Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.
Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but... yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also... it's really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.
Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.
Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.
Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn't see what the fuss is about.
My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.
I couldn't tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.
I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they're very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don't play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.
I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it'd make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.
I guess it depends on where your line for "gross" happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.
I'm also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?
So I'm not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won't stop playing, and that's a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I'm not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don't make the experience worse. They do, in my book.
But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.
I'm more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.
That being said... man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It's all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren't currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one's wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It'd be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.
Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can't resell or download without servers).
There is a warning on the box for the two that don't include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don't particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.
I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they've done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.
I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.
I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that's not the case.
I wouldn't consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren't the same thing.
Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don't like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren't full physical releases. It plays Nintendo's game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.
Well, the missing context is that this is how a lot of gaming is tuned regardless. It's pretty basic economy tuning to look at how long a task takes to complete and tune based on that (for games with grind, anyway, think RPGs).
So if you're playing "Perfectly Fair Single Player RPG 3" there's a more than fair chance that the developers looked at the expected completion time of a quest, plugged in that time into some spreadsheet and assigned XP and other rewards to the quest based on that, just to keep the XP curve of the game somewhat predictable. This is a big rabbit hole with a bunch of nuance, but for these purposes we can assume they at least started by doing that flat on all quests.
If you have a F2P game and you're charging for things you can also grind I frankly don't see a much better place to start.
Now, if your premise is that all design for engagement in F2P is gross because it's servicing your business and all design for engagement in paid games is fine because that's just seeking "fun"... well, I don't know that gets fixed. I agree that pay-up-front games can benefit from getting the ugly matter of getting money from players out of the way early, but these days even those games are trying to upsell you into later content, sequels and other stuff, so the difference is rarely that stark.
I think there's a conversation to be had about whether "good", "fun" and "makes people want to engage more" should be seen as the same thing and, if not, what the difference is. It's tricky and nuanced and I don't know that you can expect every game to be on one end of that conversation. Sometimes a person just wants to click on a thing to make number go up, and that's alright.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren't priced reasonably and it's unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it'd be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive... well, it's not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don't think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that's before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it's just that they happen to be so strong that I'm typically the one to remind people you don't own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
The examples people found include a monitor showing random technical text that someone asked a LLM to write (presumably the writer who goofed is getting paid) and some localized subtitles that were left with a machine localization (the rest of the localization was contracted out).
Even assuming a bunch of other stuff in the game was AI generated and just went undetected, which is likely, if it's all iterations on what people noticed it definitely doesn't fit your description.
I hadn't clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread... well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn't read it. I'm guessing that's the only English instance?
As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.
You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it's human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don't use/lines they haven't seen in situ.