There’s click bait, and then there’s rage bait. Veritasium never tried to get me upset about gravity not being a force with a thumbnail of an evil Albert Einstein saying, “HE LIED”.
If you want to know if this YouTube channel is of any value whatsoever, click on the channel, then click on videos, and take a look at every video thumbnail and title, and you’ll have your answer. Believe me when I say that I’ll be happy if Nintendo faces financial consequences for some of the things they’ve done in the market, but all this data proves is that PS5 had a large discount and Switch 2 did not.
In fact, Mat Piscatella of Circana says, “On the hardware side, PS5 saw the most extensive discounting. So, it got a big sales lift. Wouldn’t take much more away from the week than that, tbh.”
Does anyone know if this will have any story hooks whatsoever to Rogue Trader? Because if so, I’m compelled to play that one first, but then this becomes a scheduling problem for me.
It’s a larger scene than the likes of Rivals of Aether II or Virtua Fighter 5, but there’s more at play for game selection than just that. And remember that when it comes to copies sold, Mortal Kombat 1 having a bad day is still about as good as Street Fighter or Tekken having a great day.
I only played about 5 hours of Wasteland 1, but in what I’m sure is a DOSBox container that it comes in via Steam, the encounter rate was once again very similar to my experience with Fallout 1 and 2 and other CRPGs. I’m glad you enjoyed the game that way, and I definitely learned that it was at all influenced by CPU speeds, but I’m still not convinced that I got an unintended encounter rate given how reliably I and others come across it that way, unless you can cite a Tim Cain video about it or something.
I would say it’s “tedium” that sounds unappealing to me at higher encounter rates rather than “punishment”. And it’s not just my personal tastes but also what all of their peers were doing with encounter rates, including Wasteland 1 and 2, which I’m sure you know share a lineage with Fallout.
It’s the shoestring budget and development timeline that would leave me to believe that they didn’t intend for it to be dependent on clock speeds. It’s the tabletop roots that made me feel like I got the correct encounter rate while 8 times as many would feel wrong.
By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?
Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.
The good: WB development studios have been limited to making games off of only WB properties for so long. Developers would come up with a pitch or a prototype, but it wasn’t allowed to be an original IP, which was bad for them and Warner Bros., since it made it harder to sell off the video game division by itself. Maybe this will give those devs more freedom.
The bad: We’re rapidly approaching that Bojack Horseman joke where there are only four companies with extremely long hyphenated names, and Netflix doesn’t seem to know what they want to do in the video game space or how to do it. They have an incentive to lock games exclusively behind subscriptions, which is what everyone was afraid Game Pass would do but Nintendo and Netflix are doing this already right now.