sylver_dragon

sylver_dragon, miesiąc temu

“High Impact” like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

sylver_dragon, 2 miesiące temu

Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.

The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.

While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.

sylver_dragon, 5 miesięcy temu

I remember the hint books for Sierra’s games (e.g. King’s Quest). Each hint would be a question or sentence with multiple boxes underneath. The boxes were blank and you used a special highlighter pen to reveal the content of the box, with each subsequent box being more and more specific. It was an interesting way to get hints.

sylver_dragon, 5 miesięcy temu

And this is why indie games have been having such a good time of it. Sure, we might get the decade long “Early Access” of 7 Days to Die, or “We resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon” Palworld, but we get fun games with a lot of obvious passion behind them. I do wish we would see more Baldur’s Gate 3 style large productions which aren’t designed around micro-transactions. But, I also realize that big name studios are run by folks with business degrees and not gamers; so, I should expect major games to be after my wallet like a meth addict.

sylver_dragon, 6 miesięcy temu

Try getting old. I used to want 9 or so. These days, I seem to just wake up after about 7 hours. I don’t really use an alarm anymore. I just get up when I am awake and know that getting back to sleep isn’t going to happen. Even nights after a good workout, I pop awake after about 6 1/2 to 7 hours. Never used to be this way. But, I just seem to need less these days.

sylver_dragon, 9 miesięcy temu

Melee combat is possible on motorcycles.

Oh now this is going to be fun.

sylver_dragon, 9 miesięcy temu

Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.

Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.

sylver_dragon, 9 miesięcy temu

If you want to step just a bit further back in gaming history, the old Sierra games were absolutely fantastic for their time. My personal favorite series will always be Quest for Glory. And I still go back and play through the series about once a year or so. For more even more of a puzzle focus, the King’s Quest series or Space Quest series were both very good. Most of these games were DOS based and so run well with DOSBox. The Steam version on Quest for Glory literally just auto-runs the game in DOSBox. If you enjoy any of them, I’d also recommend looking into ScummVM which tends to make running those older games really smooth, at the cost of a tiny bit of setup work.

sylver_dragon, 10 miesięcy temu

If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.