Yes, not only many people still play the same games for 10 years, but also spend most of their gaming time in them. There’s a reason why a new live service game is both a gold mine and also incredibly difficult to stick.
Sometimes I wonder whether Starfield truly deserves all the bad publicity or whether people are also still upset because it became an Xbox exclusive and that is clouding their judgement. I know it does affect me for one. I got a ps5 for gaming and I’m automatically much less interested in anything that isn’t on the platform. And I was of course very disappointed when Microsoft outright bought all these huge IPs and made them exclusive to Xbox.
If you take any major gaming publications scores as at all legitimate then I have a bridge to sell you
Major publications give it a passable score because “lol glitches are Bethesdas thing”, ignoring objective critique because of reputation, as well as our of fear that they won’t be given access to the next product released by the or Microsoft because they give games “bad publicity”
Starfield is a broken, poorly written, dumpster fire of a game. It objectively doesn’t function correctly often, like many Bethesda products, and was designed by a team lead by a man allergic to basic game design ethos (seriously fuck Emil, my dog could do game design better than me "fuck design docs). It has moments of being interesting and, much like Skyrim, could be the base for some cool mods, but people hated it so much it won’t ever even get that
I was on Windows at the time and had GamePass, so I pleasantly had access included with what I was already paying for. I ended up pirating it so I could mod it (that is prevented on GamePass), because it needed mods.
No, it’s not negative because it’s MS owned. It’s a very bad game. I love older Bethesda games and I love sci-fi. This should have been an easy win for me. Wow, it was disappointing. The actual combat gameplay is fine, but everything between combat sucks. Too many loading screens taking you out of the gameplay.
The writing sucks. They make use of established sci-fi tropes, but then they don’t understand how to make them work in a story. They give you very few choices, often not including the most obvious ones.
Despite this being the “exploration” game, exploration is essentially non-existent. Every planet pretty much has the same stuff. There’s like five bases that spawn everywhere identically, and a handful of “natural” points-of-interest, which appear all over the planet identically, as well as being the same as every other planet with the same ones. You might see some benefit to explore if you’re building bases, but that system is incredibly clunky and frustrating to make operational. Even once you have things running, it’ll still require managing storages from overflowing and blocking incoming supplies. It’s really bad.
The universe is incredibly unreactive too. If you thought this was true for their previous games, it’s worse in Starfield. There’s no ships bringing supplies to colonies. No colonies being built that weren’t there at the start. No fighting between factions, besides pirates randomly and it’s the same random event that happens when you warp into a place, not something that happened because pirates are raiding a supply line or something. It just doesn’t change ever.
Basically, no. Starfield actually sucks. I really wanted to like it, but there’s nothing to like in my opinion. I’ve seen some people say they like it, but I honestly don’t get it. Every aspect seems like a downgrade from FO4, which had its own issues but had reasons to like it too.
Thanks for the review. Disappointing to be sure. I was hoping to play it at some point and that it wouldn’t suck as much as people say it does. Or that they would turn it around in time.
Still give a try, it’s not for everyone and it’s not to the same quality as their previous games but it’s honestly not a bad game. At worst I’d say it’s aggressively average. But I still have a great time with ship combat and exploration, the loading doesn’t bother me as much and people act like the quests and writing are BAD, They are not, it’s just not to the level of their previous games. But there are still a few quests I absolutely love.
I would say most of the writing is bad. There are a handful of interesting quests, but most aren’t. Then there’s things like the generation ship, which they don’t do anything interesting with, it uses the same technology as the modern ships, and also the quest path to end it is stupid. There’s also so many things that just don’t make sense in the universe it’s set in, and it’s overall just boring.
I agree overall the game is just aggressively average though. It plays fine enough, but it gives no reason to want to play it. It’s not actively painful to play, but it gives no feedback to make anything feel worth doing.
I really enjoyed the Ryujin quest line, the quest where the world was shifting, and there’s tons of great smaller quests and interactions, but I agree the generation ship was a big miss, the main quest flounders and flops hard about half way through and overall they didn’t do enough with universe building.
I was holding out hope that the modding scene would help support the game, because traditionally speaking Bethesda modders have done some incredibly amazing work on other titles. But no, alas, Starfield is such a fuckin’ trash fire that not even the modders are willing to put in the work to unfuck this heap of shit. Somebody might release a killer overhaul for it after they’ve had a couple more years to basically rewrite the entire engine, but frankly I don’t see anyone caring that much about this game to make it happen. I know of at least one guy who rather than getting involved in the mod scene, instead got on Steam and said fuck you, I’ll make my own fuckin’ Starfield, and started whipping up Spacebourne 2, and even this half-baked early access alpha jank has clear signs of being the seed of a better game than Starfield was. I’m sure that others have had similar ideas.
I feel like starfield is an experiment in user driven content (mods) to sell a game. The issue with Skyrim is that there is really only one map, and before any map extension mod came out, there were so many mods out there that competed for space on the map. Even today, large world overhaul mods are constantly stepping on the toes of other mods. City redesigns are also a problem unless you’re really good at load orders and merging.
Starfield feels like each world is an open map, ready for people to start designing content: either a colony, a cave, or anything really. The story seems loose and open ended so that it won’t interfere with large collaborative content. It’s not a game they are selling, but a modding storefront. It’s like Skyrim Creations, but putting the horse (armor sold separately) before the cart.
The UI and perk system is actively hostile to playing the game. It was one thing when you could always try to pick the lock in Skyrim and the more locks you picked the better you got. Now you must take the perk and it’s a requirement to pick locks before the next perk.
You cannot even craft or use core gameplay mechanics without perks. Booster pack? Perks. Targeting sub systems? Perk. (Which is hilarious because it’s in the tutorial mission and they just hard coded the event ship not to blow up. So until you visit the Internet you don’t actually know how to board other ships)
Out post building is ridiculously complex, resources take up a bajillion spaces in your inventories, there’s no guidance on production chains, and basic resources aren’t even on the same planet. So you’re back to just buying resources to get it off the ground and why are we even building an outpost again?
To be fair, the story, the fly here, shoot this, listen to story parts of the game are fine. But literally everything else around it is made as obtuse as possible because yes I want to go through a loading screen every time I need to access my main stash.
As some one said when it released. It’s Fallout 4 in space. But if all the ancillary stuff was made 100 percent more inconvenient.
It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.
Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.
I play old school maplestory on maplelegends. They have strict “no real world trade” rules and no pay to win. It really is just the game how it should be played, which really highlights all the flaws in the game (there are many)
Obviously the main draw is nostalgia, so if it’s something you’ve never played it won’t have much value, but the community is great and it’s an mmo with lots to do and endgame content to aspire to
Discounts on games creates a sense of urgency in the buyer, as most discounts are temporary. Since discounts are often shown on the front page of a storefront, it gets a lot of eyeballs on it. If someone’s wishlisted the game then they’ll even usually get a direct notification.
Another way to look at it is that the game is always available at the full price. But if you’re a patient gamer then you can expect to get a lower price eventually.
Depending on how much discretionary income you have, you might be forced to wait for a sale. Or the difference in price might be no object to you. Or you may have to hoist the black flag.
Something else to consider is that the perceived value of the game differs from buyer to buyer. If I’m a big fan of a niche genre, I might be willing to spend more on a weird game than the average user. A $30 game might be worth it for me, but you might only think it’s worth $20
And more to that point, it’s extremely difficult to nail down the exact value of a game. What honestly separates a $12 game from a $15 game when they both offer a unique experience?
Anyway, all this to say, I don’t think having sales on games is strictly a predatory thing. Sometimes a discount is the only way you’ll get eyeballs on your game, or a way to reach more of the market that wouldn’t have otherwise bought your game.
I do agree that modern AAA prices are out there. I don’t pay very much for games now, and usually AAA prices me right out of the market
I get the concept behind it. But it just seems so predatory that older games never depreciate in value. Back in the olden days of GameStop, they would adjust prices. An old game was reduced in price after a certain time since it’s no longer new.
Now, that’s no longer the case. Valve seems to be the only one that does this, as an exception. Left 4 Dead 2 is now $10 standard and that’s not some crazy percentage off discount. That’s just the base price now. Other games though are silly as hell with the pricing. Battlefield games are the most obvious. Priced at a full $60, but the value plummets to $8 when on sale. Why don’t they reprice it to $30 and then on sale for $8? Seems less psychologically manipulative
I agree that it’d be nice if they depreciated in value like in the days of physical media.
In those days though, the store only has a certain amount of shelf space. So in that sense it makes sense that they depreciated because a new game is always going to have a higher perceived value.
Digital storefronts don’t have that problem. The game can be shared infinitely without accruing a ton of publishing costs. There’s always more shelf space.
In this sense, there’s no financial motivation to depreciate. And we all know the social responsibility of big companies will be to only do what they’re forced to do.
We often feel games ought to depreciate because that’s how it’s always been. But just because that’s how it’s always been doesn’t mean that’s how it always will be.
Battlefield is an interesting case though where each game in the franchise is highly derivative of the previous game. So if each new game is essentially an upgrade of the previous one, then I’d agree that there should be an expectation that the older version is less expensive.
The same could be said about many of the giant titles. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and most major sports games come to mind.
One final thing to think of is that many games have continuing development. It’s basically the early access model (a whole other can of worms), and you could argue that many of these games appreciate in value. Some notables have - Factorio comes to mind.
I don’t think Battlefield 2042 falls into that category though
There’s still a bit of market force, but it comes in the form of other game developers.
Imagine you went to the grocery store, and saw Hardin McCombsky’s Super-Premium Dry Seasoned Cheese was $1000 a wedge. How ridiculous! How do they expect us to pay that much for that cheese?
Only…Shaw’s Bargain Dry Cheese is $4. And it’s not the same thing - but it’s still pretty good.
Basically, this kind of thing works out in many other industries. Sometimes on rare occasion, one producer makes things MUCH better than competitors and can demand a much higher price because no one else comes close.
To give a more game-relevant example, BattleBit is $15 and compared favorably to Battlefield. In other cases where there’s no competitor and the developer hasn’t lowered their price for sales, it may be because they’re confident they did good work and made a good game. Factorio is famous for this.
Physical: Get it right on release day (or in the first week after) in retail for about 40€, otherwise you will have to rely on rare good retail discounts to get it below 55€
Digital: Don’t you even dare to think about discounts
I don’t know how to feel about Nintendo pricing. On one hand, all of their games keep their value long after release, but that also means they are hard to get cheaply. I know when I sold my 8 3DS games a few years ago, I made about 230 eur which was pretty good for some used games. I dont play their games anymore but I’m not sure I’d even want to now since they never drop in price.
Yes, because the only people buying Nintendo Switch games are the ones who don’t care about the price in the first place. If you want to save money on switch games you just pirate them
Nintendo does have sales from time to time, they’re just rarely great discounts. If you have a switch and you wishlist games they will email you if your wishlisted game goes on sale.
This has nothing to do with the gaming industry, specifically. This is a basic (very effective) marketing strategy. But typically federal regulations prohibit them from advertising something as “on sale” perpetually so it has to be advertised at retail price for x% of the time.
Uhhh what? Are we talking about the same things? Steam doesn’t do sales to individuals. If they put a game on sale for $8 it’s that price for everyone, unless I’m missing something?
Look, you will have a sizable contingent of people shelling out an additional $20 to $80 just to play a game a few days early, with little to no other benefits. Their impatience is capitalized on.
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