Hard to disagree with the article, it seems it’s safer to wait at least a few weeks or months to play a new game because there are often things to be fixed after launch. Many games have multiple ambitious and complex systems that need to be tuned post launch. Combine this with high expectations/hype that marketing teams foster and you have a recipe for regret and disappointment on day 1 experiences
Remember that the free version of Unity is completely free and no money gets sent to Unity. Boycotting all Unity games only hurts the devs, except when you know the game was made with a Pro version
And? Sometimes tough choices have to be made to stand up for the greater good!
If devs realise people don’t want to support unity, and enough people vote with there wallets, they move to something else. Yes it might suck for some devs who can’t/won’t move but then thats there choice, just like it’s my choice to say screw unity!
Years ago people fought wars for this thing called ‘freedom’ but then come technology and it’s now seems a thing of legends only a select few have! 😳😎
(tbf It never really bothered me, cyberpunk is one of my favourite games ever. The story, the voice acting the goofy and scary side missions. For me the jesus pose and the teleporting cops where forgivable.)
I’ve tried to keep my spoilers to a minimum, but from what I’ve read, MAXTAC has their own siren. At 5* wanted level, when you hear their siren, a little bit of poo will come out.
Police are apparently relentless too - at all wanted levels. Oh, and straying into a gang’s territory with police on your tail can lead to interesting results lol.
I seriously can’t wait! I love netrunning, now I can be the netrunning demon everyone fears!
I’m referring to the spoilers for the changes incoming in update 2.0.
Not everyone likes to read what’s changed and want to experience it first hand. MAXTAC was not in the base game and is a huge part of the consequences of your actions on the street.
I do support live service games though. I prefer them and that’s pretty much all I ever play.
What they’ve done with handling this game in delisting it is quite frankly fantastic - get rid of all micro transactions and bundle every single one with the game and basically give the game away for free at its end of life. Now anyone what wants to play it like a regular single player offline game can for a few bucks, and I believe are least in pc it uses steam for online play so it will still be playable multiplayer. Everyone wins.
I have played several, and the vast majority have been Microtransaction Hell, and many games that are not live service are still consistently updated.
The fact that there are one or two games that do live service without intrusive and annoying microtransactions that are frequently barriers to progression or end up being pay to win doesn't make the description invalid. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The vast majority of Live Service games have zero pay to win microtransactions or barriers to progression. They’re almost all purely cosmetic microtransactions because that’s been proven to be what people want.
There was a bit of a learning curve for devs to see what people would put up with and what they wouldn’t, and stuff you describe was left on the cutting room floor years ago. Even games like COD now give you all actual content for free and just sell you cosmetics, and it’s wildly profitable for them. Selling map pack dlc got abandoned because it split the player base, whereas cosmetics don’t.
Isn't that literally what they are though? Fortnite, WoW, Runescape, Warframe or Hearthstone are all vastly different genres of games but they are still live-service games at the end. What else could the term mean besides "constantly updated", they are a living, evolving long-term service?
What are you basing this definition on? A rudimentary google search for a definition gives more than one answer and yet none of them have "always online" as a requirement for something to be live-service.
Hitman 3 for example is an example of a singleplayer live-service game, Paradox games like Stellaris are basically that as well, and Minecraft and NMS are often used as examples too. Nobody claimed that a game needs to be online to be updated, that's ridiculous, so not sure who was that clarification meant for.
"In the video game industry, games as a service (GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service.
[...]
Games released under the GaaS model typically receive a long or indefinite stream of monetized new content over time to encourage players to continue paying to support the game. This often leads to games that work under a GaaS model to be called "living games", "live games", or "live service games" since they continually change with these updates."
GaaS monetization can't be achieved without a central online service. Even with Hitman 3 a lot of content is locked behind the online requirement.
You can bend the definition as much as you want but this is what most people mean by" live service games".
Because literally every live service game ever made goes out of their way to constantly dictate your engagement with it in a way that is exclusively designed for the sole purpose of taking money from you.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
That’s strange because I’ve spent about $15 all up on micro transaction since they became a thing yet I have tens of thousands of hours in live service games and I’ve had a ball.
The fact that you can "play them" without spending money doesn't change the fact that every single element of every single feature is designed to make you want to spend money, and every interaction with every menu has ads shoved down your face.
There is exactly one design conceit for live service games, and it's "rob every player you can blind". It's the exact business model of every single one. There are zero exceptions.
Every single element of these games isn’t designed to make you want to spend money 😂. Going by your hate for them along with that terrible comment shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Almost every single live service game now just has optional cosmetics as the microtransactions. That’s the opposite of what you’re saying.
Just because some games have certain content on disk doesn’t mean others would. At some stage a game has to be cut for release and is “content complete” for printing. With live service games they continue creating content to sell in-game. With non live service games they don’t.
If you’re going to bring mods into it then that’s a completely different conversation.
Just because there are many games that do it badly doesn't mean the genre label means something different. I'm playing GW2 and Warframe which are very much live service games and I rarely, if ever, feel exploited or manipulated into giving money to them - if anything it's the opposite and the only occassion when I do spend extra on them is when I'm happy with content or updates and want to support them.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
This is subjective and I believe this might be the case for you, but it is demonstratively absolutely not true for everyone. You framing it like some absolute authority on the subject is just shortsighted and inaccurate.
I’ve been playing Old School Runescape and I must say it’s fantastic. Selling drops os enough to pay for my subscription and there’s no microtransactions.
I’ve been playing Dota more than a decade, the game that technically introduce Battle Pass. I don’t even feel pressured to buy microtransaction, the community even disappointed when Valva stop selling the yearly battle pass
The argument against live service games is that you are dependent on the servers hosted by the developer/publisher (afaik).
In normal circumstances, they are able to stop you from playing or alter the terms at any time however they like.
This is a dominant/subordinate relationship which is quite risky. Especially for young people who are still learning what a healthy relationship looks like.
The alternative is a equality relationship where you decide if you buy something based on the price.
One argument against that would be that you can „rent“ an apartment as well. But legislature has shown that states will intervene on a vendor (landlord) redefining the terms of the contract. Not so much with gaming.
Now you are arguing that the game is taken off live service and you will be able to play it offline. I don’t know if that is the case but if so then buying it now would actually send the message that doing the right thing after all boosts sales.
TL;DR: Live service games are badly legislated imo but truly making such a game offline playable with all dlc would be a good thing in my book.
Sorry you got downvoted by this Lemmy circlejerk. There's a certain toxcicity in these parts; basically anything not Linux and offline with the slightest hint of privacy issues is downright hated here.
Which is funny since the fediverse by its core principles has 0 consideration towards privacy.
It is really astonishing how reddit-like the hivemind here has become already, people don't care about even objectively discussing the terminology if they can circlejerk about "GaaS is bad ehmahgerd" instead, just going straight for extreme viewpoints and seeing it black and white. Really thought I got away from that when I joined here...
Live service games represent lazy, copy and paste style game mechanics. They’re insulting to the gaming consumer’s intelligence, and they’re basically just jobs. Daily inconsequential tasking that eventually allows you to do an inconsequential raid, where you have a 1 in 1000 chance of dropping a rare item. All so you can stand around in the game world’s hub and show off your meaningless cosmetic item that isn’t really all that useful because you’ve accomplished all of your mundane, copy and paste goals. Oh, and the casino mechanics that psychologically incentivize buying microtransactions.
The game being “constantly updated” isn’t the issue. The issue is that the “constant updates” are basically nothingburger, repetitive tasks that you’ve already done a thousand times.
Do I care enough to go on a crusade and slap boxes out of people’s hands? Fuck no. But they are a stain on gaming
I don’t know about that. The game has now removed all of the live service elements, so I would say it’s showing that there is interest in this type of game without the live service.
Granted, I’m only like five of the twelve hours in I’m supposed to be before the game starts getting good, but my god they made some baffling design choices here. Possibly the most egregious is the fact that every skill comes with leveling requirements - for example, the worst offender I’ve seen is the oxygen (stamina) skill requiring you to completely exhaust your meter 20 times before you can put a second point in. (Worth noting, ‘completely exhaust’ in this context means deplete both the regular O2 meter and max out the CO2 meter, which depletes more slowly than the O2 refills) The only way to reliably and safely do this, considering you only really need stamina in short bursts when playing normally, is to literally just run fucking laps. Bad and boring, to the point that I will say, without a hint of sarcasm, that the person responsible for making it this way should be moved off the team. I cannot fathom how that person arrived at the conclusion that doing chores was somehow the most exciting and innovative way to spice up FO4’s perk system, because that’s all it is underneath, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
pcgamer.com
Ważne