I had the exact opposite experience! I went through a lengthy process of signing up for and activating the weird nonstandard eID that most places don’t accept over the normal one I already have and use for everything, the only one they supported, only to be told I can’t use it without manually contacting the company, have them invalidate my activation and then go into some office to get manually re-activated.
As with everything in the EU, eId needs to be implemented separately by 27 member states and some states do it better than others. I am just lucky to live in a state that does e-government quite well all things considered.
Sure, but this is the thing that really annoys me: my state has really good eID, it just doesn’t work with the EU stuff. It works with literally every other government service, most companies, often as physical ID, for payments, etc etc
Yeah it was very easy actually. Though fair warning to people who are sensitive to flashing lights: after logging in with DigiD (Netherlands) my screen went full strobe mode. Looked like multiple pages loading in quick succession with different background colours before finally landing on the success screen.
I think so. It’s got an interesting story, and finding all the evidence to catch the perp is pretty fun too imo. It definitely plays up the “noire” of it all, with the pulpy detective cases and interrogations.
So, I had a look at it… It feels like a Blooper reel made for the game… The Toy Story one I believe started off with them using bloopers from the VA sessions.
But nonetheless, to have such content requires the game itself being fully finished before the deadline. This is the basic requirement we lack currently, so such stuff will only add to the stress of the devs.
I booted it up yesterday. Flew around at 10 FPS and gawked at some pretty locations. Bought armor and weapons for my allotted alpha money and crashed.
Booted it back up today, all gone. FPS was better. Took an elevator and got stuck in an ether-world. Respawned. Had to wait 10 real-time minutes for my ship to be “delivered” to the station it should’ve already been at. Flew to a lagrange point just to see the volumetric gas clouds. Couldn’t find any stations. RTB, quit, uninstalled.
I’m going to be brutally honest; if they do not start designing their ship cockpits with at least input from a real pilot then I’m gonna start being upset about it. You can’t see anything! Huge canopies in fighter cockpits, can’t see shid. I would accept this if they had implemented synthetic vision so you could just x-ray through the ship hull, but you can’t, and I’ve never heard them talk about it so I assume it’s not on the table. A lot of the ship HUDs are also dense with useless information, blocking more of my view.
Waiting 10 whole minutes to get your ship back is the devs not respecting the player’s time.
I know why they do it though, they want people to buy more ships so that they have one ready while the original is in a cool down period. This is also a similar tactic used by shitty mobile phone games.
The only time you have to wait for the ship is if it’s destroyed or lost. If you fly it to the station or landing zone and stow it, the delivery is immediate.
And you can buy and rent ships in-game, using in-game money. This is about preventing you from instantly jumping back in the same ship repeatedly which could have huge implications for PvP, for instance.
The point still stands though. Arbitrary time restrictions like this make it more difficult to enjoy the game because you don’t get to fly the cool spaceships anymore, now you’re stuck on land or in a station somewhere until the timer expires.
Exactly. One could spend at least 10 mins just getting provisions like food liquids and gear by walking/running across the station and trams. Plenty to do with how spaced out (no pun intended) the facilities are. Maybe they should put ship insurance kiosks near the apts so that by the time you get to the space port you’d have to wait a minimum amount of time.
They really just haven’t implemented the insurance kiosks yet. I do think they should take a lesson from real life and let those claims happen remotely.
I’m happy that the Citizen Con update included S42 being feature complete. I hope they will start moving some resources back to SC with that.
What people often forget is that SC has been a minor focus for a couple of years while they finish up Squadron.
They do mention exactly this. Once S42 drops we will start to see a flood of quality of life improvements in SC. This is one of the reasons my main fighter is the Aegis Gladius.
Yeah there is plenty more to come they just need to finish up S42 and get that on a slow burn to deal with the inevitable bugs, and reallocate resources to the verse.
Been out of the game for about a year now and a lot has changed and it seems like there are nearing completion on some of the major framework. I think with the reallocation and framework mostly complete we’ll finally get some real content.
Those are excellent points if the game wasn’t a broken mess where your ship will blow up on the pad for no reason. It’s a tech demo, they even say as much, so I don’t understand why you have to insist that it’s a real game that people totally play for realsies. There are like 14 people who play the current iteration seriously, everyone else are just trying to keep up to date on the status of SC.
I would be a much bigger fan of SC if I didn’t have to grind for days to experience half of what this tech demo wants to demo me. Are we alpha testers or are we suckers? Also the game ate my money, anyway.
The time restriction will make sense when there is a game to play, not while it’s a tech demo.
There are like 14 people who play the current iteration seriously, everyone else are just trying to keep up to date on the status of SC.
At this point you are just flailing.
If you actually had any clue about SC or had bothered to Google it, you’d know DAU numbers (50,000 average daily players across all regions, in 2022), and you’d never have made such an inane claim.
And no, CIG does not call it a tech demo, they call it an alpha, the 2 of which are not remotely similar.
I’d like to meet those 50000 average daily players, because they sure aren’t on any of the server I play on.
I’m glad you’re having fun. This is not a reasonable response to criticism of your favorite space toy simulator. I have invested money into this, too. I also want it to thrive. I hope you have a lovely day.
I can count the number of times I've been put into an empty server on one hand. The game has a pretty dedicated playerbase.
That said, I completely agree with the notion that time restrictions don't really make sense right now. The game is far too buggy in it's current state to really make the insurance claim times make sense and the developers seem a little out of touch on that. They have actually tried to increase the wait time several times to massive outcry from the community. I really think they would be better served cutting the grind down a little bit while they iron out the game.
I can’t discount that the state of my network is somehow responsible for putting me in near-empty servers (it’s complicated), but your second paragraph is exactly spot on.
Disagree. The intention is for SC to be a space sim sandbox, so I’m surprised they’re only making you wait 10m.
When you take your car into the shop and have to wait a few hours for it to be repaired, you don’t think “the solution they want me to go with is to buy a second car for this moment”, right? But that’s the argument you’re making here. If this is the lens you see all games through, then it’s impossible for anyone to make a game that’s just literally normal life.
Conversely, I could argue that mobile games are built around instant dopamine rushes. Any 10m wait is explicitly accompanied with an option to pay the wait away immediately. Afaik, that’s not an option here, if you’re a new player, you have to wait that 10m no matter what. Correct me if I’m wrong. But that’s not a very good job at capitalizing on the wait time.
What value do timegates add to video games? How does the user experience improve or degrade if the wait is, say five minutes? One minute? None? Is the point of the simulation to wait for everything? What’s the difference between acceleration humans can’t survive and wait times? What’s the line we can’t cross to suspend disbelief?
I personally think it’s all made up so making me twiddle my thumbs for 10m is fucking stupid. If I wanted a waiting simulator I’d play “kickstarting Star Citizen” or a less punishing game like Desert Bus.
Like it or not it does have an effect, which is to raise the stakes. If everything is instant gratification there are less lows, but also less highs. You may prefer games that are less punishing, and that’s fine, most people do. It does have an impact on the experience that creates value for people who like a more punishing experience, though. It doesn’t create that value in the moment you’re waiting, it creates it when you’re debating whether a risk is worth it somewhere else in the game. If there was no punishment for a mistake, there’s no reason to debate the risks, and that removes the high of taking a risk and having it pay off.
Time is the one thing we all suffer through equally.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a whale gamer with 100 ships or a normal person with 1 or 2.
Those 10 minutes pass the same for us all. And it’s that consequence upon death that gives real weight, meaning and purpose to your choices.
It’s what’s meant to keep you from going, “hurr durr guns go brrrr” and shooting everyone you see on sight like a neanderthal.
The only thing I don’t agree with is the current durations given the state of the game.
Often your ship explodes through no fault of your own. They should incrementally increase wait times as the game stabilizes more on my opinion.
But in a game where death is not permanent like real life time is one of the few things that weighs on us all the same.
And yes, ofc owning more ships b/c you’re wealthier than other players does give you an advantage over other players, doesn’t invalidate my point.
If anything that’s making it more realistic, and some day 200 years from now when they implement “Death of a Spaceman” there will be harsher penalties to death that you can’t whale your way out of, forcing you to prize your life and take action accordingly.
It’s not meant to appeal to everyone. Nothing is meant to appeal to everyone.
If you don’t like it, that’s fine, don’t play, no one is forcing you.
If you disagree with the game mechanics, that’s fine, don’t play. No one is forcing you.
If the devs need to do x, y, and z to appease you as an individual or you’re going to quit, that’s fine, don’t play. No one is forcing you.
In spite of your short attention span, these are good questions. The point of a proper simulation isn’t to be fun, and game that wants to be fun is usually not a perfect simulation. A game that wants to be a fun simulation has to find the middle ground. I’ve heard it referred to as “the good suck”: It sucks to have to wait for something in a game to happen, but it contributes to a larger, sometimes desired feeling of immersion. But yeah, there’s always a line where the suck outweighs the fun.
In the case of SC, if the game literally makes you sit and do nothing for 10m, that’s one thing. But my guess is it doesn’t. My guess is you can do other things in the meantime. So it’s basically like any game: you can’t just do anything you want at any time, otherwise it’s not a game, it’s a skinner box.
In the case of SC, if the game literally makes you sit and do nothing for 10m, that’s one thing. But my guess is it doesn’t. My guess is you can do other things in the meantime
What do you mean by ‘guess’? Have you not played it?
Well, if taming dinos in ARK was instantaneous, it would massively change the game, and turn it into nothing but a constant stream of t-rex (or other large predator monster) battles. Those 1-hour countdowns are a time-gate for balance.
If reloading in CS:GO was instantaneous, there would be no tactical decision around when you do it, or danger presented by it happening at an inopportune time. Those 3-second reloads are a time-gate for balance.
There are tons of time-gated mechanics across all sorts of games. You just don’t like this one.
How does the user experience improve or degrade if the wait is [less]?
Well, it means that other players may have to contend with them too-quickly returning to a fight as though nothing happened, which would be pretty crappy if you just got finished killing them. It would mean that if you fly across the solar system in a ship with a very fast Quantum Drive, you could potentially just summon your large, slow ship at your destination, effectively obviating the difference in travel time.
What’s the difference between acceleration humans can’t survive and wait times? What’s the line we can’t cross to suspend disbelief?
It’s not about realism, it’s about game balance. Your ships are something you need to take care of. Dying is and will have major consequences (loss of items, for instance). Do you think that Eve’s manufacturing timers are about realism, or that they are disrespectful to the players? Should a tiny shuttle take the same amount of time to build as a Titan (the largest ship class in the game)?
TTK is obviously substantially longer than an FPS, so instead of the 15 seconds you need for an objective mode there, you need something more substantial for battles to fundamentally work.
This isn’t a good argument, though. You replied to somebody stating the intention with a description of a game that’s in alpha.
Generally, they want everybody to have a good time, but that’s not realistic right now. Star Citizen isn’t being marketed as a fully functional game is being marketed as an alpha where people can see features that are being worked on.
Getting mad about one thing working as intended because something else isn’t right now just sounds like your expectations aren’t aligned with reality.
Yeah but they have a useful instrument panel. The panels in SC are not particularly useful except for combat. There’s 3 separate graphs that display your power usage in the Cutlass, not counting the HUD.
I’m not trying to be snarky, but landing in hangars or on pads in SC requires third person mode. You have no tools to check your clearance except experience. I have no issue landing F-35s in VTOL VR without autopilot assistance, or flying IFR/VFR in MSFS, but in SC I feel like I’m piloting a brick through a tank-commanders vision slits. Even dedicated fighters place the pilot so low in the cockpit that the entire bottom half of the screen is just interior and MFDs. Real fighter pilots can look down at a decent angle, because visual is essential in dogfighting which is the only kind of fighting this game has.
Thanks for copying the list out; I'm not visiting YouTube either at the moment. I think I probably saw this video a while ago though -- at least, that particular set of games looks very familiar...
I've played some of them and have some things to say about them:
Paradise Killer: I liked the music in this one. I'd never encountered the vaporwave aesthetic before bumping into this game via a Let's Play (back when I was still going to YouTube) which probably enhanced the weirdness factor of the game for me. It clearly took inspiration from Danganronpa, so if you liked that game you might want to check it out (or vice versa if you somehow ran into Paradise Killer without having heard of Danganronpa, I guess).
Crosscode: I found this game frustrating. I liked a lot of things the game did -- like the interaction with party members (EXCEPT for dungeons) and running around the map searching for secrets -- but... the default difficulty seemed to be set to maximize annoyance. I mean, it's doable. I was very stubborn about not changing the timing setting -- probably too much so -- and was eventually able to beat the main game, but the way it was tuned definitely reduced my enjoyment. The game claims that adjusting the setting doesn't matter, but tracks statistics about it (like GTA-style stats) which made me really stubborn about not changing the setting. A lot of the challenges in the game are Zelda-esque timing puzzles -- from hell. Like hit the switch then run over and do something before time runs out but with 20 steps instead of the one or two you'd find in a Zelda game. (If you don't like those sorts of timing puzzles you probably won't have a good time with this one.) So, of course, the timing is set in such a way that it's often tricky to actually pull off (particularly with aiming involved) even once you've figured out exactly what needs to be done. I did it, but more often than not got pissed off while doing it. The game additionally had the interesting idea of having competitive dungeons. Your party members would challenge you on the overall time to clear dungeons. So, in addition to the time pressure of individual puzzles, there was an overall time pressure to race through the puzzles as fast as possible. I liked the idea of where they were coming from with the party member interactions for dungeons but I'd have preferred to take my time with things frankly. It ultimately doesn't matter that much whether you win or lose those (I won about half of them), but having the game rub my nose in it for being too slow after getting frustrated at puzzle timing and aiming for an hour or more in each dungeon kind of sucked. The overall plot of the game was interesting enough to go through, and I liked the characters for the most part, but a lot of the gameplay was frustrating. Very mixed feelings on this one.
Phoenotopia Awakening: This game was another mixed bag. I really wanted to like it. There were a lot of parts I did like... but it is very flawed. First is the gameplay. It presents itself as a mostly cute pixel platformer/adventure game, but the developers seemed to be thinking "Dark Souls" with stamina and such and... it really did not work for me. Thankfully, you can turn most of that crap off -- and I did so unabashedly. (I beat DS1 before playing it, and since playing it I've beaten DS2 -- so it's not like I can't handle hard games. It just did not feel good to play with those mechanics enabled.) Second is the story. There's a decent enough hook to get the main adventure going fairly early on, but the game doesn't deliver on it. You get to the end and the big dramatic question of the game is... still unanswered! That is really not ok! (Instead you get a bunch of unnecessary backstory for the main character that I took as a big "fuck you"; I won't say more than that in case someone does want to play it and find out for themselves, but the ending was really unsatisfying to me.) The game had a lot going for it -- the music's good (and I still listen to some of the tracks occasionally), and there was a lot of charm in places. Some of the areas were really pretty and there were a bunch of fun little interactions -- but I really don't know what they were thinking with some of it!
Goddamn I’ve been looking forward to a release for years now but goddamn this is sad.
THE MAJORITY OF THE MAP IS ALREADY DONE IN RDR2. JUST REBUILD THE GAME AS DLC FOR THAT. Ffs we’re all willing to shill out major dollars for Rdr1 to be remade in rdr2s engine and with West Elizabeth already existing in RDR2s map you could easily just continue on from the end of 2 into 1!
Hell most of the characters are in 2 as well! Port the quests and voice acting over, not saying it’s not massive but ffs that’s the 60 dollar DLC we’d ALL gladly pay for!
Goddamn studio execs are morons.
Edit I see that there are rumors and speculation that a full PS5/XSX/PC remaster is also possible, but at this point I’ll believe it when I see it. I really hope so, but I’m just so annoyed with how game studios handle this now. If they need cashflow in between major releases then do what Witcher did with Blood & Wine. We don’t need a new engine for every small release, release a decent DLC and honestly I’d pay $50-60 bucks for it. Blood and Wine deserved the $40 and honestly maybe a bit more. If they redid RDR1 as DLC to RDR2 I think it’d be very fair to pay $60 for it and it wouldn’t require a whole new engine.
That’s probably true sadly, but still only ps4 and switch… Which I guess are the two systems that don’t have back compat.
That’s the thing about rdr1 though, they could basically name their price a true remaster and tons of people would buy a full one too. You could set a ludicrous number like 150 and I shamefully would still buy it if it were a good remaster.
You might be willing to pay an absurd amount, but you’re definetely in the minority there, most people will definetely not be willing to pay more than $60 for a remaster
It looks cool, but frankly I’m far more interested in how it’s going to be monetized. I bought into PoE early access back in the day but stopped playing after a few years because I got fed up with how its game design is compromised in order to accommodate its business model. Specialized stash tabs for currency, maps, cards, etc. are basically a mandatory purchase, since inventory management is hell without them. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but IMO deliberately introducing game design problems, such as tedious inventory management, so that you can sell the solutions is a scummy practice. The same goes for drop rates, which are frustratingly low in order to force you to trade instead of finding your gear yourself, since in order to trade effectively, you need to buy a few premium tabs. Even though I actually made all these purchases to overcome these artificial hindrances, being squeezed like that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I just couldn’t enjoy the game anymore. If they keep this up in PoE2, I’m going to steer well clear.
…but IMO deliberately introducing game design problems so that you can sell the solutions is a scummy practice.
This isn’t your personal opinion. This is a valid complaint from many avid gamers. I am not one of these avid gamers. However, I have read about this issue from many gamers in this particular space (i.e. non-casual players).
I dunno, the game seems extremely popular and successful despite this, so clearly a lot of people don’t mind. It’s hard to gauge what the majority opinion is.
On the one hand I totally agree, on the other hand I spent like 40€ on PoE for everything I wanted and got way more gameplay out of it than of many full price games.
I also have a lot of playtime in it, but most of it wasn’t really quality time. I tried real hard to like the game, but in hindsight I should’ve given up on it way sooner. Even with all the tabs, inventory management is still a nightmare. I hate the currency system with a passion, I resent the fact that there’s no loot vacuum, I despise having to manually identify items. I don’t like trading, and trying to find my own gear was like being rolled around in a zorbing ball made out of sandpaper. There’s way too much friction everywhere in the system for no good reason. I love the core gameplay, the monsters have cool designs and are fun to kill, the skills feel punchy and satisfying to use… It’s just the overarching structure built around that that ruins it for me. Shame.
In modern ARPGs, you automatically pick up currency just by being near it. In PoE, you have to individually click each currency item to pick it up. Given that PoE has a very sophisticated loot filter system, I find it very strange that it requires so much clicking to pick stuff up. You’ve already decided what loot you want to pick up when you set up your loot filter, so the clicking is mostly superfluous and could be automated. IMO that would make the game play much better, since having to stop to pick up loot interrupts the gameplay and breaks the flow.
That would require every player even new ones to make very complex loot filters and understand what loot is valuable and not to automate it.
Every item in PoE that is automatically picked up doesn't take up inventory space (Metamorph organs, Expedition fragments, Sulphite, Azurite). The concept is that players make an active decision of what they're picking up and that they're aware of what they have because they made an active decision to pick it up.
It doesn't take control of their inventory away from the players.
It also feeds into the dopamine loop, when you get an exciting drop you see it on the ground it doesn't automatically just get sucked into your inventory.
That would require every player even new ones to make very complex loot filters and understand what loot is valuable and not to automate it.
No, it wouldn’t, because it would not be mandatory (just like loot filters themselves aren’t).
Every item in PoE that is automatically picked up doesn’t take up inventory space (Metamorph organs, Expedition fragments, Sulphite, Azurite).
You’re this close to getting it. The extremely limited inventory space in PoE and other ARPGs is a severe design defect, the games would be much better if inventory space was simply infinite. I’ve had a long and complex discussion about this very topic with someone just a day or two ago, so I don’t feel like explaining myself on this point all over again. Feel free to check that if you’re interested.
It also feeds into the dopamine loop, when you get an exciting drop you see it on the ground it doesn’t automatically just get sucked into your inventory.
That would be much better solved by having a pop-up show you the exciting drop as you automatically pick it up. That way the player would still get their dopamine hit without the game also constantly filling their annoyance meter by making them pick up garbage manually.
Yeah, hard to criticize the model when you can just get everything you need for less then the price of a AAA game. It just makes it a “free to try” game, instead of a truly free to play one, and that’s fine.
And besides, in recent leagues they have gone less hard on the specialized stash tabs model, and more on the cosmetic one. They haven’t added a league specific stash tab since delirium league, and that was over 3 years ago.
They’ve said that all microtransactions from PoE1 will carry over to PoE2, which implies that all of those stash tab requirements will still exist, and we can presume they’ll just keep adding more.
Wasn’t that back when PoE2 was supposed to just be a big update to PoE1? I haven’t followed the development news all that closely, but I know that used to be the plan.
Nope, they said it again during the live stream where they had two people play part of the third act this exile con. Every mtx that effects something that is present in both games will be shared between them. I’d guess stash tabs will be included in both games, so those should carry over.
There was a (recent) PCGamer article that specifically called out stash tabs as being something that would be shared… I don’t know if they were basing that on anything or just speculating, but as you note, it seems obvious that that mechanic would be in both games.
It’s all in what you think is worth it. For me, it’s my favorite genre. I have spent about $400 or maybe $500 for over 2500 hours of gaming since the beta in PoE which is way less per hour than most games I’ve paid for up front. It’s worth it to me for playing a fun game for all that time. I also don’t really think they purposely design the game to need stash tabs. It’s just what it is. Look at D4 and all the people complaining they can’t buy more. They obviously didn’t design it like that. It’s just that type of game.
Bottom line for me is I haven’t spent money in that game in years and still play every league because everything I ever bought is still there and will be in PoE2 as well from what they say. I wonder about the tabs…
I actually love PoE’s inventory management, but I play the game “wrong.” I hardly ever trade, except to grab a cheap unique here or there that enables a build. I pick up and manually ID all the items that could be useful, even knowing that there’s only like a 1/10,000 chance that they actually are. I pick up all currency, even portal scrolls. I clear maps at a pace that might be described as “puttering.” And typically I RIP early in maps and start the league over, so most of my playtime is in the story, where successive characters can pick through my stash for junk my old character was hoarding for no reason, that might now have some use for levelling a different build.
You’re basically playing PoE like an incremental game. Your first character advances at a glacial pace, and dies. Your stash is basically prestige currency your next character can draw from to be faster. And so on and so forth.
man I’m glad that works for you but that sounds awful to me. I would make so many more alts in poe if it weren’t for the torturously boring and needlessly long campaign.
Completely disagree. It’s a good game made by good people. You can finish the campaign with just the default tabs, then can buy more tabs if you are enjoying the game.
It is a game developer driven by passion and not corporate profits.
It’s an online ARPG, the campaign is basically just a tutorial, the real meat of the game is in the endgame. So yes, you’re right that you can finish the campaign just fine without making any purchases, but that’s not saying much. Also, the low drop rates will kick your butt throughout the campaign and forever after regardless of whether you make a purchase or not.
I guess, but lots of players do Solo Self Found, ignoring trade entirely. It’s like doing race mode.
Depending on the build you’re going for, it can be more fun. Sucks if you need specific build-enabling uniques that you can’t farm for with div cards, but it works well for lots of builds.
You can still trade between your different characters on the same account, too, so it can be fun to create a character for the items you’ve found.
You get tens of hours of high-quality gameplay for free when you go through the campaign. How is that not saying much? I feel like it is not a bad deal at all. If you like the game when you probably need to drop some money to get most out of the experience. I think that’s fine. Though it is a fine line where they are walking in terms of monetization through inventory management. Would be interesting to know how large portion of the income is from stash tabs etc vs cosmetics.
Many (most) people have not had fun playing the campaign in PoE 1. And we sure as hell hope GGG s doesn’t listen to people who only play through the campaign and quit. Although they don’t spend any money so it shouldn’t be an issue.
I should play the campaign through again. Haven’t played the game after the 10 acts became a thing so essentially I’m just a noob again. I’ve mostly read that people are sick of the campaign because they have already played it a billion times, and not that first timers are having a bad time.
You get tens of hours of high-quality gameplay for free when you go through the campaign. How is that not saying much?
Because the high quality doesn’t come in until way later. When you’re playing through the campaign for the first time, you have neither the knowledge nor the resources to make a proper build, so the gameplay is very bland in comparison to what you can do later. Which means that the fact that the campaign is so long is actually a negative. It’s a tutorial that takes like twenty hours to slog through. This seems to be a common problem with free-to-play games. Warframe devs acknowledge and joke about the fact that the game starts getting good a hundred hours in.
In comparison to how the game is once you get a proper build going, yes, the campaign is bland as hell. Basically all ARPGs are like this due to the way their progression works.
I watched some streams of Starfield, and I just can’t understand how they made a game that looks so dull and boring. Skyrim had some soul to it, I remember being wowed by the trailer. The world and music in Skyrim are really beautiful too. Yeah it’s a janky Bethesda game in many ways, but it is also more than that.
My thoughts exactly. Whatever issues were in Morrowind, Oblivion, New Vegas, Skyrim etc there was still a uniquely engaging game there.
I’ve been poking around and their lead concept artist died before he got to work on Fo4, and the two main writer producer guys Emil & Pete(?) have basically admitted on game dev talks that they’re no longer trying to tell a coherent story or create a world anymore, just keep a player playing. Maybe this is why?
For all the Bethesda games I’ve played (barring Starfield), I’ve been instantly hooked and wanting to play more. There’s always been something to keep me playing. But in Starfield I feel like there’s just nothing there, I’m not feeling any sense of wanting to explore and find out more. I’m glad I didn’t pay for my copy, would have been a waste of money imo
I mean, I could see if they tried to make this rent-to-own over 2-3 years. At half the price they’re offering.
But renting… where you’re paying over the entirety of the price in a single year, is fucking insane.
If renting, and updating it every 2 years, then for like 1/4th of the price then sure. I could see it being promoted how they are. Rent out older stock for 50% retail to at least get some value out of it while allowing people to pay ~$30 a month for a decent computer. (and then you could “upgrade” the lower tier with this to end up recouping 75% of retail over 4 years.)
But who the fuck is paying 10% of the cost a month to borrow an okay computer, even ignoring the full month cancelation fee, and ridiculous contract. (which is… ignoring a LOT.)
It is sad to see NZXT lowered to this as I used to have a decent view of them. They make some nice cases. CAM kinda lowered that view a bit, but I was in the beta for that and got a free water cooler out of it so I could overlook that (it’s improved a lot since beta, though it gathering data is still not great it’s less horrible than it was.). And pushing their own not as great products for the prebuilts still seemed okay for prebuilts for those scared to build on their own. But this is just… too much to overlook. Wild.
The only way this is marginally correct is if he is comparing to the money needed to create an AAA title. And in the end the company making the AAA title will have the cost operation to host/distribute and have all the others features Valve offers if they decide to do it in their own storefront.
Also look how much of their “development costs” are actually marketing budget. They fully recognize that increasing sales is worth paying heavily for, and steam increases sales by meaningfully more than you’re paying them (which is why every AAA publisher who experiments with leaving comes back).
The fun part is, unless you’re doing stuff that’s extremely shady, they’ll basically give you as many keys as you want to sell the game externally. Of the hundreds of games in my Steam library, it’s a very small fraction that have been purchased through Steam, or that they’ve made any money on. Their 30% is closer to a commission than a platform fee, and a 30% commission on a product that’s all margin isn’t unusual.
And people use Steam because they’re actually way better than any other option. The “freedom” platforms like GOG can’t be bothered even having a client support Linux, while Valve invested a good bit into working with community projects to make most of their (already sold about as much as they’re going to) back catalogue compatible and smooth. Steam input is also, by itself, more value added than any other store, and there are several other meaningful features.
There’s something I’d like to call “the Bethesda” bar. It’s basically an industrial bar lower than most. Let’s define what that means:
releasing the same game over and over
make games so buggy that a release with only a couple hundred of glitches is deemed "polished*
ignore progressive development for things like NPC AI
put all the money in marketing and hype
make the user think they’re getting something new, rather than just another boilerplate game
I’m sure the story writers did some characters justice, but I won’t be playing this game - especially since Bethesda claims it “can’t run on older hardware”, despite the fact that modders are proving them wrong.
The Betheada bar is a cancer upon the industry and I view it as consumer facing psy-ops, relying on brain-dead fanboys with nothing going on in their lives to squeal with glee as a new AAA-title is released to fill that void.
Ah yes the “everyone who likes something I don’t like is a brainless zombie” argument, coming from someone who doesn’t like Bethesda and hasn’t even played the game.
Early Bethesda games in general focused on giving you more freedom and the tools to do what you want. Where later games tried to give you more cool things to do. I think the quality decline is obvious from the change.
ESO is great, though? It just has a shitty combat system with attack weaving. Even 76 isn’t that bad anymore. Honestly just seems like you get your opinion out of gaming journalism.
I have literally never watched or read a review of ESO or Fallout 76.
I played both.
ESO fails at being a solid Elder Scrolls game because it’s tailored more toward an MMO experience. The writing is awful, and the quests are boring. The combat sucks, and the social features are abysmal given you can’t even share quests. Literally the only reason I could imagine anyone playing this game is because they want to grind out an MMO every day that’s set in the Elder Scrolls universe.
Fallout 76, I don’t even know where to start. Again, the MMO mechanics tear out everything good about Fallout games to deliver a bland, grindy MMO with bad combat.
I really dislike most of the games Bethesda makes . Skyrim I found glitchy and the sword play felt really bad . Fallout 3 the gameplay seemed like walk backwards and shoot. I did like death loop thou
I felt the same until I modded the shite out of Skyrim this year and now my mod list hit critical mass and I‘m having an absolute blast with it. Starfield runs worse and looks worse for me so that game needs some time in the patch and mod oven before I dive into it… I‘m patient.
I don't disagree that the mods for Bethesda games are cool, but problem is that the barrier to getting a massive mod list set up and working after years of mods have come out is considerable.
I feel like, given the sheer size of the mod library, mod managers need something like a list of base, curated set of mods to start with, kind of what Wabbajack does, but then have the ability to add mods to it. That way, to get you most of the way to a heavily-modded game, you just pick from among a few popular modlists.
Choosing that curated set to start with would let you avoid spending hours poring over reviews of different mods and culling obsolete information to determine what you think the current-best, say, lighting mod is.
And have the ability to update to the latest version of the modlist, or roll back to an earlier.
Once that's up and going, then if you want to go tweak it or add or remove a particular mod, you can.
This is the way to be. I won’t be buying Starfield for at least a year, likely longer. By that time GPUs will be able to run it easier and I’ll be due for a new one. The game will have also seen its most significant bugfixes in that time.I haven’t bought a new game hot off the press in almost a decade. #patientgamers
Don’t eat your burger hot off the grill, let it cool and allow it to congeal the fats a little bit. That way it doesn’t fall apart on the first bite. ;)
You should try Prey if you enjoyed Deathloop, it’s DLC “Moon crash” was made a few years prior to Deathloop and incorporates similar mechanics except the map is randomized on each playthrough so it’s always a little different.
Same company, but it feels like Moon crash was a more interesting version of what DL did. Plus Prey occasionally just goes on like 90% off sales (one time I snagged it and the DLC free on Epic Games.)
I can see why the reviews are between ‘Best game ever’ and ‘worst game Bethesda made’ and it’s so strange. I personally love Starfield and it’s universe while my friend hates it because it’s boring for him.
Tbh, me and at least 2 other people I know bounced off it hard, even after giving it multiple chances in 10+ hours of playing. Some people just aren’t jelling with it even with playtime.
youtu.be
Ważne