ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The writing has been on the wall for physical games for some time. If you want to hold on to your games, DRM-free is better than physical.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I know it’s not an option for consoles. Since the 7th gen, it was always moving in this direction. It’s probably one of dozens of reasons that PC overtook consoles in market share.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I thought the same thing about Concord, and then no one did buy it, and that too was funny.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Remarkable is, presumably, a good bang-for-your-buck PC build?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

What’s the downside to it? It enables cross play.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

A friend of mine bought one at MSRP to add to his collection along with the likes of Anthem and Babylon’s Fall. He also picked up Suicide Squad for this reason, but he found that he unironically really enjoys that game while it’s still operational.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

There’s another thread here that I posted covering this already, but it’s important to note that the game is DRM-free from Itch, and you’re free to back up the game. It sucks that they can delist the game even if you paid for it, but your digital library really is forever as long as you make backups yourself. That’s way better than the alternative where the store hosts it forever but you can’t back it up yourself (like Steam).

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I have far more confidence that unzipping a file will continue to work into the future than this project that may fall out of sync with some future update on Steam.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’ve been trained to read that title and interpret it as the game shutting down forever.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Lots of people feel this way. This thing is going to come in at a price around $650 or $700, sell pretty much exclusively to the people who need the latest high-end PlayStation regardless, and then free up a bit of inventory of second hand vanilla PS5s. It’s a way to justify keeping prices high, because they can’t afford to lower them.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I only own the game through itch.io, which I got through one of those charity bundles, and they contacted me by e-mail. Then people contacted GamingOnLinux about it, and at least right now, it seems to only be limited to itch.io.

EDIT: I actually do have the game via GOG as well, which is news to me, and I did not receive a similar notification about it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s still available via GOG if you want the game DRM-free.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Likewise though, I’ve seen people playing Destiny for the rewards when they weren’t even enjoying it. They just wanted the rewards.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Very interesting selection. Desperados III made the list, and Street Fighter 6 appears to be the only fighting game.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

For me and many others, it was a very divisive one, so I’m not so surprised by that. I guess Eurogamer is staffed by a lot of the game’s detractors, which is possible. Hell, if it was me making the list, #1 with a bullet would be Skullgirls, but that’s not here either.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Ah, you’re right.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Me. This game is for me. The desire for this has nothing to do with desiring “ultra janky gameplay”, and I’ve already played Ghost Recon 1.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.

Yeah, that’s what I’m here for. Another way to look at it is this: remember how much “All Ghillied Up” wowed people when they showed it off at E3, and then again when people got to play it? I wanted to be the guy telling the player what to do, not just following a series of instructions. You’re right that when a game like Wildlands has to resort to wallhacks, there’s a lot of satisfaction that evaporates with it, and that’s why there might be a market for a game made the old-school way.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

And the Netherlands just became the 6th.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I thought it was killed by having stupid design around game objectives and not letting you tweak those rules yourself.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Can they stay solvent through a dozen flops when each one costs them hundreds of millions of dollars?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Free to play games have to reach a much larger audience to break even, so chances are it was just as doomed if it was free.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Chances are it wasn’t the barrier to entry that did that game in, is my point.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn’t even launch Hyenas because they realized they’d only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it’s not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn’t need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.

To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it’s a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they’re not the first one of these to market.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Supermassive games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the Dark Pictures are great for this, especially since later iterations have built-in “pass the controller” modes that are great for sharing a game with your spouse.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They’re all the same format, but The Dark Pictures is an anthology of games that are about half the size of Until Dawn. There are 5 or 6 of them at this point.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Can’t wait to play this in two years when Sony lets me, as long as it doesn’t require some kind of DRM like a PSN login.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Maybe not. If that’s the case, I’ll live. They’ve brought their past PC releases to GOG until very recently, so if they see sales drop off, they might continue to do that or relax the PSN requirement. We’ll see.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

In fact I’ve played plenty of other fun games that released this year.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

A 1 out of 10 for Starfield is ridiculous; either hyperbole, or you haven’t played many video games before to see what a 1 out of 10 would truly be. I was very disappointed by it too, but level set a bit here.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Your opinion is your opinion, but I don’t think the scale of the company or its resources matter one iota. Games made by a single person have been better than those made by thousands of people, and that’s without putting my thumb on the scale in either direction. I don’t even agree that Starfield is linear, but even if it was, that doesn’t make a game bad. If you’re calling Starfield a 1 out of 10, there’s no room to go down from there on that scale, which is absurd to me, because that means you’d have to cram Superman 64 and Bubsy 3D on the same part of that scale.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It definitely does not matter. You build a game that you’re capable of making. If it felt like they were making a game that needed a bigger budget to realize the design they were shooting for, that will affect my opinion of it. Games like Halo Infinite spent so much money on the game making it “big” that it actually made the game worse than if they’d spent less on it and kept it smaller. I don’t give a damn how much they spent making it. We had a whole era of RPGs in the 2010s that were made for a tiny fraction of the development cost of what was coming out of BioWare, but they were better RPGs without having to give them any sort of pity scale to arrive at that conclusion.

I brought up Superman 64 because it’s known to be one of the worst games ever made. When you know how bad a game can actually be, Starfield has no business being a 1 out of 10.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

In 35 hours, I got 28 out of 62 achievements and left 3 or 4 of the major faction quest lines undone. 40 hours doesn’t sound right for 100%.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.

Let’s acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let’s acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I’m still glad it failed.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It is an online-only game.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Could have been a cool split screen and LAN game.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Any game works as a LAN game. That’s the advantage of being a LAN game. Of course, when you build a game like that, you know not to assume that you’ll always have 10 players in a match, and you build it to scale to that. If they released it with LAN and a deathmatch mode for any number of players, even if they did no rebalancing on the character designs to account for it and the there were obvious top tiers and low tiers, I’d still buy it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

So the person I responded to asked if it was.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s a non zero amount of work, and there’s every chance they spend more money making that change than they would bring in.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

And I’m saying that if you throw in a quick deathmatch mode, it’s playable with only one friend. And when a game has LAN, that means that you can play with a gaming VPN regardless of the presence of official servers.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

There’s so much Baldur’s Gate 3 there already. If you never cut anything, the game is never “finished”. I think they made the right call. I’d like to see what they’ve got in them next. Perhaps a CRPG with a Starfield-esque setting. Most CRPGs lean on the post-apocalypse sorts of settings.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Then it arguably isn’t that either. They give you full instructions on how to repair and upgrade it, and they partnered with iFixIt. People have modded in more storage, battery life, and better screens. Personally, I think I draw the line at the part where it runs the same executables as any other PC, so I’ll call it a PC.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

A monopolistic practice is one that enforces a monopoly unfairly. Just having market share means they’re approaching a monopoly, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting there by monopolistic practices.