On a micro level, it’s very easy to jump in and out when you feel like it. Each mission usually takes under 10 minutes even for fresh players, while a veteran can blitz through some missions in under 90 seconds. You can choose to play either solo or in up to a four-player squad, and if you are in a squad you can get a share of the xp from kills your mates get. Loot is instanced so you never have to worry about fighting to get what you see on the ground.
On a macro level, it’s a free-to-play looter shooter, with all the good and bad that entails. You have about a billion different types of resources you need to craft new weapons and frames, and almost every time new content is added new resources are too (to force veterans to engage in that content). Some things in the game are timegated heavily- for example, once you have the parts and resources to craft a new frame, it takes at a minimum 3 and a half real time days to craft it (unless you pay to skip that, or just buy the frame outright from their shop). The drop rates for some of the things you want might mean you’d take a while to get them if you’re not playing a lot- DE has a published list of the drop chances and the wiki lists the expected number of times you’d have to do an activity before you’d get that item, but I do want to stress the grindy looter-shooter part of the game.
Most of the real-money transactions are in the form of skipping time gates or pure cosmetics. I personally feel their monetization is fair for the most part.
All it all, it’s a F2P game. Go ahead and try it if it sounds fun, and if you don’t like it all you’ve lost is some time.
The game doesn’t do a lot of directing new players, so you gotta be willing to ask other players and read the wiki to figure out what you should be doing.
Assuming those don’t faze you, the community is one of the best and the story is really good- once you get that far.
By “platform fighter” do you mean a game where your goal is to increase damage to your opponents in order to knock them out of the arena, as opposed to draining a health bar?
If so, I don’t recall any before Smash, though my interest in pre-Smash fighters ended with the SNES.
Speaking of innovation, the N64 was the, if not first then what I would call the first modern, console to use thumbsticks. The Dualshock was the second controller made for the PlayStation.
It’s not; you’re just looking at the beginning of automating creativity when labor automation has been going on for over a hundred years. The introduction of new tech is always more disruptive than refining established tech. Besides which, VA is particularly sensitive to disruption because every VA does essentially the same job- one AI can be programmed to speak in thousands (millions?) of different voices, whereas one manual labor job doesn’t necessarily require the same actions as another.
Also it’s funny you complain about laundry, given how much doing laundry has been automated.
The Steam page has said “PSN account required” since day one. Anyone opposed to creating a PSN account on moral grounds and bought HD2 has no one to blame but themselves.
… But you’re right that it is often considered the cause of many of their problems: Valve’s unusual corporate structure causes its problems, report suggests
If you look at the list of games developed by Valve it kinda becomes apparent that the only reason Valve is still around (or operates in such a free-flow manner) is because Steam is so profitable. Their release of notable titles is spotty, at best: