I wish more players would just ignore these cosmetic microtransactions and go with the default skin or at least limit themselves to ones that can be obtained by actually achieving something in the game. Using default skin while outplaying people in competitive games could probably induce some people to make quite salty comments.
Torchlight 1-2 are decent fun for normal playthrough but plagued by bad design decisions and downright silly difficulty spikes on harder difficulties. Mods probably fix many of these issues but in vanilla the build diversity on harder difficulties is quite bad with only handful of viable builds with skill trees full of “trap skills”.
That approach works for some studios and some game projects but it’s no silver bullet. A lot of times gamers don’t know what they want until it’s handed on them on a silver platter which can make taking the correct kind of feedback really difficult. Sometimes outside influence may also stray the developers from their original vision.
That being said, developing game in complete secrecy for years and expecting it to become a success has pretty much the same chance as winning in a lottery. Getting MVP out there asap to see if the game will receive any sort of traction and feedback is generally the best approach unless it already has an audience (sequel or well known developer). It can be prototype, demo or early access as long as it’s something.
Hopefully this wont be full of microtransactions even of the cosmetic kind. Monster hunter world was amazing but Capcom has become more and more greedy for the past few years.
It’s probably really tempting for them to convert Monster Hunter franchise in to a modern live service with bunch of premium cosmetics, battle passes and Fomo traps. Exoprimal and Street Fighter VI are already suffering from these.
It has also secured an age 18 rating, with mention of violence and in-game purchases.
Hopefully they don’t get too greedy.
Capcom has been slowing morphing in to becoming yet another EA, Ubisoft or Activision with the monetization in their recent games (e.g Street Fighter VI, Exoprimal). Battle passes, Fomo-traps, social pressure, skinners boxes, Denuvo etc. At least most of their games are still good if you can ingore all the bullshit.
At least in this you can probably just throw all the pawns with paid costemtics to the nearest ditch for being walking advertisements.
To Each Their Own I guess. Single player games tend to respect players time a lot more and thus usually require a lot less grinding or farming to complete. That being said Grim Dawn does have online multiplayer and community hosted seasons.
There’s a lot of enshittification going around with games and services with more greedy business practices and it would be naive to think GGG is immune to it. When it comes to live service games certain level of skepticism is healthy to have. Now I do hope we’ll be able to play POE1 even 10 or 20 years from now with it being just as good.
Maybe I am just getting old but I’ve started to spend a lot more time with older games and titles that may be rough around the edges but have some unique ideas and actually take some risks with their game mechanics.
One of these games is Outward which has a lot of walking (quick travel is almost non existent) and serviceable combat system that leaves a lot to be desired. However both of these do give the game some flavor that is missing from many modern games now combine this with interesting “death” mechanic where instead of respawning you’re thrown in to random scenarios related to the area where you died. Another mechanic is backpack which you’ll need to carry any meaningful amount of items and which will limit your movement in battle if you do not drop it with all your items. The way palyer needs to sacrifice health to receive mana is also interesting and how different each mastery tree is is also nice. I do have to admit that I’d like the game a lot more without time limits on quests as they stress really me out.
Another one is Incredible adventures of Van Helsing which is diablo-style ARPG that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It took me awhile to understand the games mechanics which lead to bad time initially but once I understood the power-up system, focus on flat elemental damage bonuses instead of percentage based ones and how silly some skills where with power-up the game got me hooked. The dialogue and story is also pretty good for ARPG and fully voice acted.
Third one is Wurm: Unlimited which is basically special version of MMORPG Wurm: Online where players can host their own servers with their own tweaks and mods. While Wurm Online is substriction based mmorpg with very very slow progression most Wurm Unlimited servers are free to play and have quadruple experience modifiers making the game a lot more enjoyable. The game is basically medival fantasy sandbox where players can terraform the world, build all sorts of structures, hunt, farm and even do pvp on pvp servers. While a lot of the game is just pressing buttons and waiting for action timers to pass there’s a lot of depth in the game and it can get suprisingly immersive. I do however recommend joining to one of the long lasting servers like Sklotopolis instead of playing the game solo on self-hosted server as the experience is a lot better with small community even if you prefer to do things solo as the world will feel a lot more interactive and a lot less empty.
I second Grim Dawn as it’s clearly labor of love from the developers and still getting updates. I also like the fact that its not live service like Path of exile meaning that it does not require online connection and can be even be modded.
It remains to be seen with GGG will do with Path of Exile 1 when they release Path of Exile 2, it would be cool if they would release something like POE Unlimited a premium version of the game that would allow people to play the first game as single player experience, mod it and host their of servers.
But in this day and age it’s much more likely that they’ll just force people to move on to their next big thing.
The problem is that the content is already in wiki fandom and there are no contributors invested/interested enough to migrate all the information to alternative wiki. These fandom wikis have no teams just random individuals making contributions of various sizes.
If I do ever get invested enough to a game to actually create a wiki I’ll definately use something else than fandom.