Yes, unironically. It doesn't stop happening. If we get too desensitized and passive they'll keep inventing more ways to be terrible.
It used to be that any monetized cosmetics were already seen as a gross cash grab, now people are thankful it's not gameplay related. But there is also plenty of gameplay related ones too. The gaming industry is just so bad now.
Exactly. This defeatist “iTz jeust opshunal” and “shaming them is a waste of time” response is asking to get fucked over more
Remember Battlefront II when the community got fed up and shamed EA into removing loot boxes?
How about RuneScape recently? Who was slammed so hard they first dug in their heels and then finally relented and pulled their pay to win battle pass?
Also those developers and publishers bitching at Unity need to be quiet because….”capitalism has been complained about enough”
Yes, in all these situations, we consoomers should all just shut up and take it because “it’s been talked about enough already”
This attitude is why Madden players get what they get every year
Keep that attitude up and you’ll see Bungie release an “upgraded” $30 battle pass on top of the current one and take all the cool and useful rewards out of the first paid track just like what Activision did with “Blackcell” for Call of Duty.
I hate that it gets dismissed as just being cosmetic. I love making cool looking characters in games, it’s really fun and is part of the content for me, especially if it’s multiplayer.
Once again fans are stepping up to help Bethesda patch up their latest release. Still, the fact that there are no city maps is just kind of baffling. I could understand a bad map or a confusing map, but just a bunch of icons in blank space? It still feels like it should be a glitch even though it is apparently completely intended.
But the Steam Deck is a portable console, so the design considerations are different, so it’s a bit of an apple to oranges comparison. On pure numbers, though, Series S will perform better. (Steam Deck is still awesome though 👍)
I’m not sure. I saw some one comment that they were running split screen on Windows, but I can’t personally verify that. Based on what I know of software development, it’s likely part of every version of it but not necessarily easily accessible. For example DoS2 has split screen coop on PC, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. You have to plug in 2 controllers and do some extra steps but it works.
Maybe if you plug in a second controller on steam deck you can?
No. You can run split screen on non-Steam Deck PCs, and in fact you can launch BG3 on a Steam Deck as if it were a proper PC with split screen enabled (it prob just won’t run well).
Feature parity is not a requirement for Deck verification, Larian simply disabled split screen on the platform and called it a day.
Microsoft requires feature parity between Series X and S versions of the same game. If you want to support split screen on Series X then you must support it on Series S as well.
Yeah it’s basically like a launch option that will configure it in a certain way. You can in fact with a launch option tell the game to ignore this, and play split screen on Deck. I have seen people doing it but I doubt it runs well but I guess that’s the beauty of PC/Deck gaming that you can do whatever you want to and make up your own mind.
The default profile for Steam Deck disables split screen. You can enable it but it will run like shit. It running at ~30 fps with the default profile means it can be verified.
Wait, acts? Are there literally like title screens like “Act 2 - The bad thing happens” or do you just call it act three in a storytelling structure kind of thing? Because I played like 15 hours this weekend and only barely made it to the underdark for the first time (no idea how far into the game that is). Howlongtobeat said the main story takes like 24 hours so I figured I’m a good way through the game already.
Yeah, I literally had the entire Sunday off to play with nothing (urgent) to do. Don’t get many days like that though. Literally played for 13 hours yesterday
Was the switch 2 a successful launch from a monetary perspective: Hopefully
But people also have to understand. Gaming gets more and more mainstream every year AND population increases every year. Of course units sold are going to increase. The last time we had a console launch was 2020-ish. It has been five years of new people getting into video games and so forth.
Its similar logic to any time we see “Call of Auto 789151 is the fastest selling Call of Auto ever!”… Of course it is. If it wasn’t then that would be a huge red flag for the franchise.
Sure thing! GTA 5 average game time was 52h (main+extras), so its price is then about $1 per hour at launch. Looking at my Steam library, I’d probably have saved hundreds if not thousands over the last 20 years if all the games were billed like this…
Have fun implementing the payment system that reliably measures and bills this with zero downtime, internationally! And even more fun when nobody mysteriously chooses to subscribe to this shit.
Yeah, but dollars per hour is stupid. I care more about enjoyment per hour. Just maximizing play time is what has cause open world games to be boring as hell. I’d rather spend less time with a game that’s more enjoyable over a shorter period than more time doing the same few activities over and over and getting nothing out of it.
To be fair, for most games which you actually choose to continue playing, enjoyment per hour must be at or above a certain threshold otherwise you’d stop playing.
Well, there are a lot of psychological tricks that can be used to make us keep doing things we aren’t enjoying. We’re just big dumb apes who are easy to manipulate.
well yup and thats what they want the games to be. a service. multiplayer diablo2 was much like an mmo but no servers needed. You could run the server and play with your friends or even open it up but everyone needed to have a copy of the game. so it has been done and they want to do it more and more.
While I’m super into self hosting instances, that usually defeats the point of MMOs. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that the publishers of MMOs often defeat the point of their game after long enough anyhow.
All that has generally pushed me towards round based games where the only advantages are my own personal skill.
Perhaps. I think in terms of Fallout they may have made the maps kind of “stylized” like how the rest of the pip-boy is, but it definitely didn’t make the game very fun. Especially when I was lost in one of the many maze-like dungeon levels and the map just wasn’t helping.
The indoors Fallout map is the worst thing ever. I don’t think it’s ever once helped me out of a jam or cleared up confusion. If there are multiple levels (and there always are) it’s all just slapped together in a single plane on the map so it makes less than zero sense.
Yeah. The worst case of it I’ve seen is in the “Come Fly With Me” quest in New Vegas. The indoor area is split into two sections each that are both multiple floors, and both of the floors vary surprisingly not at all in the way they look. Especially the underground section. The quest has you navigating the whole building about a dozen times too, so it just becomes a nightmare.
"A little jarring" is being very generous. For me, Skyrim's map is one of the worst maps I've ever had the displeasure of using. Skyrim is a grey game with grey landscape, and the map really emphasizes how grey everything is: grey land with grey icons on top and grey clouds covering most of the landscape (such a great idea). I don't mind that the map is 3D, but the camera angle limits is what pisses me off, they seem to choose the worst possible angles to showcase the map. There are no road markings whatsoever, and the LOD is so low that you can barely make out any feature on the map (considering you're lucky to find a patch in the map that isn't covered by the grey clouds).
I know that Fallout's maps are bad as well, you can barely see shit in them except for the markers, but at least it's in theme with the game, so it gets a pass. Starfield's is in theme and is pretty much like the Fallout maps, but the fact that there's literally no other features make it terrible as well, but I much rather have a completely blue screen with some markers spread around than trying to navigate Skyrim's map.
Oblivion's where it's at. They should have expanded on what they did there: simple 2D maps that are in theme with the game, clearly depicting main roads and some minor paths and simple depictions of the main cities' walls.
I just wrote a little jarring because I frankly didnt play much of Skyrim. I know, I’m such a heathen ;). So I was just going off of memory. You’re right that it’s bad though now that I’ve looked at videos of it.
I think hogwarts sold so well because of the JK backlash. Brought a lot of attention to the game. It was a good game though. Baldurs is getting attention because of how good it is. And treating your customers with respect goes a long way. I just bought DOS 1 & 2 because of how much I’m enjoying BG3 and wanted to vote with my wallet. Plus I hear they’re also really good.
I think Hogwarts sold well because it was a genuinely good game which captured the spirit of the franchise, a decent story line, an explorable world and had some decent combat mechanics.
I think the JKR boycott did help in an underhanded way because most of the protesting was shrill straw man character assassination. People tuned it out and bought the game anyway based on word of mouth. The real losers in this nonsense were gaming websites who undermined their own credibility by boycotting the game or scoring it badly just and turning the review into a diatribe about gender politics.
This update added a lot of new stuff to the game not counting the new really big island. Human bosses, an “arrogant pal tamer” that wants to see specific pals, a NPC that asks you to do specific emotes and one hidden npc that gave me a book that increases 1 work thingy by 1 (got one for handywork, the game crashed, then got one for planting, so there’s possibly one for each work)
My biggest gripe at the moment is with predator pals, which don’t always spawn where they’re supposed to (fixed locations, unmarked on the map) but drop predator cores, which are needed for the inventory expansion, as well as giant pal souls.
It also added some high QoL chests: one that lets you check ALL the chests in the base and the Guild Chest, which acts as a shared base chest. Another super useful building is the skill fruit farm: plant one, get 3 of the same skill.
The new island starts with several anti-air missile places, but at least it seems you only need to disable them once. Whether the missiles will go through walls or rocks and kill your flyer seems to be random chance, but it at least tries to be physical projectiles.
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