There’s a lot of negativity here, and a lot of it is pretty justified. But I don’t hate the idea of paid mods. Like if there’s a way for authors like the ones the made Enderal or other really big mods to make some money off of it that’s really great. Is Bethesda going to be fair about them? Probably not. Is Bethesda going to be competent with the system? Probably as competent as they are at anything else (derogatory).
But at least it’s a way that you can make some money back for your work where you don’t have to worry about chargebacks from trolls costing you more than the donations they were originally giving you. And this can be a pretty big problem for donation driven works. Someone donates $1, 200 times. Then charges them all back. Paypal charges you $15 processing fee for each chargeback. And you can contest it but who needs that? If Bethesda can be the entity brokering all of it, then they are the ones that take the chargeback risk.
So in theory, I don’t hate it. But it will all depend on the implementation and competency of Bethesda (not looking good here).
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “this is not a serious game, this is a traditional game with the goal of making players think”? I like the idea of games that make players think but saying it’s not a serious game can mean you intend it to be silly or that it’s a very low priority for you and that people shouldn’t take it too seriously.
A certain number of hours reached is a fairly easy metric to use and it works great for a lot of games. But let me tell you about Senua’s Sacrifice… that game is short. It was only $20 or something and 8 hours to play through. But it made me ugly cry at the ending. It was so emotionally charged I just sobbed for the girl. That was definitely worth the price.
For coop games with dialog I really loved how Baldur’s Gate 3 let everyone see the dialog choices and click on them to vote for what they would want. The player in the dialog didn’t have to choose it, but they could see and it let every player feel like they were a part of every conversation instead of just watching.
They’ve had this system in Overwatch for months now and that’s still a toxic hellpit. Now I don’t think that the majority of gamers are actually awful. If they were games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which is unrelentingly gay (despite the “go woke, go broke crowd”), wouldn’t get overwhelmingly positive steam reviews. But I do think the execs in charge of Overwatch and COD believe that the toxic people are a bigger group than they are and don’t want to lose them as revenue streams.
So… what happened here? The publishing director at Larian said that they “must launch with feature parity” and that they would be unable to remove the splitscreen for series S. Then Phil Spencer says “No, that’s not a thing. You can totally do it.” But only after a big delay has already caused some media buzz around one of, if not the, biggest game launches of the year. And now they can remove the splitscreen from series s.
So was it a misunderstanding on Larian’s part? Or did they themselves not want to launch without feature parity? I don’t see a world where they wanted to delay launching the product so late behind the other platforms.
Or is Phil Spencer being disingenuous by claiming a requirement to the devs, but then walking it back in public spaces?
It’s probably not that much faster than or efficient than traditional rasterization, but ray-tracing gets exponentially more expensive to absolutely completely fill in the scene. For the RT scenario it actually does make sense. Even rendering out frames and animations in blender you don’t let the renderer go on forever. At some point it’s more effective to let it stop and denoise it. The earlier you can get away with doing that the better.