Tiefling Astorion would have put people not familiar with forgotten realms too on edge talking to the refugees. Astarion’s capriciousness would have made people think that was a tiefling thing not an Astarion thing
I’ve heard this argument thrown out before but my issue is always that you have a permanently declining user base since you can’t buy more copies. This is a band aid delaying the inevitable. It will not allow a game like this to live forever.
There’s one thing, however, that Harrison recommends studios do above all others when sunsetting a live service game: let players keep playing the game on their own servers. Before shutting down Knockout City, Velan released the game as a standalone Windows executable with private server support. It’s still available to download.
That bit about “every designer or artist has a bunch of shit ideas and just picks their best 5%” is SO TRUE. Remember this when you’re doing something creative and don’t feel great about it. Just keep doing it.
How hard is it for game devs to organize themselves and start companies that respect them? Worker-owned game studios. Is that hard? Are they unionizing?
The expected profit margin when you try to make a genuinely good passion project is razor thin, if it’s there at all. There are two kinds of games that make money: outliers and whale hunters. When we think of good games proving the games industry wrong, we’re thinking of outliers. The rest of the industry is whale hunters.
In theory you could create some kind of game dev collective where a bunch of indie devs all work on their own thing under the same umbrella, and if any of them make it big, they all split the take to fund the group going forward. But you run into all the same logistical difficulties that normal communism runs into: what does leadership look like? how do you hold members accountable? what does contributing look like when development hell can look like not delivering anything for years, or forever? who pays the lawyers who have to figure that all out?
Silicon valley often had “incubators” which are kind of a middle ground between collectivism and capitalism. An investor funds a shoe string budget to several start up ideas to create minimum viable products. If one looks promising they all switch to shipping that and they’re all part owners.
I’m kinda surprised we don’t see more game dev incubators. Maybe indie outliers are just that rare.
Also, support games made with passion and love (even if technically means supporting a big corporation). Legends of Runeterra is an example of a game that absolutely hit the nail on the head (there are zero predatory systems, despite being a collectible card game!), and now has been punished for it.
Honestly, especially games made by big, publicly traded companies. They make games based on marketing algorithms. Buying good games only improves the algorithm.
We’ll have to wait until it’s out to see. The statement that they want to minimize grind? Hoooooly crap, that’s the exact opposite of what RS was. To get to the higher levels and max a skill, it was basically a mental game of sticking to the best xp/tick strategies, which could still take a month or more to max one skill. That was after they had introduced a bunch of new things. The original days? It was a third job on top of it being the second job to do it in months.
It was also really fun for being so simplistic and had a good mix of self-aware humor, so I have hope for their new game.
RuneScape to me is about having an easy enough game that you always have something to do on.
I’ve got a few 99s, but I still have plenty of others to do, and if I don’t want to do skilling, I can go do some of the plethora of quests I haven’t done yet. If I don’t want to do either of those, I can go find quite a lot of different things to do ranging from very easy to very difficult.
I’m sure most people stick around for the grind, but for me, it was always because there was SOMETHING for you to do. :)
The most misleading statement ever though. It’s only halfway XP-wise. You will have unlocked much better training methods, gear, support skill, possibly more money, than earlier in the skill. Time-wise you’re definitely way over the halfway point.
Sure its playable but the game is still (and i think always will be) lacking the VAST majority of features they’ve been talking about for more than 10 years.
Like what? What features specifically have they been talking about (for more than 10 years) which have yet to be implemented? Most of the core systems seem to be there, just seems like they’re polishing up what’s already in the game.
The last one that’s missing is IIRC Jump-points and they’re adding that within 3 months. They’re still fleshing out salvage and the dynamic economy stuff, but the initial implementation is there.
I could have sworn when I pledged in 2014-2016 (can’t recall at the moment) I pledged cause Squadron 42 was hyped to be released in a much shorter time. I’m not complaining, I spent some more cash on it, but I thought I was going to get a fancier single player space game before now. I loved Wing Commander as a kid, even had to get a tech to figure out the highmem.sys and possibly other optimization in the windows .bat files to even play so wanted to play the newest of Chris Rpberts.
Of course maybe I misunderstood at the time and it wasn’t supposed to be coming that soon, which is why I’m not bothered even if it passed, I think they are trying but got into feature creep. I haven’t logged on in over a year now but I keep an eye on things to try when it seems interesting and get use out of my HOTAS.
Since you’re replying to every comment I’ve made - Alpha still doesn’t have a set meaning. It changes between people who use it.
Logging in and doing the content you couldn’t do when you originally bought it still means it’s progressing and yes, it qualifies as a game no matter how mad that makes you.
What part of “it’s still being fucking developed” keeps getting past you bud? “It’s just a tech demo, it’s not a complete game” - no fucking shit. You being pissy that it’s not done as fast as you want it is entitlement and you should really grow the fuck up.
In its initial debut on Kickstarter, Star Citizen was marketed as “everything that made Wing Commander and Privateer / Freelancer special.” The proposed game was claimed to include a single-player story driven mode called Squadron 42 that would include drop in/drop out co-op, a company-hosted persistent universe mode, a self-hosted, mod friendly multiplayer mode, no subscriptions, and no pay-to-win mechanics. The initial estimated target release date was stated to be November 2014, with all proposed features available at launch. Additional promised features included virtual reality support, flight stick support, and a focus on high-end PC hardware.[3] While the initial release would be targeted for Windows, Roberts stated that Linux support was a goal for the project after its official release.
Cool, too bad it’s one of the worst pay to win games. Last time I checked you had to pay real money to buy in-game stuff and the prices were by no means pocket change.
It really isn’t though. For one you don’t “have” to buy anything except a starter package for $45, everything else is optional if you want to support development. There also isn’t really a “win condition,” there’s PvP, but it’s not like ranked matches or whatever.
Also those people buying the largest most expensive ships are going to be in for a rude awakening. You will have costs for managing ships that currently isn’t in the game, but when it is I imagine the big spenders will bankrupt themselves (in game currency). There’s also the fact that ships larger than a one seater will need crew so you can’t really do much with them on your own.
The prices of ships can be absurd, but I think the people that buy them are just shooting themselves in the foot. I’ve been a backer since 2014 and aside from the starter ship I only bought one “extra” cheap shuttle because I love having access to it through any wipe even though I could earn it in game fairly quickly.
Damn, as of years ago you’ve been able to buy new ships with in-game currency. You’re not even keeping up on the game you’re bitching about. Sure you can always buy better ships with real money, you can have whatever reservations you want about that, but calling it pay to win seems like a stretch. Elite Dangerous has long proved space battles are often a skill issue.
Chris Roberts has always had the ambition for a space sim where you could truly do anything, but never had the resources to actually create it.
So what is Star Citizen supposed to be?
An open world sandbox where you, a citizen of the stars, can choose to be Whst you want. A space trucker? A pirate? A bounty hunter? A smuggler? These aren’t new things in the space sim genre, but Star Citizen wants to make these aspect less like a game and more like a life sim.
So instead of clicking a few buttons to fly your spaceship, your character wakes up in bed, has to manually walk over to the ship hangar (maybe take the train there, if you’re on the city planet. Yes, the train runs on a schedule), manually access the hangar via elevator, climb into the ship, activate the ship, request take-off from control, wait for the hangar doors to open, and then you fly your spaceship.
This level of granular detail is meant for every aspect of the game and is the reason why Star Citizen will never get done!
Y’all have been burned too much, so when you see someone creating something bright and exciting, all you see is fire. Stop reading clickbait headlines, stop taking the word of tinfoil hat loonies just because it satisfies your irrationalinal desire to hate this game. They get so much wrong and manipulate the rest you’ll feel like a fool when you see for yourself. Try the next ree fly, face the cognitive dissonance and make up your own mind. Then get frustrated with the manufactured outrage that tricked you from having fun with us this whole time.
Gaming journalism is about generating clicks for shareholders, full stop, but you’ll believe them over an independent studio run by a guy whose career is full of beloved, well made space games. You have fallen into an enshittification trap and are missing out because of it.
Look at the number of comments on posts about hating star citizen. If you were an unscrupulous gaming news company, generating Star Citizen drama equals clicks and money. Go watch the weekly Inside Star Citizen episodes or dev livestreams, read the massive monthly reports, use the dev tracker to communicate with one of their thousand employees on the forums. This is a game being made in good faith. How is a constantly growing playerbase and financial success somehow considered a sign this game is bad? How does spending that money on development , pushing out massive quarterly updates and inventing new gaming tech mean this project is dead? How does the most openly developed game out there mean they are clandestine fraudsters? It’s the shareholders of gaming news who are trustworthy here? Think critically, don’t just feed your initial reaction.
People don’t make fun of starcitizen because “games journalism”. They laugh because it’s development hell is funny. Even if a satisfactory product come out the other end, it’ll still be an internet legend.
Star citizen exploits its userbase with a never-ending drip feed of bite-sized consumables, just as long as you keep feeding the machine.
This is not some poor little indie dev. They have taken over 600 million from they’re users, and have nothing finished to show for it. I treat them with the same distain that I do companies that trive on lootboxes and live services, as they all work from the same base template. At least the live service people made a game before squeezing every penny out of people.
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Aktywne