sushibowl

sushibowl, 21 dni temu

The big reason I’m hearing in this thread is “Denuvo and I don’t trust Ubisoft.” However I doubt that is the reason the mainstream audience skipped over this game. Ubisoft franchises generally sell like hotcakes, and for the most part only nerds care about DRM (like the type of person who knows what a lemmy is).

It’s hard to say why it didn’t sell more units. Certainly it seems their internal expectations were sky high:

similarly to the biggest Metroidvania’s in the market, with millions of units sold in a relatively short space of time

The game is good, but metroidvania is not exactly an easy market; there’s some juggernauts in that genre, and they came out with a completely new and unproven concept. Apparently it sold a million units or so still, to me that’s not unimpressive.

On PC, it initially launched only on Epic afaik, which certainly doesn’t help. And by the time they brought it to steam it was much too late.

What I don’t really get is, why disband the team? They’ve proven they can produce quality stuff. Just hand them some other promising projects? I suppose that’s too much of a risk for a publisher like Ubisoft.

sushibowl, 21 dni temu

How the mighty have fallen eh? Prince of Persia was a big franchise once upon a time. Like, the Sands of time trilogy was AAA tier.

sushibowl, miesiąc temu

Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.

sushibowl, 2 miesiące temu

It’s a shame 'cause SC2 had some genuinely awesome ideas, like the Allied Commander mode. Probably the best casual online gameplay of any RTS, which frankly every other RTS ever made should copy.

Unfortunately every other RTS only tries to copy the sweaty multiplayer 1v1 experience. Like playing guitar hero on expert mode on your mouse and keyboard while also doing strategy at the same time.

Even more unfortunately no one seems to be able to execute even that part half as well as Blizzard did.

sushibowl, 2 miesiące temu

Is there any reliable source for this information? Or is it rumours only.

sushibowl, 2 miesiące temu

WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn’t invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.

sushibowl, 2 miesiące temu

It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.

sushibowl, 3 miesiące temu

This is basically correct but i would add sometimes it’s better to add chips than to add mult. For example, if your score is something like:

<span style="color:#323232;">10 x 50 = 500
</span>

Adding +50 mult here would give you 10x100=1000 points. Adding +50 chips will give you 60x50=3000 points.

Adding to the lowest of the two numbers improves your score the most. Especially early game, mult is much lower than chips, so you want to improve mult. However once you have some good mult jokers improving chips becomes important. Especially in high card based decks, where you get very few chips from your hand.

If the multiplier jokers come in, the picture can change again. It makes adding mult more valuable because the addition will be multiplied.

sushibowl, 4 miesiące temu

That 2% includes forgetting to use one, running out and being too horny to abstain, and various other excuses for why you’re not wearing one when you’ve agreed beforehand that you would.

Not so. The 98% figure assumes correct use of the condom every time. In the real world where people are imperfect, condoms are only about 87% effective.

sushibowl, 5 miesięcy temu

I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.

The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.

Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.

sushibowl, 5 miesięcy temu

When your audience is five years old you don’t really need to go anywhere with it.

sushibowl, 6 miesięcy temu

It is the way of all things good in this world, that eventually they end up in the hands of people who care only to extract money from it.

sushibowl, 7 miesięcy temu

That would put the g-forces back in play: the faster you go around the rail the stronger the centripetal force that keeps you going in a circle. If the rail is straight the force only depends on acceleration not speed.

sushibowl, 9 miesięcy temu

You are quite correct that an asymetrical game is much harder to balance.

However having identical sides and a symmetric playing field doesn’t always guarantee a balanced game. For example, if one piece or position dominates all others it can lead to a lack of viable options and just one way to play, making the game uninteresting. You don’t just want the players to have equal strength, you also want the universe of possible playing strategies to contain many different strong options.

sushibowl, 9 miesięcy temu

Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?

I think Caves Of Qud qualifies. But “real” roguelikes are few and far between these days, so it’s no surprise to me that the term has expanded to cover more. Otherwise it would’ve become essentially obsolete.

sushibowl, rok temu

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

sushibowl, rok temu

It’s not that deep. Here’s the two main critiques leveled towards the game in the article.

• you don’t always know the consequences of your actions, and they’re not always predictable: a seemingly sensible choice sometimes ends badly, and a seemingly dumb choice could get you a reward
• you can load a save and redo your things whenever you want, i.e. save-scum

These are both somewhat obvious just from the structure of the game. Ultimately the conclusion the author is shooting for is that this makes Baldur’s Gate 3 a bad game but a good piece of interactive fiction.

The author uses the mechanics of chess often as sort of an example of the pinnacle of game design which to me is telling. Video Games are much broader than that. Insisting that people should not call the thing you don’t like a game but instead “interactive fiction” is pedantry at best, and gatekeeping at worst.

Sure, if you view the game through the lens of chess you will come away with these flaws. But for example, if you always knew the consequences of every choice the narrative tension would be destroyed. Of course chess has no such concern, so if we’re looking at games through that lens then narrative tension is of no value. Ultimately I think this is just a very narrow viewpoint of what games should be.

sushibowl, rok temu

I think there’s a group of people who are just going to avoid quality completely and have entire factories running at normal quality only. Kinda similar to how some people don’t really do nuclear.

If you don’t like the concept of going into space though maybe this expansion is not for you. I think the base game will get the bot upgrades for free anyways.

sushibowl, rok temu

Sony and Microsoft do this yeah, but I’m pretty sure Nintendo consoles are sold at a profit.

sushibowl, rok temu

If a great game like Elden ring would’ve had cosmetic sets you could buy, would it have undermined the “greatness” of the game? I really don’t see it happening.

I agree with you that people mainly care about the game being good. However a game’s budget is more or less fixed. If From had made a bunch of cosmetic sets it would be taking away resources from making the “main” game, and it may not have been as great and polished as it is.

Also, once you have microtransactions in a game, there’s going to be a temptation to maximize the revenue gained from them, which can lead to the aggressive strategies you mention.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to do mtx without ruining the game, but it’s difficult. Without mtx, the only thing you have to maximize your revenue is to make the game as good as possible, and so everyone involved in the game’s development is aligned towards that goal.

Once you add mtx, there will be people involved whose main goal is to maximize revenue from the mtx (and I’m not saying those people are evil or want the game to be bad; they’re just doing their job). And so a sort of tug of war starts to happen between devoting resources and design decisions to make the game better, or getting people to buy your cosmetics. Finding the right balance through that mess is difficult.

sushibowl, rok temu

How could you learn anything about what people think of microtransactions from the success of a game that doesn’t have them? If a beloved franchise added a sequel with microtransactions in it and that sequel tanked, then maybe you’d have a case. From the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 the most you could conclude is “people will still buy a game that doesn’t have microtransactions,” which is not particularly revelatory.

A bunch of AAA games that heavily feature microtransactions are smash hits and made millions of dollars. Sure, people complain about it, but they also purchase tons of them (may not be the same people, mind you). I’m pretty sure we can conclude that not all people hate microtransactions. Hell, publishers will look at Baldur’s Gate 3 and probably go “man, this game is good but if they put some paid cosmetics in there they could have made even more money.”

And it’s probably true.