I feel this way too. You find premium currency laying around all over the place. You can buy everything in the store and the premium warbond for free if explore around as you play, just like any of the other in-game currencies.
Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema’s incompetence.
It’s actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it’s that you can’t criticize them because “Hey, we’re human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings”. And when I say you can’t, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.
They take an “us vs them” attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU’RE WRONG WE’RE RIGHT.
It’s a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it’s long since entered its death spiral.
Yup. Played it in early access for a bit and enjoyed it, then I played it on release and hated it. There are so many promises they completely ignored, including an option to make battle animations faster (their response was “it would change the economy if everything was faster”)
They added a battle pass
They made everything you can buy with in-game money outrageously expensive so you buy it from their FOMO rotating cash store
Their definition of “MMO” is making the game so insanely grindy to try to keep players around for hundreds of hours despite obviously not being worth spending that much time in…
And so on and so forth. Crema are so unbelievably greedy and dumb it still hurts that I gave them money.
I just started playing with 2 friends. I’m not too upset there won’t be more content (though I know that going in unlike the OG players). What really bothers me is there are easy updates they can make to create a better user experience. The UI doesn’t feel crisp & the animations can be sped up (or skipped) for starters.
You could call ESO pay-to-win to fit this definition, because there is new content added as subscription or paid. There will be new gear sets offering effectively an advantage for many builds and some new skills.
in horizontal progression, changes in things are typically sidegrades in progress, as you trade off one thing for another, compared to having a higher level equipment with higher stats in a vertically progressed MMO. New builds can be created via patches, but they aren’t necessarily straight upgrades from the existing ones.
if that’s your definition of “winning” then you have a different way of playing mmos.The most expensive cosmetics in the game are ridiculously low drop rate infusions that surpass the cost of virtually anything in the shop directly.
A Massively multiplayer online role playing game does not mean the game is a game as a service. It’s a route of finance just like some shooting games are and some aren’t.
I really enjoyed the game when it was first released in early-access on steam. The ability to play through the story with a friend was unique and fun. Unfortunately the Crema team stopped having innovative ideas and just released their version of Pokémon systems. At the time it was nearly impossible to communicate any negative criticism because of rabid fans on the subreddit and devs who seemed to have no interest in communicating with their player base.
Big surprise that Crema has stepped in it again. They've been pretty awful since this game started. I can still remember when they first rolled out the bans and insisted their would be no appeal because their ban process was never wrong. The CEO aggressively defended it, and it wasn't very long before community managers were walking that back admitting some people had to be unbanned.
Their discord was run by dictators as a meme that cropped up around a botched patch resulted in the mods going nuts and banning anyone who mentioned it, and the steam forums were the same. They had a gaggle of fanboys who'd attack anyone who said a bad word about the game, and if anyone talked back to them one of the developers would come along and ban them.
It was such a great idea ran by absolutely awful people.
Okay, but where’s that money coming from? Someone has to upfront pay for things. Larian are lucky, they have a majory investor that was not looking for any control, they released in early access and had runway money from previous projects to go with. They are the exception, not the rule, unfortunately.
Publishers no longer publish third parties for the most part, so everyone who isn’t a subsidiary of a large company has to find funding somewhere.
It’s worth noting the vast gulf we are talking about here between the “self funded” indie studios and even A games, not even AA, just A.
The self funded indie game made by one person in their spare time that 200 people play (and occasionally a standout hit that 8 million people play) really isn’t under contention here. We’re talking about the responsibilities when starting a business.
We are not talking about making an AAA game, an equivalent of an MCU film (as those are limited to the deep pockets of large companies).
Most companies that aren’t making AAA games, are also taking funding because people have to make rent, and workers deserve to get paid a wage.
From me for example. I follow this studio and team since many years and i’ve participated to the funding of Divinity: Original Sin (DOS) more than a decade ago…
They got money from several sources but mainly because (or i should say thanks to) they delivered good products, they have being able to survive and work on BG3. Luck is not the reason, they’ve worked hard to achieve that…
They have, I’ve been playing their games from their first divine divinity game. But they are still in a lucky situation, privileged from the reality that everyone else has to go through.
They worked hard for decades. They’ve been betrayed and hampered by editors in the past until kick-started. It’s not a lucky situation, they built this luck.
they worked hard, they are in a lucky and privileged situation unlike almost every other company.
Consider an amazing actor or director that you respect. They worked hard, they made amazing things, and they got super lucky. Talent and hard work guarantees nothing.
If the implication is that they should be negotiating better terms. Well, good luck with that. I’ve been a part of many teams involved with investor negotiations. You need their money a hell of a lot more than they need your teams risk.
I don’t say it’s easy. But if you want to make a good creative product you have to be able to keep the creative control, that is part of your job and what makes realization of creative ideas, especially on big scale, more difficult. It’s the same with other creative media like movies.
Spending well over a decade pushing out moderately successful shovelware on consoles before crowdfunding D:OS and its sequel, which provided enough of a portfolio to attract the CCP’s money and allow for the development of BG3.
Depends, some people do other jobs to fund their projects. Some just do low budget stuff. Some are good at negotiating or find funding programs. Sure it’s an effort but people out there are doing it in all kind of ways.
shareholders…owners… who cares about the vernacular. There’s always the ownership. An organization of any size is only as good as it’s current ownership.
People grow old and eventually die. When ownership passes on from someone who isn’t in it for the money to someone who just wants money… even the greatest of organizations can and will fall. I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
shareholders…owners… who cares about the vernacular.
Turns out, quite a few people when those words are describing very different things.
I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
This is how I know that you don’t know much at all. GabeN has changed valve from being a game developer making amazing things like Half Life and Team Fortress 2, to microtransactions and no games. A continuation of what Gabe is doing is pretty much in line with the rest of the industry, except NBA 2k4 would be the last one and it would have microtransaction DLC for the next 15 years.
I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
Sorry but I agree with the guy on this. It’s 2024, idgaf about valve IP anymore, they can ruin their games with microtransactions and I honestly won’t care. I use Valve like you and the rest of the world use it: buying and managing a collection of games. And right now, Steam has good practices in that regard. I can get refunds if I play a game for a couple of hours and I don’t like it. I can access any of the games I bought, they haven’t gone Sony on me and restricted my purchases. They’ve proven themselves to be good guys in this and I too fear the day GabeN is replaced by some fuck who just wants to get a quick few million, so he shits all over us and our collections of games.
You’re simping for a shop. The PC Shop wars have managed to be even more pathetic than the console wars.
I have Steam, Epic Games Store, GoG Galaxy, Battle.net, XBox, Ubisoft and EA’s thing installed and they all miraculously work since I’m on PC and it’s not a locked down consoles. I get to play games that aren’t on steam!
Valve is the company responsible for unlocking my PC for gaming. Most games can now be played without using Windows and Valve is mostly responsible for that. Because most game developers do not care and would rather force you to use proprietary OS than let you use what you prefer.
I have not looked it up but I do recall proton being a thing way before the steam console was.
Okay I looked it up before posting. The deck was released in 2022 and the initial release of proton was on 2018. Steam has had native clients for Linux and native Linux support for dota for ages too.
It’s true that their recent big push is because of the handheld but it’s also true that they have been pushing for gaming on Linux since way before.
You are absolutely right, I forgot about it. Still, this shows that they have been pushing for popularizing Linux (for their own devices, sure, but in exchange benefiting everybody else) far longer. As any company, avoiding blind trust is advice but they are kinda cool.
In anticipation of their own OS and ecosystem. They are not the saviours of gaming as being professed by so many, they charge 30% to sell there and lock your games under DRM. It’s great Linux has become a bit more of a thing but still far from mainstream outside of custom builds like SteamOS.
Their os is based on Linux, every tool they develop and improve can be used in any other Linux systems. I’m not calling them saviours of gaming, I’m happy that they improved the Linux gaming experience by a fuckton for everyone not only the people using their products.
Linux has always been a thing, gaming on Linux is what was not, and steam has always had support for it, I remember playing native Linux dota back in 2015 ish on uni.
I’ve been playing several games installed through steam offline, so idk about them locking games under drm. For example, stardew valley, grim dawn. Beside that, most other games I play have an online component so I would need to authenticate in some form anyway, like path of exile, last epoch.
They are not saviours, but the competition is so bad that it’s not strange for people to see the difference.
30% seems a lot yeah but I’m not discussing that, I’m talking about them being pro Linux as a policy way before the deck.
Indeed yes, I did mention SteamOS (I think that was the original name). Steam hasn’t always supported Linux, it was years after it’s release (maybe ten?) before they did from what I remember.
Yes it’s good, but my part of the discussion is highlighting they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, otherwise there would be more evidence of it including lower fees, no DRM and and whatnot.
How is Dota on Linux? It’s, well, a bit crap on Mac as the menu bar gets in the way (tried fiddling with settings but doesn’t seem possible to fix it) and other stuff.
Eh, depends. The laptop was not that good by any means, sure, but dota has always been the most demanding moba out of the competition, by far (league/hots). But yeah, then I got a proper desktop and it ran flawlessly ever since.
What are you even talking about? I have all of those installed as well, and a few others on top. I’m incredibly wary of any of them though - I don’t know if GoG will be around in 10 years, I don’t trust epic as far as I can throw them, I don’t want to support ubisoft and EA, and Blizzard has made so many questionable choices that I’m at the point where I don’t want to support them AND I don’t believe they can make good games anymore.
It’s about trust. I trust valve to allow me access to my games more than I trust the others. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the others, where did I say that?
Valve are major players in Linux being a viable option for gaming and actively fighting the Microsoft monopoly for PC gaming. Not in line with other players in the industry.
They are actively developing proton as well as their own controller support for any games within their platform.
What is the rest of the industry doing in line with this?
I played Dota 2 from its first beta release, and many years after. Eventually stopped about 2 years ago. In that time I put 4 digit sum into that game, and received nothing that would give me any gameplay advantage. I did it to support the game, that also worked on Linux.
I understand that MTX are not ideal, but there are very different approaches to them. And at least in Dota 2, I can and did support it.
That is fair, Dota 2 is cosmetic only. TF2 on the other hand, is selling items with stats, mostly sidegrades rather than upgrades, but they do play into a certain kind of play, which does make it a de facto upgrade if your style of play matches the items use case.
Hope you enjoy your Steam game library being ripped out of your hands or a forced subscription or recurring purchase or mandatory timed video ads showing up whenever someone who can make decisions for the future of the Valve LLC believes that is the right decision.
The fact is, whoever has possession (e.g. OWNERSHIP) of the decisions for a company can choose to do this, to not do this, or to do something else, or nothing at all. Inevitably decisions by whoever owns that control will change from the predecessors and eventually someone or some combination of someones constituting the deciding majority will sell out. No one lives forever.
Epic Games Store, Gog, UPlay (or whatever ubisoft’s is called), Origin/EA Downloader have all not done this and yet they’re not controlled by Gabe Newell.
Fact is that steam, no one else, started the road down the licensing and not ownership of games path we are firmly on with regards to PC.
Most PC’s don’t even have a disc drive any more, it’s all downloads.
And Gog is the only one that still allows ownership and not licensing of software.
“hurr durr nobody else has does it yet so clearly it can never happen”
Nobody else has 70%+ market share. The others are all competing for a bigger slice, they can’t afford to be predatory.
The market leader can and the rest will follow suit. Haven’t you seen overdraft charges (just now having laws change…decades after becoming a problem), minimal interest rates on savings accounts, ads in streaming services across the board (netflix wasn’t first but the second they did it prime announced it), a reigning in of account sharing based on IP addresses for streaming services (happening across the board after a couple of big players did it)…
I get that you just can’t imagine a world where your game library is RIPPED out of your hands after a 30 day notice of service changes… i’ve seen it happen time and time again for various platforms and games. Digital services can and will fuck you eventually.
Signed: Hellgate London lifetime subscription holder
I’m sorry my opinion and analysis of these things is different than yours. I guess the difference between you and I is that i’d rather us both have a chance to voice those opinions rather than simply silence what you do not believe in.
I’m not following any dogma or parroting a political party line… i’m not being a fanboy either (which is very dogmatic.) Are you?
An LLC or any other corporate structure can have shareholders. It all depends on the structure laid out in the organizing documents. You may have meant private companies don’t have shareholders, but even that isn’t the case.
They’re talking about being a publicly traded company. Of course every company has stakeholders. Of course everyone who works at Larian likes getting paid for their work.
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