Honestly for an MMO it’s still a good price. MMOs in particular people sink a tonne of hours into, so it’s pennies per hour which (like gaming in general) is a pretty good rate for entertainment. That doesn’t mean huge mark ups like these are anything but infuriating.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Runescape should have tiered membership for multiple characters. For example, one character for $10, three for $20, ten for $50, etc. This would make it easier on player’s wallets, and frankly it would encourage people to play the other game modes.
Having said that, I think the larger problem is that the people that develop the game get peanuts for pay. Most of them are fans of the game and just want to work on it, but doing so shouldn’t trap them to a low income. It’s not a good sign when developers can leave the company and earn a higher salary streaming Runescape content.
What can you expect when the company is owned by an investment group.
I see what you’re saying, it is a lot of memberships taken out of the game, but I would argue no one running a bot farm is paying for membership with Earthly currency. They wouldn’t want to tie legitimate credit information to any of those accounts, and so they obtain membership through bonds purchased with in game gold.
It’s in part what has driven the cost of bonds from 5 million gold to 15 million. As a result, I’m of the opinion that bots aren’t a revenue source for Jagex.
I remember from an interview that the first JRPG, Dragon Quest, was heavily inspired by Wizardry (as with other CRPGs of the time). Most others copied that design, including Final Fantasy, so in many ways we can thank Greenberg for helping lay the groundwork for virtually all RPGs, not just CRPGs.
Whenever you’ve had your fill. Whether it’s 5 minutes for 500 hours, there’s no sense wasting your time playing something you don’t enjoy. I’ve played Pavlov for over 300 hours and am still going back every week. There’s no longterm goals and that’s perfectly fine, if I ever get bored with it I’ll uninstall and move on.
This is just to keep a tally for myself. I don’t force myself to keep playing if I don’t like the game then I just stop (skul was the most recent game that I just stopped playing). Just wanted some milestone for these odd genres for fun.
Got it! One thing you could do is see if the game has any time trial/challenge mode, or if there are any community challenges (like nuzlocke for Pokemon).
The whole things just a massive labor of love from a relatively small indy studio. At one point it was an RPG Maker game that was delightfully well polished in terms of story, art, and environment. After the devs got tired to rpg maker limitations, they ported the whole thing to Unity and re-released it as a free Enhanced Edition update. Childhood me played the shit out of GBA Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and it very much scratches that JRPG itch.
Minetest, a completely free and open source Minecraft clone
Picsart, a drawing app. I couldn’t find any free app that is similar in features.
the camera app, to make short videos, even cool stop motion videos, or pictures to paint on with Picsart
Signal, to share her art with the family. Although I don’t think it will run on a tablet.
Toca Boca World, a cute little game where you can decorate houses and play with figures
GCompris, a compilation of learning games, although she seems to have grown out of them in third grade
If you have a PC great games for her besides Minecraft are Spider-Man, Goat Simulator, Life is Strange: True Colors (we play that together) and GTA 5 (seriously, give her a 100% save. the interactivity in that game is through the roof)
For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):
Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding
Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.
Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.
Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.
Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world
CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes
UT: AI bots
Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons
Deus ex: rpg fps
Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.
Battlefield: large scale multiplayer
Socom: fps game that isn’t first person, online console multiplayer
Call of duty: using gun sights to aim
Far cry: open world fps
Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.
Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn’t really get into it)
Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)
HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level
TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn’t remembered for this)
Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg
Metro 2033: fps survival
Halo reach: custom maps
Destiny: MMORPG FPS
Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)
I second this, I got into the beta on Friday and have been having a blast. It’s remarkably polished for a beta and everyone who gets in can invite as many people as they want and those people can also invite as many people as they want and so on and so on. So it’s spreading like wild fire, should be pretty easy to get into.
I 100 percented it before going into mods. There is no spoon is very achievable, I did it in half the time it takes. Best part is you can just do a multiplayer run with it, you and your mates.
Statistically speaking most people can find new games in their library they bought and never touched for years. It’s a genius marketing strategy on steam’s part.
Totally! My favorite astronomical “wow” with my daughter was when she was 12. She wanted to learn about photography, so I set up a tripod at dusk to teach her about aperture, shutter speed, and motion blur. We also compared shots with a remote shutter so she could see how the slightest camera shake during a long exposure would result in a blurry shot.
We were about to go inside once the stars came out, but instead I thought it would be fun to show her how they looked with a two second exposure. “Wait, why do they look like little commas? Are they moving?” I didn’t say a word. I just looked at her, and then it hit…
😳”No! We’re moving!”🤯
Facts aren’t nearly as interesting without the connection of self-discovery.
She came really close to another mind-blowing fact: if you’re talking about linear motion, there’s no difference at all between “they’re moving” and “we’re moving”. Too bad the apparent motion of the stars is caused by rotation, otherwise it would have been a great lesson to introduce basic relativity concepts.
She understood the curved lines as illustrating the rotation of the Earth. We didn’t get into motion away from the universal center.
She’s much older now. Tyson’s version of Cosmos came out in her teens, so we watched all of those and then went back for the OG Sagan episodes. She’s my favorite nerd.
It’s a turn-based traditional roguelike + dungeon crawler, i.e. there are no in-game permanent upgrades to make the characters stronger, and only you the player get “stronger” as you become more knowledgeable. If you are into that kind of game, this is absolutely one of the best I’ve played!
The developer Evan has been continuously updating the game for the past decade, with a new, sixth playable hero scheduled to release later this year. The game is also free and open source, so you can even play the full game for free. I bought the Steam version (and has sunk 100+ hrs into it) because it’s so rare for me nowadays to find a game I don’t get tired of after a handful of hours. (Not saying short games are necessarily bad though, some of my faves are very short too.)
It’s not bad if you are an active player. The msq drips are a welcome addition when you have “run out” of content and is very manageable.
That said, I tried to catch up from 80 to 90 and I could just not justify any more hours doing the msq just to be able to raid. It was just hours and hours and days and days of clicking people reading text and going to the next location clicking more boxes
I’ll be honest compared to many of the main FF games like X, XIII or XVI, XIV’s story from ARR->EW, especially once you’re in the last segments of ShB and EW, easily outdoes them. It’s slow as molasses since it has to fit a whole MMO with 2y release cycles into it, but it’s also damn good.
The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.
Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.
What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.
I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.
That description of how the teams are structured sounds completely made up. They’d never get a game finished if the company was actually structured that way. I’ve personally never worked for a company that would just let me project hop when I felt like it.
… But you’re right that it is often considered the cause of many of their problems: Valve’s unusual corporate structure causes its problems, report suggests
If you look at the list of games developed by Valve it kinda becomes apparent that the only reason Valve is still around (or operates in such a free-flow manner) is because Steam is so profitable. Their release of notable titles is spotty, at best:
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