looter shooter, with all the good and bad that entails. You have about a billion different types of resources you need to craft new weapons and frames, and almost every time new content is added new resources are too (to force veterans to engage in that content). Some things in the game are timegated heavily- for example, once you have the parts and resources to craft a new frame, it takes at a minimum 3 and a half real time days to craft it (unless you pay to skip that, or just buy the frame outright from their shop). The drop rates for some of the things you want might mean you’d take a while to get them if you’re not playing a lot- DE has a published list of the drop chances and the wiki lists the expected number of times you’d have to do an activity before you’d get that item, but I do want to stress the grindy looter-shooter part of the game.
Most of the real-money transactions are in the form of skipping time gates or pure cosmetics. I personally feel their monetization is fair for the most part.
All it all, it’s a F2P game. Go ahead and try it if it sounds fun, and if you don’t like it all you’ve lost is some time.
The monetisation is great. The market also allows you to get Platin without the need of spending money and you therefore don’t have to grind everything and simply buy some stuff with Platin you earned from selling your spare stuff.
It is grindy but for the most part not so grindy that it gets boring unless RNG really fucks you. You can accomplish most individual goals (ie. Farming parts for a particular gun or frame) within a few hours. Also you need pay to win currency for some things but its easy to get items you can sell to other players for that so really you don’t need to spend money on the game at all. It’s a lot of fun. I probably have more time in Warframe than just about anything else. Except maybe Wow.
The thing is, One Piece does get exponentially bigger and better as the story unfolds but if you don’t like it from the start then it probably just isn’t for you.
During the darkest moments the pandemic, I needed something to take my mind off of reality. So I skipped to One Piece 500ish and just started reading. Didn’t really love it, but didn’t really hate it. Then around 600ish, it started clicking. And then by 650, I couldn’t believe I was rooting for Luffy and the Straw Hat crew.
Now I’m at 1100 and part of the extremely annoying crowd who talk about One Piece.
Man I had the opposite happen. Really liked it up until 500ish where it became mass produced hype machine with the same copy paste genre elements and over the top plots that lasted way too long.
Now I’m at the end where they started unloading action and lore because it actually has a planned ending in sight, so I’m happy again.
But for 500 chapters I was very pissed off at the amount of time I wasted reading it. I signed up for fantasy naval action, not a 700 page fake love story with 500 separate characters in Candyland and the plot progression of a boulder rolling uphill.
To be honest, the episodes are like max 15 minutes of actual content if your remove the intro, outro and all the recaps.
But One Piece suffers from what every long anime suffers, long outdrawn stories that get stretched (pun intended) over too many episodes. There are arcs lasting over 100 episodes. In those episodes, not much happens, but always something happens to try to keep the interest of the viewer. But the main culprit are the flashbacks.
Flashbacks happen so frequently in those series, it is like reading a book and every couple of pages they copy one of their pages from a previous chapter in its entirety. I too can write a 300 page book like that.
Anyway, it should be illegal for people to recommend anything with more than a 1000 episodes.
One Piece has some incredible awesome moments, but the dull moments in between don’t make up for it.
Tell me what console or system or even game manufacturer that lets you buy their game, download it to a portable micro SD and then lets you play it from there.
Not even steam lets you do that and you don’t even have a direct way of knowing what’s on the micro SD card without making a label for it which good luck.
No steam is definitely not the bastion to use as they really aren’t gonna work. They like games tied to accounts.
You could say GOG games but it really still defeats the point of it not being even close to similar to a physical game you could resell and having a nicely labeled piece of physical media.
I know you aren’t the person originally with the really bad argument btw, but yeah the list is super small this would work for.
First, you can totally make a steam library on a portable device like a microsd or an external drive (I do and I play on different places with the same drive), and play it on any device running steam.
And don’t start the “oh but you need steam installed”, since with the proprietary sd, you gotta have the propriety device as well.
Second, sure I can just lavel it, a 3 seconds job. Don’t you need the proprietary sd to come labeled as well? Also, I don’t need to label anything, I have dozens of games there and select which one I want to play.
Your defense of OP’s comment is also weird but that’s okay, we all are always learning.
Each format of game has its own merits ans they are only better than another on an objective comparison, as for subjective, just use whatever you want.
To put that into perspective, the oldest known permanent human settlement is about 25,000 years old. The Bronze Age wouldn’t start for another ~20,000 years, so they wasn’t any metal working.
While on a side I agree with you, on the other I see everytime people complaining about subscription fatigue and they never, ever would pay a recurring amount for a game.
I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.
There are no other football games that are even respectable efforts, and despite the rhetoric, Madden is actually a very good football sim that continually gets developed from year to year.
I suppose I implied but didn't explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There's an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it's well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don't think it's just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that's to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.
Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.
Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.
I've seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that's generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it's just not close. Madden isn't perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there's nothing out there that's better than "kind of close to a decade ago" technically. You're much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn't there either.
Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.
the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,
This is a ridiculous lie. It's not even in the general vicinity of reality.
The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn't get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don't understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.
Fine. I don't play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don't expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you'd recognize no matter how into football you are.
EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.
There will always be bugs. It's the nature of a complex simulation with emergent gameplay.
But anyone telling you that they're increasing doesn't know what they're talking about. They're increasingly small edge cases as the simulation gets very obviously more advanced and complex every iteration. It's not minor and it's not subtle. If you play ten hours a year with a middle school football level of understanding the improvements are impossible to miss.
Any review from someone who doesn't watch football every week all season is the exact same quality of someone who's never played an FPS reviewing a tactical shooter. it has literally zero value in any possible context and it's an embarrassment to your organization to publish it.
I can't speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don't have texture bugs and T posing. I'm glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I'm also not sure how you went from, "Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying" to "Of course it will have bugs!"
The reviews are what they are because there are literally zero gaming outlets who respect the existence of sports games or cover them the way they cover anything else.
I play hundreds of games a year and have literally never once seen a player t pose on the field. It's not a thing that's a normal or frequent occurrence, and anyone who tells you it is isn't just incompetent. They're deliberately and maliciously lying to you, and in and of itself it's incontrovertible proof that their entire review is fraud.
If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.
As a preface, I used to do this a lot on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what I found interesting in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you’ll indulge me!
But hey, I'll split the difference. Instead of SMB 1, which was a launch game and literally wasn't running on the same hardware (because mappers), we can do Mario 3 instead.
Or, hear me out, let's not do a remaster at all for current gen leaps. Here's a PS4 vs PS5 sequel one.
It doesn't work as well, though, since taking the absolutely ridiculous shift from 2D to 3D, which has happened once and only once in all of gaming history, is a bit of a cheat anyway.
Oh, and for the record, and I can't believe I'm saying this only now, LttP looks a LOT better than OoT. Not even close.
Oh I don't care about leap comparisons, was just taking interest at how graphics have evolved over time. To be honest graphics have been going downhill for a few years now in big games thanks to lazy development chasing "good" graphics, fucking TAA...
I agree that it's a meme comparison anyway. I just found it pertinent to call out that remasters have been around for a long time.
I don't know that I agree on the rest. I don't think I'm aware of a lazy game developer. That's a pretty rare breed. TAA isn't a bad thing (how quickly we forget the era when FXAA vaseline smearing was considered valid antialiasing for 720p games) and sue me, but I do like good visuals.
I do believe we are in a very weird quagmire of a transitional period, where we're using what is effectively now a VFX suite to make games that aren't meant to run in real time on most of the hardware being used to run them and that are simultaneously too expensive and large and aiming at waaay too many hardware configs. It's a mess out there and it'll continue to be a mess, because the days of a 1080Ti being a "set to Ultra and forget it" deal were officially over the moment we decided we were going to sell people 4K monitors running at 240Hz and also games made for real time raytracing.
It's not the only time we've been in a weird interaction of GPUs and software (hey, remember when every GPU had its own incompatible graphics API? I do), but it's up there.
TAA is absolutely a bad thing, I'm sorry, but it's way worse than FXAA, especially when combined with the new ML upscaling shit.
It's only really a problem with big games or more specifically UE5 games as temporal is baked into it.
Yeah, there was that perfect moment in time where you could just put everything max, have some nice SMAA on and be happy with >120fps. The 4K chase started yeah, but the hardware we have now is ridiculously powerful and could run 4K 120fps no problem natively, if the time was spent achiveing that rather than throwing in more lighting effects no one asked for, speed running development and then slapping DLSS on at the end to try and reach playable framerates, making the end product a blurry ghosting mess. Ugh.
Hell, no. 120 fps wasn't even a thing. That flash in the pan moment was when 1080p60 was the PC standard and 720p30 the console standard and the way the hardware worked you could hit max specs on a decent PC every time. It lasted like three or four years and it was wonderful.
By the point we started going above the NTSC spec on displays the race was lost. The 20 series came out, people started getting uppity about framerate while playing some 20 year old game and it all went to crap on the PC front.
As for AA, I don't think you remember FXAA well, or at least in relation to what we have. ML upscaling is so much sharper than any tech we had a couple of gens ago, short of MSAA (and frankly even MSAA). The problems that have become familiar in many UE5 games are not intrinsic to the tech, they have a lot to do with what the engine does out of the box and just how out of spec some of the feature work is.
I feel like people have gotten stuck with some memes (no motion blur! DLSS bad! TAA bad!) that are mostly nostalgic of how sharp 1080p used to look compared to garbage-tier sub 720p, sub 30 fps console games. It's getting to the point where I have so many major gripes with a lot of modern games but I feel it becomes one of those conversations you can't have in public because it gets derailed immediately.
In any case I think we can at least agree that it's been an awkward couple of generations of PC hardware and software for whatever reason and GPUs, engines and displays need to get realigned in a way where people can just fire up games and expect them to look and run as designed.
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