It’s funny that I lead with this because I had a minute to think about it and honestly I kind of just don’t care. Dragonflight did not renew my hopes for retail, although it had some neat mechanic changes. Classic will be over for me probably by the end of January, unless they announce basically Classic+ based around the WOTLK talents. I am going to get my Shadowmourne, kill Arthas on heroic, and then go play FFXIV.
No, I think they’re going to continue adding massive value to the Gamepass system to keep it afloat and competitive. Maybe a WoW sub is a bit of a stretch, but basically all other games will thrive on the platform. StarCraft 2 is still the benchmark RTS for competitive play. Overwatch and Diablo are not my cups of tea but they would also make great offerings on the platform. Most of Blizzard’s core franchises outside of WoW itself are heavily MTX’d out the ass, battle passes, cosmetics, whatever - even if it’s included in the gamepass sub, the theoretical higher volume of players will likely compensate for unit sales through the aforementioned MTX.
Yeah the hazard warnings are pretty useless now, because they’re not actually that dangerous or meaningful. I didn’t even know that it caused damage, I guess I haven’t been on a severe enough planet.
This is the second article today where I saw Todd Howard talking about severely nerfing aspects of the game. Earlier this morning I read an article saying similar things about the space suit system - initially they were going to be a lot more punitive on what you can and can’t wear based on environmental conditions, so you’d need a suit for cold, a suit for toxicity, a suit for radiation, etc.
I stuck with Gamepass because I am a PC gamer. I toyed with PSN but the PS5 controller was not natively recognized by the client at the time I was testing it, which is dumb as fuck. Steam will pick up the controller and use their drivers for most games, but the PSN service just didn’t work with the PS5 controller natively.
One of the main issues with Stadia is that they didn’t even do the basics. I saw basically no marketing, and on top of that, I heard all kinds of rumors about the business model that were entirely false. They made no effort to combat the misinformation. It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees, but that was like the number one issue brought up in every discussion.
That’s fine. Allow mods, that should never get in the way of building a proper base product. Many games allow mods and have basic functionality fully fleshed out and the mods are just that, bonuses and modifications. It’s not an excuse.
The indoors Fallout map is the worst thing ever. I don’t think it’s ever once helped me out of a jam or cleared up confusion. If there are multiple levels (and there always are) it’s all just slapped together in a single plane on the map so it makes less than zero sense.
It’s better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it’s been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I’ve ever played. It’s funny because they were getting worse.
Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I’ve ever played on launch.
It does get better with time, but it’s inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I’m still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.
I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop’s name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.
Skyrim needed UI mods, and to wit, still needs UI mods, despite being re-released like 15 times with limitless opportunities to improve basically anything - instead they focused on high resolution textures, which is something that the fanbase basically already makes on launch week.