Wow, if they want to turn Xbox around, they are going to need people. Cut Phil’s pay instead! He likely already gets far more compensation than he needs.
Even clearer now that the neXtbox is confirmed to be a prebuilt PC. They want PC/Windows to be their sole focus going forward with Xbox being a brand/app that runs on anything.
The 70bil USD ActiBlizz acquisition that was championed by Xbox fans is what ironically killed their traditional approach. Line must go up, and Xboxes weren’t cutting the mustard.
Yeah, that’s the reality…Big Business People making choices that will make the line go up. To be fair, it is a savvy move to make software readily available if the hardware isn’t moving; especially in the case of Microsoft’s first party games. Sony, being the consumer hostile and shoddy PSN holder, wouldn’t be my first pick for victor in the console space. Strange things happen when you got a few good exclusives, and pricey consoles, I guess.
It’s good that Microsoft is contemplating how to move forward, but, I disdain the news of more layoffs. They really should keep their core staff and cut pay for CEOs and C-Suites of Xbox instead. Since they are the ones who actually failed Microsoft. The neXtbox (essentially a prebuilt PC) and handheld might be a way for them to reach audiences again. Even though Valve is killing it in the Handheld Market with SteamOS and their Steam Deck; Microsoft better not recoil in fear due to this, as staying the course and making better choices will help.
They are the ones responsible for killing xbox though. Shit games, awful GUI, trash naming schemes, bad series S holding series X and the rest of the industry back, bad marketing and list goes on. If they cared about physical consoles, phil spencer would have been fired by now.
I haven’t bought the game and probably never will, since I don’t like the Dune-iverse at all. I have friends who play it and it’s a 100% online game. I’m sure you could pretend to play solo but you’re still connected to a remote server.
How would you have a multiplayer online game without forced online play? It’s a requirement of multiplayer (I guess barring LAN, but what is the likelihood of anything being “massive” multiplayer while on LAN) and online. That’s like 2/3 of the name
Let me explain how Honkai Star Rail handles gearing. Every single character has six relic slots: head, hands, body, feet, planar orb, and planar ornament. These relics go from level 0 to level 15, and four of them have a randomized primary stat. They all feature four randomized secondary stats, and every three levels a random one of those secondary stats gets a bonus. Each relic also belongs to a set of relics, and characters benefit from having two or four pieces of a given relic set. That means for every character in your party, you need to get the right items at the maximum rarity, the right primary stats, the right secondary stats, and the right level-ups for those secondary stats.
This is min-maxer mindset and I would hope randomized systems like this will prevent it but unfortunately no: even here some people think they actually need to roll every dice exactly the right way. I don’t think it’s true that this is really necessary. And no, it is not necessary to do top 10 world parses; you can just beat endgame content on modest, casual difficulty and call it a day, rather than try hard to set a record.
Even co-op in gacha games doesn’t qualify as MMO, because for that you need hundreds or thousands of players being simultaneously in the same persistent world. This is the same reason why games like Dota, League of Legends or Counter Strike aren’t considered MMO.
Star Rail isnt an mmo. And while it has many “progression mechanics”, they are slowly introduced to the player. And once you understand them, you dont really need to think that much about them. It is basically an anime+idle game.
You watch your anime episode every now and then and you afk farm daily for a couple mins(so that your characters slowly become stronger). You dont need to think loads of time to understand them but i guess it depends on what you mean by loads of times. Maybe i have played many games(mobile and conventional), so i dont have any issues with the systems.
If you want to build a character, you can choose them and the game will highlight their ideal “gear” and “stats”, though those recommendations arent always perfect. If you want to tryhard, you can use this site
And see what gear and stats are ideal for your character. Or just use your brain. Most dps like crit damage/rate, attack and speed. Most supports really love speed. Or watch a guoba video about the character you want to gear. Ultimately, if you afk grind gear, it doesnt take a giant brain to understand that the dps set, wants dps stats, or that the break set wants break damage stats.
So, the article is about gacha MMOs, but then doesn’t list any? Of the games it references, Honkai Star Rail isn’t a MMO, and World of Warcraft isn’t a gacha game.
There’s almost no multiplayer in Honkai Star Rail, though, much less anything approaching what an MMO does. It has asynchronous character sharing and one-to-one chat. That’s literally all the player interaction there is in the core game. Every now and then there’s an event where you can go head-to-head in simple games like match 3.
Great article. The entangling web of endless progression systems is one piece, but one thing they failed to mention is time gating and daily quests. It’s very important for these games to force you to play a little bit every day, instead of in large chunks all at once. This helps move the game subconsciously in your brain from “a game” to “a habit/a hobby”, and that makes your purchasing decisions very different.
China started drafting legislation cracking down on engagement bait daily tasks a few years ago and some games (like Genshin and other Hoyoverse titles) dropped daily check-in bonuses and made more things reset weekly in response. I think China later backtracked (IIRC the politician pushing the laws fell out of favor?), but not feeling forced to log in every day made those games so much less stressful.
I haven’t played anything in the genre in years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that crap crept back in again.
I’ve played Genshin almost since the start (took a break for a while) and it’s had daily tasks the whole time. You earn gems and other in-game rewards every day for it. There’s also an additional web-based daily checkin as well.
I’m not sure what you mean. The in-game reward path still has a daily “check in” task for points. And the daily “do 4 tasks” thing is in there, though they’ve opened it up a lot, which I really appreciate. (You can now do quests, open chests, or anything that costs energy to complete them, as well as the standard 4 mini-quests.) And the web checkin is still daily, with only 3 days that you can reclaim by visiting certain pages.
It looks like the game that changed its dailies was Star Rail, not Genshin Impact. Which makes sense: I remember seeing the change in-game but I haven’t played Genshin since around the time of that event in Enk… whatever the underground area is called.
I’m trying to find good articles about it but internet search is abysmal these days, especially for news outside the anglosphere. I did find a forum thread about the Star Rail change as well as a Reddit comment translating and explaining the proposed law though.
The TL;DR of it all seems to be that some time around December 2023, new restrictions were proposed affecting gacha games to curb addicting behavior. The news caused stock prices for affected Chinese companies to plummet, and the person who proposed the law was quickly removed from his position and the proposal dropped.
Ah, yeah, I think I remember that. It was pretty obvious it would be brutal for a lot of gamedev companies there, and I wasn’t surprised at all that it didn’t end up going through.
They would have over a hundred thousand players on a closed beta game? Goddamn that seems like a shit ton for a beta but I’ve also never looked at any game’s player count.
They didn’t get 100k players. The players they got counted multiple times. Someone got swallowed once but Bobby got swallowed 35 times because he’s a dumbass. That counts a 36 people getting swallowed.
It’s by the same folks that made that quasi-mmo Conan game. The bones were in it. It was just unpolished and sparse. If it’s the same core team and they’ve learned their lessons the Dune game should be pretty dope. I’m hoping it shows other MMOs that MMO isn’t a playstyle.
Oh shit did they make the Conan with the directional attacking and blocking? Age of Conan? I remember that game making my PC bleed, but I forced my way to play it at less than 30 fps.
I played the beta weekend, I liked it. I want to play it again once it’s out in June, although there were annoying parts. The sun gives you heat stroke or something as a status meter, and it makes you dehydrate faster until you get to shade. With how often you’re out doing stuff in the sun, it was kind of annoying, because I just had to keep going on blood harvesting trips through NPC camps, to proccess it at my base to keep my water stocked. But in the full game with better tech unlocked, I’m sure it ends up being fine.
A lot of people also got pissed at the sandworm because if you get eaten, all your stuff is destroyed with no way to recover it (unlike a normal death where you can loot your corpse), and sometimes it can feel abrupt when they breach. That said, I never got eaten ny the sandworm in my ~15 hours of play during the beta.
The games with death like that are much better, because they force players to care. From what I played, in Eve online you would really think before doing something stupid, because player killers would wreck your ship without caring that you grinded for 2 months to buy it.
Same was a thousand years ago in Ultima Online where you could get ganked and eaten by an ork bandit. That led to me taking a chance and run through a forest naked, because I had a house deed in my pocket, and I didn’t want to look like an interesting target. It ended up in a bandit chitchatting with me and letting me go with the words: “I wouldn’t walk around in these parts” - yeah, no shit.
Great experiences!
It’s just at some point gamedevs started catering to middle-school kids who would buy in-game stuff with their mom’s card and got upset when it wat taken from them.
Edit: typo (shop/ship)
Maybe some people just don’t like grinding for hours and hours to replace stuff they already acquired in a video game. I’m not sure why you have to present your opinion as if it’s the only valid option and everyone who disagrees is an immature child.
Maybe some people just don’t like grinding for hours and hours to replace stuff they already acquired in a video game.
Personally, I would rather that we have a variety of different game types and options. There aren’t very many MMOs that make death feel meaningful. If it’s not your type of game, then don’t play it.
I didn’t say you have to grind. This is exactly what I mean, tou would start thinking differently. You would take someone with you (hire a bodyguard? friends from yesterday’s pve stuff? guild/corporation friends?)
And for why I have to present my opinion - well, you do present yours. People present opinions all the time. Maybe you’re a child, I don’t know - you decided to read something “between the lines”, but were there anything like that, or are you just insecure?
You presented your opinion and then contrasted it with that of middle school children spending their parents money. If you don’t think that comes off as you saying anyone who disagrees with you has the perspective of a middle schooler then you aren’t a very good communicator.
The market did change in the end of 90s-start of 2000s - before, games were mostly done for “nerds with PCs”, because usually only well-off adults had something decent at home. Then, mass adoption of PCs, PS3and XBox, led to age of an average gamer drop to a teenager, for the first time in history. So many games were, in general, “dumbed down”. Now we see a great picture of market coming back, and there is a shitton of everything engineering/economics.. I’m not saying that middle schoolers don’t deserve to play games - they do, and I did. It’s just, for example, WoW’s “account bound” and “char bound” stuff wasn’t a good thing, but it then became a standard, and started an age of microtransactions (will you argue itcs a bad thing?)
I don’t mind very punishing death mechanics, but when pvp is involved I absolutely hate it. I play more than the average person, but when some sweaty ass pvp’er who plays 80 hours/week shows up, it’s just never going to be any kind of competitive fight. There is no way I will ever be able to do anything against that kind of player, and I’m also not in any way interested in trying. I like pve, not pvp.
Oh, of course in case of two examples I made, there are safe areas, stuff to do if you want to live in peace, etc. In Ultima, only you could unlock the door of your own house so hiding inside would work. And inside towns you could call npc quards (so everyone would have it as a shortcut).
In Eve there are many protected systems, it’s just getting stuff from nullsec (lawless/unowned) systems could be more lucrative, so you learn to take your risks.
I know it’s not always that way - as I see from Rust memes, everyone is just chaotically running around killing new players - but maybe it doesn’t show the real picture
The one thing a Dune game must have are scary sandworms, if it was like any other death nobody would care about them, so I agree they should destroy all your stuff. People need to fear the open sand
Absolutely - for me it’s not about making games “scary”, it’s about having “extreme reward/extreme punishment” mechanics which change players behaviors in interesting ways. But specifically, punishing unrealistic behaviours when you are afk and your character is in a scary forest, or when you are in a deadly desert choosing emojis in the chat
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