It’s the only way they can ensure it works, I suppose. They might need to control specific cookies and reported supposed clients depending on plugins, and so a packaged in-app browser for the login is easiest. Playnite does the same thing.
This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.
Yeah although I would argue one does not preclude the other. As in, of course with Hanlon’s Razor, this is because of incompetence not malice. But it’s also a scam, just one born out of not being any smarter/better.
Like a worse Dead Cells but with a pretty pretty art style? Combat seems so-so, on the one hand it has some interesting mechancis that clearly try to ape fighting games (as they say), but on the other it also seems simplistic compared to, well, again, Dead Cells. Although maybe that’s just the early parts.
Yeah I’m playing that right now, and I’m honestly massively impressed.
It is utterly boring and rote, in a lot of ways. It’s a 95% Far Cry (as in, it’s slightly weaker than Far Cry mechanically, which I didn’t think was even possible) in the world of Pandora. Some of Far Cry’s mechanics like the camps didn’t translate as well as the devs thought they would, plus the enemy AI is just bullshit, but luckily the game is easy overall as your longbow is extremely OP.
But, on the flipside, fucking hell does this game sell “Pandora”. More so than the movies, even the first one for the time it came out. Walking through and flying over the jungle is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s not just the texture/model designers that deserve a bonus payout: The actual jungle design is superb, too. And the level + sounds designers also created individual setpieces (like the trip up the rookery) that create the perfect feeling in that moment and are really memorable.
It’s in a lot of ways extremely well done. It’s also by Ubisoft and is a Far Cry reskin, which sadly massively limits how good it can be overall. I wish they had let the designers run wild and create their own thing. But it’s still an impressive game and far better than I thought it’d be, even if it’s all show.
I know she’s supposed to turn good (maybe?) in sequels, but, hey, you’ve got to sacrifice someone at the end of 1, because cheap emotional engagement trick.
Yeah but that’s the other thing, that’s how you get gamers to let somebody from their group go: You force an obvious “One or the other”-pick. I can totally see how we as consumers can more readily accept that than we can accept the very understandable part of Karlach leaving as that was not presented right in the moment you made the choice. It didn’t feel like there should not be any Option C at all.
Of course, I’m not saying that it cannot be the case, but it’s also not something I’d leave just standing.
Just from the examples you list, the same issues essentially show up:
First to show that the influencers (as a whole) and their gaming audience (in specific) aren’t just a hyper-specific echo chamber that gets amplified in volume due to suddenly being actively reported on. Like the “Only 1% of players ever will let you know if they’re unhappy”, it’s difficult to know whether for every angry idiot manchild basement dweller there’s 99 or 999999 happy gamers that didn’t even realize something big was happening because their life has bigger issues than something posted on Twitter or in a blog post.
And then second to also show that this is still relevant. Gamergate was in 2014. GamerGate was closed to Half-Life 2 than to today, and consider just how different gaming as a societal landscape was back in the HL2 days.
Again, totally not saying that it’s not very much a relevant comment that is being linked to here, but to me what is weird is that it presents an idea as fact with absolutely no evidence that the basis that fact would need to be true even exists. “Gamers” is not a single group of people. And the implication that this in turn affects game design is also entirely unverified and not something a reader can verify or falsify for themselves.
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.