I don’t know what audibles are, but I’ve become increasingly interested in action-strategy type games that find ways to directly punish players that have high Actions Per Minute, encouraging people to take fewer, more deliberate movements. Kinda like combo rhythm in Arkham, rather than mashing X to attack.
It was on Game pass before, and I kinda did skip it because I felt like I had played multiple “processing grief” video games, and didn’t like the idea of doing it in a formless world of colors rather than around some kind of deliberate, recognizable world theme. There’s such a thing as being too artsy and abstract.
Feels like it may turn out a bit like Epic Store vs Steam situation. One has a lot of money to offer to people to get them to come there - but not any actual infrastructural investment to get them to stay.
In the end, money is no substitute for ingenuity and honest community. I’m sure people will go, I mean it’s a huge prize pool, but in a potential future where SA no longer has oil money…I don’t think they’re going back.
You’re missing the point. This is not about the Madden. This is about the Not-Madden.
Voting with your wallet is not “Refusing to buy a media for several months until its publisher relents and cuts its price in half, meanwhile depositing your $60 in a jar for when the day the price falls”. Instead, it is “When you have money for entertainment, you use it for properties OTHER than the one you used to go for”.
So, to further my example; “Me/my kid really wants the new Brandon Sanderson book, but instead of chewing dirt to pay for it, we decided to vote with our wallets! …But, because Sanderson is a crazy eccentric billioinaire with a patience greater than 5 years, he just INCREASED the price in retaliation to $8 million! What are we to do? …Read OTHER books? HERESY!”
Blaming the subject on corporate psychology is a complete cop-out. They do not grab your wrist and force you to click the Buy button. I’ll make some allowances for instances of gambling addiction (and I would not try to apply this pricing logic to the housing market due to collusion and other factors) but otherwise, price acknowledgment is a very human thing people need to get used to considering, even when it comes to beloved IPs.
You do realize that’s the case for every form of IP, right?
“Man, I want to read the new Brandon Sanderson book, and eat food this month. But the publisher is asking $4,000 for a copy!! What theft!! I’m going to have to subsist on chewing dirt for the next few months!”
Or, sane response:
“Well, that price is ludicrous. I guess I’ll read other books” (and in this case, play other football games)
I guess it can be different for different people. Maybe I just never reached that “endgame point” but my progress was always marked by custom dialog and new quests in Odyssey, even if that sometimes meant a side quest rather than main quest.
The term ‘grind’ can be either a positive or negative depending on how much someone likes the core game loop. For something like Monster Hunter, it’s used in an appreciative way.
I guess it enables quick game demos? If a mildly interesting game is 80 GB, or the devs want to let people try it before they buy it but don’t want to code a demo, there’s a few options there.
Still, you’re right, not a big use case. Xbox has an advantage due to controller simplicity. I’m pretty sure you can play Game Pass games using a DualShock, even on a web browser.
I like that it’s another genre fitting for the “Silent badass treated as a lethal legend by other characters”, similar to Doom’s Doomguy. It almost makes sense - there was such a gap in skill between the common and the best pilots in wars, it’s somewhat practical to have “stories of caution about a plane with a certain decal”.
I feel like it’s a lot like the weapon breaking in Breath of the Wild - one of those systems that imposes heavy limits on players to enforce their creativity and flexibility in their approach.
I know a lot of people approach every game in a completionist, meticulous way where they do every quest, never use any consumable items, etc; and it often ruins the fun. It’s also why Ubisoft had the somewhat crazy idea in Far Cry 5 of actually forcing you to do story missions after game progress, trying to use designer mechanics to push some variety into people’s game sessions.
In Pikmin’s case, and I think Dead Rising / Persona too, the time limit is meant to get you to prioritize path planning so you get as much as you can done in a certain span. The core gameplay of Pikmin just isn’t all that interactive when you have all the time in the world for it - it’s built around the benefits of delegation and synchronization.