frog

frog, 9 miesięcy temu

Remember Baldur’s Gate 2, which had multiple installation options for different amounts of the game running from the HDD vs CD, and it felt so extravagant to go “install all of it on the HDD!”

frog, 9 miesięcy temu

This resonates so much with me. I was hoping to upgrade my GPU this summer, and… yeah, that hasn’t happened. But new release games are almost always a mess for the price paid, and there’s an awful lot of indie games that run perfectly on my computer as it is right now. I don’t think people like us are the target demographic of AAA studios.

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

I’m a lot like you as well. I’m one of those players who buys cosmetics from cash shops when I see something I really fall in love with, but I don’t feel the need to buy everything. I look at it as an occasional treat: sure I won’t own it when the game shuts down at some point in the future, but if I spent the money on, say, a takeaway meal or a night out, that lasts a couple hours and then it’s gone. I’m definitely a dolphin, not a whale.

But I wouldn’t spend a vast fortune on trying to get everything if I have to spend real money. In some MMOs I’ve bought cash shop cosmetics from the auction house, though. I think that can distort the impression of how much someone has spent in the cash shop, making it look like they’re “all in”, when in reality, they’ve just been playing for so long that they have more in-game currency than they know what to do with.

I reckon the “dolphins” are more common than you think.

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

Oh God I can’t unsee this now.

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care.

The development team got paid regardless of how well the game sold, and unless the company operates a system of employee profit-sharing, they’re not going to see any of the benefits of the game doing well. So the “buy it to support the devs” argument doesn’t really hold any weight, save in the hypothetical scenario that they’ll get a payrise for working on the studio’s next title.

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

Same here. I played in 2016, dropped it for ages because there wasn’t much too it (especially for those of us who don’t live in cities), and picked it up again in 2023. That was largely because friends were playing it. I got bored and dropped it again in less than a week. Apparently my Pokemon from 2016 are quite valuable because of… something that was added to the game that makes them very desirable? But given I didn’t want to keep playing, what would I trade them for that I’d actually want?

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

So… this is going to come across as a weird suggestion, given that the company providing it is actually evil, but… I’m actually getting good usage from Google Play Pass at the moment. A £5/month subscription gives access to a wide range of Android games with absolutely no in app purchases and no adverts. I’m not sure if any MMOs are included in the catalogue: there’s like a thousand games in the program and I’ve tried out 4 so far. Because that’s the thing I’ve really noticed. With no in app purchases, I play a game for longer as I don’t run up against demands for money, adverts, or difficulty walls that are intended to get you to pay. So I just keep playing until I’ve done everything I wanted to do.

If you can tolerate the evil that is Google, it might be worth getting the free trial month and see if there are any MMOs.

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

I can understand why fantasy settings are pretty stale, not just in games but in a variety of other media as well. Fantasy can be complex, and using old, familiar tropes (elves are haughty and love nature, dwarves are stubborn and love gold, humans are the world’s jack-of-all-trades) lowers the barrier to entry, which is really important when you want something to be easily marketable to as large an audience as possible. People know what to expect from familiar fantasy tropes, which means they can focus on plot and gameplay rather than going “so what’s that character supposed to be?”

But it’s boring. I love it when a fantasy setting isn’t afraid to trust the intelligence and curiosity of its audience and do something weird.

frog, 10 miesięcy temu

That’s so disappointing. I haven’t really kept up with anime in recent years, but what I loved about the anime I watched when I was much, much younger was how different it was compared to the western media I was familiar with.

frog, 11 miesięcy temu

Maybe… maybe this is the next stage of enshittification? When enshittification has so utterly destroyed a company that it’s essentially worth nothing, there’s only two options: it dies, or the remaining employees who actually care about it buy it in an attempt to save it.

frog, 11 miesięcy temu

Completely agreed with this! I actually avoid competitive elements in games, such as PVP in MMOs, because they almost exclusively have a hugely toxic community.

The one and only time I’ve enjoyed PVP is when an MMO was testing it on the public test server, and offered a reward for players who did at least one match. Because it didn’t matter if you won or lost, you got the reward for playing either way, it was just a bunch of people having a really chill time. If it was like that all the time, I’d do it more often.

It makes me wonder if the easiest way to get rid of the toxicity in online gaming is to get rid of all the points, scores, and prizes, so the only reason to play is because you enjoy it.

frog, 11 miesięcy temu

I’ll second the recommendation of Dorfromantik, and I’ll also add Islanders, which has a similar vibe but different visuals and gameplay.

In both cases, you’re given pieces that need to be placed on the map in order to score points, and that’s the extent of a round, which makes it very easy to play for a couple of minutes, then put it down until later.

frog, 11 miesięcy temu

When I first played Skyrim, I spent so long just wandering around, harvest every mountain flower I found, that every time I saw a bush with flowers, I felt the urge to harvest them because obviously that’s just what you do when you see something that can be harvested. The dopamine hit from resource gathering is very real.