ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

GOG does those things, for what that’s worth.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

My expectation was that they were spending money that they mostly already had, but I was very excited to see a company picking up the pieces that the biggest publishers left behind. No one was going to make a new Outcast game before this, for instance. Game publishers used to put out dozens of games of all types per year, and now they might put out 5. They hinged it all on debt that they couldn’t afford though, so they’re ruining the chances of us returning to sustainable normalcy instead of what AAA has been doing for a decade.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Did you miss Alien: Isolation, Three Kingdoms, and Warhammer?

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The investor has a stake in the company, so they share in the successes and take on the risk of failure, but they provide capital to make this purchase from the parent company in the first place.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Of those three, the one I bought was Three Kingdoms, and I was certainly not forced to buy more than the base game. Paradox’s DLC strategy is a-okay by me. Neither company puts a gun to my head to buy their DLC. Pretty sure blood is a DLC to get away with a lower age rating.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s finally happening? Console manufacturers realizing that the old model, that’s worse for the consumer, doesn’t make sense anymore?

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I think Valve in particular has more incentive to make a console-esque PC that runs Steam than they do to make a storefront on someone else’s console.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s a play for the consumer’s money, and when the consumer has better options than the traditional console model, the console model breaks down. They’ve got at least one more Xbox in them, whether or not that next Xbox is just a PC with different branding.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I wasn’t cheering for subscription services. I was cheering that this exclusivity model of walled gardens no longer makes economic sense, while open platforms are on the rise. Microsoft is hoping that their pivot will result in more subscribers to their subscription service, but all signs are pointing to them having a rough time of growing beyond where they stand now, for all sorts of reasons.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I’m really excited to hear that the narrative Lego concept is working. It makes a lot of sense on paper, but there are a lot of ways it could go wrong. We won’t really know until the game is out, but this could potentially be revolutionary for the medium, both from the customer’s side and the business side of things.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

They’re still under Take Two. If they wanted it to be BioShock proper, it would be. Personally, I loved Infinite.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The enemies ignored both of them. Allegedly, anyway. I know when I played The Last of Us at launch, there were times that enemies saw me when I thought I was perfectly hidden while Ellie was out in the middle of no man’s land. In both cases, the enemy AI ignored these other characters because A) escort missions have never been fun, and B) it slowly builds a reason for you, the player, to grow attached to these characters when they help you. You feel the resource deficit in Infinite when Ellie’s not there to throw them to you. Both games did basically come up with the same gimmick in the same year.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

He won’t rule out this year as a release year, but he won’t commit to it either.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Sure, Ellie got attacked in much the same way that professional wrestlers are in a fight. It wasn’t really material to your success or survival.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah, but a decade of development time can be deceiving when you’re prototyping a new way of doing things for a while.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

How long until you get out of the section with mimic enemies? Because when that game launched, that was all I saw in footage of the opening hours, and I wasn’t interested in that.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

If people can run pirate MMO servers, then they can run private Helldivers 2 servers. It’s very conveniently impractical for private servers to be distributed when the game has microtransaction revenue streams, because private servers would inevitably provide opportunities to sidestep them. They’d still make plenty of money though, because most people would choose to play on official servers regardless, but they see it as a threat to their business model, which is why they don’t do it.

It still stands in the way of preservation, and it’s not good enough to release private servers after the game is sunset, because there’s no guarantee while the game is still supported that it’s going to happen to keep the game alive. Plus, even in a best case scenario, private servers are necessary to get around server downtime, DDOS attacks, queues when the servers are at capacity, or just the ability to play with some friends if you’re in a cabin in the woods.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

You may as well say the same thing about DRM-free games then, since this is effectively just a gimmick to disguise DRM. You don’t provide the server to endorse piracy. You do it because anything less is giving your customer an inferior product. Even if the preservation aspect of this didn’t upset me, I’d still have a hard time buying a game like Helldivers 2 because it comes across as phenomenally poor value compared to buying a game that’s built to last.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

There are better shooters out there? Where are they hiding?

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Yes, that’s a years-old tactic at this point. It was big in the loot box era.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Sinking ship or not, word was that Wizards’ cut of BG3 was over $90M. $100M was the entire production cost of Baldur’s Gate 3. If you could fund an entire other massive video game for the cost of what you paid your partner for licensing, I’m sure anyone would be rethinking that deal. At this point, they don’t need the D&D license any more than BioWare needed the Star Wars license after KOTOR.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

For similar reasons as D&D, I doubt they’d license someone else’s system either, but I could be wrong.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Planescape: Torment on 2nd edition rules. I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 on 5th edition rules and started playing tabletop 5th edition. I’ve played Pillars of Eternity 1, as I understand it largely inspired by 3.5 edition rules, and the first 10 hours of Pillars of Eternity 2, which I assume is now iterating on its own offshoot. I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. If that’s the case, and it’s in the ballpark of what Pillars of Eternity 1 is, I’ll take 5th edition any day of the week, but if you’d like to explain to me briefly why I might be wrong, I’m listening. Compared to how the 2e games and the Pillars games handle spells of different levels, 5e’s upcasting seems like a godsend, for instance.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Unless I see major advancements in the technology, I think AI will be a great tool in the toolbelt for developers operating on lower budgets, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to have people expecting the best from Larian’s games going forward, and that’s going to mean human writing and human performances. I think without those major advancements in the technology, it’s going to come off as lesser quality.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

It doesn’t feel like a bunch of exceptions to me. It feels like you have a bonus action that’s basically always class-related, and everything else is an action. What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of. I don’t really find 5e to be unintuitive thus far such that I’m looking for another system to remedy it, I guess.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

I’m a recent convert to Critical Role as well, and even moments ago, I witnessed one of those fuck-ups (I’m still a long ways from catching up on campaign 3, so it’s an old episode), but I can’t seem to recall it having much to do with what’s an action or not an action and instead more about what the range of a thing is or what type of creature it can be cast on. I don’t know if there’s some equivalent solution to that in Pathfinder, but that would strike me as a harder problem to solve via systems changes to make more intuitive.

Another thing I respect about what 5e does compared to other D&D or adjacent games I listed above: they rebalanced the hell out of magic. In those other games, someone casts a spell that paralyzes your entire party with an AoE or massive cone, and you just have to watch with no recourse as everyone dies. In 5e, the equivalent spell has a finite number of targets, they scale intuitively with spell level by adding one extra target per level, and if it has an ongoing effect, it would require concentration so the person can’t steamroll by casting a bunch of them concurrently. Again, I haven’t played Pathfinder, so I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible), but 5e isn’t the first RPG system I’ve played. It solved tons of problems with ones that I’ve played before. Advantage rolls another D20. Upcasting adds another die or another target. You get to move, and you get an action; everything else is an action, but your class gives you bonus action options. Resistances and weaknesses are simple halves and doubles. Armor affects your ability to hit or not, with no extra junk slowing down the calculations. That sort of thing. They’re all very smart changes. If I was going to nitpick things about 5e, it would be like how your ability scores are all out of 20, but your modifiers are every other point; and that’s something I seem to recall hearing through the grapevine that Pathfinder 2e does address, correct me if I’m wrong.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

How about Wrath of the Righteous? Does that use 2nd edition? Is the game any good? I know it was built primarily for real time with pause, but is it any good in turn based mode? I don’t have the time for another tabletop podcast in my life, and I don’t see any world where I play it myself until at least my current D&D campaign reaches a conclusion. And to be totally honest, your pitch still sounds like it’s a cure for problems that I don’t have, but a video game would be a decent way to sample it.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I was talking about how the lack of Star Wars license didn’t stop Mass Effect from being even more successful than KOTOR, yes.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I don’t think he was ever a fighting scientist. That was Dr. Gerstmann, Dr. Oestreicher, and associate Pack.