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Penny Arcade - Comic - A Double-Edged Khopesh
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - A Double-Edged Khopesh
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Ubisoft miscalculated, and now that I have pierced the veil, I no longer need to buy time saving microtransactions.
more like
The joke is that Gabe is very dumb and doesn't like thinking.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Game designers take heed! You have (hath?) wrought the very tools of your own destruction!
Also, Tycho is reading a book called "Wizard Hats", which I found hilarious for some reason.
if you buy the game, then pay again to not play it? all good in the hood to them.
Time-Saver DLC that Finishes the Game Instantly : $19
= WIN!
horse armor now, that's a different story.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Because we're certainly at the point where the existence of additional paid "content" absolutely affects the quality of the base game you buy. I think we've reached the epitome of that idea with games that are intentionally dull to play to encourage you to pay to play less. Essentially the ability to pay to skip content is admitting that the original content is worth negative dollars.
I would argue there's more to it than that though. There was a time when the grindy parts were fun (even without the rose-colored glasses), but the rapid growth of the internet has led to the rapid decline of attention spans and an exponential growth of the instant gratification mentality. People don't want to work for things in-game anymore, they want to get to endgame and be "teh uberest strongest one" that all others bow down to. There's no feeling of satisfaction in hard-won levels, skills, or gear anymore.
Further thoughts: I personally tend to like grinding in games, especially if the grinding activity is fairly fun. (I actually liked mining in Mass Effect 2! I know, right?) So I don't begrudge games for having it. Nor to I begrudge people not wanting to do it. Like easy modes, it's easy to say people are cheapening their own experience if they don't have to "earn" the ending. But then, we are talking about a leisure activity. If people want an easier or less grindy experience, far be it from me to say games shouldn't contain it. Easy modes are a good thing that doesn't really diminish the experience of those who want a harder game. And grinding should be a bonus, not a requirement to advance.
But. When you are talking about *paying* extra for that easy mode is where things become different. If you want a lighter experience, and a game wants to give it, great! But what we have here is paying for less...
I have just started playing the first Total War: Warhammer. I am bad at Total War. So I play on Easy or Normal at the hardest. The campaign has two victory conditions: a long victory and a short one. This is like if you achieved the short victory and got the choice to pay for your victory screen now or keep playing until you won the long victory and got a victory screen for free...
I'd rather hear what Rod Serling has to say about all of this.
by Zid
Publisher and gamer faction's:
DLC wars will gain in traction.
Soon a post-apocalyptic waste
will be what's left of gaming taste.
Rubble crushing glowing hot
the shark card-powered killer bots
our corporate masters command will slaughter
and all our blood will turn red the waters.
Immense fireballs will light the night
proving human greed's ultimate might
as artistry's pale shadow looks on in sorrow.
Microtransactions today, our doom tomorrow.
(Really, tho-I'm not a fan but I love how freaked out some people are getting over it).
I don’t see it. Games like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy are extremely popular.
I don't think modern attention spans have anything to do with shitty games extending their game time by adding in bad time sinks that don't teach you anything other than "oh wow that's a new way to waste my time." Like Shadow of War took the fun nemesis system from shadow of mordor and added some really bad grindy gameplay to it on top of that it takes a while to grind levels against orcs that were fun to fight the first time but when you've seen the variation of different ones it just feels like even lamer D3 bosses.
pleasepaypreacher.net
No, when it was fun, we called it "leveling".
Some people do not. That's okay.
I don't think a game necessarily needs to cater to one audience exclusively over the other at a design level, and clearly it doesn't if they're able to include ways to mechanically bypass that stuff.
However, selling it to you as extra DLC is fucking garbage. It should be a god damn setting in the game. A cheat code. Making it something people who have spouses and kids and jobs and lives have to pay extra for because they don't have the luxury of time to grind out a hundred extra hours of video game like a responsibility-free teenager is fucking garbage.
I'm 34 years old. I have shit to do. Your game costs god damn near a hundred dollars at full price. Making me pay extra atop that because I have other shit going on in my life besides being a Gamer can fuck off.
If someone likes dicking around in the desert for 160 hours chasing collectibles, that's cool. I don't want to take that experience away from them. But don't make me pay extra money because I don't want to play AAA video games this way.
Respect my fucking time. There's a reason why AAA games have pushed me towards indies and casual games, and it's because they're all fucking time sinks. When a developer comes out at E3 and says "our game has hundreds of hours of content and the story is 70 hours long!" I'm like fuck you! Fuck you! I have a job, asshole!
I am exactly the sort of gamer that does enjoy grindy bullshit, if that grindy bullshit is part of a story and characters that I fall in love with.
My ability to strangely enjoy grindy bullshit is probably why I recently took up knitting and can't stop thinking about how I can do ONE MORE ROW before bed.
But yes, selling it to you for monies is bullshit, and I say this as someone who frequently defends game companies paid DLC.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I agree to a point, but if that hundreds of hours of content is actually all content, I'm fine with that.
I sunk over 200 hours into Zelda, but that took me over 6 months. I enjoyed all of it! That game pretty much justified the purchase price of the Switch for me, and was very good value.
If half of it had been sitting in the same bokoblin camp wiping them out again and again then yeah, forget that.
I'm all for good long games, as long as they are good. It's not like you've got one month to finish it and then it disappears forever, spend your time where you want.
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
That was a game I sunk a LOT of hours into and didn't regret any of it.
But, if the game was a lot of farming goblin kills (wipe forest / wait / they respawn / repeat) then that's not fun. Some games I've played have felt like this... where in order to enjoy the game I must do an insane amount of boring repetitive farming of rats or whatever.
As far as AC: Origins goes... I'm cool with the gamplay. I'm pretty much doing every side quest I come across, and enjoying all of the small missions. Sure, I sometimes go out and kill some hyenas or rob a copper-shipment... but it's not that often that I have to stop playing the regular game for that often. And robbing copper-shipments is fun :-)
Then again, I also did the "Seer" skills-upgrade-path of vendors selling materials. Which perhaps made my life easier than people that MUST hunt and steal every material they need.
Because when I saw them selling it I immediately thought "oh cr*p... they made resource gathering HORRIBLE just so we'd spend the money" so I had fears of dealing with tons of hours of boring repetitive actions.
But I skipped it, and I'm happy to say the resource gathering isn't bad.
Of course, what IS annoying is that when the "tips" show up upon my death or fast-travel... that "hint" about "Maybe you want to spend money in our shop" comes up a bit tooooo often. Like Internet Webpage advertisements often.
I don't agree. For my friends and I who grew up before the internet was widespread we just happen to be adults now with limited time due to work and/or academia. So there are no more entire weekends spent grinding early FFVII, Suikoden, or Chrono Trigger to make the late game beatable.
I'm much more interested in story or game play. So I end up really liking game play focused stuff like Hitman 2016 or Telltale games.
Two of the three games you mention I remember being entirely doable at natural levels - though FFVII you could paint yourself into a corner with leveling up materia, I only hit a wall on the optional bosses anyway, and Chrono Trigger by the time you do most of the sidequests Lavos is probably a cakewalk, depending on how you engage phase one since that part has variations.
And really that's where I've always judged a grind: at what point do I stop progressing in the game and only progress in numbers?
Chrono Trigger, that was when I went for harder endings on new game plus. FFVI it was never. FFVII it was about two thirds of the way in, but I feel like I could have avoided it with better planning. WoW last time I played it happened a few days after I hit 70. STO it didn't hit for a good month after I hit Fleet Admiral.
Shadow of Mordor it never happened. Shadow of War it hit like a brick wall with that damn defense bullshit. After putting in 15 hours with no end in sight, I have to admit I downloaded a trainer and slogged it out the shitty way with cheats. And even with god mode, infinite focus, and unlimited arrows, it was fucking tedious bullshit.
I have to admit, this is really fucking unfortunate. I loved SoM and was really looking forward to SoW. However, I'd forced myself to wait until a sale. Very glad I have, now, as this sounds like something I don't need in my life, much less something I'd pay for. Maybe they'll eventually see the light and fix it/bundle the DLC with the GOTY version or something.