$10 to replay it, replay meaning you already have the switch version. Or free if you have switch online expansion pack. It's only going to set you back 90 (instead of 80) if you've never owned it and you want it on switch 2
I think breath of the wild has always been overpriced lol. And it's not news that Nintendo rarely ever discounts their older games. But the vast majority of people who are gonna want to play it on switch 2 already own a copy ( I hope).
I wonder what this'll do to the price of used physical copies
This pricing is why Nintendo doesn’t want emulation of its games, while other companies don’t give a shit because they either figured out how to port their shit over to PC or did a multiplatform release to begin with. Steam was the largest reason piracy for games has literally shrunk and why so many from the scene stopped. Make it cheap and easy to get the game, no need for people to pirate it. Nintendo did the exact opposite and has tried and tried to keep it on a closed platform…yet it’s one of the most emulated company out there.
You might be surprised. I came to the Switch party super late when I bought my kid a switch Christmas 2023. He’s all over Zelda now, has BotW, TotK and even Skyward Sword on his Switch. For him, these games are all from the last year. He turned 2 the year BotW was released.
It’ll be the same story with Switch 2. Some kid who might not even be born yet will get a Switch 2 in 8-9 years and come across these games with all his school friends.
I doubt I’ll go the Switch 2 path with the kids. I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade, yet. I’m thinking of the Steam Deck - while the Nintendo had a fairly cheap entry point to get on the platform, I’ve spent enough on games to negate the difference between a Switch and a Steam Deck - where I already have a 500+ game library to play on it.
Sure, I just mean, look how long BOTW has been sold - it will be a fraction of that length of time before Switches cease being sold. Mostly I was pointing to the system refresh as not only a chance to reissue BOTW, but to reset pricing expectations.
There will be a future where BOTW S2-edition is still being sold and the Switch is not. From them on, BOTW will be a $90 game, since it will be the only way to get it.
Yup, which is exactly how Nintendo wants it. I feel like they’ve always had things that mitigated their BS “never lower the price of games, EVER” philosophy, most notably cheaper hardware than the competition and a lower price point for games ($60 rather than $70). Now they have a console that’s almost as much as a PS5 AND are charging MORE than $70 for some of their games? Maybe the market can handle their excessive pricing, but I hope they get knocked down a peg.
I’ve been wanting to play botw so I tried it on cemu awhile back but couldn’t get it to work. I’ll have to try it again and see if I can figure out what I was doing wrong.
I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.
Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.
Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.
Advertising better cuts to publishers doesn’t mean much when the price is the same across platforms. If epic was consistently 10% cheaper than steam it would get better traction.
Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I’m probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.
This is true, here in Brazil we have an official key seller called Nuuvem that has prices so good TikTok banned their ads thinking it was a scam, since they often have small discounts even on new games.
Just have to be careful because sometimes the key is for Uplay instead of steam.
I hope it’s okay to ask, because I am being genuine, but why is using the Epic Games Launcher such a deal breaker for you? I have Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox, Battle.net and I’m sure more that I’m forgetting and I honestly don’t mind at all. It’s never been an issue for me but I think that I’m in the minority on that so I was curious to hear your thoughts.
Thank you! Ever since the start of the Epic Store, I’ve always thought this whole “exclusive” scandal was blown out of proportion. There is a MASSIVE difference between a game being exclusive to a $400+ console vs to a free launcher that you can install in 5 minutes and add your already multi-launcher platform.
Funny thing is, I mostly agree with you, but in Epic’s case, it’s a launcher written by a company that’s 40% owned by a Chinese corporation. I can sometimes stomach running their executables while playing something, but not having it constantly running.
Personally, while I do use Heroic to access games from the epic games launcher, I will probably never buy anything from them because of Epic buying exclusivity and removing Steam as an option from games that were crowd-funded.
That makes sense. Sounds like more of an Epic Games thing than specifically an anti-games launcher sentiment, or maybe a little of both? I hadn’t heard about the crowd funded game exclusivity thing though, I’ll have to read up on that. Deeply lame thing for them to do, for sure.
I’ve also run into a few issues with the epic games launcher (i.e. game wouldn’t patch, so I had to reinstall the launcher. Having to reinstall a game because the launcher doesn’t see it anymore, launcher is slow, etc.) which is why I use the Heroic launcher.
It really doesn’t, I tried finishing Industria while I had no internet and that electron piece of shit refused to open even though I set it up to work offline in the settings, thankfully the game had no DRM so I was able to finish it just by opening the exe.
LOL the Steam launcher is basically just a web browser. Literally the same concept as Electron. It’d be Electron if it were built today, but it was built before Electron existed.
You realize there’s more DRM free games on Epic than on Steam even though there’s less games overall? If your standard for a good launcher is being able to start the game from a .exe then I’ve got bad news about Steam…
Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.
I also think that developers/publishers don’t care about the % cut that much, they would rather just sell a lot of games. Which comes back to your point, the value proposition of EGS isn’t appealing to the buyer.
It’s like I make a competition to Uber with better cuts and working conditions to drivers. That is nice, but if the consumer has to wait 25 mins for my taxi while the Uber is there immediately, than they will not pick me for the same price.
I want to point out that Valve won’t allow games to be sold on Steam and be cheaper anywhere else. With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.
I get some of the hate, but the “fuck Epic” crowd always annoy me. It’s such an ignorant position. That said, I don’t use the Epic store because it sucks to use. Fuck monopolies though. Steam has too much control. We need competition or we’re going to suffer in the future.
With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.
I’ve heard that brought up, but I’ve never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn’t apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.
Guild Wars 2 expansions are cheaper on the company’s storefront than on steam, without sales. Not sure if they get an MMO pass, but it’s not a hard and fast rule.
As has been pointed out by many other people in this thread, this is untrue.
If you are providing a Steam key, it has to be the same price as Steam. Otherwise, you can set whatever price you want (e.g. if you were selling on both Steam and Epic - like Borderlands 3, which frequently had sales on Epic where the price dropped below the Steam price)
It’s even fine to sell your Steam keys at a lower price in another place - as long as you’re planning to have a similar sale on Steam at some similar time.
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
TL;DR: Games sold on Epic could be any price they want. They’re no different to Steam, in general, because that’s what publishers choose.
Fuck Epic. I will never forgive them for buying Rocket League and ripping it away from my Linux library on steam. I will never do business with them, never play any of their games, never give them a dime, never even sign up to claim their free slop of the week. Fuck Epic with a cactus.
Tbh without epic I doubt the game would’ve survived 2020. If you recall, the whole fanbase was unhappy with how things were stale. Epic didn’t improve anything obviously but the free to play did boost it’s active nunber of players. Nevertheless fuck epic.
Wasnt it already a PS+ game years before epic? It literally had millions of players on day one.
I dropped it after my steam copy first time asked me to register an epic account, but till then I didn’t see huge issues with the game apart from the DLC milking.
It’s pretty much the same in terms of maps and gameplay. Had some regressions like removal of trading system and other things i forgot. Has voice channel now. Servers are the same except there are more now. It’s still fun for a quick match or two.
I own the original CD release of Unreal Tournament 2004, made by Epic, it includes a native Linux installer on disc, you get the full game, and it worked fine.
It makes me so sad that they did a complete 180 on this.
My theory has always been they wanted to keep the door open for Microsoft if things just go under. When you think about it, they were struggling quite a bit in the early 2000’s until gears. Microsoft really propped them up with that franchise, then they made fortnite, lost a lot of money until they pivoted to the BR mode and now they make millions every damn day.
I remember playing both Morrowind and Oblivion with like a ton of notes on how exactly to level up my character, not to min/max but to keep the game from scaling the difficulty too much.
I’d rather see a remake of Morrowind over Oblivion, though. I have the game on GOG but I don’t have the time in my life to go through all the mods to make it playable (especially getting the journalling system up to par with modern games).
The absolute shit mechanics had some kernels of gold though. I loved my Fortify Strength 100 Jump 100 spell and my 10 chaingun lightning amulets. Very few games let you do properly weird stuff with magic.
The level up system was bad. The thrust/chop/slash system for weapons is awkward. Every attack costing stamina is bad for early characters. The excessive number of weapon categories, combined with short and long blades being the only ones that were common. The persuasion system was just bribe people to get what you want, or taunt them for free murder. Run speed being a skill, jumping being faster than running and being a skill as well (combined with the level system this can cause problems). Item durability in general. The encumbrance system, and containers having weight limits. The spell making and enchantment system had some cool things, but it was also trivial to break the game in multiple ways. The quest tracking and journaling was garbage. Alchemy was undercooked. Merchants had way too little gold so selling became annoying by mid level. The haggling quickly got annoying as you could sell at extreme markup or buy for nothing fairly easy. Magicka didn’t regenerate, so being a mage was annoying at early levels until you had sufficient potion access.
There’s also some things that are more bugs I think than bad mechanics. Stealing from a merchant flagged every copy of an item as stolen from them. I once managed to make every redoran guard hostile to me on sight, which got really annoying.
Almost everything you said is why I prefer Morrowind and replay it more than any other Elder Scroll. I don’t like how hand-holdy and forgiving most modern games are.
The AI is obviously dated, some of the systems are underdeveloped, but stuff like the quest journal and athletic skills and how hard it is at the beginning if you aren’t careful or attentive are all major plusses for me. I want the weapon variety, I want the freedom to be anything but without the wishy-washy “you can be everything” style Skyrim has because they’re terrified of locking a player out of any content.
You can be almost everything in Morrowind, just like Skyrim. If anything Skyrim actually locks a chosen play style in more due to talents. There’s a few more exclusive guilds in Morrowind, but they aren’t major for the most part. Just because you have spent the time to learn how to avoid the rough edges doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Don’t run everywhere (keep fatigue bar at least half full). Don’t use weapon skills that are less than 40 (train them - there aren’t restrictions like in the later games).
It’s closer to D&D than an action RPG. Your swing is like a “to hit” roll. The game cares about your character’s skill - not yours.
I like Morrowind a lot mechanically - I like that the game will happily allow you to kill anyone you want (and with Taunt - you can do it legally!) You can complete the main quest after slaughtering everyone on Vvardenfell bar one person (the thread of prophecy might be broken - but a larger theme in ES lore is that we make prophecies happen).
I like that the game is designed around the lack of fast travel. When I complain about fast travel in Oblivion and Skyrim, I hear “just don’t use it” but it isn’t really feasible (playing a Survival run in Skyrim and life just sucks if I have to go to Morthal).
Morrowind’s world is just real and thought out in a way that I haven’t seen in a game since. The towns are designed around food sources, there’s a lot of thought into to the economies of plantation slavery, and it’s all used to enhance the world building.
The fact you have to start your comment with multiple don’t do X things proves my point. As a story it’s great, but as a game it’s got a lot of problems.
The game tells you these things though. You have to pay attention.
It’s an RPG before it is an action game. The mechanics align with that - you just might not like traditional CRPGs - which is fine, most don’t which is why Bethesda basically dropped the pretense of their games being RPGs by Skyrim.
Edit: if you want the easiest time in Morrowind - a Redguard. Adrenaline Rush will get you through tough spots. If you’re impatient and willing to sacrifice optimization for speed (which isn’t really that much a big deal), take the Steed as your sign. The Lady is better for optimization and will save you money on bribes.
If you want cheese: steal the lime ware plate on the shelves in the Census and Excise office right as you start the game. Drop it before the guard confronts you, pick it back up after he chews you out. Sell to Arrille, buy equipment matching your best armor skill/weapon skill. Hop over to Addamasartus, clear out, grab the moon sugar, sell to Ravirr in Balmora for one of his “Daedric weapons.”
But really the purpose of the game is that you should be a low level dweeb for a while. Pacing is slower - if you’re going to do the Mage’s Guild - you should be capable of magic. Lots of those early quests are no combat/easy.
It’s an experience about immersion. The gameplay and mechanics are built to facilitate this. You’re supposed to suck at first - that’s why Caius basically tells you to fuck off at the beginning of the game. You do end up with your god power fantasies at the end - by the time you’ve killed two gods and a pretender, you do get to run around one shotting everything. (Better than Sheogorath him-fucking-self getting ganked by a troll because its health pool is in the triple digits.)
A positive thing to let you experience the consequences of your actions. You are ignoring the fact that the game explicitly tells you when this happens, giving you the choice to continue if you like or reload a previous save if you don’t. It’s actually more forgiving than dying in most RPGs, which would force you to reload from a previous save.
Yeah, it’s a more immersive and interesting world. I also prefer the quest journal over map markers, make you actually read and interpret shit instead of fast travelling to the nearest pip. You also can’t just be the boss of every faction, they have incompatible goals.
And it does say when you break a main quest so you can revert your save. Just don’t be a murderhobo.
Wow I’m really surprised to hear people actually played with vanilla Morrowind and Oblivion leveling. I modded both games to fix that issue almost immediately after realizing how bad the system was.
I don’t think it was a problem in Morrowind, iirc there was no scaling at all, NPCs just existed at a set level so different areas of the map opened up to you naturally as you leveled up. It’s been a minute since I played through it so I might be mistaken but I don’t remember it being a problem, as opposed to OPblivion
Scaling in Morrowind wasn’t really a problem because almost every enemy was hand placed. You don’t have hordes of generic “Bandits” (in glass fucking armor at end game) - you have Tunipy Sharmirbasour, who has a reason for being where she is and a set level. Barring like guards and some of the humanoid enemies in Tribunal and Bloodmoon - everyone has a name.
Leveling only really comes into play when it comes to some of the generic loot that can be rolled, what some shopkeepers might have, and generic creature enemies. Even then, the scaling isn’t ridiculous - going from rats to Kagouti doesn’t feel uneven. Unlike Oblivion, you also will continue to see lower level enemies generated.
Oblivion even levels the quest rewards - so your Daedric artifacts and faction completion rewards will be useless once you level.
Leveling in Oblivion also affects enemy stats, and a lot of time it’s a flat bonus. Late game ogres and Minotaurs are not fun to fight, because they’re just massive health pools.
Morrowind has the same “inefficient” leveling problem (like, endurance is something you want to upgrade as early as possible, because it effects how much health you get every level up) - but in Morrowind you aren’t permanently fucked because you spent your first ten levels training acrobatics and speech craft or something.
Oblivion’s scaling was so wonky. Especially compared with what I really believe to be one of the worst leveling systems of all time. Anyone defending the leveling in Oblivion is nostalgic or thinks things are good just because they’re complicated. Being able to both under AND over level was such weird design.
I really dislike any game with difficulty scaling. It might make some sense, if you fight random bandits in the middle of nowhere, since they had time to level up a little, but in most places it’s just annoying.
I’d rather have my character level up and be able to literally destroy everything with one hit when I spend a shit-ton of time making it stronger. See: Gothic games or classic RPG’s.
I did play it! But I found the significantly lower usage of level scaling made it much less of a problem. Like... it is still a car crash of a system, but I don't have to compete with the fact that every enemy in the world is scaled to challenge me if I a) levelled perfectly and b) put every level into combat skills
The random hit chance thing is a separate issue though
It did. You’ll start to see “mudcrabs” become, like, “diseased mudcrab” and other various divider names as they scaled up with you, the same as they do in Oblivion and Skyrim. It has the same problem of “oh no, I leveled up to 25 by only jumping and now everything is too strong for my wimpy combat skills to handle.” Though because the game is already tougher from the start, it may not be as noticeable.
I am a spreadsheet kind of guy and the old system is for that, but it isn’t very intuitive. Without a guide you have no real idea what you should be doing, which wouldn’t work for mosr people who would love the game otherwise.
Please no. SDV is amazing and the updates have been wonderful but I’d much rather he would move on and continue working on original projects like his Haunted Chocolatier.
Nope, it doesn’t have a controller built-in and its main purpose isn’t gaming. You can’t run PS games on a Switch, does that somehow magically make either not a console?
The Steam Deck was designed from the ground up to give a console-like experience. The only real difference is it’s not a closed system, so you can use it as a PC as well if you want.
Unfortunately not Starlink: Battle for Atlas, which was one of the games I was hoping would have improved support implemented before Nintendo took down Yuzu and Ryujinx. There’s the Steam version, but being able to play as Fox makes it feel like the Star Fox game that the Switch is missing.
While I originally did get the game on my Switch, I’d much rather play it with the rest of my games on the Steam Deck.
I’ve owned every Nintendo console. It used to be that Nintendo = cheaper console, often cheaper base games compared to of the rest of the industry. Wii remained $50 after the other guys had moved to $60 and the Switch stayed at $60 after they moved to $70 (aside from their dirty little trick of TotK). Now their console is almost as expensive as a PS5 and they’re leapfrogging even the $70 standard to price their top-tier games at $80? Sheer greed and hubris. Maybe there are enough rabid Nintendo fans to support their pricing, but I won’t be one of them.
I wouldn’t trust shit either of these two companies argues.
This is probably technically correct, but in some really constructed way. And the reply by the Google lawyers will again be technically correct, but again be utter horseshit in some legal manner.
Suffice to say, people spend a lot on mobile apps. A lot.
Also, the thing they’re spending money on is the hard work of other companies, not Google’s. The profit margins are not tied directly to a Google product; the Play Store generates very little of its revenue in-and-of-itself (Play Pass is the only thing I can think of).
The Play Store certainly isn’t cheap to maintain but it pales in comparison to the amount developers collectively have to spend to create/maintain their apps. The Play Store’s profit margin is obviously going to be high, because Google doesn’t have to spend much to get a cut of the revenue from other companies that have spent quite a lot.
And that’s sort of to be expected with any digital store front that manages in app payments. The question is how much of that profit goes back into the Play Store, or Android development, or into other Google products, and how much does Google eat into the profit margins of those other companies while preventing them from managing payments themselves.
the play store, like other download stores, provides discoverability, trust, and all the infrastructure to distribute and automatically update your software products.
this is not a worthless service, otherwise publishers wouldn’t have flocked to Steam on Windows in the late ‘00s/early ‘10s. only the very biggest ones like EA and Ubisoft felt like they could make more money by rolling their own.
this doesn’t justify using anticompetitive practices to maintain your market position, but there is real value being provided there.
This article sucks horrendously. The Japanese PM was asked about Assassin's Creed Shadows by a member of the House of Councillors, which from a quick search is roughly like the Senate in many western governments.
Prime Minister Ishiba responded to the questions by Kada, saying that if such actions were carried out at real-life landmarks in Japan, he would oppose them. He said that acts such as shrines being graffitied are completely out of the question, which was in reference to a real life act from November 2024.
Holy fuck, the PM doesn't want people to vandalise shrines in real life. He's so mad about Assassin's Creed Shadows, everybody point. Also, the writer doesn't know how to spell feudal ("fueduel") and that's probably the worst part.
Yeah, very glad that Intel has stayed in the market.
It’s very refreshing to see a company release a reasonable, though that term has been skewed so much over the years, budget cpu that doesn’t completely suck and actually tries to run current green games.
It would be incredibly stupid for Intel to abandon the dGPU market after spending all this money on it. As long as Battlemage turns out alright (basically it’s only goal) I doubt it will go away.
They cut the die size nearly in half so they’re no longer blowing a fuck ton of money on a $200 GPU. As long as utilization of the silicon goes up it should be fine.
Apparently Intel is replacing Gelsinger because his plan to turn the company’s fortunes around are taking too long. My guess is the new CEO will likely sell off major parts of the company and I doubt the dGPU division will be kept
I haven’t been a huge fan of Intel for their cpus for some time now, but I agree, there needs to be more gpu competition out there. I’ve been wanting to try out an Arc for a while, I’m just hoping the dgpu drivers are better than what they run for their integrated chips.
Well technically we’ve had it confirmed all the way up to the PS9. Which presumably will release alongside somehow the Xbox X because Microsoft can’t name a product to save their life
The source the Tweektown article is quoting also says:
Anticipation is so high that some competing game publishers are waiting as long as possible to commit to their release dates for the fall, according to people familiar with their deliberations who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The publishers want to see whether GTA 6 will make its deadline or slip into 2026, these people say, and they’re determined to keep their own games far, far away.
This is probably more interesting, that some upcoming games which don’t have release dates may be waiting for this before they commit to a schedule is somewhat noteworthy.
Make a good fucking game. That’s your job. Get out of the creatives’ way and quit insisting that garbage microtransactions be inserted into everything.
It isn’t hard. Gaming companies were able to do it for decades. It’s the rent-seeking executives who are fucking up the gaming industry the same way they’re fucking up everything else.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. That’ll be the death of epic and unreal engine as we know it if it ever happened. And why team up with Google if you know they’ll abandon it in 2-3 years?
Pretty much the majority of (large) single player games in development or recently released have been unreal properties. It’s by far the best game engine for its use cases
Unreal or Unity, and one of those recently became not really an option.
I think it’s in everyone’s interest to have more variety in engine choice, but that just leads to everyone only being familiar with their proprietary engine implementation.
Godot is trying to break in, and seems to be picking up some steam though
Yes, comical that Valve secured exlusivity of an already-on-sale third-party game to try to drive support of their nascent digital store more than a decade before Epic did it and you fanboys are all just okay with it because you weren’t there.
You all try to pretend that Epic invented this sort of exclusivity on PC, but it’s been a thing for years and years before they even opened their store. But go on and bury your head in the sand even further about it, I’m sure GabeN will be your bff if you do it hard enough!
If you think losing Unreal is good for developers and the gaming industry you’re absolutely retarded. Your rant about the storefront stuff is just weird. I don’t like the epic games store either, but I guess that’s not enough for a dedicated Steam fanboy like you. What a sad neck beard you are.
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