It just wasn’t clear what the “this” in the comment I replied to was referring to, the OP or the comment it replied to. My own comment assumed it was saying thr comment it replied to had the double standard, but I see now that it might have been agreeing with that comment’s sentiment but saying the OP was about a double standard.
Tbh, I’m not even sure where most people get exposed to these whiny gamers. Maybe I’m just lucky that the places I spend time on online and offline don’t overlap much with these weirdly conservative gamers who seem to forget that the moral panic conservatives tried to use to ban games they love.
I’m not seeing the double standard there. Their overall stance sounds like they don’t gaf about anyone complaining about the sexuality of characters in video games because it’s often completely irrelevant to the game itself.
Or did I misunderstand and you mean that since they didn’t call out people complaining about a lack of gay representation they shouldn’t call out everyone complaining now that the complaints go both ways?
I believe all that “I worked at blizzard” and “my dad worked at blizzard” turned out to be lies. Even his claims about being a current game dev were based on some vaporware looking shit.
Don’t forget the thousand dollar basic monitor stand. Or the assumption that their users were too stupid to understand multiple mouse buttons until like the mid 00s. Or making a mouse that was completely round (still with one button) so you’d have to look at it to be sure it’s oriented correctly, though I guess that one was more bad design than lack of respect for their users.
And you don’t need to wait for indie games, though you might need to be patient about early access quality. But, as long as the dev(s) stick with it, even that can be satisfying to see the game improve from a janky boilerplate mess to wherever it is really headed.
I got good at it back in the day. Still found the controls awkward as hell, but that game (and later on its successor Perfect Dark) had hours and hours of gameplay because it was one of the best fps games of its time (that wasn’t on PC where wasd and mouse was already a thing right from the Doom days).
Halo was revolutionary. One stick moved, the other rotated, plus grenades were always a button away (in GoldenEye, the rare times you had them, they were selected like any normal weapon, which limited their versatility. Proximity and remote mines were way better.)
Metroid Prime also had a really awkward control scheme on the GameCube.
I wish it used a 5 star system instead of binary yes/no. I don’t like that “yeah, it’s a decent game” and “holy shit this game will change how you see games going forward” get weighed the same. A game that everyone kinda likes will have a similar rating to a game everyone loves.
Would also be nice if they had a “shows promise but it isn’t quite there yet”. Or a way of using ratings to encourage devs to address issues, and maybe a mechanism where certain issues can be tied to a review and then the dev can mark the issue as “addressed” to make those reviews expire with a notice to the user that the game might be much better for them now. It sucks to see a game with a bunch of negative reviews addressing an issue that was since fixed.
I’m so glad that I looked up some cheat codes for Turok 64 back in the day. It had two powerful weapons that were meant to be used sparingly after finding a rare inatance, in one case, or searching the entire game for pieces, after which you only got 3 shots with it. I used those two weapons until I got bored of them.
Then I tried to play the game again without the cheats and realized it was ruined for me. Why would I care to spend time searching for each piece of that weapon, knowing it only has 3 shots, when I was already bored with it?
And then later on, after I had been raiding in WoW, very focused on getting my loot upgrades, I noticed the loop of raiding to get better gear to get better at raiding to get better gear and realized it only had a point if I enjoyed the raiding, otherwise the gear didn’t matter, regardless of what stats or graphics it had.
Those two things together have made it easy to never spend any money on game progression. It’s basically spending money to either get bored of the game quicker by trivializing the powerful things (monetized cheat codes or powerups), or to avoid playing the game in the first place (getting the gear without the raid, when the whole point of the gear is to help with the raid).
And yeah, often the game isn’t worth going through the loop, but they design the early stages to give fast progression to build up an expectation but tune it so that it’s a slog grind if you don’t buy anything, hoping for a few bucks from people as they learn this, or a lot of bucks from those who set strong habits and never do learn.
And when progression is pinned to an exponential curve while upgrades are non-exponential but tuned to be ahead of the curve when you first get them, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, eventually you’ll always be back at a curve that looks more vertical than anything else and you’ll need to spend money or wait a crazy amount of time.
Don’t forget the other obvious option: we don’t have to play mario. Also, there’s a used game market with a ton of older games and Nintendo doesn’t get a cent from that anymore.
I enjoyed below zero but found the big moments weren’t as big. Like I’d categorize Subnautica as an exploration horror survival crafting game for the first playthrough but then drop the horror for subsequent ones. I didn’t really get the same sense of horror from below zero and don’t think 2 could do it either.
The way the original dripped the information was an experience on its own, you know, the whole reason I’m being vague to not spoil it while being OK with using quotes like “Multiple Leviathan class life forms detected. Are you sure what you’re doing is worth it?”
The second one didn’t have that, even though they really expanded on a lot of things and did a great job at making a successor exploration survival crafting game, it didn’t make me reel or feel like a hopeless situation just entered a whole new level of hopelessness. That experience is what I wish I could go back to but can’t.
Just in case you are thinking this like I used to, don’t go by “unplayable on steam deck” to determine what games you won’t be able to play on a Linux desktop. While those games include incompatible with Linux games, they also include ones that the deck hardware can’t handle at a decent framerate but otherwise play fine on Linux.