I can’t say I have any sort of standard way to gauge that. Once the money is spent, I don’t really think about it anymore and yeah that’s probably a result of my monetary privilege, but it’s my honest answer to your question. It’s almost impossible to determine about the monetary value of an experience of a piece of art.
I’m on a continuing multiplayer campaign in Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m also playing Atelier Totori.
It’s amazing how much new stuff I’m still seeing in BG3, and I’ve gotta be in hour 350 or something like that. I’m playing with a long-time video gaming partner and I’m just letting her run with it because I’ve already played through the game.
I really started to get into Atelier Totori once it started rolling, but I’m beginning to run out of steam. I’m really missing some of the UI/UX improvements that were in Atelier Rorona DX, and I also feel like the combat isn’t quite as sharp for some reason. I’m genuinely interested in the story at this point, however. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have just jumped to Meruru.
BG3 already payed itself off in the first couple of weeks. Subnautica is another. And although I loathe to admit it, I do have about 2000 hours in Dead By Daylight.
Hell, I’ve bought and re-bought the original two Fallout games several times back in the 90’s as I wore out the CD’s over the years. And there plenty of games in between them and the newest that were absolutely worth it. Some aren’t even playable anymore.
And since I got into the Indie scene the numbers went up.
I’ve been playing a bunch of Street Fighter 6. I just started getting back into fighting games after dropping them early in university. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve managed to climb to p platinum playing as Cammy
I’ve been trying to progress in Forza Motorsport, but the infinite loading screen bug is stopping me from playing. After almost every second race it doesn’t save my progress and I have to kill the game and lose all the progress because it refuses to save.
Also I got a new controller for PC, can anyone recommend good controller games that are on PC Gamepass?
Started Kingdom Come: Deliverance yesterday and it’s pretty good. I only just got out of the tutorial phase of the story and I’m impressed by the realism in the game. It’s like a non-magical recreation of TES 4 Oblivion, and the Bohemia open world feels very alive.
NPCs have schedules. You can see them through the windows as they sit down, do the sign of the cross, then eat their meals. Although a lot of them are generic NPCs, the unique named characters can have speech skill checks (your character vs theirs) to determine outcomes as well as to haggle on prices.
I like the freedom it gives your character when it comes to making money like through thievery. That gameplay loop is pretty well developed, with noise and visibility playing a role in your success. Playing as a thief is almost as satisfying as in the Thief games, which is impressive considering that you don’t have any of the cool gadgets in those games and only have lockpicks.
The one thing I haven’t gotten the hang of yet is combat. I’m flailing around slashing and stabbing but my character isn’t strong enough yet to really hold his own against anything more than one or two bandits. Maybe I’m too used to the simplistic hack and slash style in Oblivion or Skyrim, but I feel like the combat system could be polished a little better (like let me switch focus between enemies a little easier so I won’t as easily get flanked.)
I think it definitely depends on the sort of game. I don’t mind paying AAA pricing for a game that actually feels like the studio gave a rat’s ass about providing good value. BG3, for example, was very much worth what I paid for it even just with the ~100 hours I got out of my first playthrough.
Of course, there have also been value kings that I’m not sure will ever be beaten for me in terms of price to hours played. Minecraft and Terraria are good examples here. I got Minecraft during either late Infdev or early Alpha, and so I paid fuck all compared to the current price. Considering I’ve probably put tens of thousands of hours into that shitshow in the over 13 years that I’ve played it, and I’d say it’s more than been worth it. The same goes for Terraria. At 1.5k hours of playtime and counting, it’d’ve been worth it to me even at far more than the $10 price tag that I (probably) got it at way back when.
So tl;dr, I’d say that if a game is truly well-made and enjoyable, then I don’t mind paying whatever the devs need to charge to keep their doors open. Bonus points if I can purchase the game DRM-free somehow.
The graphics are great, like you mention. They aren’t particularly high fidelity, so performance is good, but they creative and artistic, which is better. I’m glad they didn’t just go full realism. The first game sometimes felt like they just placed assets around (although that plays into the story of the game, so it’s fine), but this one is >!in the real world!< and I was worried it’d be too realistic.
Agree with others that length/price ratio doesn’t really reflect how much I enjoy a game.
If I like it, I like it. The hours are irrelevant to me. I can get just as much enjoyment out of a six hour game with zero replayability as I can with a dozens-of-hours-long replayable RPG. It’s the experience, not the time.
Also, with Game Pass and the fact that I buy everything on sale, there’s no real good answer if I did approach it that way.
That said, the only two games I’ve bought at full price in the last decade or so were Breath of the Wild and Spider-Man PS4.
Massively fun and I didn’t feel like I had wasted any money.
I’m currently going through Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is my first experience with the Pathfinder system.
While I do enjoy it right now, the beginning was kinda rough (super long rant incoming). Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad, just some missing information on my part and maybe bad tooltips, because the poison was supposed to go away after resting, but it didn’t. What the tooltip fails to mention, the stat penalty can stack and every 8 hours of rest removes one stack, so you might have to wait around for a day or so, before you’re back to normal.
Then, while I was still recovering from that (mentally and in-game) I stumbled on a text-only event, where you’re going through some marshes and find a seemingly evil idol. Me, being the Lawful Good monk that I am, of course decide to destroy it, but get cursed in return (-2 constitution). Curses are of course permanent, until you can start to remove them at level 5. I was level 2 at the time. Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor. These potions are also super expensive and the vendor had just two of them, while I had four or five people in my party. Thank god my character is also a time wizard, so I cast Quick Load, and was good as new.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn, but that was basically it. No idea why the devs chose to put these quests and events super close to your starting base.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management. After you become a baron, you have to start managing your lands, which is fine in general, but I don’t think the devs have found a good balance, because there are just so many events that are constantly popping up, and I felt like I was making no progress with the actual CRPG part of the game. Regularly I’d leave my capital, just to get a notification that something happened, after like five seconds. So I go back to check it out, and it’s always some unimportant stuff. Experienced players might know that you can ignore these things for a bit, but as a new player, this was just super annoying. Then you also have some projects that force you to skip 14 days of in-game time, while your character is busy, and a few times, when I did that, I got notifications for like eight new things that happened. That’s when I called it, pulled out the mods and basically nerfed the shit out of that mechanic. Events now take only a fraction of their normal time, I can’t fail, and most importantly, I can manage most things, while out on the road. I’ll probably have to skip a ton more days manually, but I take that over the default implementation. FYI, you can turn down the difficulty of the management stuff in-game or even completely automate it (that way you lose some throne room events and interactions I think), I just had the mod installed already, because of a different reason, so I just used that.
Anyway, I still enjoy the CRPG part of the game. The combat is fun, although for a complete beginner to Pathfinder (and little experience with DnD) some tooltips are really lacking information. There are tons of keywords and mechanics getting thrown around, that I have no idea what they do. On your character sheet you’re presented with tons of different scores, and for half of them I don’t know how they got there (the others list a neat breakdown for each bonus you get). I think there are also some bonuses that only apply in certain cases, but aren’t reflected on your character sheet, but I wouldn’t know, because it’s not explained. I’m playing on normal or whatever is the recommended difficulty for newcomers to Pathfinder, and it’s not that difficult, so you can get by.
Other than that, I did “finish” Wolfenstein 3D and killed Hitler. There are more episodes and an expansion, but I’ll skip them. Like I said last week, I found the game kinda boring, it’s just too basic for me nowadays. Just a handful of different enemies, just three weapons, and the levels look all the same.
Now I’m deciding on the next retro shooter, that I want to tackle. Right now I’m thinking either Ion Fury or Doom 64, but something else might catch my eye.
Ohhh, one of my favorite all-time games, only surpassed by the successor.
So first off: Wrath of the Righteous is far more approachable. Better tooltips, better tutorial (including a dynamic one that pops up when relevant), better interface. Just in case you feel like more pathfinder. Note that the powerlevel is far higher in WotR because of mythic powers.
Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. I
Fun story: This encounter was heavily nerfed (twice actually, once shortly after release, and then overhauled a few months later). It used to be mandatory and much more brutal :D It literally made some people stop playing :D
Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor.
Hah :D So essentially the potion is a spell in a bottle. Wait, not essentially. That’s what it is. It has a caster level that depends on the creator of the potion. So with that caster level when drinking it, the spell casts Remove Curse against the DC of the curse. And that is what can fail.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side ;) Owlcat generally overhauled quite a lot of the encounters to remove difficulty spikes.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management.
That is a very common complaint. I liked it, and the time pressure it added. Though only for the first few hundreds of hours (1283h played in total, and without beta testing), later I did what you did.
I’ve read that, but I was planning on playing both anyway, so I decided to start with Kingmaker. Depending on the game, it can be hit-or-miss to go back to an older release by a developer. I just played Divinity 2 after BG3, and missing a lot of the changes and QoL additions that Larian has made, was a bit of a pain at times.
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side
I might have gotten it today (two undead, level 14 and 17 or something), but I was already level 9, so it wasn’t a huge deal. Actually, I’m surprised at how much higher level enemies the game throws at you, but you can pretty comfortably win against, as long as you’re prepared (I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system). A few times I had to reload and get a different weapon to actually kill an enemy or change and refresh my spells, because I wandered into an unexpected fight, but did manage to get them down.
Yeah, it was a good idea, as usual, for the reasons you mentioned. I just wanted to shill the successor a bit just so you won’t skip it because some things with PF:KM irked you ;)
(I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system)
You are smarter than 90% of people playing the game ;) It’s crazy, their games have super detailed difficulty settings, and presets with explanations. And yet people go, play on the brutal because they like Dark Souls and then complain it’s too hard. It’s like there’s some mental health pandemic with gamers. /rant
but you can pretty comfortably win against
Besides the difficulty, TB vs RTwP also influence this. I play on Core (actual setting in WotR, requires manual changes for KM, essentially as close to tabletop as possible; then some mods to bring it even closer to TT), but a lot of fights I could not do with RTwP, but they become far easier once I play the game in the way the system was designed.
It was painful ;) TB actually started as a mod, that was later with permission taken by Owlcat and improved for the enhanced edition. During the development, there was almost an even split between devs preferring TB and RTwP, and RTwP barely won. So with the mod having laid some groundwork and it being extremely popular, it was easier to pitch the addition.
And yeah, I’m an old school RPG fan, I love TB. I actually stopped playing RPGs just before RTwP became popular with the Infinity Engine games, and only returned to them with NWN2.
Currently emulating the old Crash Team Racing as I make my way through most of the Crash Bandicoot games. The racing game is pretty hard as racing games go.
Still working on Divinity Original Sin 2. Game is fun and it’s a lot better than #1 in that series. It’s a large time investment but I do love the game.
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