As stated my someone else, it is a fairly mid-sized game. The map is rather small, albeit with various vertical level that stays inaccessible until you catch specific monsters. But all of them lacks variety. You either get grassy plains, scarce forest, automnal forest, forest or water. Oh, and a mountain too. But once you’ve got accustomed to the grass/forest part, it gets boring quite fast. I’d really like to get a desert/sand biome, a rocky one, and the likes. And they even have the lore excuse to be lazy with the placement, they don’t even have to make it logical.
Eh, I thought it was perfect. I hate how modern Pokemon games have become quasi-MMORPGs, in staleness of core design, lack of combat depth and also their desire to have you spend every waking hour doing absolutely mindless rote activities.
This was nice. Strictly superior oldschool Pokemon clone with fantastically punny names, really cute characters and a nice runtime that’s still longer than the old Pokemon games but not as bloated as modern ones.
Cassette Beasts is relatively short. You can beat the story in a couple of days. 100% and the DLC take longer, but it’s an absolute pleasure all the way through. Highly recommend you move it to the top of the backlog.
Across the globe, companies can simply say you DO NOT own your games as long as they have a EULA, and it even gives them the power to destroy your ability to play a game!
Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind and Game Dungeon fame) has done the leg-work of researching how much power these companies have in various countries, and what he found was that, as a gamer, you effectively have the same amount of rights as a squirrel.
The only way to stop this practice would take millions of dollars to fight it legally in court, and uh… I don’t really see any millionaire gamers willing to take up that cause. So, in any realistic sense, the corps have won here. There’s nothing we can realistically do, short of boycotting.
BUT, that doesn’t count for the EU, Scandinavian countries, Canada, UK, or Australia. Unlike the US, they actually have functional consumer protection laws, and ways for consumers to fight back against corporate overreach without needing to have a few million in the bank.
If you live in any of those countries, we could use your help! It would help even further if you’ve purchased and own The Crew at any point in time, but you can help even if you haven’t!
If you live anywhere else, you can STILL help by helping sign a French consumer petition, which has real weight to do something, it isn’t like one of those pointless change(dot)org ones! But to participate, you must have owned the game.
You’re on the front lines of consumer protection for gamers across the globe! Your actions (if we’re ultimately successful) would likely have ramifications even in the US and Canada!
How can you help? If you can’t watch the video, here’s the website with a step-by-step guide on what you can do to help: StopKillingGames.com
This is likely going to be the biggest push for consumer protection for gamers there has ever been, so… Like, it’s kind’ve a big deal. Let’s make this count, guys.
Last Epoch is a phenomenal game and was worth every penny years ago–I’m incredibly excited for the 1.0 release. It’s got just the right amount of build complexity–if making a Path of Exile build from scratch takes a PhD, then doing it in Last Epoch would be like community college (although there’s definitely differences in complexity from class to class).
The developers (Eleventh Hour Games) offer regional pricing, so non-Americans aren’t priced out of the game, and although servers for online play will be available based on a cost vs demand basis, it is possible to play the game 100% offline.
If anyone has any questions about the game, let me know!
What’s the story line like (if there’s any)? One of the reasons why I like Diablo (1&2) so much is because of the atmosphere, the world building, the lore, the attention to small details. Especially in Diablo 2, for instance, things like cool random names for mini-bossess, the personality of the all monsters (like how the fallen make cute grunts and scream “RAKANISHU!”) - it feels like you’re fighting against real creatures which are alive. It makes the world feel so much more alive and immersive, and increases the replay value.
Now compare this with Diablo 4, where all the mobs just feel so generic and unimaginative - like you’re fighting a big bear called “beast”… like wtf. Also, the biggest problem in Diablo 4 is that the difficulty scaling is whack - you never feel like you’ve become powerful, because the monsters become just as powerful as you and it just feels like an endless, soulless grind. Even so called “legendary” items are crap and meaningless, they don’t bear any excitement at all - like imagine how excited you’d be in D2 if you got a Tal Rasha’s or an SoJ or something, or heck, even just one of the upper runes. And finally, in D2 you have some very memorable NPCs with iconic dialogue and voice acting. Even more than two decades later, people reminisce fondly about Decard Cain and all his epic quotes like “Stay awhile and listen!” - and I bet any D2 fan reading this would’ve instantly read that quote in Cain’s voice. D4 has none of that, it’s a soulless game. So how does Last Epoch fare in regards to all that? Specifically, what I want to know is how’s the:
The story is currently unfinished, so I can’t comment on its entirety, but I’m enjoying the themes and choices they’ve made so far. It’s based on fantasy-inspired time travel and visiting the same areas in different eras of time, similar to Crono Trigger. You meet some characters at multiple points in their life, sometimes changing from friend to foe or vice versa. Finally, the endgame mechanic involves exploring alternate timelines where key events in the history of the world had a different outcome (for example, one timeline explores what would have happened if the gods had failed in their quest to exterminate the dragons).
Music
The music is immersive and calm when it needs to be, and engaging and dramatic when it needs to be. Ultimately, I felt like it wasn’t anything to write home about when I turned it off in favor of my own playlists a few years ago, but the composer has had nothing but time to refine their craft and I wouldn’t be surprised if they update the soundtrack for 1.0.
Environment/World Building/Mobs
I feel like they knocked it out of the park on this one. Enemies in the Ancient Era are primal and wild, the Divine Era is regal and civilized but barbaric underneath, the Immortal Era is appropriately gory and dreary but filled with loving people who still have hope, and the Ruined Era is consumed by darkness and it really shows in the enemy design. The giant reptiles you fight in one era may get resurrected to fight against you in the next; wild scorpions will have glittering gems appear in their carapaces as you near a treasure trove, cultists will grow more mutated as their exposure to their deity grows, and more. Side quests have you time-traveling from era to era to complete objectives in creative ways, and there are even ways to skip parts of the campaign by exploring and completing dungeons, for when you’re leveling alts.
NPCs:
Most town NPCs rarely elevate themselves beyond exposition dumps, although there are some memorable moments; but the characters that travel with you or fight against you are great and charismatic. I like one of the characters enough that I’m legitimately upset that they die, and I hope we’re able to save them at some point in the future (or should I say, some point in the past?). Sadly, the main vendor that you use in the endgame is kinda dull and flat and is definitely no Deckard Cain, but that’s honestly the kind of feedback that the devs would appreciate and find a way to apply to the game.
Loot:
Uniques and Set Items have descriptions that build out the world or tell you more about the person who originally used them, kinda like dark souls. Normal/magic/rare/exalted items don’t have descriptions and are based on a prefix/suffix system, and unique items can potentially drop with 1-4 Legendary Potential, a stat that allows it to inherit a number of affixes from an exalted item equal to its Legendary Potential. They are also implementing two different approaches to loot by adding mutually exclusive Item Factions to the in-game world-- the Circle of Fortune will increase item drops and add mini-quests to further increase drop rates for specific items similar to Prophecies and Atlas Memories from PoE; while the Merchants Guild will let players trade increasingly powerful items with each other, either in person or through a bazaar (although there will be limited options to trade items with friends regardless of which faction you choose to join, if you spend time together in game)
Mfw you want to check some quick Minecraft details and you get a pop up then half your screen covered with one video. Thank heavens that they created minecraft.wiki as a wiki is basically essential for playing that game.
They can also be some of the best, most engaging, and longest-lasting forms of entertainment
Emphasis mine. Longest-lasting is the one thing live service games are guaranteed not to be, which he gets to later.
The thing that really truly makes a live service game a live service are the updates.
Games got updates before live services, and games today that aren't live services get updates.
Then the author acknowledges the existence of expansions and patches before live service games but doesn't see this as being at odds with his definition. Expansions certainly didn't take "several years" to release back then, like he said, and they still don't take that long now (they still exist, which he also acknowledges). While the updates that came along with World of WarCraft were large and significant, it also wasn't out of the ordinary for PC games to add content like maps and modes for free, no subscription required, because just like today, new content drops bring players back to check it out.
Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not. They're selling you a product, not providing you a service. The regular work the developers do on those games are just R&D that any producer goes through to make a product. The "service" of live service games are that they're providing the server for you to play on alongside those updates, but the server code is just a part of the product that they withheld from you in order to make you dependent on them and eventually have to spend money. Live services are not services; they're just bad products, because they didn't give you everything you paid for.
The author then discusses all of the manipulation that comes along with live service design, and I too find that gross, but from my perspective, that's just part of the bad product that they built. Chicken and egg. Customers were perfectly capable of the technical requirements of running a vanilla WoW server, and it was only Blizzard's legal department that stopped them.
I think the industry as a whole should be finding a better way to preserve these games and also to provide some legal avenue for paying customers...to continue playing them even when the publisher has thrown in the towel.
Exactly. This is the problem. These companies won't do this unless somehow forced though, because that dependency on their servers means you have to play the game with the lengthy grind that they dictate so that you stay subscribed longer (even though the house rules on the community server speed up the grind to be more fun), stay online longer through manipulation, and keep getting opportunities to spend money in their cash shop. Even games that aren't monetized like a live service do this nonsense, probably out of some attempt to prevent piracy, but it just ends up just making the game worse along with it. I no longer buy or play games that are dependent on an external server; even this definition has some blurred lines with games like Hitman.
It's okay to make a multiplayer game that people may only play a handful of times before putting down, or a single player game that you play through once that has a deathmatch mode attached to it. Some of the most successful multiplayer games of all time, including ones that are still popular today, started as great single player games with multiplayer attached to it. If it really gets its hooks in people but needs some touching up, put out some patches and expansions for it. It doesn't need to keep getting new content forever, and thinking that a game can or should do that is what leads to all of this nonsense. Give us the servers. Give us LAN. Give us direct IP connections. Give us same-screen multiplayer. Sever the dependency on a server that I can't control, or I'm not buying.
Thanks for a thorough sourvey so i dont have to watch the whole video.
Last paragraph is everything i would say too, just i take it a step up - if a game requires an additional accout - im not bying ( unless i get scammed into it, like not reading before getting doom eternal that aside from game store where i bought, i had to have a bethesda account too )
I got it on ps5, was greeted with a log in with your beth acc to start. Someone said play in offline mode and they could be right, i said then im going to look way better before i buy.
One thing that keeping exclusive control of the server does is make a game, or at least the game in multiplayer mode, really hard to pirate. That’s a pretty compelling argument in favor for someone making the game.
It's also a compelling argument for me to not buy the game, though, because it puts an expiration date on the game. Baldur's Gate 3 sure had no problem moving copies even though it's got LAN, direct IP connections, split-screen, and it's available DRM-free. By contrast, I could have been into Mythforce, but multiplayer is tied to a server in that game, so no thanks. Cherry-picked examples? Sure. But it still doesn't make the server-tying any more compelling for the consumer.
Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not.
Well... MTG is as close as a live service game can be as a physical object, including questionable monetization practices. The booster pack is very similar in principle to the lootbox. They also can ensure continuous sales through power creep and controlling what cards are allowed in official competitive formats. It's not the absolute control that digital live services allow, but it's nearly there. As a more practical comparison, MTG is more manipulative than card games that allow players to pick full sets that they want.
Then we have MTG Arena that is a Live Service in every aspect. They don't let you freely host those games either.
I agree on all of the above. But they still don't provide anything resembling a service. They just call these things live services to disguise bad products.
Live service games aren’t all bad, imo mmos are a good example of a good live service game, I would never have the same enjoyment for RuneScape for example if it were not a live service game, there is a level of authenticity to achievements given by it being a live service. Also it’s a little disingenuous to say non-live games get updates too implying its equal when a good live service game can put hundreds of hours of content per year into the product without worrying about when they would need to release a new game or paid expansion to continue being profitable.
The money to fund those updates has to come from somewhere, and the incentive systems behind those games leads to, inevitably, the game being wiped from the face of the earth. Plus you lose access to the earlier versions of the game, which may have been better; if not for you, then for someone else.
Subscriptions are a sustainable way to do it, or so it seems from the games that have lasted 20+ years with decent player bases. I get where you’re going though, cash grabs are common in games nowadays and making a game a live service is a great way to do more monetizing, but it isn’t necessary.
I agree that it’s bittersweet to see a game change over time, and that is definitely a trade off of MMOs, but imo it’s not a total negative, a game having visible history in the world, when done well, can be a benefit.
I'd still argue that it's worse than giving the customers the ability to roll out that history. When your incentive is subscription fees, then you're trying to keep people playing longer, which means making the game grindier. At that point, it's trivial to add hours and hours of content, because it takes so long to make the numbers go up. World of WarCraft may have lasted 20 years, but I can't legally play City of Heroes anymore.
Some of us have been on the web since 1994. It’s not much older than that. The World-Wide Web, I mean. HTTP. Of course you had Usenet and such before the WWW.
2008 would be 14 years later. Sure, it was 17 years ago, but in 2008, people were on MySpace. Pretty sure 4chan was around then, wanna-be hackers and pedophiles posting anonymously. So yeah, I think people were aware the Internet could be a dark place by then.
4chan was definitely around in 2008 but it was a lot more crazy random eclectic message board and a lot less nazi pedo bar. There were still shitty people there but it wasn't the norm.
I went on 4chan back in 2004. I was 14 and I remember thinking I found some super cool secret website full of badasses.
I got bored after a few weeks. I returned when I was 18 and realised it was full of socially mal-adjusted teens pretending to be super cool badasses, with a few pedophiles mixed in for good measure.
I don’t really even recall the “web” being one of the rougher places. It was Usenet and IRC, aka places where you could actually deal with other people directly, that were the livelier area. They were also more fun for that exact reason.
Doing nefarious things on the Internet is probably not much younger than the Internet. That take sounds like something someone who wasn't around in the 90s would say. I still remember the Ping of Death, people abusing netsplits on IRC, scams, identity theft, fraud, etc. - this is not exactly a new thing and even predates the web, but it has continued to evolve throughout the years.
When Facebook was just starting to be popular I was telling my uncle how people will get exposure to more of the world and be more open to it. He told me he was afraid the wrong people would find each other too. Fast forward 15 years he gets red pilled and dies of Covid.
Science Fiction authors from the 40s, 50s and 60s toyed with many scenarios and theories about where technology would wind up. Half of them were right, half of them were wrong. I think it'd be a dumb thing to say what you quoted.
youtube.com
Ważne