If you don’t go public with your company, some other company will go public, and buy your company or your customers from under you with the money they got from Wall Street. There are some companies that can try and resist, but the field tilts against them.
I get that a lot of people are saying “oh this has been taking forever”, but from what I’m seeing these guys are producing an AAA-sized title with an engine they don’t own, with an IP they don’t own, all on volunteer time.
I haven’t really got into HD2, too online for my tastes, but I can see its appeal. I think there is a broader phenomenon of a divorce between where big studios are heading and where “traditional” players want to be.
They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
You playing for free illustrates my point perfectly. You are there to provide entertainment for whales who actually pay for the game. The deal is that you get some entertainment of your own so that you stay around. But the game is not made for you, and that becomes apparent every time the owner puts the screws on to extract some more money.
Vote with your wallet means people with more money get more votes than you do. MTX does not target people at large, they are fishing for the small amount of whales for whom money is no object. It ruins gaming for the rest of us.
There is a reason industries get regulated. Swill milk killed a ton of babies, and sold like hot cakes.
I think ARPG is just broader than that. Bethesda games are also described as action RPGs, yet they are neither really about builds or gitting good, it’s more of an exploration / virtual theme park thing.
I think the definition of an ARPG is “an RPG where the player’s skill in controlling the character in an action-game like fashion has a major role in gameplay, as opposed to games where the character stats or strategy is solely decisive”, like in Divinity or most older RPGs.
It’s like when people describe both Doom and Six Days in Fallujah as an FPS, yet they are nothing alike.
On the one hand, it kinda devolved into a generic open-world time-waster, where I and II were mostly story-based action-adventure games. Car handling, as someone else said also made the game what it is for a large part, driving a Model T felt like it was from that era. The low acceleration especially made car chases high impact, which I haven’t seen done in any other games. The story was actually about the Mafia, as in Italian-American organized crime, and I felt it got diluted by the change of atmosphere in III.
I don’t think III is a bad game, it’s just not a Mafia game. They could have sold it under a different name, and made a proper Mafia III.