Of those three, the one I bought was Three Kingdoms, and I was certainly not forced to buy more than the base game. Paradox’s DLC strategy is a-okay by me. Neither company puts a gun to my head to buy their DLC. Pretty sure blood is a DLC to get away with a lower age rating.
There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.
My expectation was that they were spending money that they mostly already had, but I was very excited to see a company picking up the pieces that the biggest publishers left behind. No one was going to make a new Outcast game before this, for instance. Game publishers used to put out dozens of games of all types per year, and now they might put out 5. They hinged it all on debt that they couldn’t afford though, so they’re ruining the chances of us returning to sustainable normalcy instead of what AAA has been doing for a decade.
The investor has a stake in the company, so they share in the successes and take on the risk of failure, but they provide capital to make this purchase from the parent company in the first place.
How long until you get out of the section with mimic enemies? Because when that game launched, that was all I saw in footage of the opening hours, and I wasn’t interested in that.
The enemies ignored both of them. Allegedly, anyway. I know when I played The Last of Us at launch, there were times that enemies saw me when I thought I was perfectly hidden while Ellie was out in the middle of no man’s land. In both cases, the enemy AI ignored these other characters because A) escort missions have never been fun, and B) it slowly builds a reason for you, the player, to grow attached to these characters when they help you. You feel the resource deficit in Infinite when Ellie’s not there to throw them to you. Both games did basically come up with the same gimmick in the same year.
I wasn’t cheering for subscription services. I was cheering that this exclusivity model of walled gardens no longer makes economic sense, while open platforms are on the rise. Microsoft is hoping that their pivot will result in more subscribers to their subscription service, but all signs are pointing to them having a rough time of growing beyond where they stand now, for all sorts of reasons.
It’s a play for the consumer’s money, and when the consumer has better options than the traditional console model, the console model breaks down. They’ve got at least one more Xbox in them, whether or not that next Xbox is just a PC with different branding.