i was around during the first lvl 200, fully support the player’s decision. ppl asking “why play then?” have never been in an abusive relationship. it’s a great game tbh, just filled with mtx & grinding to the brim. ima check out his latest vids @tniru to see his side of the story
Exactly. It is a really great game and the grinding can be very fun with the character skill explosions wiping out entire screens worth of mobs.
When the game released, the only micro transactions were clothing for your character and a pet that could pick up items automatically. Its really sad they didn’t just keep it that way.
A few months ago they got in deep shit because the gacha part apparently sometimes didn’t contain the low chance stuff at all. So you could pay a million dollars and you would never get it.
This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.
In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it’s actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?
I feel really bad for the people working on these games. PAYDAY 3 will eventually reach success in a niche, but will likely be hated by those same people.
The objective behind a game like this, or Sims, or FIFA/FC, is not to create a great gameplay experience. Sadly, they make a passable game, that will help them leech money sustainably for a considerable amount of time, through endless DLC. Paradox will inevitably make Colossal Order do the same with C:S2, despite them claiming that it’ll be fewer but larger DLC.
There are very few studios I will refuse to show respect for, and the one behind PAYDAY is one of them. Just like what remains of Maxis
Yeah for an example of a series that has found a reasonable equilibrium there companies should be looking at Civ. By making every game significantly enough different moving to the next doesn’t feel like 20 downgrades to get a slight upgrade, but more like 5 has reached the conclusion of what it will ever be, 6 is now new and will have 2 major expansions and a variety of minor ones, but you only see a bit of how it’s incomplete until years later when you’re reminded that some feature came in rise and fall and you’ve just taken it for granted for several years.
I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.
Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)
The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.
So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.
I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.
I’ve been playing Sims since 2006. Sims 4 feels like an insult. I want to like it, and aesthetically it is pleasing, the build tools are nice. But game play wise I need so many mods to make it enjoyable. The packs don’t really integrate with each other and the relationships feel very shallow in vanilla experience. I have Sims 3 and Sims 2 and I love both of them, I used mods but I also it was a fun vanilla experience. I never felt robbed when I bought dlc for them, but at this point with sims 4 unless the dlc is on sale I will not buy it at all. Every sims 4 thing I have bought except base game has been sale. It didn’t even release with pools or toddlers.
I am interested in Life By You from paradox games just to see something different in the genre, it helps that Rob Humble is on the development team. I also keep an eye on Paralives to see how that grows. I just want something new in the life sim genre.
If not for mods, I would not play 4 at all. It’s just bland. It has no soul. And don’t get me started on how broken the few recent expansions were. Not just “egh, an occasional bug that would prompt a restart”, straight up irreparable damage to your save, and broken features that are still not fixed
What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
The trend would be developers that are unwilling or unable to release a new game that is better than the old one (especially in formulaic series like a racing game), or that they intentionally withhold features in order to resell them again. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes good reasons for it, just that it’s something I’ve personally noticed happening now that developers are leaning harder and harder into DLC, and now that games are stagnating in innovation and reasons to buy the next entry in the series.
Also for PAYDAY 3 specifically if you don’t have any familiarity with Overkill/Starbreeze I wouldn’t defend them on this one. They have chosen money over their players every single chance they could get, including breaking their promise to never include microtransactions in the game, and then breaking their promise in 2017 that they wouldn’t release any more paid DLC. In 2017 they released the Ultimate Edition with this promise, and in 2019 they went back on it. In 2019, they started releasing DLC again with the mission statement of “hey any money you put into this DLC will help fund PAYDAY 3 development”. The community immediately noticed that the DLC from 2019 onwards was of lower quality and more expensive, and although people frequently brought this up, others would defend it and say “yes, but we need to support Overkill or PAYDAY 3 won’t be made.”
They started development on PAYDAY 3 in 2016, so they’ve had 7 years to develop it before it released, whereas PAYDAY 2 has been out for 10 years at this point. The moral of the story is they kept releasing mediocre DLC for PAYDAY 2 because it was easy and lucrative, and it became such an addiction that they neglected PAYDAY 3’s development to the point where it released with barely any features or content even after 7 years of development.
Well, and because 2 is fucking abysmal as a game. The starter car shouldn’t feel like it’s on rails regardless of speed, mostly - it’s a fucking racing game, get it right. (modern nfs is in the corner giggling but that piece of shit is always trying to force me to drift, again with an un-upgraded starter car with like 150hp, so it’s no better)
I was a closed beta tester for 1 and 2, and was very excited for both, but going from 1 to 2 is a huge step backwards in handling alone. Whereas I pre-ordered 1 and got several others to as well, I told everyone I know to avoid 2, bought it on sale a while after launch, was immediately disappointed they never addressed this, and it sits with… 13 hours on the clock. As a reference, I have 4,048 hours played in Forza Horizon 5.
I have no idea how they fucked up so badly. It’s a travesty.
(I play with keyboard/mouse out of preference but also because of physical disabilities, so while I /could/ use a controller and maybe mitigate this, grab a controller and try playing with one hand, see how great that experience is x_x) .
Seriously. At the end of the day it’s the players who decide whether a game is good or fun. They might not understand the nuances of what went into creating a game they don’t find fun, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
343 just sucks at making good halo stories, great gameplay (on infinite atleast), but they just don’t know where to take the story. I was disappointed in 4 skipped 5 and infinite was another halfbaked story that just felt empty.
343 is okay at making gameplay, but they are not good at making Halo gameplay. I mean, Halo 4 was just Call of Duty with Halo window dressing. And it makes sense because 343 was so proud to announce that they hired people who hate Halo to work on Halo. Well look how that turned out.
As the other reply said, half the (H4) game was good. But they listened to the haters and changed up H5 dropping or rehashing the majority of things from H4. Then they capitulated again and threw everything out for H6 and gave us essentially H7 in all but name.
Years spent bringing everything to a head for 6 with Cortana, the Guardians, even Halo Wars. Then it’s all confined to audio logs.
I want to finish that damn story 343. Not whatever the fuck Infinite was.
Isn’t that true of all Halo games though? I’ve only played 1 and 2, but the writing in those was just not good at all. I can’t imagine subsequent games being even worse.
I couldn’t get through Halo 4’s campaign when it was released as part of the MCC, nor was I able to get though Halo Infinite’s (it wasn’t bad, just… meh; nowhere near as good as the Bungie campaigns but not trash either, just not as good). I would still like the option to play Halo 5 on PC just so I have the ability to play the main campaign, plus I’ve heard it’s the best multiplayer Halo? But yeah. Even if I never actually play it, it’s nice to have the option.
On a tangential note, I think 343’s Halo games would have been considered good if it wasn’t for Bungie’s Halo. I don’t think their campaigns are honestly bad, per se (though again, haven’t tried to play H5), they’re just bad in comparison to the “OG” games.
Yeah there’s a reason there hasn’t been much interested in Xbone emulation, almost everything worth emulating has gotten PC ports over the years or is also on PS3 which does have a good emulator. Maybe if Sunset Overdrive was still a console exclusive I’d bother, but I guess this is cool for some peeps.
Halo 5 had a lot of problems. Bit it’s a damned masterpiece compared to Infinite.
Halo 5 had great gunplay, Warzone Firefight was a blast, the Guardians were a great stand-in for the Halo rings, Cortana was an intimidating enemy by the end of the game, the lootboxes were actually better than the armor cores and marketplace from Infinite.
There are A LOT of negatives in there too. But a lot of positives. Infinite is just a shitshow from the beginning.
I have a lot of problems with it. Between the “story” and the copy-paste map. I would rather the game didn’t exist, because at least then they could make a follow up to 5’s end.
I really don’t want to spoil your fun if you’re enjoying it though. A lot of the gameplay elements are fun to play around with.
It did not release with co-op. I think they had to figure out how to make it work with the open world map and zip lining. When I had finished it, it still didn’t have it. When they added it, they also announced that they had stopped trying to make local co-op work.
As far as I know, they gave up on assassinations too. To be honest, by the time I finished the game, the missing features were at the bottom of the list of problems I had with it.
Them just retconning Cortana was such a letdown. Honestly while 5 wasn’t great, it did set up infinite to be really really good. Then they went with a really boring alternative.
This is my biggest complaint. Halo 6 was set up to be an amazing game. Then Infinite ended up with zero story. The most interesting stuff in Infinite were the little flashback sequences that bridge 5 to Infinite.
You can really tell that campaign took a back seat in the game. A shame because the open world was honestly a lot of fun, it was just empty and hollow because of such of a lame story. You could have been jumping between worlds fighting Cortana for the survival of the human race. Instead… we’re lost on a ring again, and we’re fighting a brute guy we don’t care about, while desperate for any actual story about what the hell happened
I STRONGLY disagree. 5 was a letdown with some bright spots. Infinite is offensively bad with no redeeming value.
Even if you remove Infinite, 5’s combat is better than 4’s in every single way. I would split second worst between those two depending on what aspects you’re comparing.
Infinite is good now with the netcode having been re worked. It has a few poor maps and bad choices regarding forge and split screen. Ut actually playing the game is fun in most cases.
I played Halo 5 Forge on PC no scratch the Halo itch when MCC wasnt even announced yet (I felt so cool for knowing that exists).
If I could choose, I’d play Halo 5 Forge over Infinite. But I like the gadgets more than the booster feature.
“basically we made a coloring book. It’s bland, boring, but some talented artists will add onto the poorly fleshed out systems later and keep it alive for five years. We love our modding community.”
Watching Bethesda scrape together this new IP and it just being… Average… Is disheartening. I hope they’re just channeling their good ideas in ES6 but I’m losing faith.
Yeah but every NBA game gets flooded with negative reviews and these people will buy it again next year. It doesn’t matter how many negative reviews it has if it sells well.
I always have a laugh when half of these reviews are “wow guys this poorly rated game that everyone told me is garbage turned out to be garbage. They’re making the same game every year!”, fast forward to them posting the same review next year.
I got Madden 22 for free and for awhile I was enjoying it. It was my first Madden game since the 360. So I start going to forums for the game, and every single post was about how bad the game is, highlighting ridiculous bugs, shitty AI, missing features.
Then details about Madden 23 started to come out and everyone that was tearing 22 apart was absolutely in love with every little thing that was shown.
Man I remember being on the Gamefaqs forums back in like 2005 or so, and people were complaining about this exact scenario back then. Some things never change
Single player shooter’s aren’t bad or even unpopular right now. But I think people are beginning to realize that anything that has EA’s name attached to it is trash and just avoid it on principal.
Jup, even new iterations of their older IP seem to be devolving instead of taking that which was fun and expanding on it.
Maybe they should use all these behaviour experts to investigate why people keep playing games instead of figuring out how to maximally predate on your customer base.
Ubi does the same. I found the last farcy so Uninteresting that I stopped playing somewhere mid game. And the first signals from their pirate game are also not encouraging, while I know many people that looked forward to it.
Everyone in the single player fps demo is replaying the old good games, or seeking out like custom doom wads or the occasional actually good indie fps single player game, having at this point long given up on large studios being able to make a compelling single player fps.
Sure, a lot of us enjoy lots of other kinds of games too, but good lord is there an unscratchable itch for a new, compelling FPS campaign thats actually interesting and challenging.
It's boomer shooters or nothing in that space right now. We're starving out here. On my radar in the coming year or two are Mouse, Core Decay, and Agent 64, but no one knows what kind of quality we'll get out of those. Also, is it a crime to just throw in some competitive multiplayer that's meant to be played a handful of times with friends instead of being the next e-sport?
And then you’ve got absolute mad men like Concerned Ape making stardew valley 10 times better with free updates for years and years. Showing these money hungry companies how it’s done.
Honestly, why would we need a Stardew Valley 2? There’s so many harvest moon games but are they really anything more than small iterations? Not to mention those have been garbage since the IP was basically stolen from the original developers.
I feel like Stellaris is a measurably different game than release. I bought the game on steam like 10 years ago and while it looks largely the same, the mechanics have seemingly had complete makeovers or renovations every few years. As far as I can tell most of the modified mechanics have been introduced to the base game as well, so those without DLC aren’t completely left out.
The game used to be some weird rock-paper-scissors game of either wormholes, gateways, and jump drives with corvette death columns. There was an optimal way to play and everything else was a handicap
The scale is just a little bit different here, isn’t it. One guy (maybe a few more) and an indie sensation that makes a ridiculous amount of sales vs. a company that needs to pay wages for 30 people.
We can have a discussion here, but comparing standard run rates vs. a massive exception isn’t a great starting point.
Yeah it’s also one guy who got so rich off it he never has to work again if he doesn’t want to. Haunted Chocolatier isn’t because concerned ape is a game dev now and needs money, it’s concerned ape wants to make a new game. He clearly loves stardew valley and that’s part of why he keeps updating it.
Terraria is a better exception to use but still an exception. I’m not asking for every game to give free unplanned massive expansions, though I will continue praising those who do such things and absolutely add them to my list of “buy their next game if I’m remotely interested”.
What I want is games that feel like they’re trying to give everyone a fair deal. A base game that’s good on its own and doesn’t feel like a downgrade from the previous game. A few expansions that are good, reasonably priced, and make the game further into its best version of that iteration of the series. And a reasonable number of non expansion dlc that add something and ideally don’t leave me trying to decide what ones I want to get. And by the end of life the game can be not quite the cheapest but full, good, and complete. That way when the next iteration of the series is dropped I’m not left thinking it was because they just wanted to sell me the same things over again. Civilization does this excellently.
Yes, companies with 30 employees are, in fact, money hungry because that's how the employees fucking eat. One person's recurring costs are nowhere near the recurring costs of dozens of people. WEIRD HOW MATH.
Stardew Valley, Undertale, Braid, all of these one-man (mostly) shows generated enough revenue to effectively retire their creators overnight but if they had to pay 30 motherfuckers with the proceeds... yeah, not so much.
I’ve worked for those (sized) companies and employee pay is not as much as you’d think. Not to mention higher sales don’t equal more pay (for the actual workers.)
Yeah exactly, my first thought was “Doom is still in the public discourse.”
Not to mention, oh what’s that game that broke earnings numbers on steam, oh yeah, Cyberpunk 2077? Rough launch aside, the game literally printed money, and is a great RPG and a great FPS.
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