Also, support games made with passion and love (even if technically means supporting a big corporation). Legends of Runeterra is an example of a game that absolutely hit the nail on the head (there are zero predatory systems, despite being a collectible card game!), and now has been punished for it.
Honestly, especially games made by big, publicly traded companies. They make games based on marketing algorithms. Buying good games only improves the algorithm.
How hard is it for game devs to organize themselves and start companies that respect them? Worker-owned game studios. Is that hard? Are they unionizing?
The expected profit margin when you try to make a genuinely good passion project is razor thin, if it’s there at all. There are two kinds of games that make money: outliers and whale hunters. When we think of good games proving the games industry wrong, we’re thinking of outliers. The rest of the industry is whale hunters.
In theory you could create some kind of game dev collective where a bunch of indie devs all work on their own thing under the same umbrella, and if any of them make it big, they all split the take to fund the group going forward. But you run into all the same logistical difficulties that normal communism runs into: what does leadership look like? how do you hold members accountable? what does contributing look like when development hell can look like not delivering anything for years, or forever? who pays the lawyers who have to figure that all out?
Silicon valley often had “incubators” which are kind of a middle ground between collectivism and capitalism. An investor funds a shoe string budget to several start up ideas to create minimum viable products. If one looks promising they all switch to shipping that and they’re all part owners.
I’m kinda surprised we don’t see more game dev incubators. Maybe indie outliers are just that rare.
Let’s not pretend that the vast majority of CP2077’s side quests are not that type of C&P’ed filler crap.
They are.
What is significant about CP2077 is how a dozen or so side quests are incredibly stellar, far outdoing even the main (non-expansion) story quest. They’re incredibly good. That’s just a few ones sadly, but they’re big and have lots of interactions and cool moments though, they almost feel like the main quests in a lot of ways.
I get how people didn’t like them. But I had a ton of fun doing the NCPD busywork. The gameplay was engaging enough to entertain me. If you don’t have a lot of time to play video games ut’s sometimes frustrating to watch an hour of cutscenes and only play for a couple minutes. The story was great but it gave me the option to just play.
That bit about “every designer or artist has a bunch of shit ideas and just picks their best 5%” is SO TRUE. Remember this when you’re doing something creative and don’t feel great about it. Just keep doing it.
Ok its not loading properly on my phone so i accept i might have to eat my words here, but i remember the vast majority of quests in cyperpunk being “go into a building and kill some guys”… Not exactly ground breaking stuff
There are two tiers of side quests in cyberpunk. Gigs and full on side quests. The gigs are all pretty short ‘go to place, shoot / rescue someone’ stuff but the main side quests are generally more involved, including all the romance options etc.
The gigs can be skipped without missing much, but skipping the side quests misses a ton of story IMO.
And not just that, you’re a mercenary. There’s only so many types of tasks you get hired for. CDPR did a really great job differentiating gigs from eachother IMO.
Sure some of them are cookie cutter, but there’s a story behind them and sometimes you can link that story into the overall world. Sometimes there’s choices to make that impact the outcome. Usually there’s multiple ways to approach it. And very few of them have the same layout.
There’s 89 Gigs in the base game. I didn’t at all feel ripped off that some of them are similar. I’d rather the gigs feel similar than have them encroaching on the side quests in feel.
I’ve heard this argument thrown out before but my issue is always that you have a permanently declining user base since you can’t buy more copies. This is a band aid delaying the inevitable. It will not allow a game like this to live forever.
There’s one thing, however, that Harrison recommends studios do above all others when sunsetting a live service game: let players keep playing the game on their own servers. Before shutting down Knockout City, Velan released the game as a standalone Windows executable with private server support. It’s still available to download.
Tiefling Astorion would have put people not familiar with forgotten realms too on edge talking to the refugees. Astarion’s capriciousness would have made people think that was a tiefling thing not an Astarion thing
This should be a legal requirement, imo. It’s unreasonable for them to sell a game to people, and then make it impossible to play because they weren’t making enough anymore. That’s like making a movie unwatchable because dvd sales dropped
I would use the term “licensing” rather than leasing. A video rental store “leases” the license.
But the point is, they’re selling you a license to play the game, and then at some point after sale, without you knowing when or why, they rescind the license without compensating you. Any reasonable person would think that purchasing a game means a license to play it indefinitely, especially if you received some kind of binary in exchange for money at the point of sale.
It’s the difference between Uber offering a subscription model, but then a year later suddenly saying they don’t offer it anymore, vs Tesla selling you a car, but a year later disabling features on it, saying, “you were merely licensing/leasing those features”.
pcgamer.com
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