Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn’t play them, myself included.
I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.
I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.
Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.
You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.
A coop PvE game for two dads and three sons?
A shooter, preferably. Any recommendations, #mastodon guys? The youngest lad is 10, so as little violence as possible. Thanks 😉
Replaying Dragon’s Dogma in prep for the new game. I had forgotten how much grind the game requires, honestly. I’ve been Mage 1-11, MArcher 6, Ranger 6, Sorc 30-40 or so, and my magic score is still low as hell. I’m purposefully delaying meeting the duke because I really want to give MArcher a try in the post-game, and it feels like I’ve already played for a long time but sheesh, levelling up is slow. I had never focused on building for stats, honestly. I know now though that most of your damage comes from your gear, so I might quit levelling Sorc when I reach 450 magic instead of the 600.
Hope it’s a little faster in the second entry.
Apart from that, trying the Nordic Souls modpack for Skyrim, and Helldivers 2.
IMO the problem at this point is leadership. They’ve realized people will buy their shit if they sell a cheap, surface-deep fantasy with interesting visuals and let folks do a very limited number of different things in a single playthrough. Because of that, there’s no nuance to their worlds. They want to make a sandbox game with no reactivity.
Unless leadership resigns I won’t expect anything else than the equivalent of a gas station meal.
I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).
Yup. D2 has the worst new player experience of any game I’ve played. But at the end of the day, it’s just about knowing where the daily solo dungeon is, so you can grind Light level. Raids are complicated though, because a lot of them are like puzzles.
Stopped playing it because of how money hungry the game is.
5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.
Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.
Skyrim, after lots of years of not playing it. Tried a couple modpacks and collections and they either have horny mods, bad performance, or are unbalanced in regards to difficulty. Like, I can accept dying a lot, I have hundreds of hours on soulslike games. What I can’t accept is dying because of jank, and as good as a mod might be made, it still interacts with a janky engine. Even scriptless mods end up janky sometimes. I’m building my own modpack instead, choosing simple mods for modularity. Not gonna bash nothing so it will probably end up a little basic, but eh. Playing this to tide me over for whenever an Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate expansion drops.
Apart from that, Baldur’s gate and Zomboid with friends. And the good ol classic, Rimworld.
Also, I’m a new DM and decided to fuck myself thrice over. I’m designing a whole new homebrew to play in an ASOIAF setting. It requires whole redesigns of classes, weapon systems, mechanics, etc. My players are excited for it though, I’ve been dropping sneak peeks and they’ve responded well.
Depth is what Starfield is lacking, imo. It fixes a lot of what both skyrim and f4 did wrong (there’re backgrounds, they affect your skills, and they come up from time to time, to mention one), but they regressed so hard on other things. They tried new stuff but the delivery was so limp dicked that everything landed awkwardly, or not at all. Think the game suffered because of scope creep, honestly, if they had limited the game to just a handful of planets, they could’ve tailored the experience and they wouldn’t feel so empty.
And as always, their obsession to let you do everything in one playthrough hurt the game hard. There’s very little reason to go for a second playthrough.
Like, they did a good job with most of the game’s mechanics, but everything else is mid as hell. Very forgettable.
Have to pitch it. DD:DA is what if you had Monster Hunter, added magic classes that feel great, and set it in a high fantasy setting. It takes some cues from jrpgs and feels less western than any soulsborne game, but still.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, though less and less each time. Baldur’s Gate 3 with my friends, Halo Infinite with my friends, and Skyrim for the nth time. Downloaded Wildlander and it’s like a whole new game.
Honestly, I prefer this, as long as the single player option is unaffected by the multiplayer component’s performance, and the resources allotted to the SP game don’t suffer because of the MP.
True, but that was before mtx became the name of the game. Nowadays when a game has a multiplayer component with no bells and whistles and just works, it’s an outlier.
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
Same, about 0.02 USD per hour at this point, with DLC included. Would be even lower if I had bought the game earlier instead of pirating it for months.
Ditto on what others have said. Hours/price is a lousy metric because nowadays lots of games have some pretty toxic mechanics that incentivize sticking with a boring experience (New World, Assassin’s Creed, etc.), inflating how much time you’d spend in a game that should be much shorter.
Games I’ve paid full price and I don’t regret: Rimworld, Baldur’s Gate III, Wasteland 2, Doom 2016, Celeste, Project Zomboid.
They’re also the standard in some industries, inc. design and video production. At least where I’m at. Hate the OS with a passion but not having a mixed OS workplace sucks.
Well, not dedicated to that, but mr samuel streamer (mostly crusader kings and rimworld) has an alt channel where he shoots the shit with his fiance, and sometimes they play games together. They’re playing vampire: the masquerade: bloodlines rn.
Yup, this. I’ve played two runs by myself and on my fourth with some buddies and I’m still finding out meaningful stuff I didn’t do on my solo runs. Starfield is an upgrade in tons of aspects over previous beth titles (big exception is planetside exploration), they fixed tons of issues both Skyrim and F4 had. Skill checks, while not as present as they should be, pop up once in a while. Skill tree isn’t as boring as F4 but build variety suffers, same as in Skyrim. Character background pops up in convos sometimes (but isn’t as deep as it could be).
That’s starfield. It has the makings of a good game, and it is, but it plays it very safe. And because of that, NPCs are boring, as is the story, as is combat, as is pretty much everything else in the game. The only thing that impressed me was that one mission in the main quest but even that one was limp dicked on the finish. And ship costumization, but if I wanted in-depth ship mechanics I’d play KSP.
Like the game was too ambitious and too chicken shit at the same time.
DM’ing my first DnD campaign ever with some of my friends, all of us are new. Besides that, Cyberpunk for the second time, and Baldur’s Gate for a fourth time with a friend who just got the game.
I was looking into Cyberpunk! Reading through my files I realized I got the sourcebook with the game. Ended up getting Carbon 2185 and already looking into making some homebrew systems to take it into a shadowrun esque bent. Will have to talk my guys into that one though, some of them aren’t interested in a cyberpunk run, maybe once I pitch those HBs they’ll get into it.
I had to take up DM duties for this run and assure everyone I’d take it easy on them, so they can learn systems and all. Turns out I really like world building and planning sessions, but RPing characters is really hard for me. I got a very monotone voice and my range of accents is very limited. Making up for it with a ton of planning though. I’ll make sure to pass on my workflow to whomever ends up DMing after me.
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
It still is a little lib-ish. The game goes to great lengths at showing Silverhand (and anyone blaming capitalism) as being a bit too harsh or off their rocker, with V explicitly mocking his leftist opinions in dialogue many times (replaying the game, once during an elevator ride, another after dealing with the chapel in pacifica). The game is very on the nose about blaming corporations but spares the rod when talking about the system.
Honestly, I’d rather have stellar voice acting and okay graphics (not good, just not bad enough to turn it off after it makes me dizzy) than the other way around. Graphics lose their appeal after a short while in-game.
For me it was Dead Space 2 when I was 12-ish. For reference, at this point the most gruesome/gorey/violent media I was exposed to was the Halo 3 Flood levels and the original 2 Alien movies....
One of two. Ghosts and Ghouls on snes, I was like 4 but wasn’t scared. And the other one is not a horror game but for 6 year old me it was scary as shit, Halo CE. The Library level and the one before, 343 Guilty Spark, were hell for me. Beating those levels was a goddamn relief.
Yeah. For a while I thought about upgrading to a desk mic and semi open headphones, but after looking at my desk, yeah, having a mic in front of me would be hella uncomfortable. Not to mention, I’d probably knock it over accidentally and fuck it up within a month.
The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don’t perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress...
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. If you were too lazy to trek back to Cordon after deactivating the miracle machine (I think), you couldn’t get the true ending without abusing glitches and bugs.
So, uh, Chinese Room. Think they’re the walking sim guys. Vibe looks different to the first one, less gothic punk and more succulent goth mommy. Not sure how I feel about it. Guess I’ll wait for vertical slices.
OK, I finally took the plunge on Baldur’s Gate 3, and, coming from playing several hundreds of hours of Solasta recently, the first thing I noticed is the lack of a combat grid....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of May 12th
What are you all playing! I beat thousand year door! Really amazing game. I understand why it is so beloved....
Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe': industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Microsoft closes Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin and others (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Kerbal Space Program 2 studio reportedly shut down by Take-Two (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
'Marketing's dead, and I can back this s**t up': Larian's publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 3rd
What have you all been playing! Still on my helldivers and binding of Isaac grinds. Spreading managed democracy through the galaxy 💪
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6 (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Stardew Valley Expanded exceeded its creator’s wildest dreams (www.polygon.com) angielski
How are you all playing these insanely complex games?
Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 19th
What have you all been playing?...
Here Are The Nominees For The Game Awards 2023 - Game Informer (www.gameinformer.com)
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Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 29th
Whatcha all been playing?...
Far Cry's Multiplayer Game is an Extraction-Based Shooter (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 22nd
Hey all! Whatcha been playing. I am recovering from surgery and have been playing a ton of Mario wonder. Loving it so far 😊
When was a game's price worth it to you?
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It (www.macrumors.com) angielski
Unity CEO John Riccitiello 'retiring' from company weeks after pricing controversy (www.eurogamer.net)
Can anyone recommend let's play channels or streamers wherein a group of multiple people play single player games together?
Examples include: Scary Game Squad, Gamegrumps, Team Double Dragon, and the like....
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Cyberpunk's storytelling makes Starfield seem ancient - Opinion (www.eurogamer.net)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 1st
Scary edition of the weekly thread 👻...
What type of game you want to see that doesn't fully exist yet?
Epic Games Is Cutting About 900 Jobs, or 16% of Staff (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved? angielski
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com) angielski
lol. lmao.
What was the formative horror game of your childhood? angielski
For me it was Dead Space 2 when I was 12-ish. For reference, at this point the most gruesome/gorey/violent media I was exposed to was the Halo 3 Flood levels and the original 2 Alien movies....
Bethesda and CDPR's developers must have very different love lives (lemmy.world) angielski
Sennheiser Exits Gaming Headphone Business (www.anandtech.com) angielski
Technically the successor owner of the gaming brand....
What games had easy soft locks that prevented you from either progressing or getting a true ending? angielski
The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don’t perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress...
Bloodlines 2 - Official Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com)
So, uh, Chinese Room. Think they’re the walking sim guys. Vibe looks different to the first one, less gothic punk and more succulent goth mommy. Not sure how I feel about it. Guess I’ll wait for vertical slices.
Why do modern strategy games hate the grid? angielski
OK, I finally took the plunge on Baldur’s Gate 3, and, coming from playing several hundreds of hours of Solasta recently, the first thing I noticed is the lack of a combat grid....