It's likely a far cry from shutting down, but shutting down is inevitable. Most online only games you only lose access to when they die, but Destiny deletes stuff while it's still alive.
“Instead of getting more accepting of microtransactions these days because they’ve become so normalized, I’m moving the opposite direction. I genuinely resent Diablo 4 for sinking so, so much work into its $15-30 armor sets in the store when they could have been farmable in the game, and in-game sets are already starting to fall behind in the seasonal model.”
You clearly don’t resent it that much, considering you gave Diablo 4 a 9/10.
It's not a burn; it's a poorly constructed comment made out of context. The author's criticism on Diablo 4 is based within the context of Baldur's Gate 3's release. The review for D4 was written before BG3 was released.
Oh sorry I didn’t explain myself well enough. I mean if there’s a significant online component where a large part of the content is interactions with other players, it seems like there’s a shelf life to getting the best experience from the game. So maybe it’s worth having a legit copy instead of pirating some time down the road.
You’re not missing anything content-wise if you play it solo. In solo mode you control all 4 of your party members during their turns, and in the multiplayer mode you control some of your party and your friend(s) control the others. The game content is the same but the experience is very different since multiple players are generally less tactically coordinated than a single person and they can wander the map separately
It’s only 1 to 4 player co op, there is no major social element, don’t worry you can get buddies together to play BG3 years from now if you want co op I’m playing single player and its astounding so far, tho, so you’re fine either way
It’s not at all focused on multiplayer. Honestly, it’s probably super difficult to sink into the story if you’re playing with other people because there’s a ton of dialogue and that’s difficult if everyone’s not moving at the same pace. Multiplayer is probably intended for people who really want to invest a lot of time playing with a specific person. Single player is the primary way the game works.
Multiplayer makes fights more fun, but the game’s story is better experienced on single player.
When I first started playing I was mostly just using basic attacks against enemies like a regular rpg. When I played with friends with all sets of different builds I saw them dropping furniture to barricade doors, shoving enemies off of cliffs, triggering traps from a distance and all sorts of cool stuff I wasn’t even considering. But outside of fights everyone moved somewhere different and triggered different story elements that the others weren’t seeing at all.
I think that was intended for figure out ways to beat some of the time sensitive quest, where the trigger might be you talk to someone, enter an area, etc. If you long rest then the NPC might be dead and change the subplot. With multiplayer I don’t know how they handle long rest(like can one player go long rest while others don’t? or a voting system? etc.) Anyway, I do single player, and I think multiplayer could be fun as well.
There’s a multiplayer component like in Larian’s previous Divintiy: Original Sin games where your friends can join your party, but otherwise you can play it pretty much single-player.
Fwiw, I apparently paid for it like 3 years ago when it was in Early Access on Steam and forgot about it until I went to try and buy it again recently, but it’s absolutely worth the $60 if you wanna play it now bs later.
Honestly mate? Buy it. This isn’t a AAA game; this is a AA game made completely independently, without microtransactions or lootboxes or any of the many bullshit practices of modern gaming. The studio deserves your support.
It does have a multiplayer component, but it’s co-op. The game can be played in its entirety either way, and indeed, the single player experience is fantastic. So’s the multiplayer experience. The former is similar to Dragon Age Origins, and the latter is literally Dungeons and Dragons. Both are fantastic, and both are worth playing.
Don’t skip it. This is a deeply special game, and if you’re sick of the AAA bullshit, a great way to show the greater industry is by supporting it. Vote with your wallet.
FWIW, AAA is not typically defined by budget, but instead by the presence of a publisher and methods of release. If you go by standard definitions, as a completely independent developer who crowdfunded the game at the start, Larian’s actually indie.
There is no consistent definition for AA or AAA. It's just an implied level of production value. This game's got the equivalent modern day production value of a AAA game from 15 years ago, but the production value of AAA games like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption these days has soared to levels unattainable to most.
Sure you could. The Witcher 3 has better production value by a meaningful amount with tons of scenes to shoot and permutations of those scenes. People said you couldn't meaningfully do better than the likes of the Kickstarter CRPGs ten years ago because of how much work would go into voice acting and animating all of those scenes, but BG3 is the better production value version of that.
Frankly I think that's laughable. The Witcher 3 is fine production quality wise, but it's not even sort of competitive with BG3. The main quest line vs BG3 side quests, maybe, but there's a huge step down to the animation quality of anything else.
I'm still working my way through BG2, but even watching main story quests in BG3 in the footage that's coming out around launch, the thought frequently enters my mind that the Witcher 3 looks better, like it got better touch-ups beyond what the engine automates for them.
A lot of the storytelling is through 2D scenes giving the illusion of being animated by moving pieces around (which does the job perfectly fine), and a lot of the side quest stuff is just plopping one character without any impressive animation in one spot just dropped in the world.
In BG3, there are a bunch of minor side quests where there are several characters interacting with each other in the 3D world, and your decision making branches branch harder. Just the sheer number of otherwise "minor" interactions with fully animated, voiced, and narrated actions is crazy.
I never played the first one. I just watched a story recap.
The gameplay isn’t janky just brutally difficult and unforgiving. It goes for realism above all. I’m really liking it but I’m only maybe halfway through the story.
Greatest arpg of all time. Runs better than PoE1 lmao. (No, for real, it’s waaaaaay better optimized)
It needs balancing for sure but the core is pretty good, with some balancing tweaks it’s gonna be incredible.
Mild criticism that the article doesn’t seem to mention, probably because they are not a PoE1 player: the endgame is pretty fucking boring. Not because it lacks content, but because decoupling the entrance key (waystone/map) from the zone/layout doesn’t really make it “infinite” as they say. If you think about it, on PoE1 you also have an infinite endgame since each map has a fixed tileset and in both poe1 and poe2 you search for zones with good layouts. All this map of tilesets does is force you to do undesirable layouts and since you only need A tier X map, map sustain becomes trivial.
The endgame quests really need some thinking, it’s not okay that the core gameplay loop incentivizes you to clear zones around tower heavy areas to optimize your use of empowering tablets, but the endgame quests incentivise you to ignore all that empowered content and to run in a single direction, to find the special endgame zones. I do like to put some tablets and clear all boss maps that were boosted in an area, but it feels bad to do when you have those quests objectives telling you to find the fortresses.
I totally get that it’s EA and they created the endgame in a single month just for the EA, but this needs to be said so that when they start refining it there’s a history of feedback around the mechanics.
In any case, I have very good hopes that the endgame will be excellent on release with the amount of feedback they are receiving, and as long as they keep increasing the customization of the map generation, the amount of extra content and the amount of layouts (don’t worry, they will), it’s gonna easily beat PoE1.
Because the wealthy need to remind us how much free time they really have because they don’t actually fucking work or contribute anything at all of value to the world.
The first thing I wanted to comment was “Was this written by Elon Musk’s ghostwritergamer?”
Real answer: Because the games industry is bigger than the film industry, in terms of total valuation.
I can’t wrap my head around this comment. You think playing video games is a wealthy people hobby? Or are you saying the author of the article is a wealthy person who doesn’t work? And he has to remind us that becuase that’s apparently something rich people do all the time that I missed? Or is it that only wealthy people have time to read these articles? Did I miss elon musk promoting path of exile or something what does he have anything to do with this?
The real answer doesn’t make sense neither, the article makes no mention of how much money the game has made, it’s just a surface level review.
As for the real the answer: I’m assuming what they mean is, since gaming is such a popular medium (which can be seen from how much money the industry makes) it makes sense otherwise unrelated outlets would have articles about it.
Forbes, for many years, has been mostly written by freelance bloggers. Some is very high quality (some is not) but it’s not like an editor in a newsroom is asking for these stories.
They have journalists on staff still but they write a minority of what Forbes publishes online.
well yeah, but that’s only because the slow death of “generations” will be complete by then. We already have a large swath of casual and/or younger gamers that are still gaming on PS4 because PS5 is too expensive and all the games work fine on PS4. Bump that forward by a generation, and what would you expect to happen? I don’t think it’s all that wild to expect that for the majority of the PS6’s lifespan, 100% of games will also come out on PS5. Hell, I’d bet even low-budget and indies continue to come out on PS4! It’ll be like phones - the PS6 is there for the people that want to pay out the nose for the bleeding edge, and the PS5 and Pro will still be there for everyone else that wants a console gaming experience. And all those kids playing fortnite and minecraft? They’ll still be playing that on their childhood PS4.
Thank fuck tho, it will keep electric waste down, and I feel we are starting to figure out you don’t need to spec your game to the newest graphics card for it to be fun.
From my understanding users of the beta can then invite others to join as well, Valve isn’t necessarily directly choosing who has access. So if Valve didn’t send the invite themselves they wouldn’t know to specifically put someone under a more strict NDA or whatnot because they’re a journalist. Could they have done more to restrict all users from sharing information? Yes, since apparently you just have to hit escape to bypass the agreement pop up, and there’s no other sort of NDA or contract or w/e in place upon joining.
I’m just speculating, but I think they chose not to do that so people could openly get their friends playing with them instead of going through waves of sign ups and hoping to get in together, or otherwise risk people losing interest when they can only play with randos. I could also see a line of thinking where you assume people want to talk about the game, so let them bring others in to play with them and that gives them someone to talk to about it too instead of just spilling the beans for randos on the internet.
Valve fucked up but the Verge still broke the social contract regardless of whether they’re legally in the clear or not.
Doing something just because “it’s legal” doesn’t make it a moral justification. My wife and I have a joint bank account. It is legal for me to take money from it and gamble it all away, the gate is “open” but that doesn’t make it morally justifiable.
Meh, I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with what he did. What he did wasn’t just legal, it’s literally his job. The only issue is that Valve is now angry at him for their own failing.
To continue the same analogy, they didn’t just leave the gate open, they literally invited a bunch of people and told them to invite other people. I’m not sure what they expected if not this exact situation.
Valve isn’t really angry as far as I can tell, or have heard. They’re about as angry as any other person which goes and posts this stuff online: revoking access. If Valve wanted to expand their testing userbase without people leaking it online, they would have sought NDAs and other legally-binding agreements with testers and - by extension - journalists who can test the game.
I refuse to support streaming games or subscription models as they only screw the consumer in the end. These companies have shown time and time again they are not to be trusted.
Such as editing games after release to remove media, inserting shitty launchers and DRM , removing content you have paid for such as dlc, shutting off the multiplayer servers etc
Once they have the market streaming they can set the price as they wish and you will have to have mutiple subs to play different games. Were seeing this with movie and tv streaming now.
They don’t care about preservation just the CREAM … dollar dollar bill y’all
Valve is good for now and I support them to help further linux for us all but gaben is not immortal so who knows what the future holds.
I like gog but as a linux only gamer steam is just way less hassle.
Emulation and roms is the only way to be sure you can continue to play your games. So get building your collection.
I’ve put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let’s use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I’ve played each of them for about 2,000 hours…that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let’s be generous! Let’s count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that’s at 10% off. I’ve bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let’s try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That’s about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I’ll take it!
Granted, since most games don’t hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren’t going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I’m willing to occasionally pay these days.
I’m all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!
The menus are pretty fucking awful. The map is really really bad. For a game that’s like 90% based around fast travel you would think they would have a map that makes sense.
Skyrim never improved on any of these aspects even though it got re-released like 15 times. I still have to use UI addons a dozen years later. I love that Bethesda has a great, strong modding community, but it’s really really shitty that they’re constantly relied on for regular, baseline things that shouldn’t be bad.
I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.
That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.
I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”
It’s perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.
I’d try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It’s a better release than Bethesda’s usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven’t done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.
It’s better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it’s been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I’ve ever played. It’s funny because they were getting worse.
Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I’ve ever played on launch.
It does get better with time, but it’s inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I’m still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.
I’m not a fan of Bethesda’s reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it’s like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man’s Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won’t be going back to it despite loving it. They’re not going to add the kind of content I want, they’re likely never going to, and they’re not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they’d allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.
With starfield, I’m excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I’ve had a friggin good time and definitely got my money’s worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.
That’s fine. Allow mods, that should never get in the way of building a proper base product. Many games allow mods and have basic functionality fully fleshed out and the mods are just that, bonuses and modifications. It’s not an excuse.
I feel like microtransactions are “ok” for people on general as long as the game is good. If the game is well made, has a soul, and not a cash grab, people tend to not care about microtransactions. Except the occasional “fuck, this is 10e?”. Like path of exile for instance.
But if the game is half baked, released waaaay too early because of higher ups said that the need money now and not 6 months from now, THEN they become an issue. Games belong to this category soooo of then these days that it’s just what happens. But the microtransactions are not the reason, they just exasperate the issue.
If a great game like Elden ring would’ve had cosmetic sets you could buy, would it have undermined the “greatness” of the game? I really don’t see it happening. Unless they’re like super aggressive or meant to trivialise the game, like, continue fighting the boss only for 2e! Here’s a popup mentioning this each time you die.
If a great game like Elden ring would’ve had cosmetic sets you could buy, would it have undermined the “greatness” of the game? I really don’t see it happening.
I agree with you that people mainly care about the game being good. However a game’s budget is more or less fixed. If From had made a bunch of cosmetic sets it would be taking away resources from making the “main” game, and it may not have been as great and polished as it is.
Also, once you have microtransactions in a game, there’s going to be a temptation to maximize the revenue gained from them, which can lead to the aggressive strategies you mention.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to do mtx without ruining the game, but it’s difficult. Without mtx, the only thing you have to maximize your revenue is to make the game as good as possible, and so everyone involved in the game’s development is aligned towards that goal.
Once you add mtx, there will be people involved whose main goal is to maximize revenue from the mtx (and I’m not saying those people are evil or want the game to be bad; they’re just doing their job). And so a sort of tug of war starts to happen between devoting resources and design decisions to make the game better, or getting people to buy your cosmetics. Finding the right balance through that mess is difficult.
The reason cosmetic microtransactions are so prolific is that their fixed costs are low and the return on investment is high. It wouldn't have affected Elden Ring's development much.
forbes.com
Ważne