I’ve heard “we’re going to do something never been done in a game before” a few times in the last decade, and even the people who I genuinely thought could do it, haven’t actually done it. CDPR was already one of those developers. Now they’re saying it again?
Pixel Dungeons/Nethack be like that depending on the RNG. The color of the potions doesn’t indicate their effect; the effect is randomized and you could totally end up with Red potions that give magic, and blue potions that give health. Tho more than likely the red potion will be acid and the blue potion will be a bomb, and consuming either kills you.
Night City is a masterpiece of design on a scale that’s never been done before, nothing even close. Not sure if CDPR made promises regarding that, but they do good work and their track record shows it.
One of the best ways to drain people's energy nowadays, is via video game design.
I like to open my games with a long segment of walking while your character is injured, so they really just kind of slog along at a slow pace. Having them be injured at the start is good, because they can really get used to pressing a single button to move forward without having to worry about any other buttons. Since they're stuck going slow this is also a good time to have a narrator or other npc explain convoluted lore of the world that you won't really care about, but it'll be mildly important if you put in over 100 hours into the game, so we can include that unskippable dialogue here.
Then after 8 or 9 minutes of injured walking, we'll have a 3 minute unskippable cutscene in which our character gets healed, but then also gets thrown into their first combat. And me, I like a challenge, so the first enemy is a boss fight, but since the player probably doesn't know the buttons yet, it should probably take most players at least 3 tries. The fun part is, you can't save until after beating that first boss, so if you fail, you have to go through the 9 minute slow walking segment and 3 minute unskippable cutscene again.
At this point a lot of gamers go onto the internet to complain about stuff like this, and I just respond that all that stuff is unskippable to protect the narrative vision of our game. Even though really most of the story is just lifted from "A Good Day to Die Hard."
It's not as powerful a drain as you can get in person, but you can get little bits from a lot of angry nerds on the internet at once.
I actually enjoyed that game, was the first and only mafia game I played. I really like the cars and music of that era, the racial tensions also added a lot to the story and gameplay.
My vote for worst energy vampire game would be AC Valhalla, just barely fun enough to keep me playing for over 150 hours just to see how the story concludes. Wow what a waste of time that was, story made almost no sense on the ISU side and the conflict building with your brother ends with him just giving his clan to you.
Yeah Valhalla was the last AC I’m probably ever gonna play because of that. I mean, I guess I kind of enjoyed some of it? I liked the proto-halloween story with the Welsh girl the blacksmith falls in love with, and no one understands as fucking word she says.
There were a few things I liked, but the alliance missions got really stale. I feel like if the writing was even 10% of what the witcher had, I would have cared about these dozens of side characters, that you only see again at the end of the game. Just blew me away how lazily the cut scenes and scripted portions were made, really gave me the quantity over quality vibe early on in the game.
half vampire, half mortal. Always seemed kind of silly to me, since I always felt like vampire was more of a modifier then a race, but lore exists so vOv
I play one in Pathfinder, and being able to travel by day is useful, but the sun is such a debuff that it’s really more of a nice thought than anything I take seriously.
I mean, this isn’t that dissimilar to a Persona game: normal school kid by day, with requirements on time; superhero badass at night delving into the digital world to fight bad guys.
Reminds me of how Castle super best was saying how some find it refreshing to see metaphor tackle rascism, but it’s not uncommon to see it in western gaming. They just never played games from that end of the pond.
Or at least release the server code when you shut the game down, so anyone can spin up a server of their own. Community servers are fine, but you should always be able to host your own for friends to play on.
Well, no.
Deep Rock Galactic has fully optional skin packs to make money and they're doing great.
Warframe has been chugging along for over a decade now and they're doing great. Beating the pants off of Destiny 2 for average player count.
The live service trick is that live service only works if the company actually cares about the product. Those two companies stand out because they legitimately care and have great communication with their communities.
So far Warframe has been the ONLY example of a good live service game. It’s the OG when it comes to the model, but it’s also the exception, and not the rule.
Destiny historically vasscilated between “fucking amazing” and “dumpster fire”. The problem has always been that it is near impossible to maintain that level of quality and entertainment consistently while also innovating on a regular basis. It is very difficult and very expensive.
They moved into “dumpster fire” territory significantly more than “fucking amazing”, sadly. Like one good expansion, three bad updates and two bad expansions, one good update.
“Live service” is a game that has an always online requirement. Just getting updates on the regular doesn’t make it a live service if the game works just fine without an Internet connection.
Single player Ubisoft games are all “live services”, due to some of them needing a constant connection to Ubisoft’s servers, and them having in-game shops that only work while online.
They’re the same thing. “Live service” is how Activision-Blizzard rebranded games that required to be always online. They also solidified the outline of things publishers at the time were already doing with their always online games, such as endless content players will have to buy.
Those documents leaked many years ago, and soon after that the moniker was changed from “always online” to “Live Service”.
I’ll try and find them, but first I heard from it was from Jim Stirling. “The Jimquisition” on YouTube, I think. Haven’t kept up with that guy in years.
DRG and Warframe also hit the critical requirement of actually being games that are fun to play!
I haven’t played a lot of WF, but I’ve got hundreds of hours on DRG. There is no grind. Getting holiday loot takes 5 to 8 matched total, and the Seasons are long and very relaxed. I maxed out XP for this season already and the next probably won’t start until at least this summer.
The community is going strong, the game is fun, Ghost Ship seems stable and like a nice place to work. It’s so stupid that more companies don’t see that they could run like this instead of chasing “get rich quick” corporate schemes that always alienate the fans.
Warframe’s MTX is so fair too. All of it can be earned in game, get items sell items for Platinum (paid currency) get the item from the shop.
The exception is the Fan made skins that are a few bucks. But those directly support the fan created skins.
Warframe is mostly pay-2-convenience.
The latest story expansion Warframe 1999 was phenomenal. If you havent played it yet, definitely follow through the main story it’s all tied together. One of the best stories that continue to deliver.
The problem being that execs often learn the wrong lesson from that. Instead of learning that this type of live service game isn’t wanted by the market, they’re likely to learn that this series of games or this character is no longer wanted.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne