Arc Raiders has only been out a day, but it has already surpassed a Steam concurrent peak player count of 264,673, making it one of the biggest extraction shooters ever on Valve’s platform.
Out of what? Like 5 extraction shooters? I don't get the popularity, it's pretty damn bland and shoves MTX in your face like crazy, but I have been pretty out of touch with the mainstream market for a while now.
No need to start throwing insults. It takes away from your argument. If you want to pay for cosmetics, sure go for it, but that's how we got in this mess.
Artists get paid either way, they are not paid on commission of skin sales. Any extra profit goes to the executives anyway, not to the artists. So that entire point is null.
Games existed before with no paid cosmetics, they would exist again without them. This used to be the free-to-play model, but now they realise they can charge you for the game and then again and again for skins. These types of games are designed to extract as much money from you as possible, that's their entire purpose. They are not giving you extra skins to be nice and then paying the artists more from it. A skin is made one time and sold a potentially infinite amount of times for ridiculous prices.
As I said:
It's so ingrained it's actually crazy.
Why would you ever want to advocate for a worse experience? It blows my mind, but that's the situation we got ourselves into.
I said the situation is crazy, not a specific person. I dont blame any individual, the strategies used over the years by these companies to sell skins and make consumers complacent are all very manipulative and effective. The people designing the systems and the ones doing the marketing have done a very, very good job.
You seem stuck on artists all being freelance, getting paid on some sort of commission. They are almost always salaried employees like anyone else at the development company.
Weird analogy, paying for a game, something usually worked on for years, is a lot different than paying for a cosmetic change to something. It's like going to the movies and paying the price of the ticket again to sit in a green chair instead of a red one and being told that's completely normal and something you should do.
I agree, if skins were sold for $0.50, $1.00, max $5, then I would have less issue with them. I'd still have issue with the predatory practices used to sell them though. Some people are more susceptible to this than others, so I would rather it didnt exist at all.
You buy a game once, have all the content and are not pressured again to spend anything, that's the ideal scenario, why would I compromise on that?
Games should be a sustainable art form, not gross corporate projects to extract as much money as possible from consumers.
No, not at all. Extraction shooters require you to take in gear, which you can lose. Find loot or better gear and extract with it. If you die during the mission you lose pretty much everything, high stakes are required. DRG has no stakes, you just go and complete a mission for some progression.
It's bland. That's my opinion. If you don't think so that's fine, but that is literally what an opinion is. The style is very similar to their old Frostbite games. You can see the EA Star Wars Battlefront in it.
The drones just being physics based isnt all that impressive that it makes the game for me, it's not exactly revolutionary, similar things have existed before anyway. The gameplay is like you see in a lot of other games, that's why I think it's bland. It's your run-of-the-mill 3rd person shooter, with some basic extraction shooter elements added.
If you enjoy it, fantastic go have fun, doesn't mean I have to like it and you don't have to defend the game or your position at all.
You are very confused. My point is very simple and understandable, yet you will purposefully misinterpret everything I say, just to fit your agenda for the sake of argument.
I already said, if you want to buy skins, go for it. It's your money. You dont need to get so defensive over that. It's okay.
Because you are so hellbent on going in circles as an argument strategy, I wont discuss further. Good luck out there.
CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I'm still not sure it functions fully now.
They butchered community servers and don't seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there's no "fun" until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it's never going to change and it's probably why Valve jumped on CS again.
I wish Steam would put the 3rd-party requirements nice and obvious above the buy button. Along with "uses AI content", "in-app purchases" and "always online requirement" banners too. And more too, every game should be shamed before users get to the buy button.
AAA is just cash grab, they haven't been good or innovative games for a long, long time now. They are very good at marketing to the masses though and they have the pricing tiers laid out perfectly to extract as much money from people as they can.
They start off with their massive price tag like $70-80, plus the deluxe editions for $100-120 for any suckers who want a fucking extra skin. Then after a couple months when sales slow down, they put it on sale for like 20% off, then a couple months more, its like 40% off and so on. DLC has kind of fallen off, as they get people stuck in the battle pass and cosmetic buying loop instead (people are crazy).
If a AAA game looks interesting to you at all, you are literally best just waiting a few months or more, it's a win-win, you either buy it it's actual value or you get the reviews that its a disgusting broken mess or was completely over-hyped (it's these last two 99% of the time).
Steam sales are for getting them older games a bit cheaper, good indie games are worth their price tag multiple times over honestly so unless you are tight on money, I'd support the developer regardless of sales.
They dont want people buying the old games, even their 15 year old ones are still full price on purpose. They want you in the latest game each year, exposed to all the predatory extra-transactions, then they want you to do that again the next year and the next and the next... the games are not priced like that because they "forgot", it's a business strategy.
But Larian themselves released a buggy mess even with early access for 3 years? Why did they rush it out?
Fuck EA and AAA in general, but like practice what you preach Swen. You aren't the small studio you think you are anymore, you have nearly 500 employees.
You cannot convince me it cost $700M to make any of the recent CoD games. They are rehashes of each other. That has to include literally every dollar spent during the games development lifecycle across all studios and the publisher, right? Otherwise they are just pissing money away.
Sledgehammer Games. They never really kept the cycle, they kept fucking up and others had to come in to help etc. There's got to be disatrous management at the studios.
If it includes marketing then yeah, it's mostly that. $700M is an absolutely absurd astronomical amount for what CoD is, on a purely development basis.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it's used for it's out of the box "good" graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or "framerate number" should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I've yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it's entirely reliant on TAA as it's deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it's all about the money...
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing "upgraded" graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It's good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
I really dont mind solutions like upscaling, but it should be for people with older hardware, so they can run newer games better.
Instead it is used as a crutch by developers to gain some "performance" out of their poorly made game (Not blaming devs individually here, they are all probably overworked on titles like this and they wont have much of a say in what tools or timeframe they have). You are right, it's a capitalism issue too.
TAA just looks like I have grease smeared over my monitor... the only acceptable AA for deferred rendering is SMAA honestly, but I still think it's a misused technique in most cases, I have only seen a few games look good with it. Games with it usually have lots of visual flaws, that they hope TAA smears over. But then you just get a blurry game.
You cant toggle it, or you get loads of shimmering, you cant use it because you get loads of blur. There's ghosting even without AA. This is the exact problem, there's no good implementation if you are relying on TAA and/or DLSS as anti-aliasing. Squad suffers it, the same as any UE5 game.
You can play Unciv I guess, I don't see why you would want a strategic view only though? Nothing stopping you just using that mode exclusively yourself.
Steam (and PC in general) just lends itself to indie games more, which is good. It could do better, but overall there's a lot of great games that get the recognition they deserve. Triple A finds most of it's success on consoles, where they can easily market it on the front page of the console, rather than just on the store.
But PC is (unfortunately?) really getting mainstream now, so we are starting to see a lot morals thrown out the window by consumers just to play the latest AAA slop too.
The best thing is back when Battlefield was Battlefield, it would self-regulate because most people played on self-hosted servers, so cheaters and bad actors were taken care of swiftly. But now they want their own control to put shitty bots and SBMM in the game, so here we are.
This whole game is a case of the devs making bad decisions and then instead of changing them decisions, they apply the quickest bandaid fixes they can.
Yeah well too bad that ship has sailed as well. Such a shame, BF2, BC2 and BF3 were quality games, just needed a modern take of one of those instead of whatever this is we got.
Overall scope was set by EA, they wanted a more mainstream shooter to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, so they could jump into the seasonal content/battle pass grind. But the devs made all these little individual decisions that add up.
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The game is incredibly poorly made, with clipping textures and models everywhere, animations are horrible, performance is terrible, it's hazy and blurry, there's AI imagery all over the place.
It's a cash grab at best. You just have to spawn into the lobby to immediately know you just bought an incredibly low quality game.
You are right thats what it would be called, but it doesnt do anything to be a "spiritual successor". It's just a modern copy of it, even worse in places, definitely in terms of quality. I wouldnt be surprised if the assets are just from a marketplace. I left some more thoughts elsewhere in the comment thread and they certainly love their "modern technologies", with AI generated art ingame.
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