Perhaps an unpopular opinion, and I preface this by saying I do not fully understand the ins and outs of game development, though I am a software engineer (just not a game dev).
OSRS has made some absolutely amazing improvements in the last couple years. Almost every single update has hit perfectly with nothing but minor errors or complaints. New expansions and regions, new quests, new raid, weapon and damage rebalances, new bosses, new community events and special game modes, new updates to their clients both mobile and desktop, and most importantly a significantly better bot-busting system over the last few months.
This shit isn’t cheap. That’s a LOT of parallel systems and work, and OSRS continues to have 0 micro transactions outside of membership. True, RS3 and its cesspool of mtx helps fund OSRS, but I don’t know how far that goes.
I’m OK with OSRS costing $2 more per month if it means that this current cadence of content of QOL updates marches on. Jagex has been absolutely nailing it and I’m very happy with them, and that’s worth money to me.
I used to be a game dev. Busy so can’t reply atm but Jagex and OSRS make a LOT of money compared to everyone else already. Their subscription stats are insane
Price plays a role too, only 17,55 Euros for Squirrel here and Concord 40 Euros, plus 20 for Deluxe.
I was interested into Concord, not gonna lie. But even if I wanted to buy and play the game, accept their terms of usage and create a Sony account, its not playable on Linux. And to be honest, I’m thankful for not being able to waste my money and time.
That’s what happens when you mix a pile of abusive industry practices with an overall bad and iterative game that doesn’t bring anything new to the genre
The gameplay doesn’t look bad to me, I am interested into it. It has way bigger problems, like the unpopular character styles and looks. But what do you mean by “abusive industry practices”? I like the idea of paying upfront and getting the whole game, way better than a Free to play model to me. But I guess that approach isn’t working in today’s world.
Paying for it is not the problem at all, in fact it’s preferred over a freemium model.
The practices I mostly refer to are:
microtransactions in any context;
requiring additional software (PSN overlay) that doesn’t support all platforms;
PSN account requirement for a game that’s sold on Steam (have they forgotten about the shitshow that was Helldivers II?).
EDIT: history has also told us that paying upfront for a hero shooter doesn’t work out in the long term if the game wants any shot at being popular, just look at Overwatch’s failure to capitalize on it’s momentum by not becoming free-to-play earlier (and everything else wrong with Blizzard and their management).
But those points are not the reason this game flopped. Lot of games have micro transactions and are popular. Other games require additional account (and even launcher in some cases) and are still popular. While these arguments are in fact negative, they are not the reason the game failed. If Sony comes to this conclusion too, then they will not learn anything from it. So I hope they analyze it better.
In example the initial trailer reveal wasn’t good. Then the characters and the universe it is in isn’t very interesting, huge problem for a hero shooter. Sony completely ignored the critics from beta test phase. The marketing in general was terrible. Game is not playable on Linux either, which would have gave them some marketing push too. And the timing of the launch day was badly chosen too lot of people and news was focusing on Wukong and Deadlock.
There are lot of reasons that are well orchestrated together to fail the game. It’s not as simple as the list you gave (in my opinion). Games with worse industry standards get more popular.
I’ve been using this for about 3 months. I would estimate that my dog walks are now about twice as long as they used to be. I don’t really enjoy walking, but this gives me just enough incentive to do it everyday and, if I feel like taking a shortcut, taking the long way instead.
Globulation2 brings a new type of gameplay to RTS games. The player chooses the number of units to assign to various tasks, and the units do their best to satisfy the requests. This allows players to manage more units and focus on strategy rather than on micro-management.
It’s actually quite old and has gone through stretches of inactivity, but appears to be kept in working order in its git repo, and recently has been getting maintenance patches.
It is a game about building functional computer by combining logic gates. Game arranged in series of small puzzles to make it digestible for people without electric engineering degree like me. You slowly build new components, so you can use them later as higher level abstraction until you get to the point of having to program your own computer to solve further puzzles. If you curious how computers work, this game is a gem.
Martha Is Dead is a grim psychological triller about twin sisters, set in Italy at the end of WW2. It’s not about war, however. This game left me with deep emotions no other game could do. Heed the warnings given by authors, though. It may come too disturbing to some people.
Severed Steel is a single-player FPS featuring a fluid stunt system, destructible voxel environments, loads of bullet time, and a unique one-armed protagonist. It’s you, your trigger finger, and a steel-toed boot against a superstructure full of bad guys. Chain together wall runs, dives, flips, and slides to take every last enemy down.
I manually searched for the SteamDB and ProtonDB links for this game on Google, copied the link, selected the “SteamDB” text in the comment textbox and pasted with the Ctrl+V shortcut. Same with game name. Lemmy did Markdown itself 🙃
XCOM 2 came out in 2016. Let’s get another XCOM game. Maybe humanity pushing into space and creating a colony which then comes under alien attack. You have to defend the colony, cut off from earth, and take out the alien menace.
I want to like Chimera Squad but every mission feels the same. I love the character based approach though. Also it was fun having aliens on the team for once.
Xcom 2 and Chimera Squad both had some annoying UI problems but luckily they were fixed (for the most part) by mods.
They’re effectively visual novels with light gameplay mechanics for navigation or making some narrative path choices. At least, that’s how I felt about Until Dawn.
It depends. There are visual novels in which you can set them on auto and just let voice acting play out. I think there's strong similarities there, though I don't think anyone could get away with calling a Telltale style narrative game a visual novel, flat out.
But I do think they are doing similar things, they may scratch similar itches.
Although certainly similar, the fact that these games have every scene fully animated does add to it in a way that simply reading descriptions about what’s going on doesn’t.
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!
It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!
I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.
Like if the engine doesn’t support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There’s only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren’t working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.
Is it better to have “Body Shape A/B” or “Male Body / Female Body”? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.
It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.
I don’t think it’s fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3’s developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.
Yeah, but In Baldur’s Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want… So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon’s Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I’m ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural “Body Type A/Body Type B” language instead of saying “Masculine/Feminine” ? It just makes me feel like I’m in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn’t exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren’t getting any favors here because they’re STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it’s just now that “Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words” aren’t present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one’s needs are really being met here, we’re just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that’s just for the “normal” sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that’s a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
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