I don’t really care if they want to rework the good/evil system. What sucks is that they took out the body morphing completely so your character model won’t change with the skills they’re acquiring. Seems like a lazy choice, and doesn’t bode well for the rest of the game IMO.
I don’t think the headline is fair at all. I think it’s there, just reimagined. And personally I think it sounds really cool. If I want the old system, I can play the old games.
Well, if I get what they’re doing this time, it’s different.
Heroes in Fable are driven by narrative forces, they are supposed to be literally heroes of a fable. Morality in these games is not reputation, it’s not supposed to be realistic, it’s like a natural law of the world. And, along with a few other character development traits, morality changes your character physically.
You can even “boost” your evilness with stuff like eating live chicks. Nobody witnesses you doing that.
There’s a whole shtick in Fable that sets it apart from most RPGs, in that, Fable never even pretends you’re a character among others. You’re one of 5 or so heroes destined to shape the story, and the rules applying to you are just different from everyone else.
It sounds like this time, they’re going for something a lot more classic, i.e. scoring how people feel about your choices.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about it feeling completely different then! Not least of which because I haven’t gotten to feel it at all, since it’s not out. It looks very cool and fun imho though! Still think the headline is unfair.
Right? Also it’s not like the mechanic is universally loved. The good vs evil decision features of games (like in Fable, Infamous, Knights of the Old Republic, etc.) are often heavily criticized for being obvious, simplistic, forced, and sometimes even punishing to some play styles or mistakes by restricting some skills behind one alignment or the other.
I liked it as a mechanic personally, but I am also interested to see how the new evolution on the mechanic works. Maybe it’s shit, maybe it’s a more nuanced version of the old one. We’ll see.
I liked what Mass Effect 2 did. Scars that healed if you did good deeds and got worse if you were evil. Or you could pay to upgrade your sick bay, remove the scars, and disable the feature entirely. I roll paragon on the Normandy, but I removed the scars.
If only more people had heeded her message, we wouldn’t have ended up with the “morality” system of Infamous, where it was such a hard choice to either save these people or harvest their energy for your own gain. Decisions, decisions.
Yeah, I fucking detest the way morality systems in games work.
I don’t think they’re a fundamentally unworkable idea, but very few games have even come close to doing anything good with the concept.
Most just offer you two equal but different benefits, let you pick between them, and call that morality. See Bioshock. And the Mass Effect / KOTOR system always sucked because it punished you for going down the middle (ie, playing a complex character).
One of the only good morality systems I’ve ever seen is Metro 2033. For those who don’t know, the game has a secret personality tracker. It gives you points for taking actions that are pro-social. You get a lot of opportunities in the game to refuse benefits or give up resources to help others. You are never directly rewarded for this. It doesn’t do the bullshit where you give someone some food and they go “Here’s an old gun I had lying around.” Being kind costs you. It also measures the time you spend interacting with people, listening in on conversations, that kind of thing. Just generally giving a shit about other people. By the end of the game, if you’ve played your character like someone who cares about other people, you get an opportunity to make a better choice in a specific situation, that leads to a better outcome. If you don’t, the choice is never presented to you at all, because the character you portrayed wouldn’t even think there was a choice to be made in that situation. It’s brilliant, and it completely solves the usual Deus Ex / Mass Effect “Three buttons” ending where nothing leading up to it matters. To be able to make the good ending choice you have to have played the kind of character who would be willing to make that choice in the first place.
I would say its more that morality systems are hard to implement.
If you make simple system where you loose karma from stealing and gain karma from donating money for orphans player can exploit that system easy. You would need to figure some other system. One could be system where after stealing or donating a certain amount you get a status that permanently raises/lowers your karma. But it really cant be permanent either because it takes away from player agency. How would you turn those things to a points. I mean stealing last coin from beggar cant be same that stealing a coin from a millionare. Also this kind of karma system makes so the quests in the game are black and white. You cant make a quest where dooming 12 orphans to die saves thousands from a plague.
How to implement the karma? Everybody magically hating you for low karma is just unrealistic. Should karma effect only some random events and set story points? Sounds fine, but then devs need to implement that system to the storypoints and its not easy to do so without railroading the players. Like Paragon/Renegate in mass effect 2. It made it so everytime the opportunity came to choose from the two, it took away from the real choise and it became just desition to wich stat you want to raise. Also choosing neutral choice was never good option, because in the end game you need to have one or other stat high enough to get trough gated discussions. You could roleplay and choose what ever you feel right, but then some late game options are just locked from you.
It’s ok. With faction relations and stuff. And cobbling up a troll with a jetpack and a legensary sword has something. While the lore is ok. But you need a reshade to get rid of the “gray fog”, especially in the swamps. I mean the 1., didn’t play the 2. yet.
A welcome change imo. The morality system in the Fable games were always heavily lopsided, with one side being strictly superior than the other. Though I will say that I did like the cosmetic changes it made.
Being paid is better. Less cheaters and griefers on new accounts ruining everyone’s game.
There are still plenty of griefers (mostly PlayStation players in my experience, which is why I have crossplay disabled and don’t join randoms anymore), but imagine how many more would be there if they could use bots to keep creating new accounts to claim the game for free.
This surprises me, as I've only really encountered one lobby that had griefing issues, and they were readily resolved by me running an autocannon and the laser pistol lol. I think the nature of the game itself does a lot to minimize the impact of players being jackasses.
I tried playing with PS players about 11 times, and every single mission ended with me being team killed and kicked right before extract, but after all the objectives were completed. I’m not giving them another chance.
As someone who played an unhealthy amount of Rocket League, the transition from paid to free to play ruined the game. The sheer amount of smurfing was disgusting.
Well, that’s 50 studios that won’t ever see my money.
*edit
So, every time a corpo does something shady, social media at large argues: “vote with your wallet”
Given Microsoft’s criminal and genocidal history I decide to boycott companies who associate with that behemoth, especially when they are validating a business model that fucks over other indies. It’s the perfect example of “fuck you I got mine”. I’m clearly voting with my wallet against this unconscionable practice, yet, this thread, on average, thinks that’s a bad thing. I think it paints the average user here on a very negative light, which is disappointing.
48 studios will be closed before they get a game out, and then the other two will be closed after making something award-winning and genre-redefining, and the IP will never see the light of day again.
Maybe not; but my bigger worry is that while this is good for indies initially, by guaranteeing a minimum fixed income for a project - the long-term effect will be that Gamers^TM^ may just begin to expect indie titles to be “free” via GamePass and won’t buy them otherwise.
This would pretty much monopolise those sorts of titles to XBox and leave developers dependent on Microsoft for their continued existence.
I think that there’s big enough chunk of gamers that wasn’t own and support Indie games directly rather than rent them through gamepass that it hopefully won’t have much impact.
I am hoping there won’t be any exclusivity BS though, Epic has been bad enough with that already.
Unfortunately that’s already happening, I know a few people that are hard to convince to play something that isn’t on GamePass — I never insisted, but it’s still a bummer that I need M$'s blessing to play with people I know, considering I don’t have an Xbox and cross-play games that we all like are hard to find.
Yeah it’s straight up the big tech playbook. Undermine competition with low subscription prices and a lot of content. Lure in developers with deals that are too good to be true. And then once the customers are invested in using GamePass and stop buying games, increase subscription prices. And since MS is by then the gatekeeper to the market they don’t have to pay out so much to the developers anymore. It’s basically what Uber has done, once they killed the taxi market in a city they increased prices and lowered payouts to drivers. And since customers are used to those ride hailing apps the normal taxi market will never bounce back and drivers are basically forced to work with Uber or change jobs.
Also once Microsoft has a large chunk of the market in hand they basically decide before hand which games become a success or not instead of letting the market decide. So yeah games critical of their customers like the Israeli government will probably never get on GamePass and thus never reach a large audience. We’ll be seeing way more censorship than what we’ve seen with Steam recently if GamePass becomes the default way to consume games.
I hate Game Pass. It’s a poisoned well. If it’s a continued success it won’t just turn games into subscription service content (meaning we’ll own our games even less. Anyone thinking MS will continue selling games separately I guarantee if Game Pass sticks around for the next decade there will be “only on Game Pass” games) but it will become a locking mechanism for whatever MS new gaming OS will be. MS will make sure Game Pass won’t work on Linux so MS could continue having OS dominance in the gaming space. And of course the service will eventually enshittify because $$$.
The future of Game Pass is a future nobody wants. Paying for an overpriced service to play a curated list of games you can’t own on a machine that will track everything you do and feed you ads every chance it gets.
Whose employees then go and form a new company, marketing its first game as “by the makers of X” and MS is left holding IP of dubious worth and their dick in their hands.
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Aktywne