I remember them saying that they dont want to do another one in the series because they are looking to innovate and make something truly original.
I don’t remember them saying this, but I remember people speculating that this was a reason. The truth is, if you look into The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, they prototyped a bunch of different single player games that were cancelled because they just weren’t working, including Half-Life 3. Post-Alyx, in recent weeks, we have evidence to suggest that Half-Life 3 may be imminent.
It’s true they’ve always been distracted with multiplayer games as well, things like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress and I did play them for sure, because I was a kid and I had all the time in the world.
These days I’m not a kid anymore and so when I game I tend to look more for memorable experiences instead of mindless grinding.
Boy, I miss the days when multiplayer games didn’t mean mindless grinding. I play fighting games, and the mindless grinding in recent releases is siloed off to a separate mode that I don’t have to think about; otherwise you’re playing the game because it’s fun and/or because you want to get better at it, not unlock the latest costume. I would love nothing more than for campaign FPS games to come back–the kind that postdated the designs of what we now call boomer shooters–and to come with a deathmatch/CTF mode made out of levels recycled from the campaign, playable online and local. You’d play that multiplayer mode for maybe 5 hours or maybe 5000 hours, depending on how much magic they managed to capture in it, but you absolutely would not have some expectation that the devs must keep updating it. Those were good times, and I didn’t appreciate how good we had it.
I’m aware, but when GOG takes the ambiguity out of it, I don’t have to do tons of extra research to know that they have an extra feature that’s important to me. I’d really appreciate if some store took the ambiguity out of it when it comes to multiplayer games being playable offline. It’s something that Steam should easily tell you in theory, but there are tons of games that have LAN and such without bothering to report it. Some say they require an online connection and actually don’t. These are problems worth solving for me, a particular kind of consumer.
When I buy on GOG, I know I’m getting a game DRM-free. They muddied that a tad with how they handle online multiplayer, but for the most part, I get more value from their store for that. It’s a huge reason why I’d choose their store, because they’re solving a problem for me that Steam does not.
Your comment is very out of place as a response to mine, but since you brought all this up:
I don’t begrudge Nintendo for getting ROM sites shut down. I begrudge them for shutting them down without also making their games legally available for purchase where their customers want to play them. Those old games aren’t even legally available for purchase at all, because they want to just rent them to you forever, which is an enormous dick move. Then they further that with the dick move of trying to remove the place where we get those games the way we’d like to enjoy them, and getting them that way is a better experience than using their official solution.
So assuming you didn’t get lost and you actually meant to respond to my comment, I can’t consider them pro consumer when they’re not doing what’s in the consumer’s best interests.
It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.
It’s not. EGS doesn’t solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.
Fault is too strong a word. This is the performance they can reasonably get with the effects and fidelity they’re after for their vision. They could get higher frame rates by toning that down, but that’s the tradeoff they decided on. It happens every console generation.
I have no authority over anything, so yes, they can. What I’d like to see is an option to buy an offline copy of the game and any add-ons I bought, but no one does that. What Stop Killing Games is looking for is for the server to be made available after the game’s end of life so that you can continue to use anything you paid for.
Licenses and middleware can be chosen more proactively to preserve and distribute the server if they know during development that it’s a requirement. There are tons of people who functionally play MMOs single player already, when the server is already running. And I play a 12 year old fighting game that’s easily able to coordinate 20-100 people to play it multiple times per week with nothing but Discord; there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to get 40 people together for a raid on a private server.
Making a good game is the minimum expectation. Making an open platform to force competition to also endorse open platforms would be going above and beyond to be pro consumer.
I hear good things about what they did for AoE2 on controller, and the genre was long overdue for someone to solve that problem. I’ve got some hand and wrist issues these days after working at a computer for so many years, and I’ll always prefer a controller when possible.