Do they even use facial mocap? Fallout 4’s best facial animations were all reserved for Preston Garvey, and they are so not very smooth, I always assumed they were done by hand.
Unfortunately I don’t think itll make a difference to whether people buy the games or not. Itll tank performance but itll be in games that people buy regardless of performance. IE Pokemon at launch was in an awful state and still sold like hotcakes
Let’s be honest. It’s not about the 5v5. It’s not about the CC. It’s not about the balance changes. It’s not about the cancelled single player.
It’s about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody’s angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.
There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that’s why they’re called servers):
Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody’s already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
don’t make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.
I get that it’s disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you’re asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 – I can’t think of a modern popular game that isn’t a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.
It was pretty generous for people who weren’t buying loot, but selling loot crates in a slot machine was far worse, imho. You just know how bad that must’ve been for people with gambling addictions – “here, buy 100 random pulls and hope you get the skin you want”.
The difference being that it was a skin and you didnt need to buy them. I had almost every skin in ow1 just by playing and i didnt even have a silver banner thingy around my character portrait.
In ow2 you are buying characters which you actually need to play effectively.
I wholey agree that gambling mechanics have no place in games, and that cosmetics can have as much pull to addicts and people susceptible to fomo as things that affect gameplay but when the thing you are gambling on can be bought for coins (which you earn tons of by playing the game and pulling items you already have) and the chances of pulling items you dont already have are stacked in the players favour then it does beg the question of wheres the fomo?
The characters are very easy to unlock in game for free. Obviously it’s not as good as getting them at the start of the season, but it’s not p2w. They’re at the end of the free battle pass in their launch season, and have an easy achievement challenge to unlock them in following seasons. I’d say the preferred weapons in tf2 were harder to get.
45 level grind isnt easy for people that have limited time to play. And i needed to win 35 games as a support character to unlock lifeweaver, which as a solo queue player with enough time to play 2 to 3 games on average a night when i actually get to play, is not easy.
I know im not the only person playing the game but i also know im not alone in my situation.
The fact is its not the game it used to be but its pretending that it is.
If they hadnt cancelled the co-op rpg element that was the original reason we all had to abandon ow1 th3n maybe that wouldnt be much of an issue. But they said its too much to develop it so its gone. And now to replace it they want more money for something else that used to be free.
Its all just a cash grab. Its not balanced towards player, if you think its fair then you have been fooled by capitalism too.
It is a lie that they cant provide the resources to make the rpg part of ow2. They have several thousand employess and are one of the richest game companies in the world. Larian have 400 employees and managed to make bg3 in 6 years… so its absolute bollocks. Blizzard spent 3 years developing wat ended up being ow1 witha reskin.
Well that’s a good sign then. That should mean the masterserver is cheap to run, and good chance that the game can be hacked to be fully p2p in the event the masterserver gets taken down. P2p means far less server side code that has to be reverse-engineered.
Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.
But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.
Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.
I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?
Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.
I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.
Define “harass”. LoL and Fortnite don’t “harass” you into giving recurring payments. You can make f2p-friendly games, especially on pc, if you want. Blizzard just doesn’t want.
I loved WarCraft 2, but it came much earlier so it wouldn’t fit the “peak Blizzard” timeline. For all those years to this day I’ve been humming music from that game.
IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.
So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.
Personally I think of StarCraft 2 as Blizzard’s last good game. It was the last time they made something new and didn’t cut it up to sell to you in pieces.
They were the GOAT for SC:BW, D2:LOD, and the first couple years of WoW.
SC2 has done well over the years but I remember being really disappointed when it came out. The original’s campaign was so gritty. Playing each race, you felt like you were in this strange scifi world. It was brilliant.
The SC2 campaign was so bad. Cartoonish, one dimensional characters. They made zerg and protoss more human like and boring. They were already focused on making their games sports, so single player was not their focus at all. I was fine with the esport focus but not at the cost of making it more cartoonish.
I was so excited to play the SC2 campaign when the game came out. Starcraft and Brood War was my life for years.
I was so disappointed by SC2 that, to this day, I haven’t even read the wikipedia summary of the expansion campaigns. Never bought either of them. I stopped playing around the time they introduced paid maps (in 2010 or something). Playing competitive was good, but UMS was botched just as bad as the campaign when the game was new. That was my most anticipated thing after the campaign. Even now people mostly only play the same 3 UMS maps.
The original game still holds up too. We got robbed of a good sequel. And don’t even get me started about diablo 3 lol. RIP blizzard.
Edit: did some googling and it turns out they announced, but did not implement paid maps in 2009. Map micro translation did eventually get implemented though.
I watched SC2 on YouTube on and off over the years. UThermal is worth checking out, he’s a great player and super positive self-conmentator. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched SC2 a lot more than I’ve played it. Which is sort of weird for a game…
I just saw it on the PlayStation store on sale for like $50. May as well just give it away at this point and I still won’t play it, it’s silly they’re charging that much for it still, especially since the devs shut down
A German Youtube channel named Game Two, did a documentation about what went wrong and released it this weekend. Like the Developers they are based in Hamburg and did many interviews with former employees. It’s linked in the article but unfortunately only available in German.
Honestly, I'm amazed by the hatedom for Starfield. It's ... a Bethesda game (and it's actually better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4). I'm not sure what people seem to have expected?
More progress than “better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4”.
I was a die hard Bethesda fan prior to 76 and they need to do better than par to earn my favor back. They scorned me and my wallet isn’t going to forget that any time soon.
Maybe but why should I consider playing anything they have anymore? They ripped me off. I never got my canvas bag with my pre order and the whiskey was a over priced plastic shell with mediocre whiskey in it.
The whiskey wasn’t part of the deal but the pre order was and I want what I paid for damn it. There is no excuses for their shitty business practices.
Nothing. I didn’t buy it nor review bomb it. I watched the gameplay and scoffed at how yet again we were being spoon fed more mediocre Bethesda content.
The thing is, I want to love them. I used to be obsessed with the lore from Fallout and I’m embarrassed to admit how much time I spent playing ESO. It sucks but if I keep giving them my money I’m just basically saying “it’s okay you screwed me over”. If they really want my money again they have to shape up both their buggy software and their business practices.
Yup, I’m right there with you. For me it started with their paid modding nonsense with Valve. They apologized, I forgave them, and then they literally did it again with the Creation Club. Totally betrayed our trust and clearly only did it because they were so desperate to monetize their modding scene in any capacity that they were fine with going back on their word.
Fallout 76, along with the preorder BS, the atomic shop, and their overpriced subscription service, all added to my growing distrust in Bethesda. And tbh even Fallout 4 really let me down and made me nervous about future games.
All that being said, I still really wanted to like Starfield. Unfortunately I just didn’t.
My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.
They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.
The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
Agreed; I don't even understand why procedural generation is popular anymore. It was novel in its first uses, but where devs see convenient shortcuts and marketers see "infinite replayability," I see "this shit is all going to feel identical after like 5 tries tops."
Oh look, it's the skybox from 3 planets ago with the ruin from 2 planets ago and the enemy selection from 5 planets ago. And I think this might be a new shade of blue in the grass, or is that just the skybox casting a weird hue over everything?
I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.
Here’s a contrasting example:
In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.
In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you’re constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what’s the value of stealing a cool rock? It’s also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don’t matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you’re far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don’t even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don’t really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.
So to summarize: I don’t know who I’m stealing from, I don’t know why I would care to steal anything, it’s not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it’s not worth using my lockpicks, I’ll never be caught, and their door is always open. There’s zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it’s critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It’s just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.
Now I’ll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I’ve changed. It’s possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what’s that cool cave on this planet? I’ll go check it out! Oh uhh, it’s nothing? There’s… a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?
I think vendors being open 24/7 was a quality of life choice. Different planets work on different time-scales. In skyrim, you fast travel from Riverwood to Whiterun, and it only takes a few in-game hours. You leave Riverwood at day and likely load into Whiterun at day as well, so shops and quest-givers are more likely to be up and open.
In Starfield, the day/night cycle and the distances are so different and vast that every time you jumped anywhere it would be a 50/50 on it being night and you having to find a bed or chair to wait or not. I think that would get tedious, so the shoddy solution is that everything is open 24/7.
Oh you’re definitely correct. But I think many decisions were made in this way, and it compromises the core experience. There’s all these friction points between the different systems that make the experience feel disjointed. They are each fine in isolation, but they don’t talk to each other very well, in my opinion.
Even Skyrim arguably suffered a little from problem of locations not mattering, but at least you needed to first visit the place to unlock it as a fast travel point, which meant you needed to travel there on foot, which meant exploring the world, which requires other design work that supports that experience. But for Starfield of course, these are planets so you can just fly there. It makes sense for what the game is, but it doesn’t make for a compelling experience. See that mountain? You can go to your map and fast travel there.*
*I know it doesn’t work that way once you land on a planet, but you know what I mean
It doesn’t have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It’s generic. It’s boring. It’s bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.
Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like… humans haven’t written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth’s exodus? Cmon.
I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I’d paid CDN$90 for the privilege I’d probably feel more strongly about it either way.
I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn’t amazing or anything, but I don’t regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.
For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn’t just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.
Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical “Bethesda” issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I’d 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we’ve seen before. The only real “new” thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.
As for what people expected? Better. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren’t just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn’t just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.
That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that’s where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you’ve more or less explored the world, there’s not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn’t been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.
Their biggest, most consistent fault isn’t bugs orjank, it’s the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.
It feels like they’ve been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.
Skyrim had some very compelling narratives, however it has the prior games lore buildup to build off of
I feel like Starfield is a lot more “matter of fact” about it, wherein things are told to you moreso rather then needing to go out and “find” the lore.
I also don’t know of any mysteries in the Starfield world that aren’t just… Explainable
For example, terrormorphs or starborn, the game just tells you the details with hardly any effort needed to uncover the info yourself.
Maybe I’m just way to into the FromSoft narrative style at this point where there’s tons of deep lore but they don’t just hand it to you on a platter, makes it more fun to theorize and dig
If you’re buying this (or anything other than Nintendo exclusive games) for your switch, it’s because you don’t have any other options and likely only own a switch
If you had a PC or a PS5, you’d buy it on that.
So switch only owners would pay whatever for it, but the rest of us wouldnt
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
Given that the switch version looks terrible even by Switch standard, I think they’re right to complain and refuse to buy it. And not everyone can just “invest in better hardware” the second an upgrade comes along. Let’s not forget that up until the Steam Deck, the switch was the gold standard for handheld gaming - mainly by virtue of being the only real option
Not always true; some games work really well on handheld/portable devices and the Switch is really good for that. The Binding of Isaac springs to mind.
I own a ton of games on my switch that aren’t switch exclusives. I travel a lot and use it like a Gameboy on planes, in hotels etc. Anyone using a switch entirely as a home console experience, ya silly to not buy games on PC etc instead.
I always marvel at how Grim Dawn isn’t in the conversation. It’s easily top tier, has no microtransactions, is single player offline, but also supports co-op multiplayer. It features a full cosmetic system that is entirely in-game with no cash shop nonsense. There are so many skills and builds with an outstanding itemization system. Robust crafting system. Repeatable end game challenge content.
Also, it is just recieving another huge free patch, and another full expansion has just been announced.
It took me forever to actually try it, I thought it was going to be janky indie stuff etc. I’m closing on 3000 hours and still dropping back in with new build themes and ideas. I paid $35 for that 3000 hours in a Steam sale.
But yea, Last Epoch is ok I guess.
Edit: a word
Edit 2: just to add since I saw a comment about multiplayer, there is a community run seasonal ladder League as well. Grim League, for those interested.
Yeah so many people have missed out on Grim Dawn. It’s a bit sad it doesn’t have multiplayer but in the grand scale of things its what a lot of people wanted with D4. Let me play Singleplayer offline! This game does it. And boy does it do it well.
I played all current dlcs and the base game on separate occasions alone and with my friends and the game never really clicks for me. I don’t know what it is but it never got as fun as many other arpgs for me. Doubt that I will look at this new expansion as it feels I could have more fun spending my time with another game instead. Kind of weird as I have over a hundred hours and like the game genre but… Yeah.
It’s just old. People talked about it back when it came out. POE I think gets recognized because it’s free to play (with DLC/MTX). I’ve played every ARPG under the sun and Last Epoch is one of the best I’ve ever played. It feels like the real successor to Diablo II
The biggest difference is that PoE gets huge expansions every 3-4 months with new content while Grim Dawn only mostly gets numeric patches. Yeah there’s a new expansion on the horizon, but it’s been a good while…
That’s a legitimate point for physical goods and services, like food or dry cleaning. Not when Sony magically created this “service” and is free to dictate the price at will, regardless of how much real value there actually is. I guarantee 90% of people who pay for online pay just so they can do that, get online. Not for the bs free game releases they do or anything else. Sony could’ve dropped the price and their operating costs wouldn’t have changed a dime because it doesn’t cost them anything to have online services. Paying twice for internet is so bullshit.
Not when Sony magically created this “service” and is free to dictate the price at will, regardless of how much real value there actually is.
I agree that Sony is able to arbitrarily set the price to whatever they want. Online play and cloud saves are free on Steam and such, for example, so obviously Sony could just as well set the price to zero for at least the tier without free games. However, it’s not like the price increase comes out of nowhere. Sony probably makes internal calculations based on the US Dollar or the Yen and then converts to local currencies in certain intervals and since the last conversion the value of the Lira decreased massively because of Erdogan’s economic policies.
I mostly just read economics news articles, so I’ve read way too many stories on Turkey lately. It’s insane they reelected him. That man has pushed some economic policies that a middle schooler would be able to point out the holes in. The savings accounts that guaranteed the lira pegged to USD value? How in the fuck did he think that would be a solution. You’re literally agreeing to cause massive inflation by printing/handing out free money if inflation happens. So you created more inflation, to stop inflation… Some of the most horrific logic I’ve ever seen.
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