That’s plenty of variety to not end up seeing the same matchups over and over again, as long as there are no runaway top tiers to kill the variety. Really excited about this one still.
In a roundabout way, I guess, due to where they land on the supply-demand curve, but I’m not sure why we’re talking about Super Mario World. Game prices weren’t really standardized in any sort of way until they moved to discs, where the “floor” price for any given game was minuscule, and as we moved to digital distribution in the next few decades, this is the period where prices remained fairly stable, as they rose far slower than inflation.
Oh, I love skill-based matchmaking. Without it, if you’re having a good time, it means your opponent is almost surely having a bad time, rather than keeping the matches close. At low ranks, often times a single piece of knowledge can escalate your play to a higher level, which can make those low ranks feel kind of swing-y, but I don’t know that that’s a problem that can really be solved unless you remove the asymmetry. That said, I no longer wish to substitute matchmaking for the likes of a server browser.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
At the time, 12 years ago, maybe that was the most expensive video game ever made. Like Avatar, it too has been eclipsed by so many others. A Call of Duty game now costs about $700M to make. A Sony blockbuster costs $200M-$300M; Concord may have been $400M.
I’ve got a 3.5 TB hard drive that mostly holds video files and stuff, and there’s at least 1.5TB free at this point. When you’re playing games that predate solid state drives, that may as well be infinite space.
There are a handful of games out there that have tried to do some aspects of an Elder Scrolls game without doing the other parts badly. Dread Delusion is very much an exploration game, and it excels at that.
I’ve basically been marathoning Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. It’s hard to state just how much improved from the original game without writing a book, but the highlights are that combat is way better, the stealth is way better, the mission designs largely don’t ask you to do anything tedious for the sake of “immersion” without something interesting happening along the way, and they do a better job of recording everything you need to know about a quest in your journal this time around, while signaling the things that they won’t. I’m having a hard time putting the game down. It’s Witcher 3 levels of “every side quest is interesting”, and the game gives you a lot of freedom. My alchemy skill is now maxed out, and there’s basically no problem I can’t solve with potions. So far, this is the best game I’ve played this year.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
That’s not the point I was making. The price you’re paying is the same, but they’re delivering more for the same price, which you argued they were not. Then you said that quality dipped when they made more, which I argued it did not, and the reason for that is because they’re spending more time making it, so they don’t have to sacrifice quality to build more game, because they can give it as much attention as they’ve always given it but for longer.