ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 2 godziny temu

Realistically, this game’s got bigger problems than what its DLC strategy is.

ampersandrew, godzinę temu

From the gameplay footage, it looks like a studio that’s only ever made walking simulators before is making their take on Dishonored. Maybe that’ll be pretty good, but I’d be surprised. What it certainly isn’t is an RPG that’s anything like Bloodlines 1, lol.

ampersandrew, 3 godziny temu

I don’t think you know what grift means.

ampersandrew, 3 godziny temu

GTA is a crime story video game. “Dishonest gambling” doesn’t mean “gambling I don’t like”. A science-based dragon MMO Kickstarter is a grift. GTA 6 is a video game.

ampersandrew, 3 godziny temu

Are you unaware that there’s a component of GTA 6 besides GTA online? Even in the online mode, they’re milking gamers for weak content using regular gambling. A grift would be like a carnival game that appears winnable but actually never is. For your gambling money, you do get “stuff” in GTA 6, even if you or I would consider it a poor value. I don’t know why a shitty online mode would make me want to play a good crime story single player mode less, but the mere existence of the single player mode easily makes it more than “just” that.

ampersandrew, 2 godziny temu

I just think that if you’re going to call something a grift, it should actually be one, because words have meaning. We can call it all sorts of other things. “Predatory” is a good one. I myself called it “shitty”. That’s not arguing in favor of a giant corporation. You can’t just pick your favorite negative descriptor when it doesn’t apply.

ampersandrew, 2 godziny temu

Honestly, I’m not. Rockstar has changed their formula very little since 2008. But I don’t exactly have a lot of options for crime stories anymore, and they’ve been telling good stories for just as long as they’ve had this format.

ampersandrew, godzinę temu

You called it something it wasn’t, either because you misunderstood the definition or willfully misrepresented it. That was the argument. The game can be criticized in all sorts of ways, but “grift” makes no sense here, assuming they’re doing what GTA V did and didn’t come up with some crazy new scheme that hasn’t been detailed yet. And even if the online mode was a deterrent to you, there’s a whole other part of the game above and beyond the online mode where you never have to even see that stuff that could make the game worth playing, meaning it wouldn’t be “just” a grift.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

Is this not the third tabloid style headline here about essentially the same thing?

ampersandrew, wczoraj

That would be hard to believe, because the game already conservatively made tens of millions of dollars in a few days.

ampersandrew, 23 godziny temu

It’s hard to consider an 81 on OpenCritic to be a trainwreck. People tend to buy games that review well, especially when it’s a co-op shooter with basically no competition.

ampersandrew, 23 godziny temu

Nah, that game’s great. The writing’s not good, especially for the villains, but people like that game because it’s good.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

Ubisoft didn’t do this. It’s a community project.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

I think these online subscriptions are proving to be a major factor in why there’s been a migration of audiences from consoles to PC. People are seemingly running the long-term calculus in their heads and realizing PC is cheaper at a certain threshold.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

I think that’s exactly his point.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Not the current one, no. The Steam Deck is closer to a PS4 spec, and even if there weren’t optimization problems, this is built to a PS5 spec.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

It’s by revenue over a certain amount of time, but I don’t know what that period of time is. A $35 game has to sell twice as many copies as a $70 game to rank just as high. Since the Steam Deck is about $400, depending on SKU, it’s usually in that top sellers list despite not matching the volume of sales that certain games do.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Boards like these don’t talk about Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed much either, but all of these are multi billion dollar franchises.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

Borderlands 3 was significantly better, in my opinion.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

I definitely wasn’t playing Borderlands at any point for the story. I like that it has one, but if they wrote some terrible villains, it doesn’t affect how much fun I had with my build synergies in those boss fights.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

It wasn’t out of left field. They telegraphed it frequently.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

The new DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II came out, Legacy of the Forge. I’m playing it after finishing the main game, but it’s looking like it will probably be best enjoyed when slotted into the main game. It’s early goings, but it looks like it will involve a lot of crafting and then selling things to upgrade your home, your shop, and your reputation. Still, there are new quests and more backstory for Henry’s “pa”, Martin, and I’ll take any excuse to play more of this game.

I’ve been playing Mafia II: Definitive Edition. It’s a pretty good crime story that leans heavily on Goodfellas inspiration (I guess if you had to pick one, that’s the one to pick), but the gameplay often feels arbitrary, which is a weird way to put it but probably most accurate. There was one mission that was literally just drive to a place and drive back with some story in between. Most are simple setups where a firefight happens in the middle. There are mechanics from GTA IV present that don’t really fit back into Mafia II’s core loop. In other words, this game is totally fine but not exactly a masterpiece. It’s serviceable, and I miss crime stories in video games, so I’m playing through this series before I play The Old Country.

I’ll also throw in an anti-recommendation for New Tales from the Borderlands. It animates well and looks nice, but this game basically is only story, and the story is awful. I played through it because I’ve now played through the rest of the Borderlands games, except Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and I suspect this game could be canon. If you don’t have the same compulsion to see the rest of the canon story that I do, steer clear. At least I’ve got Borderlands 4 waiting for me this weekend.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

For anyone curious, I politely asked a streamer to check for me, and this game seems to still have LAN, despite the lack of mention in their FAQ and the store page and the explicit removal in Borderlands 1 GOTY edition.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

Having played through the entire series this year, they’ve constantly communicated via their actions that they’re aware of what the previous game’s shortcomings were, and they acknowledged as much for BL4 in the marketing materials as well. As for Jack, leave him be. We’ve killed him, killed his fucked up clone, killed the AI preservation of his consciousness, teamed up with him in a prequel, and allied with the Terminator 2 friendly version of him via a body double/face-off situation. We’ve had enough Jack. Come up with a new good villain, lol.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

Alright, fair enough. There are two ways to interpret that sentence in English, and I guess I read it the other way, haha.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

I’ve seen Mat Piscatella talking about this, and it seems like his take is, paraphrasing, “it values different games”. Some games see far more success with the broad access they get to subscriptions, and some see less, which seems to be corroborated by the author of this article.

Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore.

I mean…you can for anything in Game Pass, but that’s not the case for Nintendo.

Without wishing to portray myself as a comprehensive researcher … I have come across one study of Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus that appears to bear elements … showing that in contrast to the music or movie and TV industry, these subscription services have not “substantially cannibalized existing revenue streams”.

And I think a lot of that has to do with how much longer we spend with a given game than any song or movie. And even in television, every current show is on some streaming service, and you really can’t buy those, but in games, it’s the opposite. With few exceptions, you can just about always buy the game, and they’re often not present on a subscription service. When games are sold, they tend to command a higher price, too.

Then, not mentioned in the article, are weird cases like Indiana Jones or Doom, where they’re quality games that don’t sell many copies despite impressive pedigrees, presumably because everyone knows they can get them on Game Pass. But then games like STALKER 2 or Clair Obscur, with low-ish review scores and basically no pedigree, respectively, sell plenty of copies despite being available for far cheaper on Game Pass. Some of this might be the association with Game Pass being for Microsoft-owned studios or something, and Microsoft is aiding that association by making fewer lucrative deals for third party studios.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

It actually is, and they listed that in the article.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Through lawsuits, we did get to see what those payouts were in the past, and they’re all individually negotiated in lump sums, not determined by algorithm. And those payouts were from the good days. Reporting indicates those payouts have dropped off dramatically, which was followed by a drop-off of Xbox ports, since that seems to be the primary way Xbox players play games at all.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

I’m fairly sure every Battlefield game until BF3 had LAN and private servers, so it ought to work, yes. Bad Company 1 never got a PC version, so you’re at the mercy of what those consoles allowed for, but Bad Company 2 is on PC.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

If you’re using Hamachi, you won’t need port forwarding, correct. I tried to make that clear above, but maybe it was easy to miss.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

I liked Hollow Knight, but yes, it kind of was. Frequent destinations were far away from fast travel, and there was a low level area that they transformed into a high level area later in the game specifically so that crossing the map wouldn’t be a cake walk. I’d argue that earning the power to make an area like that into a cake walk is a core part of the fun.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

What about people who like the game but have criticisms? This is the time to discuss it.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

They’ve been working on VR hardware for a while, but the market has kind of stalled out on what the technology is capable of. They’d have to be pretty confident that they can jumpstart it again with their own games if that’s what it is.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

A new Orange Box sounds so much less appealing in an era where Valve’s games are mostly live services now.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

It’s still a good time to get a Steam Deck. Most games fit its spec just fine, it’s one of the cheaper handhelds on the market for the power you get out of it, and it has good battery life for that power, too.

ampersandrew, 12 dni temu

They’ve been working on standalone VR for a while now, like the Quest, so it wouldn’t have to be called Index 2, since it’s not just an improved version of what they made before. A colloquial term for glasses is “frames”.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

The title on this link really undersells how much interesting data there is there.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

Yeah, I’ve noticed more hits coming out Europe lately, with the likes of Remedy, Larian, Warhorse, Hazelight, etc., and probably the reasons they could afford to make those games in the first place is that labor costs are far cheaper for a similar result. Where capital is flowing and creating employment, I’d imagine, is tightly correlated with that.

ampersandrew, 14 dni temu

This is just classic shrinkflation. Your bottle of shampoo comes in 32 ounces, they shrink it to 24 ounces without changing the price, then later they come out with 32 ounce bottles again with a higher price and a sticker that says, “Now with 33% more!” to make it seem like they’re giving you so much shampoo; and then the cycle repeats.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

America’s stupidity doesn’t account for all of it. Sony would love to get more PS5s in homes at lower entry prices if they could.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

Yes, but Moore’s Law has broken down, and the things that used to allow for consoles to get cheaper over time, via new revisions, are not holding true anymore. So in lieu of those things, we’ve got classic shrinkflation.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

Sure, on already thin margins (I don’t remember if PS5 is sold at a loss, but Xbox is), multiplied by millions more units.