ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

They're not going to suffer from weaker deals. They're going to turn down deals that don't make up for their lost sales.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I would hope we deserve better than that.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I guess people will just have to make do with $17 Starfield instead, which is still insanely cheap, lol.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

You could. But that's also if it's the only game you play and you don't boot up Sea of Stars, Quake, Halo, Goldeneye, Yakuza, Unraveled, or what have you. I don't have a Game Pass subscription, but the math on it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally "rent" 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.

Baldur's Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who've beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I think I agree with him. It's not just that it looks good and that it's cinematic; it's that it brings what they were doing well already to that cinematic standard that we got from the big studios for years. But those big studios were frequently sacrificing the depth of the RPG in the process. Mass Effect 1 had a full character sheet and a bunch of mechanics that never really came together. Mass Effect 2 had fairly simple skill trees. That series was good for lots of reasons, but in order to make each sequel in only 2 years, they threw away what didn't work rather than iterating on it to fix what didn't work. BG3 is iterating on Larian's previous successes and still letting us get that cinematic experience from Mass Effect. It's definitely what caught my attention when it was previously barely on my radar.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I finished Baldur's Gate 2 and moved on to Baldur's Gate 3.

Baldur's Gate 2 still has, or possibly invented, a lot of common RPG trappings that carry through to this day, but it's still very dated in some key ways that sucked the air out of the room, which was a shame, because the bones are solid. Sometimes there are just obscure knowledge checks against the rules of D&D or the monsters therein that make the game unsolvable unless you know the specific answer. Sometimes it's a monster that can only be defeated by +3 weapons or better; sometimes it's magic that can only be countered by specific counter spells. At the start of combat, enemy spells seemingly cast nearly instantly, but the defense spells to beat them take several combat rounds to cast, can be interrupted, or otherwise are ineffective unless you've already cast them before combat started, which means you're save scumming a lot as a necessity. Not only that, but the game throws so much combat at you. I ran out of patience for its combat, after playing through BG1 the month prior, sometime around chapter 4 or 5 out of 7 and just threw it on "Story" mode, which is basically god mode. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the decision making. I just wish the designers had more restraint when it came to combat encounters and that they properly signaled these countermeasures, but perhaps they were trying to sell strategy guides.

Baldur's Gate 3 is difficult to put down compared to its predecessors; not just because 5e is easier to understand; not just because the game goes to great lengths to explain its entire rule set; not just because I can avoid repetitive strain on my wrist by using a controller. Though separated by 20 years of game design paradigms, they're remarkably similar games, as they should be, but this one just excels in every area it should. The presentation is phenomenal, all the way through the narrator that infuses some Planescape: Torment DNA into the game that wasn't so much of a thing in the past two BG games. The combat encounters have more restraint; I took on a goblin camp from the inside out and basically faced wave after wave of goblin patrols, and still it felt less taxing than the typical BG2 dungeon, with more systemic ways to interact with the environment and just find clever solutions to things. I just feel like a damn genius and a sense of exhilaration when I get through a combat encounter, as opposed to having a sigh of relief that it's over like I did in the last two games.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Yes. I just have a compulsion that most people don't where I feel like I need to see the earlier games in a series in order to get the proper perspective on the later ones. For instance, with returning characters, winks and nods, etc. It's orders of magnitude more approachable than BG1 and 2, which were harder to get into than Planescape: Torment, IMO. And at least right out of the gate, they don't expect you to have any foreknowledge of what came earlier. I'll bet they'll drop that lore as I get closer to the in-game location, Baldur's Gate, because you do not start there, and I understand that, like the first game, you don't see that city until toward the end.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I don’t know the last time I’ve ever finished a game like this just to go right back into it.

Elden Ring is this game for a lot of people, myself included. I'm early in BG3, but just like with Elden Ring, I'm already thinking about other things I'd like to try on subsequent playthroughs.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Every time Irenicus spoke, I just wanted him to keep talking.

I have no idea what level >12 magic looks like in 5e and why it gets so challenging, other than what little I know of Wish, which is in BG2, but magic was a menace in the under level 12 area of BG1 and 2 also. Just frequent spells that would AoE stun your entire party for the next 10 rounds, which may as well have been an instant kill.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I highly recommend Mercenary Kings. It's like Mega Man combined with Contra combined with Monster Hunter. There's a really satisfying loop of fun missions where you get upgrade materials so that you can upgrade, strategize, and equip for more fun missions.

For roguelikes, I'd highly recommend Streets of Rogue and Vagante. The former is wackier and a more open sandbox; the latter is a better challenge and perhaps a bit more satisfying to beat, but both are phenomenal. Streets of Rogue is sort of a twin stick shooter with tons of classes that play very differently, often compared to Deus Ex; and Vagante is like Spelunky crossed with Dark Souls.

Other than that, those Quake remasters have split-screen for co-op and versus multiplayer. A friend and I just started Quake 1 recently.

As a bonus, all of the above are also online multiplayer.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I haven't started playing yet, but this sounds like the solution is to not position your party near instadeath falls.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

That does sound cheap. Is it listed in this tome of patch notes as something they addressed?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I just wanted Skyrim where I could invite a few friends to come along for dungeons. Then they made Elder Scrolls Online as though that was at all the same thing.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

What "should" you pay?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Nah, it's pretty easy to avoid games with microtransactions. You're just listing the games with the most marketing, but those are also the games most likely to have microtransactions because they know they've got you in the hype cycle. If you look a little bit outside of that bubble, the next closest games are most likely to earn your dollar just by making a good product.

EDIT: Also, what about Forspoken is "incomplete"?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It's as arbitrary a number as anything else. Games used to be $50 in the sixth gen, and N64 games in the generation before that could cost as much as $90. We first switched to $60 games in the mid 00s, and if you adjust for inflation, that would mean games today should cost $90, all other things being equal, but not everything is. The average game, and especially Baldur's Gate 3, is way bigger now than it used to be. Those non-inflation-adjusted $90 N64 games and $50 PS1 games were made by about 20 people as opposed to Baldur's Gate 3's 400. If the game isn't worth $70 or $80 to you (there is a $70 version, FYI, but you seemingly only saw the deluxe edition), then you can wait for a sale or play a cheaper game, but I do believe they're charging what the game is worth, if not underpricing it. I know I bought Elden Ring for $60 and felt like I'd rarely ever gotten that much value out of a game before; and value goes well beyond how long the game is.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

The frequent complaints I heard (which I double checked just now against Open Critic) were monotony, uninteresting story and characters, and enough bugs to be annoying.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I think they thought through just how important hitting that price point was, because it's done very well for them.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

And do you think that would have panned out better if the cheaper console option wasn't available? Not to mention it would only leave them with the console that shared a lot of the same components as the PS5 during supply shortages as well.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I mean, unless their goal is to lose even more money on each console sold, I doubt they were interested in that. But that's not their goal. Their goal is to get people subscribed to Game Pass.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Game Pass does include PC gamers, which is why they're probably more interested in opening up that service to more people with a cheap console SKU than to sell Xbox consoles, likely because outselling Sony by doing the same thing Sony is doing is a very steep hill to climb.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

One day they might. PC has taken a larger and larger market share as time has gone on. PCs became easier to game on, consoles became less streamlined, and perhaps even the closed-off nature of consoles compared to the open nature of PCs has played a role. But as of 2023, you're still not making a $300 PC that plays games as well as an S. While consoles have become less streamlined, they're still more streamlined than a PC.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Did we establish that? Most of the biggest games are not the hardest on system requirements. And while Microsoft would obviously prefer that they sold more Xboxes and reached more Game Pass subscribers (the 25M-30M is impressive regardless), I'd be surprised if they expected the majority of those to be Series S; but they probably did recognize that that customer base is still worth reaching. We're just not at a point in the history of consoles where they all have the same business model anymore, like they did 20 years ago.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I've got a really hard time calling it a mistake when it's been more successful, but you do you.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

So instead they offer subscription style gaming at a huge loss

It's not at a loss, unless you mean the console itself. Game Pass is profitable.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Major studios burned down their existing businesses to try and jump into the streaming space

It sure seems like streaming burned down their existing businesses by its mere existence, not that they did it to themselves by abandoning their existing businesses, unless we're talking about a bell that just can't be unrung. People stopped going to the movie theaters in the same numbers they used to of their own accord. After all, if our TVs are almost as good as the movie theater, but we can watch the same thing for a tiny fraction of the price, with the ability to pause it and not have to deal with people talking over it, a lot of reasons to go to the theater just evaporated.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

The answer is still to not play that game. I'm also not sure what DST is; Don't Starve Together?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

The business these days is that keeping people online provides value to other players who are considering being online. A big online population means new players have reasons to jump in and play. How do they make sure there's a large population? They create psychological hooks to make sure you keep coming back, rather than making a multiplayer game that's satisfying, that you could play with friends whenever you wanted with small group sizes and your own servers. Because the business is to monetize that pool of players over and over again rather than to keep making new experiences via new games every couple of years.

It is a bad deal. I got into a game called Fantasy Strike. It's a fighting game that boils the genre down to basics and gets you right into the fun. I loved it. It didn't sell a ton of copies. So they updated it to be free-to-play; everything gameplay-related in the game was free (with an asterisk...more on that later) and they monetized it with a bunch of the live service trappings and nonsense that bothered you enough to make this post. Limited time purchases for cosmetics, subscriptions, etc. The thing that made me stop playing it was that they added a replay viewer where, much like in Street Fighter 5 and 6, you can just watch anyone else's replays, including your own, but that replay viewer was locked behind a subscription fee. You know, the feature that people use to get better at the game and see what they did wrong. Monthly subscription. It's a horrendous deal and made me put the game down. You don't get to charge me a recurring fee for something that lives on my own hard drive and gets calculated by my own computer. Likewise, these live service games are all things that could be run without their servers, with private servers or LAN, but they want you to keep seeing these opportunities to buy these ephemeral cosmetics where both they and the game itself are designed to self-destruct once the game stops making money.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

They’re stuck until the next console generation

Since these Xbox consoles came out, maybe even since Xbox One X, they've been talking about being "beyond generations". I figured that would result in more periodic updates, probably with two simultaneous lines of Xboxes, X and S, but it hasn't turned out that way. So far, it's just seemed to mean that you don't have to deal with Sony's BS around PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

The previous two games, 20 years ago. It's what gave them the reputation of being a studio that made great RPGs. Then they went on to make Neverwinter Nights (another D&D game), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Star Wars with rules very close to D&D), Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

All signs point to that program being a failure for them, which is why the exclusivity offers and announcements started drying up, but I guess this is them trying a revised strategy.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I'll use that for things I already have in my library, either from my Windows days or from giveaways, but I'm not going to spend money in their stores when they don't officially support me as a customer. Unofficial launchers like this could be broken by those storefronts at any time, and they were never guaranteed to work for me. GOG fares better than Epic in this regard, since they do sell Linux games, but I want official cloud saves and automatic updates as well.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah, there's just too much good stuff coming out this year. AC6 will likely not make the cut. Not even for money but for time.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It's unfortunate that your expectation is that a game won't work at launch rather than us being able to control our own servers or whatnot.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I figured it meant that he'd consult for his replacement and occasionally collect a huge paycheck in between enjoying his retirement.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

They'll stop doing that when he stops putting asses in seats.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Pratt has definitely put asses in seats probably since Parks & Rec.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

And then Smash referenced it with a spirit battle in Ultimate.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

They've sanded that frustrating learning experience in subsequent games to the point where Elden Ring now has more traditional tutorial pop ups, and unsurprisingly, it's their most successful game to date. That and the aforementioned evidence lead me to believe that the experience a lot of people had with Dark Souls was not what they intended. And you can absolutely get to a few points in Dark Souls 1 and get stuck without a guide; I know it happened to me when it came time to walk the abyss, and even having read item descriptions, it's very easy to forget the one description of one ring you got potentially hours and hours earlier that would solve your problems.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I only had to Google it like 7 times to get it straight.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It's a free to play multiplayer game. If you continue playing it, you're providing value for some other player who might spend money, so just by being in the matchmaking pool, they've got you where they want you, and they won't care about your review.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Can you seriously envision a scenario where the worst game of all time is among the most-played?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Yes, I answered your question with a question because your scenario was as absurd as you perceived mine to be. So I'll answer yours directly: "yes, but not at that scale". Because at that scale, it's a review bomb.