If you like Lord of the Rings: Lord of the Rings Online is extremely nice story wise. It’s an old school MMO, but that shouldn’t shock you when you only know old school ones anyway.
If a low initial fee is fine, wait for Elder Scrolls Online sale. You can regularly get the base game for $5 or so. It has no forced monthly cost so those $5 are worth hundreds of hours or quest content.
It’s really sad. I truly believe that Yves (or rather the Guillemots in general) were passionate about game development once. Now it feels mostly corporate, even though they still claim to be pro-gamer and innovative and fun. It’s double sad because they acquired quite some good studios that have to be shaped into their corp structure and ultimately lose their innovation. It’s not as bad as old-school EA, but it’s still subjectively bad.
I think it’s not that easy. From what I understand, the payment providers enforce that for the whole store, otherwise they don’t want to be involved. Quite shitty, but they have enough weight to pull shit like that off.
I think EA was still worse. At least in my perception.
I think EA actually bought studios just to get the IP and immediately get rid of the employees. I also think they tried to milk a few of the IPs before letting it go downhill.
MS, from what I can tell, gave studios quite a lot of freedom to do what they do best. I don’t think they intentionally wanted to fuck over studios, but they rather sacrificed them.
Don’t get me wrong: that’s still bad. But there’s a difference between fucking studios over with intent and reacting badly to changed circumstances.
I imagine it’s rather licensing. If they have to provide the software at some point, they can’t use components they are not allowed to distribute. And I agree, that this will impact development costs. But with the law in place, this is not an unexpected cost but one that can be factored in. Might be, that some live services are then no longer viable… but I don’t care. There are more games than anyone could play and games are cancelled or not even started to develop all the time for various reasons. One more or less is just noise.
Same for the “online only design” argument. The moment they decide it’s not viable anymore and they want to shut it down: what does it matter to them, what players do with it? As long as they offer the service themselves, no one is bugging them. (Although I would absolutely be in favor of also getting self hosting options right from the start, I am realist enough to accept, that this would indeed lower economical feasibility of some projects.)
If you go for subscription, you accept that the stuff is temporal. Or at least you should. So it should make no practical difference if a game vanishes because it gets pulled from the catalog or if you decide to cancel the subscription because you consider it too expensive.
My impression of Starfield (after release, at least) was, that it was a bunch of pretty well intended and implemented subsystems (as is, to my knowledge quite common in game development; each team works on a different one), but they just don’t fit really well together. All the subsystems are good parts of a theoretically good overall big picture, but the complexity seemed too high for them to actually flesh out the big picture.
Technically it all works, but IMO you feel the conceptual gaps whenever you transition (UX wise) from one gameplay mechanic to the next. It just doesn’t (or didn’t) feel like a cohesive game.
I would rather bet that most people have no clue what an operating system is and that the one they (unknowingly) use is made by Microsoft. On the other hand if they play games (on that PC), they will know Steam, because they actively had to install it and click its icon frequently.
It kind of is, unfortunately. Games are often developed with a lot of pressure and the constant dangling of the budget being cut off. I don’t think the devs are incompetent and think what they produced (code quality wise) would be the best, but what could they do if they need a result to present to the publisher end of week and then don’t get money (aka time) to clean it up but instead they get the next deadline.
On the other hand I am also not sure I can blame publishers. Things can easily spiral out of control if managed badly in the other direction… see Cloud Imperium Games (i.e. Star Citizen).
The second one gives you the necessary flashbacks to catch up if you should intend to follow the story. It also explains all the basics of the game mechanics as part of the quests.
I even heard people being surprised it’s not Geralt. When they were surprised I started to question myself if I just dreamed that they announced that wayyyy back.