I wouldn’t say unplayable, maybe less convenient? I get what you mean though
example: why play CG on hdos or the steam client when I can use runelite and have c engineer tell me “2…1… mage/range” every few seconds for easier cycles lol
Nope, and I mean it’s actually unplayable without Runelite. They other guy is missing out a lot of details, even simple stuff like increasing the render distance and using GPU rendering.
I’ve actually never met a single person who uses the official client, it has so many things that are just required to play. Sure you can click and move like normal, but you’re missing a massive amount of essential information and QoL features.
Remember kids, casuals, and people on mobile, plenty of the player base doesn’t use runelite but also doesn’t base their personality around a game from 2002 and talk about it all the time so you’d never know. I’ve played for nearly 20 years but almost never talk about it online and absolutely not in person. I’ve used runelite for a lot of that time but in the 00s I was on the browser with everyone else and played a fuckload perfectly fine
Uh yeah and the game today is very different then it was in the 00s. As much as I wish I was a 10 year old mindlessly killing goblins all day for next to no experience, people optimize their exp/hr nowadays, and that requires Runelite. Mobile is good for when you want to do woodcutting while on the toilet though.
YOU min/max your xp/hr, not everyone. Some of us just enjoy fishing on karamja and chatting or chopping some trees and talking shit in draynor or making deals at the GE. So many people that have gone into min/max mode assume that everyone does the same barrows run with them 40 times a day when that isn’t the case, the majority of us don’t care about 2/3 tick this or that or best t-bow drop rates, we just enjoy the game whatever way we want to enjoy it
As a casual off-and-on player of this game for at least 19 years, I’m not opposed to this battle pass. It replaces the “must play 7-days-a-week to get max rewards” task system with one that gives you freedom to play when and how you want.
Too early for me to give an informed opinion on whether the rewards of the pass are worthwhile, but I’m a fan of the intent behind it at least!
What devs see is “all those other devs are too lazy to make a good game”.
What players mean is “all those other games are full of micro transactions and sell missing content and features as dlc”, which is not the same thing.
What players want to be addressed is the bad influence investors have on the products. Publishers aren’t interested in publishing good games, they only care about money.
Devs don’t go about making a game only for the money. Most of them would rather do it the same way Larian does it, focus on quality and provide a good gaming experience, but their hands are tied.
So the message gamers try to get out goes to the wrong recipients, and it’s obviously being taken the wrong way.
And that’s why I generally prefer indie games. Many indie games are made with passion, with money being down the list of priorities. AAA games are made with money first, though there is certainly passion as well, it’s just not the top on the list. As studios and budgets get bigger, so will their expectation of profits.
So if you want better games, buy from smaller studios. Show them that you value passion over high budget.
But when a game like BG3 comes out, with all the stuff no indie studio can afford to do and it has this level of passion without sticking its hand in your pocket, it absolutely reminds us that AAA doesn’t have to be like it is.
As good as indie RPGs are, Disco Elysium was only able to afford voice acting after being a giant commercial success. No small budget team is going to be able to have mocap work on the level of BG3. These things cost a lot of money and involve paying a lot of workers. BG3’s Kickstarter got to be carried by the name recognition of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons in general, following a huge popularity surge for the latter thanks to the rise of real-play podcasts and such.
Do games need hundreds of voice actors and incredible mocap to be good? No. But it’s something that only AAA studios have the ability to add, and it’s a shame that it’s all going into the next fifa/COD/whatever other money pit GAAS the industry is shitting out.
Agreed. But I’d much rather sacrifice AAA features like mocap, voice acting, and RTX if it means a higher chance of playing a game with a lot of passion put in. Those are nice to have, but not the reason I pick a game.
Yup. And I wish more AAA titles took more risks in gameplay and storytelling, but those seem to be few and far between.
Starfield is a fantastic example. If you asked me to describe a Bethesda game set in space, it would look a lot like Starfield (but I probably would’ve missed the procedural generation). Usually AAA games are pretty much as expected, with one or two surprises on the side, and that’s it.
BG3 basically delivers on Cyberpunk’s promises (branching storylines, mocap, great visuals, etc), and it did so on launch, which is really rare.
I really love the game but optimisation and performance are a joke. I played it with 30fps on console and PC and it needs absurd amounts of power. Would it be even more worse with a multi release on PS5?
Yep, the linux driver issue is either crash on 535 or get a rock solid 26-31 FPS on 525 irrespective of settings with frame timings being so smooth you get a more pleasant experience chewing sand.
which is hilarious because the game plays better on a steam deck than on my 3080
Like everyone else is saying, I think the standard for primarily single player video games should be releasing a finished product for a reasonable price. I’m sure I don’t speak for just myself but I’m super tired of things like: unreasonably priced tiered purchase options, cash shops/microtransactions, battle/season passes, twitch drops, preorder bonuses, and just any kind of FOMO in general. It feels like a lot of modern video games are only designed to siphon as much money from the consumer as possible with the least amount of work possible. A lot of these games have no soul and they’re unfinished and broken on release. I just don’t even bother with them anymore.
Some of the things you just mentioned are actually things Baldur‘s Gate 3 did, though. Namely Twitch drops, pre-order bonuses and (arguably) unreasonably priced purchased options with their day 1 DLC. The latter is especially baffling since Larian Studios makes a big deal of not paywalling extra content while doing exactly that from the start. It‘s also guilty of having quite a lengthy early access phase prior it‘s release.
The success does not come from lack of bullshit, but from delivering a good, polished product regardless.
Yeah, I wasn’t too happy with the twitch drops thing but I caved in and created an account so I could get them. I feel like I let the 10 USD DLC slide because 70 USD total seems to be becoming the standard price for games anyway. They’re not totally innocent of the things I dislike but they delivered such a phenomenal game that I can overlook it.
The 10€ DLC iirc only has content that references their past Divinity games, I feel like it’s one of the fairer DLCs, given that it’s completely innecesary for the full experience and might even detract from it for non larian fans. I feel like it’s better to give it as an extra purchase than include it in the pack.
Full disclosure I backed/preorderd the game the moment they announced in kickstarter and I have gotten it for 40ish euros iirc, and I got the DLC content for being an early backer. I don’t usually preorder but it’s Larian, they always overdeliver, and this time they did also, while raising the price of the completed game because they overdeveloped the initial concept way too much lol.
Sad that we went to unfinished games by moneydevouring publishers and all its errors that come along with that (overworked staff, bad salaries every here and there).
When did we leave the path that finished games should be released around the clock?
Basically, capitalism can be traced back as the reason for most decisions corporations make. Although the fact people will complain and do it anyway is something else.
Day one patch means they released an unfinished game. They haven’t done enough testing before physical production. Also fucks over the people with a slow connection.
A patch 1 year after release is fine. Some people found a rare bug which can be fixed. If the game gets patches 1 year or longer after release tells me the developers have love for their game and/or community for fixing it long after they had any obligation to.
A day-one patch is the day of the release, so it counts as included in the release in my books.
It doesn’t mean « they haven’t done enough testing before physical production », it means they took advantage of the inevitable several weeks or months between start of physical printing and release.
And of course a patch 1 year after release is fine. What I’m saying is that I prefer a broken game that is fixed on release day over a broken game that is fixed 1 year later.
Except that’s not what happened in the old days, I’ve been getting PC game patches for as long as I’ve been gaming, upwards of 30 years. You’re not going to get every bug. Console games just didn’t get patched, if it was a buggy PoS it remained a buggy PoS.
BG3 had a day-one patch, and is at its 6th hotfix now. Does it make it a broken game?
With the scale of modern AAA games it is inevitable, if a studio had to wait until every bug in a game the size of Starfield was fixed to release it, it would simply never release. You have to decide at some point that the game is in a releasable state, and at this moment you start printing discs, then you keep working on it and fixing bugs and that constitues the day-one patch. And don’t worry about the expansion, they started working on it long before the release.
Having a day one patch doesn’t make a game broken, but it is a symptom of a bad internal process. Here are the patch notes for BG3 Day 1 (not sure if 100% accurate, but this is the best source I could find). To me, that doesn’t sound like anything game breaking.
I’m not saying BG3 is the gold standard for AAA game releases, I’m merely saying it’s what we should expect for an average AAA release with some being a little better and some being a little worse.
I’m not saying every bug needs to be fixed. Even older games before SW patches were a thing had a ton of bugs. I’m just saying, the game should play well even if users never patch the game. This is really important for game preservation, so you should always be able to take the game disk and install it offline and play through the whole game and have a great experience. That’s not the standard many AAA studios hold themselves to.
Look at this way, you’ve got everything you needed to fix complete. The game is uploaded the the storefront database. It’s now a week before release. There will always be bugs to fix and no game will ever be completely bugfree (especially not games at this scale). At some point you have to release the game, so why not just release what you’ve been working on since when the game launches?
I’m not saying the game needs to be perfect, but it should be a great experience beginning to end without applying any patches. As in, I should be able to take the game disk and install it without any Internet connection and play through the game with only minor bugs here and there.
This is really important for game preservation (the patch servers will eventually go offline), yet many AAA games are almost unplayable without day one patches.
I’m a huge fan of software updates for games, but those updates should merely improve an already great experience, not be the method to fix a broken game. A broken game should never leave QA.
As usual, people have no idea of the complexity of software. Games are extra complex. Games that are meant to run on an infinite variety of hardware combinations are worse. And it’s not any game, it’s an expansive RPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay and paths.
It’s impossible to ship this kind of product bug-free, and it’s quite probable that it will never truly be bug-free. A day-1 patch is obviously expected, and bugfixes in the following weeks mean that devs are closely monitoring how it goes, and are still working full-time on it. That’s commendable.
Day one patch is fine. It’s just an odd remnant of buying physically as the discs have to be pressed and shipped several months ahead of launch while the Devs carry on working. Digital owners just download the latest build on launch.
If there’s a patch and the game is still full of issues, thats another story.
So pressing unfinished games on disks is fine for you? They should release a finished game. What if the console shop or server goes offline? How can you play it then? For preservation, day one patches are a nightmare.
I’m glad to see the trend of releasing more games for pc beside their console counterpart rising. It makes preservation easier.
Pressing unfinished games is a trade-off and a lesser evil than instead choosing to distribute games digital only. One alternative would be to delay all launches until multiple months after the game is considered “ready,” but that would likely impact revenue streams in a way that the people making those decisions would never agree to. It would also upset the 80% of the market who buy games digitally - why should their release be delayed?
Would you prefer for physical releases to not be available until 3-6 months after the digital release (and more frequently, for there to be no physical release at all)?
Even if you press finished game, you still find tons of issues to fix before the release. It should be treated as bonus polishing time though, not time to finish the game.
BG3 has plenty of bugs, some of them game breaking. Look at the litany of fixes they delivered in each patch. It’s not about that. It’s about releasing a game that isn’t a “service”, and just a purely high quality game - tactical combat that works well, characters with good writing, a solid plot hook, a distinct graphical style, phenomenal voice acting and mocap (which matter more for this genre than they would in, say, a third person shooter).
Every game has bugs, that is not really what a ‘finished game’ is about. Its more about consistently working features, delivering what you promised and working on fixing things you know arent working correctly.
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