I’ve said it before, but until Epic adds some way to provide feedback to others, I won’t spend any money on it. Being able to read if a game is buggy, runs on my hardware, etc, is too essential to the experience to not have.
Epic wants to be the pro-developer storefront, but since that seems to involve being anti-consumer, I as the consumer have no interest.
Hell EA is doing good now in some ways like open sourcing the command and conquer games. Maybe they got rid of their Shit executives to Ubisoft and Nintendo.
I recently broke a decade plus boycott of EA products to purchase Split Fiction for full price. My friend asked me to play It Takes Two with him for free through friend pass and I was so impressed by it that I wanted to support the devs. Besides, the whole point of the boycott was to “vote with my wallet” and I want them to know that I want more games with that kind of quality made by teams that are (seemingly) happy to be doing what they do.
I’m far from being a business savvy person, but honestly, from business perspective what exactly is Epic offering that sets them apart from other competitors? Even if Epic fixed their launcher issues, how would they be different to Steam that is already well established for 20 years? That’s why I like GOG as Steam’s competitor. GOG focuses on selling DRM-free and retro games. If a game also happens to be available in GOG, I would prefer to buy it from there than Steam. Moreover, GOG keep old games well maintained and updated to run in modern computers; something that Steam is very poor at doing. What does Epic even do differently, apart from doing exclusives which any companies could do?
It’s slightly cheaper for developers to put their games on there. But that sucks as a business model, because game prices aren’t any lower so for the end user it doesn’t matter. And on features, Epic just loses every matchup against Steam.
Specifically, if they’re also wanting to be on Steam (the largest marketplace by far, so you need to be there) your game can’t be cheaper anywhere else. It’s a little fucked up that Steam can wield their power like that, but they essentially have a monopoly so they can.
Sure, but even Epic exclusives aren’t any cheaper than the games on Steam. These savings directly go to the game developer/publisher, not the consumer. This means there’s no incentive for the consumer to switch to Epic other than exclusive games, which is a pretty poor reason to switch away from a well-established platform.
That’s only true if you’re selling steam keys. Eg you are using Valve’s infrastructure. And they don’t even require the 30% cut in this case. If you sold the game using another infrastructure then you can price it how you want.
Hmm… that’s fair but it seems that Epic even forgot to think of end users-- the gamers-- in that regard before trying to compete with Steam. They prioritised devs first over the actually most important stakeholder.
To be honest, I totally forgot about Epic until articles are popping recently that it’s not going well even after all these years.
Also, what’s wrong about discussing this? Epic is a good example of a business venture not doing well for failing to do one of the most basic business philosophy: set yourself apart from the competitors.
As the customer, which in a practical sense is the only perspective that matters to me day-to-day, Epic offers me nothing close to what Steam or GOG can give me. Hell, even EA’s and Ubisofts launchers were more useful since they at least had exclusives. All Epic has is Fortnite and for someone like myself that doesn’t care for that kind of game, there is no reason to even consider their platform for anything.
And given my recent switch away from Windows and to Linux full time on my gaming PC to put a further wedge between me and the things Microsoft has been doing with Windows that I don’t like that is a good thing given Epics history of embracing things that will never work as smoothly on Linux as Steam games do with Proton or GOG’s native Linux options do.
I recently recommended the game to my wife and since then she tells me every day what her progress is and what she hates about the game and how tedious it is and how bad and inconsistent the controls are. And then she’s off to play more.
having played maybe 500 hours with controller only, maybe I don’t know what I’m missing, but the controls don’t seem that bad. Only thing which comes to mind as terrible is the slingshot, i never even try to use that.
Recently? Or early on? The slingshot controls got an accuracy rework and also the option to be aim direction instead of pullback direction if the player prefers.
I think most of the control issues for new players unfamiliar with the genre is how precise you need to be to water crops and stuff. Those of us that have been playing farm sims(not farming simulations, totally different beast once you write both words in full like that, lol) for decades already probably don’t even remember a time when it was tough to manually align our tools to the grid. For a lot of people, stardew is their first one, and for a decent subset of them, it’s not just their first farming sim, but their first video game on a controller.
There have also been grid aligning innovations in other farming sims for onboarding new players. Some games have a modifier key you can hold down that basically turn the analog into digital movement while holding it. Your character will move exactly one grid space at a time and keep facing the same direction. That sort of thing can help, but honestly, probably better to just make the game fun enough that people are willing to keep playing while they are bad at it, to eventually get good at it. Not every farm sim can accomplish that.
The issue I had with slingshot was in whatever version released for the switch at release, maybe in 1.3? Tbh I have not tried with the slingshot in newer versions
Now that you mention it, I remember that I would play it with mouse + controller for some reason (back at 1.0), not sure why I picked that as the best way to play but there was probably something bad about using the keyboard and also something bad about not using a mouse.
The slow movement is what kept me from playing it forever. I know there’s mods that improve it, but I wish the base speed would be higher.
Back at 1.0 launch it also had a bug where walking diagonally was even slower, so that may have affected my judgment as well - it was fixed after a week or so.
There are plenty of both permanent and temporary speed increases, with the permanent ones you are almost as fast as the horse. And with temporary ones you can be faster than it. No need for mods, just base game. And these are things you easily earn part way through the first year.
I don’t recall there being permanent move speed increases at all, but it has been some time since I played. I think there second island was relatively new when I last plagued. Is that something that was added, or something I missed when I played before?
Not sure specifically when they were added, but they are there now. Play the game once every 3 years or so, hehe. Last playthrough we did a 6 player group game. Basically played it like it was dnd sessions. That playthrough had the move speed stuff. Comes from a book seller. So if you know when that book seller was added, it would be then probably.
Existing owners can upgrade to the Switch 2 version for $10, gaining better framerates, higher resolutions, and HDR support.
I didn’t realize they had this option. As far as legal routes go, that’s not terrible (assuming there’s no weird downside, like no longer being able to play the original on the switch 1). Free would be better, of course, but $10 certainly beats paying $90 just to play the improved version on switch 2.
The upgrade pack is also free for Expansion Pack tier switch online subscribers from what I've heard at least for botw/totk. So if youre already on one of those for N64/GBA/Genesis/GameCube then it's no extra cost
It’s basically the PS4 to PS5 $10 upgrade thing. The difference is that Nintendo isn’t dropping the price of their 8 year old game, unlike what the rest of the industry does. So it’s $60 BotW + $20 DLC + $10 Switch 2 upgrade = $90. Absolutely ridiculous.
I think Project Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel are the ones.
I’ve not played them, watched a stream play one of them. The tippy part is they go off the OG lore so Cyrodiil is a more tropical/Mediterranean climate which is fun.
I’ve used Tamriel Rebuilt a while back and it was pretty fucking cool. There was only one small patch of the map that wasn’t completed when I played it, and none of it was populated. But they had the landmasses and cities all built and decorated. If they haven’t gotten NPCs populating places by now, I have no idea what they’ve been doing this whole time (it’s been several years now since I checked it out).
The fully lit portions of this map have been fully NPCd and quested. You might have enabled the preview landmass, which includes (or included, not sure if they still distribute it) a bunch of mostly mapped exteriors with partial interiors and typically no NPCs.
The tippy part is they go off the OG lore so Cyrodiil is a more tropical/Mediterranean climate which is fun.
Fucking Thalmor denying the power of Talos of Atmora.
Seriously though, the canon explanation for Cyrodiil being the way it is now as opposed to original lore is that when Talos achieved CHIM he changed it, because that’s a thing you can do with the secret syllable of royalty. All part of the path to mantling Shor/Lorkhan via one of the Walking Ways and forging an empire.
I’ve joked in other places in the past that CHIM stands for “Character Has Installed Mods” because what it allows is roughly on par with the character opening the modding tools and changing what they want to change.
The Epic v Google lawsuit is bringing to light a lot of interesting tidbits of info, so I think it's just that. It's an interesting tidbit, but not really relevant to much outside the trial. That said, I do like seeing this kind of info shared, as it gives us a peek behind the curtain of these megacorps' operations.
I could totally be misremembering, but I seem to recall the Ezio trilogy being praised for accurate cities. So not the original originals, but probably some of the best.
Not all of it though. I remember Blue from Overly Sarcastic Productions going on a tangent about how he went over to florence (or venice) and looking for a place that didn’t exist. Ubi had made it up completely.
He hasn’t had a great streak in completing progress in haunted chocolatier because he keeps getting pulled back into stardew valley ports and making new content for stardew valley. If he and his collaborators soon have to support both stardew valley and haunted chocolatier across multiple platforms, I don’t expect development on a new stardew valley game to progress quickly at all. I would expect half life 3 like timelines.
This CEO may think it’s developer-friendly, but I highly doubt if Epic will keep such developer-friendly stance if Epic becomes a giant in this industry.
Epic burnt so much money on Epic store these years. If it succeeds, it’s very likely Epic will try to earn it back. From player? Will players willing to pay more in Epic store than the others? If the answer is no… Sometimes it really makes me wonder if these CEOs are really that stupid…
Yes, and at wholesale rates it’s a pretty good bang-for-your-buck, as an advertising scheme. Advertising is a numbers game about getting as many eyeballs as possible on the product, and I know I actively check for free games on the Epic launcher most weeks. Even if I don’t ever buy anything because of that specifically, it keeps the app on my computer and keeps me checking back in.
Edit: And I shit you not I just opened it to check 'cause I can’t remember if I looked at this week’s free game. Turns out it’s a good thing I did too, the Fallout collection is free right now!
“Even if I don’t ever buy anything” is why I doubt it’s going to work out. Epic is publicly right now saying that it’s great at acquiring users. Yeah, I’ll bet it is. People love free stuff. Is it great at turning those users into paying customers? Even at wholesale rates, I’ve gotten hundreds of games for free from Epic, which means they spent thousands of dollars on me, and I can’t foresee an instance where I’ll ever give them a cent back.
Yeah, obviously they’d want to earn it back and yeah, obviously from customers. You make that sound malicious. Steam is doing the same thing. With the amount of money Steam makes, they could drop their share in half and still make a killing. Epic wouldn’t have to do anything that Steam isn’t to recoup costs if they were competitive with Steam.
That said, Epic does take less revenue from developers, which is nice. This doesn’t translate to less for the end user though because Valve uses their market dominance to force the same price across marketplaces or you aren’t allowed on Steam. It’s fucked up.
Just pointing out, once again, that games sold on the Epic store can be different prices to Steam. “Valve uses their market dominance to force the same price across marketplaces” is a nonsensical, incorrect statement.
You own the game on switch and already have the dlc so pay nothing unless you want to pay $10 or have the switch online subscription for the switch 2 edition if you want the enhancements. For a total of $0-10 depending on your choice
You own the game but dont have the dlc so pay $20 for that and then $10 for the switch 2 version unless you have the subscription for a total of $20-30 depending on your choice.
You dont own the game so you buy the switch 2 version for $70 and the dlc for $20 for a total of $90.
This is not the same as the $90 game lie thats being told, but it is painted that way. To get clicks.
Paying $70 for a game and then paying more for an expansion is nothing even close to new. For example, Destiny 2 is free but if you want the DLC its gonna cost you between $150 and $270 depending on when you buy it as there are sometimes deals on.
Breath of the Wild is 8 years old at this point. Asking $70 for that is pretty egregious in my opinion. Maybe for TotK that’d be more acceptable but for BotW I think it’s a very steep price. Especially given that it’s common that rereleases usually include dlcs by default.
I’d expected $60 for the full package, not $90, given that the amount of development work was likely pretty low (the game was finished years ago after all). So 50% higher than expected.
The SM64+Sunshine+Galaxy bundle game was $30, for comparison. That’s three full games that they needed to put in effort for to run on the Switch.
Absolutely fair. An 8 year old game should not cost $90 all in.
I dont dispute that. I just think the article is misleading as there is a lot of talk about $90 switch 2 games, which turned out not to be true, and it creates anger that is misplaced. Even if the reality isn’t far from that lie.
I do, however, think it’s an interesting thought experiment to come at it from another angle.
Imagine the article was “8 year old AAA game and DLC at a huge discount” and the article said things like:
breath of the wild was ahead of its time on release
the graphics still look great thanks to the cell shading and art style
unique gameplay elements and a modern feeling combat system
vast open world with expansive storyline
on par with modern games
currently only $50 on this deal, a bargain considering everything you get for that price
From this point of view i think you would agree that anyone would argue its worth more than $50 and that its a great deal despite being 8 years old.
Nintendo games should definitely come down in price over time, but the point is its just so easy to spin something however you want if you use the right words.
If this turns out to be a solid performer, the price could make it the best midrange value since AMD’s Polaris (RX 480). Let’s hope Intel’s build quality has improved since the A770.
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