I think cosmetics can be fine, but they aren’t always. I remember spending a lot of time and effort unlocking all the armor in Halo 3, and it made it feel rewarding. Now, skins can be interesting customization, but they’re never rewarding.
I like MTX to an extent, because it let’s other people pay for continued development of games I like. However, even cosmetics only absolutely still has an opportunity cost to the feel of the game that’s being payed. I think we should all be aware of this. I know at this point most people probably don’t remember when cosmetics were opportunities to make the game feel more fun, not just products to sell, but that is how it used to be.
Oh, definitely. The one issue with cosmetic DLC is that they used to be unlockable. Sometimes paid cosmetics are more development work than the kinds of things that were unlocked in-game back in the day, but not always.
Sometimes cosmetic DLC is a way to support the developers. Sometimes cosmetic DLC is a cashgrab. But if the game stands on its own, players generally aren’t missing much if cosmetics are paid DLC. Smash Bros. Ultimate comes to mind – there’s plenty of stuff to unlock in the game even with lots of costumes and such being behind paywalls.
The problem is what follows from microtransactions. When the managers see line go up because they released a paid element to the game, all the incentives push toward more paid elements. This means any dev hours that can be redirected away from work on the core game to the paid elements will be redirected.
Regarding the first point, if they can hire someone to make a feature happen, and maybe get an unpredictable increase in revenue, or hire someone to crank out cosmetics, which are much easier to make, and for which they often have metrics to show how much they expect to get, which do you think they’ll pick?
As for the second, I’m not sure if I’m understanding you.
I’m not talking about firings, or even other specific examples. The talk of hiring A vs B is just an example, not the whole concept. I’m talking about the inputs that influence internal decisions. Microtransactions incentivise decisions that put the focus on generating microtransactions, often to the detriment of other objectives.
And, okay, I get you now. DLC is kind of a case by case thing, but still not great to me. Some devs put out incredible DLCs that actually add something to an already complete game. However, some companies put things into DLC that should just be in the base game. (playable characters, etc.) The practice of having paid DLCs incentivises that approach, so I’m not a huge fan, even if some of them are good. It’s kind of like political donations. I can like the effect some of them have, but I recognize the problems that come from a system that uses them.
I have to say that the customer holds some of the blame. If people are obsessively buying cosmetics that do nothing and that’s the only way the game is being sustained…either the game is that good already, or the players are the reason the game sucks.
When players need to spend money to be competitive, I think it’s fair to place the blame jointly on both the devs/publisher and the players. When spending money doesn’t change the game OR provides new content, it generally indicates that the player base is happy with what they’re spending money on. I don’t think that’s a problem.
Enh… iffy hand wiggleI tend to put blame more at the point of informed decision-making.
In the same way I wouldn’t blame a person from the 1930s for their lung cancer after their doctor sold them cigarettes, I wouldn’t blame gamers for the DLC. A huge percentage of gamers are kids, legally incapable of giving informed consent. Many others are people who have never had the chance to learn the implications of their buying habits. It’s hard to blame people who aren’t making an informed decision.
The people at dev companies on the other hand, are immersed in the gaming world. It’s effectively a form of incompetence or negligence to not pay attention to the industry if that’s your job. They are either knowingly engaging in the practice, or failing to pay attention to the effect they are having on the world.
Part of it is the question of where you assign fault in a bad system. These days, and I’d hope you can agree, slavery is bad. But where should the blame lie if you lived in ~1800s America? Should it be on the producers, who choose to use slave labour, on the providers, who capture the slaves, on the legislators, who make/keep it legal, or on the customers, who choose to buy the fruits of slave labour? They all could be said to play a part but I’m inclined to find the customers, who have the least power in the system, have the least blame as well.
I think you’re making large reaches in your analogies. Are we supposed to have the government come in and bad cosmetic DLC, and then fight a war over it that splits the country (or world) in two? Lol
My point is that cosmetic DLC (and expansion packs) isn’t the problem – the problem is loot boxes and pay-to-win microtransactions.
I just wanted an unambiguous evil to serve as an example. You’ve gotten lost in taking the example as the point again. It’s an analogy, not an exact replication of of a previous event. See the similarities between the two and not the particulars of either one. That’s the point of an analogy.
The point is that the system of microtransactions incentivises the bad results (manipulative practices and distortion of decisions) without necessitating the good. (enjoyable content) As long as paid DLC exists, there are reasons for people to use paid DLC to manipulate people out of their money. However, nothing about paid DLC means there will necessarily be benefit to anything other than revenue, and things that exist within DLC could exist without it. I’d try to give another illustrative example but I don’t know if it would help.
You don’t understand the use of analogies. Common enough. Many people can get lost in them. Not a big deal. Not your fault.
You do understand them, but were actively trying to focus on the ways the chosen analogies were not one to one with the object instead of on the point the analogies were only used to illustrate. This falls under the category of bad-faith communication.
I assumed you were well-meaning in assuming your ignorance. Was I wrong?
Microtransactions have gone wildly past financing devs
The entirety of the Starcraft wings of liberty campaign made less money than a single mount cosmetic in WoW. That money definitely didn’t to to the developers
Idk, I feel that’s okay as long as the saves are incredibly frequent and reliable.
I’ve never lost progress in a From Software game for instance, and they have an only auto save system, but it saves literally everything you do as soon as you do it, so unless you deliberately alt-F4 instantly after doing something, you won’t lose any progress.
Can you reload old saves, or only the most recent? I think being able to reload an older save is important in the case of glitches (NPC walks through wall and is unreachable etc)
I also have never had any issues with game breaking bugs like that. I’ve encountered some glitches but nothing a save+reload couldn’t fix. Everything just resets to its normal spawn point.
There are game studios out there that don’t release broken garbage that needs the player to walk on eggshells, backup saves, and do arcane console commands to make the game playable.
There’s also a place in hell for devs who don’t include a “save and quit” in rogue like games because they’re worried people will save scum. As if honest people who can’t devote enough time for a full playthrough are less important than people lying about progress in a non competitive single player game.
I assume it’s more about the hassle of implementing a way of serializing the game state for storage in most cases but if people want to cheat in a single player game let them or better yet seed the rng so that the outcome is the same anyways.
Hngh. Balatro already had a bunch of hassle on Switch eShop due to the PEGI ratings change.
Earlier, Nintendo somehow got a PEGI 12 rating for 51 Worldwide Games, which includes poker and blackjack. I wonder what they argued to avoid the 18 rating. “Sure, this compilation has poker and blackjack, but it’s not like we made it fun.” (It’s adequate but compared to Balatro it’s very much a non-frills experience.)
“sure our game has gambling elements, but we’re Nintendo so shut the fuck up and give us a better rating because you’re a private company in the business of giving ratings”
It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.
I’m just genuinely curious why/how it’s still getting updates and people are playing it with the way it’s talked about, they make it sound like the worst game ever
That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.
According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.
In my opinion, anyone saying OW2 is worse than the original is saying this for personal reasons and not trying to be objective. OW2 is, in my experience, much more balanced than OW1. Many of the more frustrating aspects of the game have been fixed or removed, and most of the characters added since OW1 seem fun to play and not frustrating to play against.
There are very many valid criticisms one can make of Blizzard. The history of being a shitty workplace, the objectively awful decision to make OW2 a sequel, the treatment of Jeff Kaplan by execs, the monetization, and probably more. None of those criticisms (except monetization to a limited degree) have anything to do with whether or not OW2 is a bad game or not.
But I’m speculating since the person you responded to has not elaborated on any of their views.
I agree with you. Even though they’re still not the kind of game so would play regularly, Overwatch 1 was extremely annoying to play with all the stuns, freezes and more. Overwatch 2 toned down and removed most of these which made it actually somewhat enjoyable.
Ehh I disagree, I played consistently ow1 for years and ow2 just wasn’t as good.
I mainly missed tank synergies. Without it the game just wasn’t the same. The other tank changes were just insane too. And I preferred the full 6v6 experience.
Then they had to go an monetize the shit out of it, when I already paid for the game! The last straw was either paying for new characters or grinding like hell.
The tank and 6v6/5v5 has been heavily discussed, recently devs made a long devblog about it. I can kinda see where you’re coming from, I think, but between balance/queue times/the average player (of which there tends to be more of when you’re with 5 others instead of just 4) it seems to me like 1 tank works better in practice even though it struggles when compared to the ideal world+nostalgia goggles.
I was very pleasently surprised not disappointed by the monetization, like uncompleted weekly (battle pass -primary method of profression) challenges carry over, so in theory you can do all weekliesduring the last week if a battle pass. also aren’t the new heroes available if you play just a few matches?
I honestly though I would get used to it, like the forced 2-2-2 comps which I initially disliked, but I never did. It just made the game feel like too much more like a pure fps. And it not feeling like that was what made it unique.
In my experience all the que times were fine as 2-2-2 even when queued as duo dps
I don’t mean to be a dick but without giving actual reasons all you’re saying is “I preferred ow1”, which is kind of what my original comment was referring to. Tank synergies is definitely something that was lost with ow1, rein/zarya and dive comps were very fun and definitely something I miss. But it was also a major source of balance issues and player frustration.
Two tank team composition was a consistent balance issue and severely restricted the design of tank heroes. Sigma is a really fun and interesting hero, but when he was added overwatch entered a prolonged two shield meta which was incredibly boring. The devs added a cool hero, and he made the game worse. Not only did he make the game worse, but there was no obvious or easy solution, because sigma wasn’t the problem, two shields was the problem. In my opinion that exemplifies how bad of an issue the game was facing and justifies the changes made.
There’s nothing wrong with preferring ow1 but the person I responded to called it “a terrible game compared to the original” which is just blatantly incorrect in my opinion.
Why? I played OW from beta, stopped playing after all the shitty workplace accusations came out, then played again for 10 or so hours last month.
I didn’t play much competitive (in my recent sessions) but the game seemed like it was in a pretty solid place. The only “major” issue I can think of is that the tank role is incredibly important, which creates a bit of a toxic environment where people are scared to play tank because they get flamed if the team gets rolled. But I think the downsides are worth the benefits, with tank being so important it’s become the core that the rest of the game balances around. Healers have more agency and dealing damage/contributing to elims is a vital part of the role. A lot of the frustrating/cheesy aspects of the game have been removed, scattershot, damage-doomfist, mercy 5-man-res, goats, double shield.
Again, I took a long break from the game, but before that I clocked a lot of hours in competitive. Personally the game feels about as balanced and enjoyable as it’s ever been.
Obviously the monetization is gross and that entire side of the game sucks now but that’s an entirely different conversation.
So funny when a corpo is forced to seem positive about something where there is absolutely no positive way of spinning it. It has this surreal energy where the person doing PR seems almost uncanny, like some kind of lizard person.
Yeesh, I’ve never used the website but that NightCrawler person seems like they have some serious control problems. The fact that the whole community was willing to chip in/pay for it and take it over and the admin still refused to cooperate is pretty shitty. At least it looks like someone managed to convince the admin to let them host and takeover the site’s wiki.
This is oddly common in ROM hacking/mod scenes. There’s been no shortage of drama in the Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics communities, too.
At the very least I wish people would consider the bus test once a site/project gets to a certain critical mass. Insane to me that a site with this kind of profile never had coverage for that scenario this entire time.
I really hope that tcrf doesn’t take over. I STILL can’t contribute to that website because it requires you to sign up for Discord and agree to Discord’s ToS just to paste some stupid code into their bot.
after some further research, it became apparent that Discord staff could save a significant amount of money by changing S3 providers. The new bucket was set up, but when the time came to make the change NC refused to do it, even though he was not the one footing the bill.
There’s a conspicuous absence of explaining why they wouldn’t do it. What were their actual concerns? Did they not voice them or are they just being withheld?
NC refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time.
Why was this a requirement?
Did we vent in private? Sure.
And what did you say?
Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I’m LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.
Well something clearly happened if his family was brought into it, so if you’re going to skimp on the details, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to believe that.
The whole thing just comes back to the larger issue with discord: the record vanishes.
I have to force myself to not fall into the trap of trying to play a “perfect” game and instead to just let happen, what happens. Blundering through content and accepting temporary setbacks is more fun than following guides or save scumming.
But it also depends on game design:
With bg3 I missed a one of a kind item in act 1, a staple dnd item (ring of protection) that I was locked out off because I did quests in the “wrong” order. that gave me some anxiety, after which I started checking the wiki page before starting a new zone, which eventually sucked the fun out of the game, after which I abandoned my first playthrough.
And then I found a mod that randomizes all loot, so I can just let happen again what happens, without that anxiety of losing access to unique loot because of game design.
You got upset because you missed a +1AC item? There’s so many much better items in that game I’m surprised this one matters so much.
I totally recognise playing the perfect game angle though, depending on the game I look up collectibles ahead of time, so that when I find the area I know there’s one nearby.
Nah, the knowledge that I could be locked out of unique items is what caused anxiety, not what I was actually locked out off (though I do think it’s a really good item for a ring). I played act 1 as a blundering fool, at the end of act 1 I checked an item list to see what I missed, so I could backtrack for what I could use. And then I destroyed my fun in act 2 by checking guides before starting an area.
I also fall into this trap semi regularly, a happy medium I have found is a missable items guide that doesn’t tell you how to play or where to go but it does tell you “make sure you get item X before going to place Y as that’s your last chance”
It means I can be happy to play sub optimally knowing that if I really want I can go back and collect anything I missed later.
Not an RPG, but in the Thief series the hardest difficulty usually means that you aren’t allowed to kill anyone. Many people even try to play the games as a ghost. Meaning the only sign of their presence after leaving is the stuff they stole. Every door has to be closed and locked again. Keys stolen from guards have to be returned (in lieu of a game mechanic for this you have to lay it on the ground behind them).
People do challenge runs of the Gothic games as pacifists. So it isn’t part of the games but doable with some shenanigans.
And next they will come for other labels deemed “against the rules” without elaborating. Porn is the canary. You can “lol incest” but this is about taking down what folks cant argue with first then the next will be porn at all, then queer stuff, just like tumblr
I hate when the default controls have duck toggled on R3 but then don’t have anything on two of the 4 face buttons. Crouch should be on Circle/B if you’re not using that button for anything else.
The entire reason it’s like that is so you can crouch and aim at the same time, it’s almost objectively better, as long as you don’t accidently press it.
The best control schemes are the ones that bind any action that would be useful to do while still controlling the camera to the back buttons or the sticks.
I’m talking about a toggle tho. It’s not going to be accidentally toggled if its not on the stick, and the stick press is usually really sensitive. I can also hit the far right face button with the first knuckle of my thumb, while still having the end of my thumb moving stick.
If there was no toggle crouch in the theoretical game, then I would agree with you.
I prefer toggle crouch and I still much prefer it on the right stick. Allows you to spam crouch and aim at the same time, but do you. I just think it’s objectively better and hate when any action I would use while controlling the camera is on a face button.
My main point is there is a genuine reason it’s mapped to the stick by default, I would be annoyed if it was on the face buttons by default.
I think we can both agree that not being able to make any button do any thing is the best way to go about it. I hate being limited to a single scheme, or even just 2 or 3 and not being able to 100℅ fully customize them.
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