Mmos and arpgs are intrinsically linked by their gameplay loops. Admittedly, this can vary to a greater or lesser degree depending on the specific games being compared, but Diablo 2 was, in many ways, proto-WoW.
MMORPGs have pretty different mechanics alone. Just because most are WoW clones doesn’t mean that is the only thing. EVE for example is very different.
As soon as Krafton bought them out it wasn’t just downhill from there, it was a steep drop off a cliff. The game had so much promise but got royally fucked.
They should have just put a fork in it when it became very apparent early on it was too ambitious for the studio to handle. And that was long before it blew up in popularity. Now the game has been unprofitable for the past few expansions and their owners are coming to collect. Live service was a massive, greedy mistake as Bungie is also not learning with D2.
After ditching D2 last year well past the 10k hour mark, I’ve been bouncing around a bunch of different games, mostly working through the backlog but also looking for a long-term grind to scratch that same itch. Out of everything I’ve tried, PoE2 and Warframe feel like the only ones doing live service “right”, especially the latter. Between both games, the only MTX gripe I have is PoE2’s stash tabs.
Last Epoch had a ton of potential but the team were in way over their heads and forced to start cashing in, and the Krafton buyout was the nail in the coffin. It feels like they just flat out didn’t have the budget to keep it going.
Yeah, we’re in the same boat. I’m going through the backlog, but I have yet to truly find my comfort food even though those two games are excellent. Especially PoE2.
Regardless, agree on your points. The latter two franchises have shown that live-service can be done well. Though I still don’t quite get how Warframe pulls it off… I guess it’s that they never broke their model while Bungie… you know.
For Last Epoch, the campaign wasn’t even finished and then suddenly. Don’t write checks you can’t cash, I guess.
That’s rough. I tend to cycle in and out of games (particularly ARPGs).
Paid DLC content acts as a deterrent to me going back to a game that I only play fairly casually. Not saying that I won’t do it, but it does raise the bar on my expectations.
Paid DLC that is simply less content and more texture pack is just bullshit. Paid DLC like Grim Dawn xpacs are content I’m more than happy to pay for. So it’s all relative but this for me is dookie
Hoping to cover costs solely from cosmetics is a pie-in-the-sky fancy and they knew that, the only way that works is if your game blows up in the way that only those rare, 0.01% of games do. Saying they expected that to work out was some fucking bullshit. I sympathize with their plight, it’s obvious that if the options are sell DLC or shut down the studio, you sell DLC, but it shouldn’t have happened like this.
They were dishonest at worst or brutally naive at best from the start. I’m willing to accept that latter simply because these were originally Reddit people who wanted to make their own mark on the genre, but it’s still inexcusable. I have zero involvement in the industry and I could tell you that was not gonna work out.
Ah. I didn’t know they said that. It’s definitely shitty to go back on that promise. Although in a vacuum, I think this is the kind of non-cosmetic content that’s somewhat acceptable to me as paid DLC. It’s not a competitive game and assuming the class is balanced, it’s just adding content that gives more variety. I’ve been fine with paid DLC in other big games as long as it’s a worthwhile amount of content for the price and it’s sold in a straightforward way without any funny business. Given that this game has online co-op, I think it makes sense that they’re gonna keep the content expansion free so it doesn’t divide people who would want to play together (also I guess there is trading, but I’m a CoF player so…) and then this is something that mostly just affects someone’s individual experience. Like if you were going to be happy enough to keep playing the game with existing classes, then this doesn’t really affect you.
So in principle I’m ok with this… but like I said, the bigger issue is them going back on their word.
Not defending last epoch but Grim Dawn did not feel complete. The base game story ‘ends’ on a complete cliffhanger quest the way a TV show Season 1 ends.
I like Grim Dawn but it pisses me off that the base game is so cheap when the studio knows the experience is super incomplete without the 3x as expensive expansions.
Valid. I just cannot play ARPGs absent a decent enough story. I’ve dropped a few due to uninteresting grinding, but I understand that is an appeal in and of itself to other gamers.
Grim Dawn was an excellent and finished game on release, and said DLCs came out years later via DLCs that acted as expansions to the campaign.
Last Epoch doesn’t even have a complete story, just some unfinished tripe with no real lore and oh here’s a bunch of alternate versions of how the unfinished thing you encountered could have happened differently.
They’re not even in the same class. It’s why I have 440 hours on Grim Dawn and would play it more still. I dropped LE at 170 hours and don’t really see any reason to play more. Hell, Last Epoch had a cash shop before the game even left Early Access. It feels like the development and costs were mismanaged out of the gate. I waited to buy it on discount.
Considering the number of NMS updates that are just back-ported features that were created for Light No Fire, I suspect the game loop will be pretty much the same as what we already have in NMS
Given how many systems NMS has and how disconnected they often feel from one another, taking a more focused approach might work out better for the game.
“Infinite” universes, like NMS or Starfield sound good in marketing, but if you’re really moving around them, at scale speeds, they can’t help but feel isolated and instanced. Even LNF, if it’s a whole ‘earth like’ planet, is huge. Earth has about 50M square miles of habitable surface - if you drop 10,000,000 people in there randomly, you’re going to have to walk half an hour to have a chance to find another player, if they happen to be on at the same time. It shouldn’t have the sharp breaks between biomes that fast-travel to a different planet gives, and I expect that will make it feel a lot more coherent.
Not only do they feel isolated, they also feel the same. NMS technically has billions of unique planets. In practice it has about 10 or so because they all feel the same. And even those look alike because they're all sparsely populated worlds. Big stretches of emptiness filled with the occasional POI. Where are the mega city planets? The forge worlds with heavy industry? Any city with more than 100 inhabitants?
Sentinals have wiped them out and destroyed every trace of old civilisation.
Then again, it’s just an excuse; having them does not solve the issue. Most devs these days will prefer procedural generation with handcrafted POI on top, but having the player spend time on them is the issue, because HG are terrible at creating POIs with lore.
Let’s hope that he is doing open-world exploration right this time, instead of implementing a bunch of disjointed mechanics without a purpose to artificially lengthen the life of the game as a “sandbox”.
It’s the easiest path to gaming compatibility. Don’t know about loongarch. For RISC-V box86/64 supports it but it’s probably far from great and there’s a lack of RVA23 chips to test and develop for currently. These companies could employ people to work on it but most hardware companies really minimum needed effort software until it bites them in the wallet like Nvidia vs AMD/Intel. Qualcomm hyping up day one Linux support for X Elite ARM laptop chips and then over a year later it’s still medicore. Mobile graphics drivers for Mali, Adreno, and PowerVR all being different levels of mediocre. Every car company vs Android auto and Carplay
These Zen-esque chips have come up before, though it sounds like this might be the first time they’ve been used in a marketed product. A couple other companies born out of the remnants of Centaur also seemed to have borrowed architectural notes from the early Zen CPUs, potentially as a result of their competitors like Hygon making that deal with AMD almost 10 years ago. It’s the first time one seems to be almost a boilerplate 1700x though.
They probably have the finances to spend as much time they want this time around. I wouldn’t be surprised their Joe Danger money dried up during NMS development.
Yeah. I barely played NMS, despite pre-ordering it due to launch fallout. Still worth it, because the money was for “the joe danger guys want to proc-gen a fucking universe? I’ll kick in”.
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Aktywne