Considering I have 827 games on Steam, the figure of $1620.26 doesn't seem too bad. Now I've probably bought a load more bundles bumping that up, but there's no convenient way to figure out how much that adds (let's round to $2000). I've had the account 18 years, 9 months.
I mean, Factorio’s early access is the middle point between now and when God of War 2 was released. Meaning that when Factorio was on early access God of War 2 was as old then as Factorio is now.
The article puts the cutoff for “old” as being 6 years or more. Officially, Factorio was released in 2020, but we all know that any other studio would have considered it done years before that.
I don’t even know what the newest game I even own is… Helldivers 2? Except for Elden Ring and it’s DLC, I haven’t bought anything close to release for years. HD2 came out last year and I bought it last week.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring are the last 2 AAA games I bought close to launch for full price. Other than that, I picked up Hades 2 in early access. The rest of my library is all stuff that I bought on sale.
I do have Monster Hunter and Avowed on my wishlist but I think I’m going to be patient. If I do pull the trigger, it would probably be for Avowed because I want more Obsidian games. On a related note Grounded is $20 on Steam right now so I stopped that up even though I beat it back when I had Game Pass.
Based on the size of the company and the budget for the game I’d at least call it a AA game. My real point is I paid full price for it and have absolutely no regrets.
You know, I was thinking about upgrading my graphics card this year along with the rest of my PC but I think I can squeeze a couple more years out of my 3060 TI at this rate.
This might be a unpopular view but I think games like Elden Ring or Lies of P are a better RPGs. More action packed, less busy/boring missions. I beat BG3 and had fun for the first half of the game, the last half was a bit of a drag. I tried KCD 1 and couldn’t get into it, going from one end of the map to another doing mindless tasks. It was more of a middle-age simulator. I put ~250 hours into Elden Ring + DLC and I wanted more by the end of it.
Either way, I have some hope for the future of games.
Elden Ring better classified as an action RPG, to use an analog its more akin to PnP dungeon crawlers in how it approaches its RPG elements. While say Baldurs Gate 3 is closer to an extended campaign PnP game. They are both RPGs but that’s such a broad grouping so as to be meaningful, an atlatl and a welding torch are both tools but there’s no meaningful overlap.
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
You can complete 90% of everything in one playthrough. Then complete the other parts in NG+ so you’re not completely starting over. I believe you only need 2 great runes to face the end boss.
Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
Or, hear me out, the future might be 2D pixel-art games made by one or two people in a bedroom – not by critical acclaim or player sentiment, but just by sheer volume, filling up digital storefronts.
Im almost done playing crosscode and i was floored away by how engaging and fun it is. I never thought id invest 60+ hours in it so willingly and eagerly. Honestly the best time ive had in gaming in a long time.
The baffling thing about RoP is that they had a budget multiple times greater than the Jackson movies and still made substantially worse looking armor and weapons.
Like, forget the scripting issues, how do you not just hire as many of the same companies as you can find?
I thought the first season had its moments but some of those armors… Oof.
That wasn’t the case. In 2023 dollars, the LotR trilogy had a budget of around $513 million, eventually resulting in about 12 hours of finished product. RoP has a budget of about $150m for around 9 hours. So the trilogy spent $42m per hour compared to RoP’s $16m per hour.
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.
I can’t imagine how it sucks to being these devs. They obviuosly earned more and lived better than me, but I’d have a hard time parting with some project even if they are all mismanaged unborn messes.
I was a professional developer in a wide range of gaming areas for about 20 years… Looking back, I can honestly say that 95% of the work I did ended up as a vapor… The 5% that made it to market were so fleeting…
I derived my satisfaction not from completing projects, but solving the underlying problems. That kept me very engaged.
Especially if Silksong comes out this year. I could see a board memeber pointing at it saying, “IF THAT FLAT GAME CAN MAKE A MORBILLION DOLLARS, WE CAN MAKE ONE SO FAST AND GET SO MUCH MONEY!”
Just ask “what is making money” to get the answer. It’s still live service and gacha shit, but I’m sure they’ll try to add machine learning to it somehow cause you gotta have that
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