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.
BG3 came out and RPG fans across the world realised what an RPG was actually meant to be. D4 is so, so shallow, it honestly did not hold my interest through the first season.
The base game content is barely interesting enough to play through, let alone playing through again from scratch with only the four quests they added to spice it up again. Drab.
“When we introduce digital rights management technology to our products, we do it to protect our bottom line loyal customers. DRM technology enables us to forgo server-authoritative anticheat provide a more consistent and fair gameplay experience, preventing us from having to spend money on servers cheaters and hackers from impacting your enjoyment. We work extensively with our software vendors to ensure that we add checks everywhere the impact on performance and usability is negligent, and you can’t use cheats to bypass our microtransactions your experience is optimal. While we understand that some individuals may feel upset with the permissions required by our DRM and anticheat technology, we can assure you that we don’t give a fuck about take the utmost care in protecting your privacy and safety.”
One thing that I don’t understand is: if they have a day one patch ready, why leave it as a patch and not directly integrate it in the game before launch?
I think it’s kind of just an archaic holdover. They have a deadline for publishing the game physically, and while it usually extends to digitally as well, you can update the digital thing. If you get the game directly on Steam or something, you probably won’t even notice the day 1 patch being installed on top of the game, since in many cases it is integrated with the main download and not separate patches you get sequentially.
All day 1 patches truly mean is that they continue working on the game even after the deadline to begin printing the physical copies in time for release.
Which is really dumb. I wish they would just wait to release until the game is done instead of sending a bunch of patches over the first few months after release. It’s that kind of crap that makes me not want to buy games at release or even for the first few months because I know if I wait, I’ll get a better product.
Before digital was a thing, game companies had to fully test their games before releasing because there was no way to patch it later. I wish we would’ve kept the same mindset today, but with the ability to patch in case they missed something.
I remember things like… Different ammo types in Fallout not actually working correctly. Armor Piercing rounds actually do less damage because the calculation is fucked up in the code. Or the biggest fuck up: The slides playing incorrectly if you manage to solve the Gecko/Vault City issue flawlessly. It still plays the ending cards as if you sided with Vault City, instead of getting them to work together peacefully by replacing the president of VC.
Many infinity engine RPGs have game breaking scripting bugs that needed patching or still haven’t been fixed even through user mods.
Anarchy Online straight up couldn’t be installed because the physical media was screwed up. Bought it day 1; didn’t play it until a full year after release when they finally put a fixed installer up for download.
World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade had an issue much like AO’s, with physical media being printed incorrectly and not working.
Just go and find playthroughs of some of these old classics. They just work around the issues. That’s what you had to do. In some cases, like soloing BG1 and 2, these issues were the only reason challenges were possible. lol
Aah, I must have been to young to spot those then lol. All I could remember off the top of my head is driver issues (specially audio, ugh) and reinstalling Windows because install corrupted the system and such.
Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
Dark Forces
Lords of the Realm 2
Command and Conquer - most titles
Warcraft - 1&2
Age of Empires
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.
Literally every game has a day one patch. They don’t just throw their hands up, say “yay, we did it!”, then stop working. They continue working on the game to push out more fixes because they can and society has accepted it.
This game (Immortals of Aveum) already had a lot of controversy when they announced the PC minimum requirements, including an RTX 2080. People knew something wasn’t right there (optimization seemed poor, game was made with “upscaling in mind” - aka “we didn’t do anything to optimize this other than adding FSR2/DLSS, good luck”). Releases and it’s worse than expected with mediocre graphical features and horrible performance, generic cookie cutter garbage.
IIRC didn’t Microsoft hold the game back specifically to ensure it didn’t launch in a horrific state? Bethesda games are known for being a nightmare at launch, and even with these assurances, I’m still expecting the first few weeks to be a mess. That being said, if any Bethesda game was going to launch well, it would be this one.
It’s been held back for a full year and the rumors/leaks from when it got pushed out of 2022 was that it was in about the same state as their games usually launch in, but the higher-ups were worried that someone would make a viral youtube compilation of bugs (cyberpunk being an obvious example) and have their flagship title turned into laughing stock.
IIRC spaceflight was something mentioned as working well but looking really jank, so they spent time fixing that as well.
I expect to encounter many bugs still, but hopefully nothing like fallout 76
Man, imagine going to jail for something so stupid as posting some shit earlier than some other schmucks, for something that’s probably gonna be buggy as fuck from the get go…
In what way did he qualify as a Master Thief? He stole stuff from an assembly line then posted video about it under his own name. Sounds very non-masterly to me.
One QoL improvement I’ve not seen here is a better journal system. When I can’t further a quest line even something vague like ‘Continue your journey so learn more’ would be great. I have spent time on some quests hunting down a person to discover the quest can only be completed in the next act multiple times now.
This was an issue I had with DOS2 as well. It was at the point I literally wrote stuff down in a notebook so that I could keep track of the side quests and what the last step was. Eventually they did overhaul the journal in that game to be a lot more useful though.
50,000 reviews now. It’s a shame, I used to play OW1 a lot even after they stopped providing new content for it. Came to OW2 and I just couldn’t be arsed to grind for characters I don’t have unlocked. You need to win 35 games, and since there’s a basically forced 50% winrate that means you need to play 70 games to unlock a character each time. Wanted to play Ramattra, saw he’s locked, uninstalled and didn’t look back. The monetization is terrible. The balance feels worse than it’s ever been.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t literally SHUT DOWN OVERWATCH 1 to shove people into the cash shop grind sequel
I know next to nothing about neither Ow1 or OW2, but from the sound of it they turned OW2 into a game focused on grinding, where you can pay to skip (part of) the grind. Is my assessment correct? If so they must’ve looked at War Thunder and taken that idea.
Yes. OW1 cost money, but you got all the content. The only paid service was cosmetic outfits for the different characters. You could buy loot boxes for cosmetics. But you had all of the characters, maps, game modes, etc available to begin with. You got the whole game, then could grind for cosmetics.
OW2 takes that and flips it on its head. The game is free, but each character costs money. The problem is that they shut down OW1, so now the players who owned 1 are having to grind for everything. They’ve also had some weird server bugs, with players getting indefinitely locked out of characters they already own.
Wait. I bought overwatch 1 but stopped playing a few years ago. If I go back into overwatch I would have to grind for characters that I used to previously have access to?
Yeah, but honestly I don‘t think it ruins the game. Sure, it’s not the best idea, but I don‘t care too much. I actually care more about the fact that the gameplay currently sucks and is completely different to Overwatch 1. 5v5 and the overall balancing sucks.
That’s not the balance, that’s the gameplay. There are still balance problems like the era of Mercy damage amping.
And while they’ve solved the CC and barriers problem, they’ve made teamfights too swingy. With only 5v5 and a single op tank, teamfights are often basically over after a single death or a single Rez. Especially for the tank. That’s just too much pressure, so nobody wants to tank anymore.
So don’t? You get the new hero like a month or so later then. I haven’t put a dime into ow since I bought it. You don’t need the cosmetics. Let the dumb whales fund the game.
I guess I don’t care because I never traded in this game, but this seems like a major step backwards after 7 years. For many people I used to play with trading was a major part of their gameplay loop, I used to give my loot boxes to my friends routinely because I was too lazy to do it. I will hazard a guess that this is purposefully pissing off remaining fans and a sequel will be announced soon.
Yea, I was never that into trading.
I made a car that looked nice to me and I kept that with the stuff I already had unlocked.
Sometimes I’d unlock something new and try it out.
I never really got too involved in the cosmetics, but had some friends who played this like it was day trading or something.
I remember some new car decals being almost the opposite team color which I thought was a terrible design choice.
It’s been a while, but soon after Epic bought them out it started lagging and rubber banding like shit for me, which got old quick.
I must have had hundreds of crates when I stopped playing.
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