Why is this a sigh of relief? Nintendo has bullied an emulator’s dev team and got $2.4 millions out of it. If I was an emu dev, I certainly would not be happy with this news.
The best approach is to play games that respect their customers by having no microtransactions, or a fair monetization.
Most games that respect these criteria are indie games. The devs of those games deserve your money more than any AAA company, and their games are often just as fun as those you played when you were younger years ago.
I played CrossCode a few years ago, and it’s been the most fun I’ve had in years. I don’t know about arcade fighting games, but surely there must be an alternative.
So, T4B splits from Microsoft-owned ActiBlizz… To keep working with Microsoft. Odd.
But anyway, they were one of the very few developers I cared about in the ActiBlizz group, so I’m happy to see them going independent. I hope it turns out fine for them.
I suppose this also means that Microsoft is not interested in having a new Spyro/Crash game? Otherwise, why let them split up?
The old WoT video game was surprisingly competent, and if you’re willing to forgive its FPS nature that turned the One Power into guns, there was a lot of love for the IP, with every “gun” referencing a specific quote from the books.
Definitely not what I’d expect from a WoT game, but far from a hack/fraud.
I’m not even a Star Wars fan, but I spent a lot of time with the PS1 Phantom Menace game as a kid. Some of its levels (Naboo and Tatooine especially) felt surprisingly open world for a game of that era.
Have you tried the titles from Amanita Design? They’ve made quite a few old-school point-and-click games, with hand-drawn graphics and cute stories despite the characters never talking.
Spent a good chunk of my childhood playing Sacred 1. It’s aged very poorly, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone nowadays, but I still think that the world design and environmental storytelling were some of the best I’ve found in a videogame.
For example, at the beginning of the game, orcs are migrating from the desert and attacking human settlements. When you progress, you discover that they aren’t doing it because they want to, but because the undead army is forcing them out of their land. And when you progress in the northern part of the world, there’s a completely optional region inside the forest, where you can find a few hastily made orcish settlements - but you only find women and shamans, because the men are fighting at the front. There are no dialogues, quests, books or anything telling you that, it’s just something that you infer from the environment.
It made exploring the world and finding its secrets fun, even if there wasn’t always a reward.
(There were also a metric ton of easter eggs, from tombstones mentioning LotR characters to receiving sunglasses as a reward for chasing rude orc visitors from a tourist island… it was a wild game)
I’ll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I’d say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I’m honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.
From personal experience, by the time casters have depleted all their spell slots, martials are low on health as well, making the balance finicky at best even if you’re having multiple encounters per long rest. The game is balanced in a way that makes it impossible for martials to shine: you either play with few combat encounters, thus allowing the casters to shotgun their infinite spell slots at the enemy, or play with multiple combat encounters per long rest, which has martials on death’s door because their HP drop faster than the casters’ slots.
It’s also difficult, from a narrative perspective, to fit so many combat encounters in a single day, to the point that I honestly don’t think it’s possible unless you subscribe to some form of gritty realism ruleset (7-day long rests, long rests in safe zones, long rests at the end of a narrative arc, etc…).