Personally I feel that games are just one form of entertainment among many, it’s not all that uncommon for people to have points in their life where binging tv-series or reading books can feel more novel and interesting. It’s also possible that one finds a new hobby or interest that develops in to a obsession taking most of the free time with it.
Sure as an adult you’ll have more responsibilities and less free time to play but I feel that at least for millenials and zoomers gaming in some form or another will persist throught our lives. For some it may be few hours a day, for others it may be few hours a month but it’ll still feel good to pick up that new/old title and have some fun.
Returning to a game you’ve left unfinished or just havent played in a long while can really feel like leaving ones comfort zone. Funny thing though is that its often a lot easier than one might think once you actually gather enough motivation to sit down to it.
When it comes to light rpg mechanics, those are usually designed so that you can’t really go wrong with them. They’re more of a problem when you’re a “minmaxer” looking to “optimize fun out of the game” as then it’s really easy to start overthinking about these things.
The game will likely be a moderate success provided they can fix the performance problems.
Most players (unfortunately) do not care about having microtransactions in a full priced video games or about things like Denuvo. This is party the reason why the triple-a game industry is in such sorry state at the moment.
Also I find it funny that you’re already worrying about sequels when the newest game has not been out for even a day.
Honestly they’ve been on a steady decline in my eyes at least. With each and every new entry they’re becoming more and more like the rest of the Triple-A studios.
Sure many of their games are still decent fun if you can ignore:
Dark patterns
Microtransactions in full priced games
Battle passes
Denuvo
Personally I just can’t as mere existence of these thigns ruins my trust towards these developers/publishers.
They’re still microtransactions in a full priced game which can break the trust between player and the developers/publishers.
Worst ones are probably the portcrystals and metamorphsis ones which both solve artificial problems created by the developers.
I wish more players would just ignore these cosmetic microtransactions and go with the default skin or at least limit themselves to ones that can be obtained by actually achieving something in the game. Using default skin while outplaying people in competitive games could probably induce some people to make quite salty comments.
Torchlight 1-2 are decent fun for normal playthrough but plagued by bad design decisions and downright silly difficulty spikes on harder difficulties. Mods probably fix many of these issues but in vanilla the build diversity on harder difficulties is quite bad with only handful of viable builds with skill trees full of “trap skills”.
That approach works for some studios and some game projects but it’s no silver bullet. A lot of times gamers don’t know what they want until it’s handed on them on a silver platter which can make taking the correct kind of feedback really difficult. Sometimes outside influence may also stray the developers from their original vision.
That being said, developing game in complete secrecy for years and expecting it to become a success has pretty much the same chance as winning in a lottery. Getting MVP out there asap to see if the game will receive any sort of traction and feedback is generally the best approach unless it already has an audience (sequel or well known developer). It can be prototype, demo or early access as long as it’s something.
Hopefully this wont be full of microtransactions even of the cosmetic kind. Monster hunter world was amazing but Capcom has become more and more greedy for the past few years.
It’s probably really tempting for them to convert Monster Hunter franchise in to a modern live service with bunch of premium cosmetics, battle passes and Fomo traps. Exoprimal and Street Fighter VI are already suffering from these.
It has also secured an age 18 rating, with mention of violence and in-game purchases.
Hopefully they don’t get too greedy.
Capcom has been slowing morphing in to becoming yet another EA, Ubisoft or Activision with the monetization in their recent games (e.g Street Fighter VI, Exoprimal). Battle passes, Fomo-traps, social pressure, skinners boxes, Denuvo etc. At least most of their games are still good if you can ingore all the bullshit.
At least in this you can probably just throw all the pawns with paid costemtics to the nearest ditch for being walking advertisements.
To Each Their Own I guess. Single player games tend to respect players time a lot more and thus usually require a lot less grinding or farming to complete. That being said Grim Dawn does have online multiplayer and community hosted seasons.
There’s a lot of enshittification going around with games and services with more greedy business practices and it would be naive to think GGG is immune to it. When it comes to live service games certain level of skepticism is healthy to have. Now I do hope we’ll be able to play POE1 even 10 or 20 years from now with it being just as good.