So… Where are all the realistic medieval sandbox RPGs? You know, of the kind set in an actual historical period?
Or… Or… How often has capturing the freedom and complexity of D&D in a videogame been attempted so accurately?
For something to even approach becoming a cliché there’d have to be a lot of that particular something done in exactly that particular way. So please do give a nice long list of games exactly like Kingdom Come Deliverence and Baldur’s Gate 3, because clearly everyone must’ve missed them.
And yet there’s an incredibly high demand for playing old Nintendo games. When Nintendo occasionally sells emulated old games on newer consoles, they tend to sell pretty well. The NES and the SNES mini were much sought after and best-sellers.
So imagine if Nintendo offers the games in their entire retro library (that they are licensed to offer) with an official emulator for people to buy. That would evaporate the piracy of retro Nintendo games pretty quickly.
However, Nintendo doesn’t want that. They like completely manufactured, artificial scarcity. And so there’s piracy. A lot of piracy.
They don’t want people to play their old games either. Nintendo creates an artificial scarcity by only occasionally releasing older titles to their newer consoles, despite that those older titles are quite literally running on emulators… Emulators that use a lot of the open source code the community they hate has created.
I’ll try and find them, but first I heard from it was from Jim Stirling. “The Jimquisition” on YouTube, I think. Haven’t kept up with that guy in years.
They’re the same thing. “Live service” is how Activision-Blizzard rebranded games that required to be always online. They also solidified the outline of things publishers at the time were already doing with their always online games, such as endless content players will have to buy.
Those documents leaked many years ago, and soon after that the moniker was changed from “always online” to “Live Service”.
“Live service” is a game that has an always online requirement. Just getting updates on the regular doesn’t make it a live service if the game works just fine without an Internet connection.
Single player Ubisoft games are all “live services”, due to some of them needing a constant connection to Ubisoft’s servers, and them having in-game shops that only work while online.
So far Warframe has been the ONLY example of a good live service game. It’s the OG when it comes to the model, but it’s also the exception, and not the rule.