Indeed, the good and free ones are value for money. There are a LOT of terrible ones though. I enjoy Josh Strife Hayes’ YouTube channel, which covers most of them.
If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.
I wouldn’t call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn’t work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it’s more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It’s not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.
But, it’s one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I’ve been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.
If I stopped playing, I’d give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we’re mostly used to. She doesn’t really play other games. So far, it’s still worth it, but I’m really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I’m basically held hostage.
I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won’t get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It’s a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it’s extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.
Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could’ve been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there’s reskinned content that’s heavily time-gated, and it just screams “low effort”.
Do yourself a favor and don’t think about giving Blizzard money.
Not really defending them here but it’s worth noting that the buggy campaign wasn’t the main game. It was in Legion: Remix which is an event where you make a new “time runner” character and play it through the Legion expansion at like 10x speed and power. I found it to be extremely boring and haven’t played much of either in a few months
True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it’s extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don’t care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.
But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that’s inexcusable. It’s also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it’s a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn’t know about it, or just don’t care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn’t even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn’t let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.
I’ve had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.
I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn’t have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.
+1 to shitty customer support, it’s what made me quit and never ce back. I got 4 months of free sub from a giveaway but I didn’t have the latest expansion so I sent them a msg asking if they could freeze for a month so I can get paid and buy the exp. They said they can’t freeze but if I don’t play a single day of those 30 days they could refund it. So I waited.
Month later I ask them for the refund and they say they can’t do it, what the previous rep said was wrong, it’s so stupid I said I would just quit for good.
It sounds like you’re the unicorn with a healthy WoW habit, lol!
But I totally get the feeling of being attached to it because of personal relationships that are WAY more important than doing the Right Thing when it comes to not sending money to a vendor that you don’t think deserves it.
I’ve got perhaps an unusual one - 99% of the time I play games with the music turned off. I just find it much more immersive and I enjoy, for example, not knowing that combat is about to start because the music’s just changed.
There are plenty of games where you can’t turn the music off. I’m not a fan of that, but I get it. The devs want you to play their game in a certain way, and turning the music off isn’t part of that. No complaints.
But then there are games which allow you to turn the music off, but all the rest of the sound has been made under the assumption that the music will be playing. The music often covers up a litany of jankiness like background sound effects not looping well. And sometimes the atmosphere sounds (say the drone of an engine in a spaceship) are also controlled by the music slider.
So, if you’re going to give the option to turn the music off, make sure that the game still sounds good without the music.
I’m a muted game player as well. Music is the first thing I turn down to negligible, followed environmental sounds. If I can’t control those, buhbye all sounds.
In the murder hobo games, I don’t really need to listen to that anyways.
There are others but this is one I just can’t believe is a thing. It’s so fucking simple to fix. Just start the volume on the lower end and if it’s too quiet I can raise the volume or just give me a volume slider first thing on initial load before any sound is played and let me find the right levels with a test sound before playing any menu music or something.
This and full white dev/publisher logo screens. I have a pretty large HDR monitor and whenever I boot up a Bandai Namco game I’ll flashback myself if I don’t look away in time.
Isn’t this what the volume on your sound system is supposed to do? Master volume in a game should be pretty much maxed out by default and the volume on whatever you use to output the sound should be set so loud isn’t blowing your ears out.
Unless you are actually complaining about sound levels of stuff that shouldn’t be loud (like menu clicking or background music) but that’s relative sound levels of different categories in the game, not the master volume.
Nah, I get what they are saying; games are just unusually loud. I can have my sound system’s volume when streaming YouTube or something on my PS5 set to a decent level but when I switch to a game I have to cut the volume in half if I haven’t messed with the settings yet.
Yeah basically this. My system volume is exactly where it needs to be for anything else I’m doing. Videos, music, voice calls, etc. I shouldn’t have to basically mute my system to not go deaf when I launch a game for the first time.
Launching a new game shouldn’t shake the house. I shudder to think how loud it would be if my system volume was above 30%. I made the mistake of having a headset on when launching a new game, and the headset learned to fly.
A couple games are still loud even after setting game volume to less than 10%… They get the full mute treatment, I no longer care of they have the most amazing soundtrack, I value my ability to hear.
Reminds me of the first time I booted up Elden Ring. The title screen started up and I heard some music, but it was so quiet. I turned up the volume and then a second later thought I almost blew out the speakers on my headset.
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Aktywne