I would add another thing to this I wish the author would talk about instead of immediately projecting onto their own prejudices: People generally prefer the “good” option in games.
And I don’t even necessarily mean whatever the game calls Paragon-vs-Renegade. I mean the fact that for a game where you recruit characters to your “camp”, naturally losing characters feels like a fail state. Like you messed something up. As a result, players will intuitively lean to options that present the least “bad outcome”, in this context meaning the less often NPCs leave your camp the better. Recruiting someone is a victory, someone leaving is a defeat. The games present it as such, so it’s no wonder players err towards wanting everyone there.
Sure, but I’ve also just read about a black gay Trump voter. Extremes exist, it is upon the one presenting a theory to show the extend of the problem.
I’ll readily believe that focus testing and the safety-only design of companies such as Ubisoft augments any problem massively but it’s still easy to accept “Oh it’s because gamers are too afraid of powerful women in their games!” as a rhetoric without having anything indicating it’s actually happening.
Yeah, I played it for a while between stopping EQ1 and starting WoW when that released. Fun game at the time, but the expansions took a lot away from the experience as they naturally muddled the idea behind it.
Still, an important stepping stone in the progression of MMORPGs, in particular to mass PvP.
Playing this now, the game is not bad at all, it’s just… massively disappointing?
It is just a skin over a Far Cry, with a lot of mechanics weakened to make space for the skin.
That being said, on the flipside, fucking hell is it the prettiest skin anyone ever made for any video game to convert it into another IP. Pandora comes to live like even the second movie could not achieve it, and walking between NPCs and through the jungle is utterly magical.
I would argue that if you get this cheap and you like Far Cry and in particular Pandora as a world, go for it. It’s not bad at all. But do not expect anything but a watered down Far Cry (which, granted, is an achievement in itself 😂).
Personally I would love if they made something based on FATE. I would have absolutely no clue how to do it in a CRPG, but I love the system for actual pen&paper.
Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That’ll fix it!
I’m talking to you Hello Games (No man’s sky), just don’t mess it up with upcoming ‘Light no fire’.
What messed up NMS was overpromise to a basically criminal degree. If this were a B2B-transaction, they’d have been sued to hell and back. There’s absolutely 0 chance LNF won’t suffer exactly the same fate.
Early Access is just “release”. Only the devs openly admit ahead of time the game is buggy and unfinished, and promise - as always - to fix it up and add the missing parts.
Often they do. Sometimes they don’t.
TBH it’s ultimately nothing but a shitty buggy release, but the honesty of making that known ahead of time buys a whole lot of goodwill. It should be the default, that any publisher releasing a game that is not finished - so most AAA nowadays - marks it as Early Access, openly declaring the unfinished part.
It’s also very different from a beta version, which is usually feature and content complete (otherwise it’s generally called an alpha). Early Access versions are often very early in the development process, they’re feature-complete-ish, but never or rarely content complete, usually just starting out on that. This works exceedingly well for games that need “just more stuff”, but can miss the mark on games that need underlying systems reworked as this ires the existing playerbase and splits it.