Seems too soon to be announcing a 3D Mario or Zelda for holiday release, but I could see them announcing something for spring release in hopes of boosting holiday sales.
Tbh I think TOTK and BOTW have enough legs, especially with the Switch 2 releases, and I suspect the next Zelda will take some time because it’ll be a much different installment than the last two. But goddamn if I’m not ready for a new 3D Mario.
Wasn't a lot of the usual names from the 3d mario studio's last game (dk) missing from the credits? I heard someone say it's probably because they were working on a 3d mario in parallel... hopefully
Yup, this is why the $80 price tag doesn’t bother me. I’ve got a backlog of games I want to play that I probably already can’t finish in my lifetime. This will be $20 a year post release and in two years that $20 will get you all the dlc as well.
Yea. The only games I buy on release are fighting games, but that just because during the release window is some of the best fun you can have for the online multiplayer as a casual. After about the first month or so a meta gets established and then everyone online is just playing the same carbon copy of whatever the YouTube pros are doing.
Though these hands are getting old and I think this most recent release of fighters will be my last. Just can’t keep up anymore.
The Atari 2600 released for $190 in 1977. Or about $1000 today.
The best selling title, Pac-Man released for $28 in 1982. Or about $95 today.
Compared to so much else that has risen dramatically over time, vastly outpacing video games comparatively, I think it’s a bit hard to argue with the value proposition of modern titles.
I think looking at it through an “all else equal” mindset is a little misleading.
Back then it was basically space-age technology. Video games were leaps and bounds ahead of other forms of entertainment, techwise. You could somewhat justify the expense because there was literally nothing like it in existence.
Nowadays? People make video games for classes in high school. I can write a flappy bird game on my phone and play it there. Small projects with less than 50 people regularly end up as bestsellers on Steam. Thousands of titles release on steam every year.
Video game supply is through the fucking roof, yet companies go out of their way to overproduce and underdeliver. QA is nonexistent anymore because of day 1 patches and always-online. They realized a long time ago that when your primary market is children, you can be as absolutely shitty as you want because a parent will give their child anything to shut them up or help them fit in. You can exploit a child’s labor for profit and their parent will pay you just to keep them occupied (Roblox, cough cough).
I mean we all knew video games couldn’t cost $60 for all eternity, but watching the price hike an entire third at once (50% if it costs $90) I think has made people realize just how overvalued modern video games are in general.
You make a good point, and I agree. I wasn’t thinking that it was the only thing on the market and therefore the price is whatever a new technology costs.
I tend to think of video games - being a form of entertainment - as a great way to be entertained while also being an incredibly low cost option for the amount of time I spend enjoying them.
Buying a $600 console just to enjoy a single $60 title is an extreme example but to me, if that game provides 100 hours of playtime, that seems well worth it. Cheaper than going to a theatre or most other forms of entertainment.
To be sure, I don’t do this, but I’ve always viewed gaming through a $/h lens, and could never understand why so many people saw it as a waste of time. That’s what I was thinking when I wrote that comment earlier - it seems to me that you get more playtime with some RPG from this decade than you would playing Pac-Man. Though perhaps I feel that way because games like Pac-Man don’t appeal to me.
Thinking about it, your point might be valid again, with the Atari being a new technology, people were likely to sink far more hours into a title than they might do with modern games since we have so many to choose from now. I’ve never thought about it that way. Thanks for pointing this out.
Games at that time were cutting edge technology, distribution networks didn’t exist, physical units had to make it to stores, etc. The environment isn’t the same. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think $80 is terribly outrageous in our modern economy but at that price point it has better provide 60+ hours of entertainment. If outer worlds 2 is as good as #1 it’s worth $40 tops. I played that game end to end and can’t recall a single characters name.
I agree about everything in your first point. I hadn’t previously considered that the novelty of a new technology would necessarily increase have disproportionately high initial cost.
That said, I feel like any calculation of cost against how many hours played is entirely subjective. Your suggestion of $0.75 / entertainment hour is quite different than what I consider ideal. Games will vary genre to genre, person to person, platform to platform.
A person with limited time might exclusively play shorter titles, or maybe just multiplayer titles. A person with significant free time might spent hundreds of hours replaying an RPG.
To be incredibly broad, I would say that games shouldn’t cost more per entertainment hour than half of what any given person earns at their job - but even that is quite subjective and should be taken with salt.
It’s been so long I thought they had dropped the IP. The first game has some issues but it wasn’t as bad as people make it out to be. Hopefully they addressed the issues with the first game.
As far as I could tell, the “issues” people primarily had with it were that they wanted it to be bigger, but I also really appreciated its scope and how little time they wasted.
I had at least one quest which, when certain choices were made, would not complete. They never fixed it, but did release a cash-grab level-cap-increasing version later. Left a bad taste in my mouth. (There were other bugs and issues I faced that also never got fixed, but I don't recall what they were anymore). I mostly did enjoy the game, otherwise, and the size was fine in my opinion.
What issues? Who makes it out to be bad? As far as I remember everyone has always loved this game, it’s like saying “despite the issues with Fallout New Vegas, it’s not as bad as people make it out to be”, or Skyrim, or Red dead redemption 2, it’s the kind of game I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone complaining about it (except perhaps for the existencial dread caused by finishing such a good game and not knowing what to do next)
Its odd that you haven’t come across any complaints since almost everytime this game comes up in online threads that I visit, it’s filled with people criticizing it.
My main issue is a perspective thing - it felt like playing half assed fallout in space, in the sense that many questlines and stories felt very “been there, done that”. Its probably great if you haven’t played fallout 3 or new Vegas, but it just didn’t do much that was new beyond a coat of paint so I just got bored with it.
Toxic Positivity is a phrase that doesn’t refer to gamers online behavior in game, but rather the way that some will violently defend a product or company from any criticism like they’re shilling. Like how gaming media and online forums were trying to villanize the people criticizing Concord before that spectacularly failed.
Its like you aren’t allowed to say something that isn’t positive about games anymore (not even negative, even neutral comments are taken as “negative” and must be silenced at all costs). I mean, certain games like Star Wars Outlaws, Concord, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, etc.
Kinda like how the average Lemmy user acts with Linux.
Negative comments are fine but players are too black and white, they will say a game is “trash” because they don’t like one thing about it. Often they haven’t even played it. I think too many gamers are overwhelmed by choice or just spoiled.
With the state of modern gaming, I can’t fault anyone who jumps down the throat of anyone speaking positively. It’s such a fucking predatory industry at this point, full of shitfuckery, and personally I don’t want to give any positive reinforcement to any games that have invasive DRM, online-only, kernel-level access, in-game ads and microtransactions, 3rd-party accounts, 3rd-party launchers, 3rd-party EULAs, prolific data-mining, etc. All of these should be deal-breakers. Things are this way because we allow them to be.
Let’s face it: that trailer was just bad. We already knew MP4 was in the works; there was nothing that was shown for us to get excited for. No new enemies, no new suits, no new abilities, no new weapons. If I had to guess, I’d say the team was told to put something together for Nintendo Direct at the last minute, so they threw together footage from the intro level. It worries me that Nintendo wants to drive the hype from the existence of MP4, instead of the content of MP4.
Yeah, I suspect the last minute trailer request too. I am a huge fan of the Metroid Prime trilogy (hunters doesn’t count), and that trailer did practically nothing for me.
Woo, slight remix of the space pirate theme, scanning a dead pirate, and morph balling through a conduit. And three seconds of Sylux, again, because we’re supposed to care about that character for some reason.
It failed completely at being a Metroid game. It’s obvious the single-player “story” was just hastily hacked together from the multiplayer mode.
Maps were linear, without any kind of secrets or exploration. They were mostly boring corridors between multiplayer arenas for fights against bots.
The only abilities were different coloured guns, and while the MP trilogy gives the four beams specific properties to interact with the environment, I can’t remember what most Hunters guns were supposed to do beside opening corresponding doors.
There were three boring and mostly static bosses in the whole game, two of them copy pasted once to make it last a bit longer.
I don’t even think its controls or arena map design felt like Metroid Prime. The very limited Metroid Prime 2 multiplayer felt more like “competitive Metroid Prime”. It was more fun to me anyway, not that I’d buy a Metroid game for multiplayer.
I think this is all fair criticism. I played this game when I was 12, after all, and did mostly play the multiplayer after a single run through of the story.
Also important to note that I hadn’t actually played the mainline Prime games yet at that time, that probably had a lot to do with it.
I am sure there are people with good memories of it as an arena shooter, but I had little interest in that. And as a Metroid, it sucked (…sorry)
I remember trying the First Hunt demo, that was a demo cartridge from the beginning of the DS and was supposed to be a short teaser for what Hunters would be. Back then I thought, yeah, with a game around it, it could be great.
Turns out the actual Hunters was absolutely nothing like that, and focused only on multiplayer. The only reason they tacked a half-assed single-player mode on it is so it could be sold to people who wanted an actual Metroid game. I’d respect the game more if they didn’t try to sell it as more than it really was.
This late in the Switch’s lifecycle, I’d argue that the existence of a new game as big as a Prime sequel is good to remind people of. Haven’t touched my Switch in a while, but will likely be picking it up again for Zelda and Prime.
It’s great just to see it exist. And not every game needs to reinvent the wheel, especially when the series hasn’t had a game in 15 years.
Plus it’s a MetroidVania. Well, kinda the MetroidVania, or half of it. Trying too much with it would feel weird IMO because I’d want the two grandfathers to focus more on the central tenets, not some inventive genre-spinoffs.
In retrospect yeah. I was very excited just to see a trailer at all. After sitting with it for a while I’m kinda like, that’s it? To me it looks exactly like the recent Metroid Prime remaster (which to be fair I did really like).
I wonder if the reveal of the big baddie was intended to carry more weight than it ultimately did.
It was hinted that guy would return in MP3’s ending, and apparently in Federation Force too (I haven’t played that one, but of course the reveal has been floating around).
Sure, it was still kind of hidden, but for those who recognized him at all, chances are they’d knew that too.
The trailer certainly failed at making his apparition exciting in any case.
yeah this was one of my most anticipated games, until I saw this trailer and noticed the gameplay looks completely unchanged, now all my interest has disappeared.
unlike nearly every other company in existence in any industry, they actually earned their position. It would be nice if they gave a bigger cut to devs, sure, but literally nothing is stopping devs from going on multiple platforms. I am also more forgiving of that due to their contributions to linux gaming, especially now that windows is continuing to go bonkers even after they reached the point that I could no longer tolerate it.
I only buy off steam, gog, and itch.io for some indie stuff as the rest are a terrible experience. And there’s the other part, other platforms need to be good for anyone to want to use them, because nobody will leave steam for a worse platform unless gabe dies and the supposed fuckery prevention plan fails and they go corporate and get an EA approved ceo. Even then it would likely be a slow burn like twitter and reddit. gog and itch have the minimalist store covered so even that is a hurdle. Maybe epic execs can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and figure out how not to suck, then people might use them for more than just hoarding free games they will likely never play.
even if I search ‘zoom platform’ its like the 7th result after zoom the video conferencing software. just the sad state of the internet these days. anyway I found it now and I’ll check it out after work.
I mean sure, maybe the game turns out fantastic, but after a trailer that was apparently done by the Forspoken team with some consulting by Marvel and Fortnite people, I have exactly 0 hope for this.
Sm64ex-coop is amazing! I never got far in super mario 64, the camera gave me headaches. I did know it was a revolutionary game for it's time though.
With sm64ex-coop, you can enable free look with the camera, and if you set it up right it feels just like the camera in many modern games. There are hi-res texture packs (Render96) available that also look amazing. And finally, they added a bunch of mods and features, one major one being the ability to play multiplayer.
Oh yeah, and it's cross-platform, runs on a whole bunch of different devices. I highly recommend checking it out, it's sooo much better than anything you'll get from an emulator.
I suspect it was my age when I first played it but when I play it now I don’t feel the camera pain. I know that’s the biggest complaint but what exactly is the pain? is it hard to articulate exactly other than it feels like a lack of control?
I was another person who suffered from motion sickness trying to play the original Super Mario 64.
I wish I could tell you what it was - I have played everything under the sun, including VR (in which I was also motion sick), and the closest thing I could come up with is the low FOV combined with the automatic movement of the camera.
I think it’s similar for people who get car sick as a passenger, but not a driver.
Heck yeah, this sounds fantastic. Are you able to give me any pointers in a response or DM on how to move forward with getting it all set up? My wife never had a 64 so she never got to experience the game. Ideally, we’d play it together each of us on our Steam Decks. I’ve bought All Stars or whatever it’s called on the Switch but the prospect of us playing through the game together almost like a couch Co OP experience is extremely enticing. Obviously, you’re not responsible for me figuring everything out so if there’s a good forum or even video link discussing it, I’d be most appreciative.
It’s been a few years since I tried it out but I think following these instructions on an Ubuntu machine worked without any problems. From there you just copy the binary to your Deck and add it as a non-Steam game as normal (making sure to use the Linux runtime rather than Proton).
And then of course there’s the oblkgitory Ship of Harkinian for my Ocarina of Time fans, which is probably the most feature-complete PC port of an N64 game ever.
There was this little RPG company, BioWare, that made this little known game called… uh… Baldur’s Gate or something. Then they made Baldur’s Gate II. And all was fine. And then they said “you know what, we should do something really cool and innovative and creative!” …And they did! They made Neverwinter Nights. And Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro was a real drag in the process, wanting them so many compliance meetings regarding the content and canon and game mechanics. So Bioware was like “OK this is the absolute last time we work with this kind of nitpickers, we’ll create our own fantasy RPG setting and system.” …and that’s how Dragon Age came about.
WotC/Hasbro isn’t any easier to work with these days, that’s for sure. Except this time, even the tabletop fans know that.
Hopefully Larian gets to eventually make the epicest dream game they can and, uh, not get bought out by EA or something.
Yes, despite what Larian wants you to believe, 30% of the company was sold to Tencent years ago to raise more money for BG3. Afaik Danny O’Dwyer dug that up from the irish business register because Larian never even made a statement about it. Instead they keep pointing out how privately owned they are and that there is nothing to worry about.
BG3 was a massive success, but I wonder how much of that cake is left after 450 employees, Bioware, WotC and Tencent got their pieces of that. If they really want to release a much bigger game in half the time, they’ll need to tripple their employees which will absolutely explode spendings. They have nothing else in the works until then, no mobile game cash cow or big merch sales to keep them afloat. The only way to generate more money when production costs will inevitably exceed expectations is… to sell more of themselves.
The divinity games definitely felt inspired by DND. I’ve even been able to convince friends (including some who don’t play video games at all) to pick it up because of how similar it feels to tabletop. Larian was a natural choice for BG3 and I’m convinced that was part of the vision with their early work
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