After watching the Folding Ideas video I was 100% sure I will never come back to this game. Toxiest years of my life. I’m glad for many experiences and friends WoW gave me, but I am really over it and I love being a filthy casual in FFXIV.
I can’t speak for FFXIV, but if you want pvp in an MMO you might give guild wars 2 a try. It’s got 5v5 pvp matches where everyone is on an even playing field. It’s available in the free to play version, and you can go into it right after the tutorial if you want, don’t even have to do leveling.
There’s also a large scale pvp mode called world vs world where you have three teams of hundreds of players fighting over territory. That one uses non-equalized stats so it’s an end game thing, but it’s a lot of fun!
I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation’s team. I didn’t like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a “MOBA mode” plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.
5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).
In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They’ve recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.
Whether you are a current player … or maybe you jumped off the WoW train a few expansions ago, now is the time to come home
Sorry, but I left this abusive relationship years ago for a reason. Not coming back. I am also not sure if multiple expansions in a short time frame will be what the users want that are fine with going back every 2-3 years for a new expansion for three month and quit, if there is not enough time inbetween to forget why they stopped playing. Just saying.
And for the story side of things, they have messed up everything to the point that I do not even want to read about the story anymore. I am just done with the world and the lore and the graphics. There are so many interesting worlds and ideas out there, so many great games. I have fond memories of the friends I made ingame, but I also regret the massive amount of time I spent in one single game. It wasn’t healthy for me.
Blizz always has great ideas and then falls flat in execution. I say this as a WoW player. It’s ok. If they can pull off these ideas, which they absolutely have not proven, then this could be good. I remain skeptical.
You have a point, but I think WoW succeeds in spite of itself. They promise big things then deliver a fraction. It never lives up to the hype, IMO. I think it’s that there’s nothing better, and if there was, it’d have to be a LOT better because of sunk cost fallacy. 80% of the reason I play WoW is because I have always played WoW. I like my stuff and friends there.
Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it’s presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.
I fondly remember my wow days and friends. But it doesn’t fit into my life any more. It’s too all-consuming. Plus, it feels less like an adventure and more like a theme park. Everything is so tidy and precise with carefully measured dopamine hits at regular intervals.
There’s no getting back the things I’m nostalgic for. Even if all the people came back and I got back into my guild, I have kids and obligations. I don’t want my kids to hear me say something like I can’t attend their play because it’s raid night, or watch me rush to finish daily quests before bed like any of that shit matters.
I’m still casual friends with some of the folks I met through wow. But I’m done with it.
Daily quests, login rewards, any other mechanic that wants to dictate when I should play, all that ruined my relation with a lot of games. I actively try to ignore them nowadays. If my line of reasoning is I should play a little more because the reward is around the corner and will be gone tomorrow, I’ll let the most precious opportunity go to waste to protect my mental health.
My favorite things were random PvP at Tarren Mill, getting a group together for UBRS, LBRS, and Strath back when that was all we could do, and some of the epic storylines leading up to dungeons and raids like the Drakkensryd.
I met my guild leader just out questing and we started roleplaying and it grew from there. Does anyone actually meet folks out questing any more? I haven’t played in a long time. I got back together with some friends for one expansion and that was the end of it.
Is this the cuckoo’s egg strategy? Require the user to install your games and consume so much disk space that they have to choose between playing your game and somebody else’s?
It’s 140GB on console and >200GB on PC… You can’t actually uninstall Warzone if you have CoD HQ installed, so MW3‘s total size is technically just 90 GB plus other garbage. Even if all you want to install is the campaign, you still need to download 100+ GB of other data first.
We heard you liked call of duty, so we made it so you have to start your old caller of duti before you can play your new phone of obligation, so you can play telephone of responsibility while you play anticipate of indirect tax
Kojima, the driving force of Metal Gear is gone. What is left is a corporate committee who through focus testing and guesswork try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
They will make any new version look and feel as much as possible as the previous games, only deviating for committee-approved reasons of monetization, trend chasing, or marketing appeal.
What they will not and can not do is to strap a rocket to the roof of Metal Gear Solid, take a hard right and drive the car off the road and into the hills and launch it over Mount Everest. They don’t have the will, the auteur ability, or the trust of the fanbase.
Kojima could do that, which is what made the franchise what it is today.
MGS is dead, but Konami owns the pelt. What comes out next is just taxidermy with animatronics.
As far as I’m concerned the series is definitively over. 5 was the final. You don’t really need Kojima for remakes, just a team of good devs who love the series. But I also don’t trust Konami to pull that simple thing off. What is with the really bad “remake” ports from all the game companies in the last few years? Is it that hard to remake a game?
As someone who thinks Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the best Metal Gear since Solid 1*, I really do wish it had become an ensemble world. Platinum doing Raiden/Grey Fox. Imagine IOI making an ACTUAL stealth game set in that world. Hell, I could even see a timeline where Arkane made a game where you play as The Cobras. Instead, we just kept going back to the Snake well and had ever increasing dissonance between cutscene, boss, and normal gameplay characterizations.
As for bad remasters/remakes: A lot of that is that this is The COVID Year in terms of releases. These are most of the games that would have had most of their dev cycle during lockdown and were heavily delayed or had massive scope changes to meet release windows. Sometimes that means we get truly amazing games (BG3) and sometimes that means we have shovelware that just needs to avoid sunken cost fallacies.
And the other aspect is that a LOT of studios, particularly Japanese ones, are in the process of upgrading their tech. I loved Like a Dragon: Ishin (and am so excited for Gaiden next week). But that was a VERY small scope/ambition game (a mostly beat for beat remake of one of the lesser PS2 games) that was pretty openly about exploring Unreal Engine. And there have been a lot of games that are less open about “Hey, we are mostly dicking around to see if this tech works for us”.
*: 3 was awesome but very much “Empire Strikes Back”… in a lot of ways including the conspiratorial “So did the Creator actually write this? Because a lot of signs point to ‘no’”. And 5 was an awesome sandbox with no plot or pacing to speak of
I played the main series and never played the side, PSP games like peace walker, so I was completely lost when playing 5. I was wondering what this setting and people were for a while, until I realized I had to go back and read up on peace walker.
Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.
All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO and PW was a prototype for the format of TPP):
This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her but her true love is, and always will be, Big Boss. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.
Don’t think too hard about why Skullface is basically just Hot Coldman but more of an edgelord.
A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.
I hate it when developers make what they say are side games in a series essential to canon, especially when they don’t tell you they’re doing it or when they go into the side game not planning to make it canon and then decide it’s canon during or after development.
Or I should say, I hate it when developers make the next main series game assuming you’ve played the essential “side” game and leave out or half-ass their catch-up for people who haven’t played it. I call it “Chain of Memories syndrome” after when Kingdom Hearts made Chain of Memories essential to fully understanding KH2.
What they need to do is take whoever the next director of the game is going to be, strap them to a chair Clockwork Orange style and mix the entire Criterion Collection and Evangelion for about a year or two.
Then just for good measure have them write a page of names and slap them anytime a name nears anything of normal.
Then, and only then, should they be allowed to start working.
try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
Based on their last attempt they couldn’t even manage that. Have we already forgotten that as soon as Kojima left the company, Metal Gear Survive came out?
PS, Kojima has a really cool Instagram where he posts his thoughts and stuff he likes, if anyone is a big fan and wants to sub to him. Dude has some radical tastes lol
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Aktywne