I may be an outlier here, but I don’t think remakes should be done at all anymore. They were great when the medium was still new and we made major jumps between generations or when we started to figure 3D out. Nowadays, I can’t even tell the difference between a PS4 and PS5 game. The medium is evolved enough to just go back and play the originals without them feeling dated in a bad way. Take for example the demon souls remake: Yes, it looked nice, but people argue to this day whether or not it’s better. The gameplay is identical. Or even worse: Look at Pokemon. The remake for Gen 4 is worse than the original and didn’t even include Platinum content. Instead of wasting dev time on a full on remake, they could have ported Platinum to the switch and called it a day. A remake probably only makes sense anymore if you can’t port a game at all. Make new games instead.
Why would it be a straw man? It’s exaggerated for sure, but the point being: If you pay per theoretical hour of gameplay, games will include a lot more low quality padding.
Play times does in no way mean quality or dev time. I could make a game right know, in less than 30 minutes, where you have a single button. You win at a billionen presses. I’ll take my thousand dollars, thank you.
Now you might think that nobody would buy it and that’s fair. The secret is to continue making games like normal and tack my button at the end of my 5h campaign. If everyone does it you either pay up or stop playing.
What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
Paid cosmetics being fine stems from a time where not every other game weaponized FOMO by basically hacking your brain. Yes, it is still easily avoidable by a lot of people, but we shouldn’t allow vulnerable people being preyed on.
Around the midpoint of a game, often while still enjoying it, I start asking myself how close to the end I am. Let’s Plays are great for this. I can just open a playlist and read episode titles until I’m around the same point I’m actually at. Let’s say e.g. 45/67 videos or 2/3. If I rarely do this, maybe even not at all, I’m really into the game.
For context, I mainly play quite linear JRPGs. For other games, I usually just look at howlongtobeat.com and compare it to my playtime.
I did not. Back when Second Light released I’ve seen people praise the game for how much of an improvement it was. I planned on playing the first one anyway, but I could not find a physical copy.
About halfway through Blue Reflection: Second Light
The story is fine, but I’m unsure about the battle system. At first I loved it, but building up a combo in every fight makes random encounters kind of a drag. I wouldn’t mind this as I could just avoid them - however, you need to farm drops quite a lot for the crafting system.