Long cutscenes that don’t let you save or pause when anything comes up that forces you to leave the keyboard or just focus elsewhere.
“Control” was the worst wrt this (or was it Quantum Break? Maybe both). I was just about to go to bed when it showed me a “cutscene” that went on for more than 30 minutes. Turned out later that you could actually go back to watch it again afterwards, but there was no indication of that at the time.
When things aren’t balanced. It either tells me the devs do not play their game or they have a dominant strategy and don’t bother playing anything else.
I’ve heard stories from professionals and you would be surprised how many devs don’t actually play the game they are developing.
In almost every game the gameplay tips and tutorials they give you are not only suboptimal but often outright counterproductive. This is especially bad in multiplayer games.
It was really nice in Doom Eternal, where they added quick swapping to the tips.
When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.
Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.
When the game is such a precious labour of love, so obviously cared for, and constantly improved, that there’s no way the dev has any time left for gaming.
Started the Lies of P: Overture DLC. Rough beginning, getting back into the groove, some bad enemies, that culminated in an absolutely terrible boss fight. Just complete garbage.
You’re stuck in a tiny arena, with a big ass monster, and a terrible camera. You constantly get shoved around, into the walls, clipping halfway into the boss, because of terrible hitboxes, just living life. Half the time I died and couldn’t even see my character, so I had no idea what my mistake was. Did I mistime my block? Or maybe the last block sent me reeling, and I couldn’t react in time? Or maybe I was just on the ground because the hit before that knocked me down? Nobody knows, not even the boss, because his face is inside the wall.
It’s been getting better since then, the next two bosses weren’t as bad, the second one might even be fun with a few tweaks, and the fourth (which I just beat last night) was actually pretty good. I hope it continues like this, and doesn’t go back to the atrocious start.
As much as I absolutely love Lies of P, I've been holding off since I've been hearing about a lot of bugs. Sounds like I maybe need to wait for another patch, unless the patch they released a week or two ago is the only one.
Performance felt a bit choppy at times (need to activate an FPS overlay again to check for drops), but otherwise no bugs as far as I could tell. It’s just that I think the first boss is terribly designed, and I don’t know if stuff like that would get fixed in a patch.
That there is no guarantee that I will always have access to a game I like is really what kills it for me as a user. Like, I’m basically paying them the equivalent of the cost of a game every 3 months, but I could loose access to a game I like at any time because it’s no longer on game pass, so I’d be better off just buying games I like outright with that money every three months.
I’d rather my money go directly to studios making things I like, rather than fractionalized among who ever Microsoft decides deserves to make games.
Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn’t afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I’ve bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I’m starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?
The first few levels of Pirate’s Life are fantastic imo. Especially that first one when you’re going through the cave and listening to the voiceover… I got chills when I first played it. It was just really fun for me and I can’t really explain why. I liked how they got the original voices to record some new lines for the quest/level too.
And I really like the “DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES” guy.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren't priced reasonably and it's unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it'd be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive... well, it's not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don't think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that's before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it's just that they happen to be so strong that I'm typically the one to remind people you don't own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.
Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?
I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.
I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that's not the case.
I wouldn't consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren't the same thing.
Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don't like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren't full physical releases. It plays Nintendo's game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.
Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.
And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.
Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can't resell or download without servers).
There is a warning on the box for the two that don't include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don't particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.
I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they've done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.
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Aktywne