ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Or it's Red Dead Redemption, and it costs $50 because plenty of people will pay it.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

No, but they're a public company, and you can see predictable profits from GTA 5. They're not hurting for cash.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Do you prefer it to older champion-less Quake games? And what do you think it would take for this brand of FPS to have mainstream appeal again, if anything, given that others have tried to bring them back with little success?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Plenty of games are "complete" and have a similar or larger scope then BG3, and they're not getting the attention that BG3 is getting now. On the other side of the coin, people really responded to Disco Elysium, and a lot of that had to do with what they did within a small space. If all I wanted was "big" and "complete", I'd be interested in Starfield, not Baldur's Gate 3.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

And to add to this, there's a Humble Bundle right now with the Steam versions of both of those games included. I've also been playing the Enhanced Editions on Steam recently, and they've worked just fine on Linux.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

You're not totally out of options. Have you tried Heroic Launcher? I haven't really used Lutris since this thing came around, and it seems to do a similar job. But if not, there's a Humble Bundle going on right now with the Steam versions of both games included, and I can confirm that they work great via Steam.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Imagine the satire you could put in a new GTA game set in Florida these days.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

There's close to zero chance that GTA VI doesn't make $2B.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Assuming that their revenue only came from boxed sales and not the behemoth that is GTA Online, they gross $2B with under 30M copies sold. GTA V has, to date, sold a little shy of 200M copies. GTA VI will be fine. In fact, GTA V made so much money that if they pissed away $2B on GTA VI and it sold zero copies, the company would still be fine. They've been making half a billion in profit per year for a long time now.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

No, it actually doesn't, and I outlined why in the comment you replied to. In fact, I just checked what GTA V did sales-wise, and that 30M copies sold was passed in its first six weeks. It brought in $2B in its first six months. Of course GTA VI is going to do that again, regardless of what it does in subsequent years. And this is still not factoring in the revenue that GTA Online brings in. It doesn't have to be anywhere close to being as successful as GTA V in order to make back the $2B they spent making it.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

The first evidence I can find of a sale for GTA V was in 2015, over a year after launch, and the first price cut appears to be in mid-2018, five years after launch, meaning that they could continue to sell copies at that $60 for five straight years without much extra motivation for consumers. Whatever you think you the cost basis is for GTA Online, it is still a pittance compared to what they'll bring in.

You don't know if it can.

Funny then that you seem to know that this is some enormous risk instead of probably the safest investment a video game company has ever made.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Hey, feel free to put some money on the line and call me a fortune teller when this game comes out profitable. Nothing is guaranteed, but a new GTA game, especially after GTA V, is about the closest thing to guaranteed success you'll see in this industry.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It doesn't even really have to go anywhere except having new characters in a new city. There aren't a ton of crime story settings in video games these days, let alone GTA's brand of it.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

The price of Game Pass is still four months for the price of one full priced new release game, like it was before. But now new games cost $70 instead of $60.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I was referring to the price for Ultimate.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Especially since what they showed was very much not a return to the roots of the franchise that they promised.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I think the reviews have shown that a lot of people wanted the DMC stuff. But there are only so many PS5s out there, and we live in a world where PC market share has been steadily rising for over a decade.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I'd recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you're also giving Bad Company A's product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B's product, encouraging more of Good Company B's product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn't say "unprofitable") games, which means they're not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they've diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they're using now piss you off, it's important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.

For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don't buy it, I don't pirate it, I don't play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

People would often respond to me with the sentiment that "games aren't fungible", which is true, but there's so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you're looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don't have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

EA's portfolio has been so thoroughly undiversified that they're looking for a buyer, just like Square Enix, Zenimax, and Activision have been. In that time that EA became enormous, smaller publishers like Embracer, Paradox, Anna Purna, and Devolver have grown as they reached that neglected customer base that EA left behind. Larian has grown by making really good games in a style neglected by EA. EA owns BioWare and got further and further away from making the Baldur's Gate 3 that Larian just made. So yes, it makes a difference.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

There is no consistent definition for AA or AAA. It's just an implied level of production value. This game's got the equivalent modern day production value of a AAA game from 15 years ago, but the production value of AAA games like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption these days has soared to levels unattainable to most.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Sure you could. The Witcher 3 has better production value by a meaningful amount with tons of scenes to shoot and permutations of those scenes. People said you couldn't meaningfully do better than the likes of the Kickstarter CRPGs ten years ago because of how much work would go into voice acting and animating all of those scenes, but BG3 is the better production value version of that.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I'm still working my way through BG2, but even watching main story quests in BG3 in the footage that's coming out around launch, the thought frequently enters my mind that the Witcher 3 looks better, like it got better touch-ups beyond what the engine automates for them.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I just started Baldur's Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It's not the first D&D game I've played before, but I'm far from well-versed in it. I had to Google "THAC0" a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There's a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it's still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I already started it and bought BG3 as well. I had played Planescape: Torment about 10 years ago, so some of this was familiar, but it and Baldur's Gate have some different philosophies around things like combat and party size. One thing I'm fairly confident will be a thing of the past when I get to BG3 is trash mobs. BG1 at times feels like it's being run by an asshole DM who's out to kill the party with tons of trash mobs between rests rather than providing a good time.

Imagine you're at the table with your friends, and the DM says, "Then, from the darkness of the dungeon emerges...6 Kobolds!" You beat them, the party is pumped about it, and then the DM says, "As you press further on across the bridge, you come across...7 more Kobolds!" I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was, but between the aforementioned trash mobs and the magic casters who attack you with debilitating adverse affects that do tons of damage and take you out of the fight for like 20 straight turns, BG1 can be cheap as hell, even on easy difficulty. I get the sense that BG3 will still be difficult, but from my brief time with Divinity: Original Sin and what I've seen of BG3 footage, I'm expecting them to have more consideration for each combat encounter.

And oh yeah, BG1 also had a few areas with really narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle, as friendly characters would bump into each other and not be able to figure out how to move.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I definitely organically discovered the cheese you can do with fog of war, but most of the strategies you mentioned were things that I just did not come across organically. I would love to have more of the debilitating spells that the enemy NPCs were using on me, and I did come across things like Sleep that would rarely work against an opponent challenging enough to deem it worthwhile, especially considering how many enemies you're likely to run into until your next rest compared to how many spell slots you'll have.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

That might be the worst site I've ever visited on mobile.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Two great choices for fighting games. Do you hit up Mix Masters tourneys?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Mix Masters Online runs Skullgirls every Thursday for NA (other regions will have their own online tourneys). Plus there are beginner brackets, Discords where you can ping beginner roles, danisen leagues, and whatnot for every level of play.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I'll take this opportunity to plug my YouTube channel, primarily because it will get you up to speed in Skullgirls much more quickly than it took me. There's the primer video here, and you can watch the combo video after that.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

We've got Sea of Stars coming this year, for instance.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

There are plenty of turn based western RPGs that aren't JRPGs, like the brand new Baldur's Gate 3. If a game is a JRPG, I'm expecting an ensemble cast who each have their own special abilities and weapon type, and they each level up in more or less exactly one way, which I can't control. Instead, I customize them through equipment, if at all. Dialogue may have choices, but it's usually between choice A and choice B.

In a western RPG, I may have a party of characters or only control one, and when I level up, I get points to spend in whichever attributes I think I'll get the most value out of for the build I'm going for. These skills may result in skill checks that open up different avenues for solving problems in the game than if I had invested in other skills, and these skill checks may come up in dialogue.

Of course, J or not, the reality of the world is not so binary, and many games have some but not all of these traits or make them more difficult to define, but the J does tell me something.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I shortened the definition for the sake of not writing a book, but the point is that no one game will satisfy all of the criteria of a genre, but they evoke a common set of responses and scratch a similar itch. The genre would be more anchored to early Final Fantasy titles than Earthbound.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

But then it's only informative to people who've played that game, as opposed to people who've played that genre. Far more people have played a JRPG than people have played Earthbound.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

But see, Dark Souls is very much an RPG but uses more western RPG design axioms than those of a JRPG, which is why this genre is not at all about being made in Japan. Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Fire Emblem often get linked together as a strategy RPG or a tactics RPG. Kingdom Hearts is a real-time or action JRPG, Persona is a turn-based JRPG, and the "active time battles" of the late SNES and PlayStation era from Square sort of straddle a few of those lines, but there are commonalities among all of them that a fan of Earthbound could reasonably be into. Likewise, there are commonalities between western RPGs and JRPGs where someone who's just into "RPGs" would be into. These are just genres and subgenres.

The other thing too is that the definitions of these genres will change over time as more games come out that can be grouped together. When games inspired by DotA started getting released commercially, some tried to call them "Action RTS" games, but then you'd have games like Smite and Super Monday Night Combat that no longer have anything to do with the RTS genre, so Riot's coined "MOBA" stuck because, even though it's kind of a lousy name for that genre, it doesn't contradict itself by calling them a derivative of RTS games.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It will cost 3 times as much, make the entire old library of games obsolete, only allow you to buy games from Apple, and have a strange controller that their marketing tells you is better but everyone knows is objectively worse.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Well, in this case, they already did that by switching to their new processor architecture, so they can cross that one off the list.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

If you're familiar with the planning phase of Rainbow Six 1-3, and that sounds like something you're looking for, I'd recommend Door Kickers.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It would be great if they were interested in making them without an always online requirement. I bought Fallen Order on sale for $4 and still felt ripped off.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

And isn't there extremely limited support for M1 Mac on Steam? As Mac users upgrade their machines, they can't continue to use Steam like they used to.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Right, what I meant for limited support for M1 on Steam was that the library of games on Mac is essentially obsolete. And their toolkit requires intervention from developers in a way that Proton does not, I understand. Which means it costs money to continue supporting your customers who already paid you a long time ago. I don't see the situation improving much.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

Never? There's that infamous quote about how people will never need more than 64KB of RAM that comes to mind. SSD prices are falling rapidly, and internet bandwidth is only increasing. I understand if you don't have the means right this moment, but 100+ GB games are here and will only happen more often.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

To be fair, is there any amount of extra money you could pay on PlayStation to do the same thing?

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

6th is GameCube/Xbox/PS2. 7th is 360/PS3.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

It couldn't hurt to try it out, but I always liked F-Zero more than Wipeout. At least it looks to be as fast as F-Zero.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I mean, a lot of my favorites were slower than Quake for sure. Faster isn't automatically better. Regenerating health was preferable to health packs, but we also had the likes of Doom 2016 to show that it didn't have to just be one or the other. Games like Halo 2 and 3, Call of Duty 2, 4, and Modern Warfare 2 (the first time), the Timesplitters games, the 007 games of that era (Agent Under Fire with moon gravity and Q Claw is some of the most fun you'll have with three friends on the same couch), Half-Life 2 and its episodes, Crysis, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2; and getting into third person shooters that were of a similar design philosophy, Metal Arms, Gears of War 1-3, and the much better Star Wars Battlefronts than the ones EA put out with basically the same titles.