Alisa is a great horror game that uses pre-rendered backgrounds and plays very much like an old Resident Evil game. It even opens up with a pretty nice FMV intro.
One big difficulty of it is that there’s one finite currency used for buying upgrades, weapons, health, and ammo; and you’ll likely be strained if you avoid buying the latter.
Same, it’s hard to build expectations, but I also felt a little bit of that with Endwalker’s impending release. “Oh, so we go to the moon now?” when the moon was barely before the halfway point.
One thing that can help is if they can invent methods of moving beyond power scaling. The Endsinger’s potential was mostly dictated by “despair for the future”, which is such a vague concept they could likely invent new such challenges without explicitly saying “This thing is stronger than the last thing you fought”. It’s already hard to claim that the cattle at the far edge of Thavnair are stronger than Hades.
I know a lot of people point to resale as a big advantage of physical media, but I really prefer just having a digital environment that encourages frequent sales and price reductions.
If you think about memorable singleplayer games for instance (AAA or indie), they’re really victimized by that mentality of “Well, I guess I’m done with this now”. Even shitty online games, or big open-world games with 80 hours of boring content, usually won’t be re-sold in that way; and each used sale will be a lost New sale for the developer. Never forget that You are the product of GameStop’s used games business.
The funny thing is, I don’t think even this is a right way of looking at it. I think variety in the characters you view makes them more interesting; adult characters can definitely come across as heroic even to kids. It’s not necessarily excluding them as an audience.
Besides the difficulties for players, there’s also the fact that key reselling is an excellent method for credit card pickpockets to launder money quickly.
Someone’s credit card is swiped in the streets, and in the time before it’s reported stolen, the thief buys many copies of expensive games, to be resold on a place like this. The key resellers themselves claim they’re purchased directly, but…I personally have almost no faith in them or their claims.
The judicial decision seemed to be based more around the fact that he was a danger to others, regardless of his own mental limitations. He re-hacked the company using a cell phone and a Fire TV stick when cut off from other devices. What else can they feasibly do? I sympathize with people who have special needs, but that doesn’t mean people should just live in fear of the ones that are a danger.
When the “victim” is lost money and leaked footage, I’m sure there’s limited sympathy, but I feel like these hackers are not so long from deciding to SWAT someone and very possibly getting people killed.
“I was able to get into your admin’s crypto wallet and steal $400,000”
“Holy crap! Good find. Can you document how you did that, and put the money back?”
“Lol, you think you can order Lapsus around? Money’s mine, life lesson: Secure it better. I’m going to leak your home address now.”
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
I guess with such a terrible track record around games based on larger media properties, it might not be surprising if that new (reportedly decent, if by the numbers) Avatar game isn’t selling gangbusters.
It didn’t have a way to function in the event of system failure.
Steam sometimes goes down. When that happens, people can often still play their singleplayer games. If Steam had totally failed business-wise, it either would have been sold to another publisher who would maintain access, or the games would’ve been unlocked for permanent offline play.
Take a look at Stadia’s failure resolution strategy; they had to fully refund every person who bought a game there, because all purchases became completely unusable. Imagine if they’d gone a decade selling games to people and building off of their revenue, before encountering failure.
No matter how popular it is, I’m pretty sure I don’t have to play it to know I wouldn’t like it.
You walk into rooms, and if there’s no monster, you collect the scrap. If there is, you either die instantly and present a clip for your teammates, or there’s a very simple counter for them that just requires not instantly panicking.
Lots of waiting for your teammates to finish a mission because you just got unlucky.
This one did seem to come out of nowhere, and definitely seems a lot better than the common standard for games based off movies. The reviews are kind of in the middle, but given that’s been the case for prior Far Cry games and I’ve still enjoyed them, I wouldn’t mind picking it up.
Granted, not now…like everyone, I have a huge backlog and can’t justify buying a new game at full price.
Funny thing is, I realize now there’s multiple franchises I’ve stopped for gameplay reasons, not story.
In God of War, not only was I contending with an offset thumbstick that I didn’t feel like replacing, but I was stuck on a fight that I didn’t seem to be geared for, and was getting pummeled.
Last of Us, I got stuck on some stealth section against enemies that didn’t seem to behave as the tutorial suggested.
Demon’s Souks would just be leagues beyond me anyway, so no chance there.
I’ve heard secondhand the people working on a coop mod, after making one for Skyrim, gave up on it after deciding the game is just bad and uninteresting.
It is, and arguably a very good thing. SSDs vastly improve loading times, so there’s fewer occasions where your character awaits a slow elevator, or shimmies slowly through a crawl space. Or, just have you stare at a loading screen.
Not to mention the issues in multiplayer, where 7 players on SSDs need to wait for a hard drive player to load the level before they can start.