None of this surprises me, but I've been frustrated with what felt like to me the free pass Bethesda games got with Skyrim. Which was just shockingly broken on a gameplay level for a triple A game.
YMMV and all of that, obviously- everyone here knows I'm a gameplay snob.
Digression of a sort: part of the reason I'm a gameplay snob is because gameplay is how you interact with the world of the game.
Just like how the choice between first person, third person or even second person narration dramatically shapes how you experience a novel, of the choice of lighting and directorial technique shapes how you experience a movie
Games by their very nature are interactive, and how they let you interact says a lot about the world your character inhabits. It can also be a significant source of friction - Skyrim's choice of location is immensely mountainous... Yet the gameplay makes no allowances for climbing other than most well known of mountaineering beasts, horses.
This may not be a problem for a lot of people, but for me at least that disconnect between realistic presentation and very gamey/artificial mechanics itches something fierce.
Compare and contrast Breath of the Wild/Tears which are both more explicitly cartoony and fantastical, but also have a much better level of interactivity with the world. Thusly, I don't experience the same friction from them.
I wouldn't say I'm a gameplay snob, but when I'm presented with an obstacle that I'd expect a common sense way around (like climbing it) and that feature wasn't added, not even for a ledge just barely higher than I can jump . . . if the game is an RPG, I'm likely to call BS. If it's a collectathon or a metroidvania, I'm more likely to be understanding. The type of game plus the gameplay is what commonly defines the kind of experience I'll have, even past the story. Like, I dug the story of God of War (Norse Edition), but if the gameplay felt utterly horrible (to me it didn't) I wouldn't have been able to chug through for the story.
For me, good mechanical and gameplay systems can cover for a bad story, but bad interactive systems can't cover for a good story.
Yep, I'm much the same. I'll also draw a line here between bad story where it's actively offensive/dumb/whatever, and just wafer thin story. BoTW's main plot isn't winning any awards for depth, but it works.
I'm sad Ubisoft never did more with the grow home/grow up games. Climbing was real fun and tactile in them, had a really good feel to them more on rails effect that AssCreed, or especially Horizon Zero Dawn (I really hate when games do this seemingly free climb, but it's super on rails and specific, it feels very artificial)
I had not! If nothing else that's awfully pretty and evocative going by that trailer. I'll have to remember to wishlist it
I've also got to grab No Mans Sky at some point. They keep doing 50% off sales... Which just means it costs 50 bucks and that's still somewhat steep for me
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
edited October 2023
since it was on sale, I snagged Dome Keeper on Steam
first thing I noticed when booting it up? It has options to change input icons!
this seems like a small thing, but it's a huge pet peeve of mine as I use a DS4 controller; there's so many games that just default to using Xbox icons and don't even have PSX input icons, even when they have PS4/5 ports! refreshing to see a dev go ahead and just have that as an option in Settings
None of this surprises me, but I've been frustrated with what felt like to me the free pass Bethesda games got with Skyrim. Which was just shockingly broken on a gameplay level for a triple A game.
YMMV and all of that, obviously- everyone here knows I'm a gameplay snob.
Digression of a sort: part of the reason I'm a gameplay snob is because gameplay is how you interact with the world of the game.
Just like how the choice between first person, third person or even second person narration dramatically shapes how you experience a novel, of the choice of lighting and directorial technique shapes how you experience a movie
Games by their very nature are interactive, and how they let you interact says a lot about the world your character inhabits. It can also be a significant source of friction - Skyrim's choice of location is immensely mountainous... Yet the gameplay makes no allowances for climbing other than most well known of mountaineering beasts, horses.
This may not be a problem for a lot of people, but for me at least that disconnect between realistic presentation and very gamey/artificial mechanics itches something fierce.
Compare and contrast Breath of the Wild/Tears which are both more explicitly cartoony and fantastical, but also have a much better level of interactivity with the world. Thusly, I don't experience the same friction from them.
I wouldn't say I'm a gameplay snob, but when I'm presented with an obstacle that I'd expect a common sense way around (like climbing it) and that feature wasn't added, not even for a ledge just barely higher than I can jump . . . if the game is an RPG, I'm likely to call BS. If it's a collectathon or a metroidvania, I'm more likely to be understanding. The type of game plus the gameplay is what commonly defines the kind of experience I'll have, even past the story. Like, I dug the story of God of War (Norse Edition), but if the gameplay felt utterly horrible (to me it didn't) I wouldn't have been able to chug through for the story.
For me, good mechanical and gameplay systems can cover for a bad story, but bad interactive systems can't cover for a good story.
Yep, I'm much the same. I'll also draw a line here between bad story where it's actively offensive/dumb/whatever, and just wafer thin story. BoTW's main plot isn't winning any awards for depth, but it works.
I'm sad Ubisoft never did more with the grow home/grow up games. Climbing was real fun and tactile in them, had a really good feel to them more on rails effect that AssCreed, or especially Horizon Zero Dawn (I really hate when games do this seemingly free climb, but it's super on rails and specific, it feels very artificial)
I had not! If nothing else that's awfully pretty and evocative going by that trailer. I'll have to remember to wishlist it
I've also got to grab No Mans Sky at some point. They keep doing 50% off sales... Which just means it costs 50 bucks and that's still somewhat steep for me
What kind of blighted wasteland do you live in where a $60 game is $100? Because that's just beyond insane.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
0
Options
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
None of this surprises me, but I've been frustrated with what felt like to me the free pass Bethesda games got with Skyrim. Which was just shockingly broken on a gameplay level for a triple A game.
YMMV and all of that, obviously- everyone here knows I'm a gameplay snob.
Digression of a sort: part of the reason I'm a gameplay snob is because gameplay is how you interact with the world of the game.
Just like how the choice between first person, third person or even second person narration dramatically shapes how you experience a novel, of the choice of lighting and directorial technique shapes how you experience a movie
Games by their very nature are interactive, and how they let you interact says a lot about the world your character inhabits. It can also be a significant source of friction - Skyrim's choice of location is immensely mountainous... Yet the gameplay makes no allowances for climbing other than most well known of mountaineering beasts, horses.
This may not be a problem for a lot of people, but for me at least that disconnect between realistic presentation and very gamey/artificial mechanics itches something fierce.
Compare and contrast Breath of the Wild/Tears which are both more explicitly cartoony and fantastical, but also have a much better level of interactivity with the world. Thusly, I don't experience the same friction from them.
I wouldn't say I'm a gameplay snob, but when I'm presented with an obstacle that I'd expect a common sense way around (like climbing it) and that feature wasn't added, not even for a ledge just barely higher than I can jump . . . if the game is an RPG, I'm likely to call BS. If it's a collectathon or a metroidvania, I'm more likely to be understanding. The type of game plus the gameplay is what commonly defines the kind of experience I'll have, even past the story. Like, I dug the story of God of War (Norse Edition), but if the gameplay felt utterly horrible (to me it didn't) I wouldn't have been able to chug through for the story.
For me, good mechanical and gameplay systems can cover for a bad story, but bad interactive systems can't cover for a good story.
Yep, I'm much the same. I'll also draw a line here between bad story where it's actively offensive/dumb/whatever, and just wafer thin story. BoTW's main plot isn't winning any awards for depth, but it works.
I'm sad Ubisoft never did more with the grow home/grow up games. Climbing was real fun and tactile in them, had a really good feel to them more on rails effect that AssCreed, or especially Horizon Zero Dawn (I really hate when games do this seemingly free climb, but it's super on rails and specific, it feels very artificial)
I had not! If nothing else that's awfully pretty and evocative going by that trailer. I'll have to remember to wishlist it
I've also got to grab No Mans Sky at some point. They keep doing 50% off sales... Which just means it costs 50 bucks and that's still somewhat steep for me
What kind of blighted wasteland do you live in where a $60 game is $100? Because that's just beyond insane.
New Zealand.
Most games here cost $80 to as much as $160 these days. It's why I am such a prick about certain things like quality in some of my posts. We pay a fucking ton for games and when something straight up fails to work, like Lamplighters League, it's just extra bad on top of the extremely high price.
There's also other space games out there that it can be compared unfavorably to.
Not to mention I haven't heard anybody say if Starfield is interesting or funny, the way I hear people talk about Fallout and Elder Scrolls.
the lore is VERY underwhelming compared to Fallout/Elder Scrolls. Bethesda kind of lucked out with those two IPs. Starfield, while having some interesting lore, still just can't compete with what Fallout and Elder Scrolls have. The Nasa Punk 'realistic but still kind of space magicky' aesthetic is neat, but they didn't go that crazy with it, and it ended up making a lot of enemy factions and randomly generated stuff very samey after awhile
There's a lot of little world things that Starfield is lacking, things that you might not normally pay attention to in TES but becomes very notable once you realize it's not there. For example all of the books in Starfield have absolutely no stories or worldbuilding in them, it's literally all a couple of paragraphs of real life public domain novels. I wouldn't even call that good enough to qualify as minimum effort.
oooooof.
That is incredibly depressing. Lore books are like one of the things that RPGs can do incredibly well, and it's a great way to add texture and tone to your setting.
On the other side of why didn't Starfield get hype/seems to have kinda gone plop in the public consciousness, I think there's a one two punch going on:
One: plenty of folk were very cynical about another Bethesda Sim after getting burned/tired of the forumla from Skyrim and F4. If another Bethesda arse Bethesda game is a turn off for you, none of the marketing did anything to convince you to give it a try.
Two: Baldur's Gate 3 happened and ate it's lunch. While they're very different iterations of the rpg genre, they're still both RPGs, and BG3 blew up in a way that no one seemed to be expecting, which kept the hype for it going and set a real high water mark.
Fairly or Unfairly, this was the atmosphere Starfield came out in - there really wasn't a lot of oxygen left in the room for it
Tbh, most of my problems with it are that it's actually not very good at being a Bethesda game. It doesn't really have radiant ai shenanigans, the exploration is reduced to being an even clunkier version of me2's galaxy map, which would matter more if the exploration (arguably the main point of a Bethesda game) somehow even had more map reuse than freaking dragon age 2, and the companions aren't even sworn to carry your burdens.
Which would probably matter more if the itemization wasn't somehow even worse than fallout 3's. I'm still using the same random gun I found in my first procgen dungeon an hour in, that doesn't actually have any affixes, since even the purples I find have significantly (like a quarter) lower DPS. Like, this full auto machine gun I got in the first 5 hours does almost the same damage per shit as these supposedly upgraded purple semi auto revolvers.
In terms of being a Bethesda game, I think Fo76, might have been better. At launch
None of this surprises me, but I've been frustrated with what felt like to me the free pass Bethesda games got with Skyrim. Which was just shockingly broken on a gameplay level for a triple A game.
While I do have a laundry list of gameplay improvements I'd really want to see in ES6 (not least of which is talking with people from Arkane on how to make melee combat feel better kind of like how they got some feedback from id on making Fallout 4's shooting feel better than 3's did), I think it's worth pointing out that at the time of Skyrim, Bethesda only had around 200 or so people IIRC. That's tiny, a fraction of what Ubisoft devotes to making a AAA game even back then. While Skyrim sold AAA numbers, it didn't really have the resources of a AAA project.
Most games here cost $80 to as much as $160 these days. It's why I am such a prick about certain things like quality in some of my posts. We pay a fucking ton for games and when something straight up fails to work, like Lamplighters League, it's just extra bad on top of the extremely high price.
That feels insane to me, and yet I also just calculated a conversion of $59.99 into NZ currency, and it came out to . . . $100.48. And I'm sure the "price" in each place is kept at "equal", which means certain countries get screwed over. It just doesn't feel . . . right.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
As a reminder, while the exchange rate still makes the price unfair, NZ$ and US$ are not the same
No I'm Australian, our prices should be similar. 0.94 exchange rate. 160 is insane.
$160 wasn't Final Fantasy XVII, it was $135 NZ. I think Starfield was like $184 on Xbox for the special edition that gave 5 days early access or whatever. Lies of P for special edition was $120. Baldurs Gate 3 was $130 for the early access edition and so forth. Basically I figure if I'm going to get reamed on price, I might as well also get the edition that lets me play the game really early while I am at it. I can't recall what I bought that was that weird price, but it might have included DLC or a season pass with it.
Most games here cost $80 to as much as $160 these days. It's why I am such a prick about certain things like quality in some of my posts. We pay a fucking ton for games and when something straight up fails to work, like Lamplighters League, it's just extra bad on top of the extremely high price.
That feels insane to me, and yet I also just calculated a conversion of $59.99 into NZ currency, and it came out to . . . $100.48. And I'm sure the "price" in each place is kept at "equal", which means certain countries get screwed over. It just doesn't feel . . . right.
Does not feel right for those of us that actually have to pay the "wrong side of the planet" tax either.
new games creeping up to $150 and beyond, so much for it being cheaper to ship 1's and 0's around the world instead of physical media.
I've always maintained that Bethesda proper peaked with Morrowind. Everything that came after was just trying to do Morrowind with a bigger budget, which I don't think worked in their favor.
What are your thoughts on the Dragon Quest games?
No thoughts, since I never played them?
But (probably similar to what you're asking), I do think Square proper peaked, critically, commercially, and creatively, with FFVII, and has been trying to capture the lightning again with bigger and bigger budgets.
Back to the Elder Scroll series. Morrowind is one of the few games that actually gave me goosebumps when dungeon crawling. I distinctly remember finding The Egg of Time, opening it, and seeing all the cryptic glyphs and diagrams, and thinking "My god, what have I found?"
Morrowind, FFVII, and a very short list of several other games, are some of the distinct few where I've played, I love them to bits, but I always have lots of problem picking them up to replay.
Honestly, I feel Square has gotten largely better, when they're not doing some paint-huffing, foot-shooting bullshit.
Like, I compare 7 and 7R and it's not just the budget for very pretty facial animation or whatever - R is just so much clearer on what it wants to be, what its thesis is and what its characters are. You can tell there's been a couple decades of practice on, like, storytelling, happening in the meantime.
But then you have the moments when Square just goes "hey, you know what, NFTs!" or whatever other harebrained fucking idiocy and you lose alll hope on them again.
As a reminder, while the exchange rate still makes the price unfair, NZ$ and US$ are not the same
No I'm Australian, our prices should be similar. 0.94 exchange rate. 160 is insane.
$160 wasn't Final Fantasy XVII, it was $135 NZ. I think Starfield was like $184 on Xbox for the special edition that gave 5 days early access or whatever. Lies of P for special edition was $120. Baldurs Gate 3 was $130 for the early access edition and so forth. Basically I figure if I'm going to get reamed on price, I might as well also get the edition that lets me play the game really early while I am at it. I can't recall what I bought that was that weird price, but it might have included DLC or a season pass with it.
FF16 was 90 on release here at JB or Big W.
Kinda explains why you are basically a ball of hatred for some games, if I was paying that much the game better be fucking spectacular.
The most I've paid here is about 110 and that was for new release Demon Souls. I usually pay between 60 and 90.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Digital prices can get up to 124 in Australia, and if you go to EB games, the GameStop equivalent, they can charge 120ish for new next gen games, but yeah jbhifi usually has a day one special of 70-100 depending on the game, and a max of 110 I’ve seen. Still expensive, but as long as you’re not getting an ultimate edition I don’t know why they’re charging so much more in NZ
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited October 2023
Demon Souls was 135 at EB but if you go to EB in Australia I really don't have any sympathy. They're a scam.
But yes JB is the reason I got a disc version of a ps5. Sure swapping disc is awful, but being able to get much cheaper new games at JB is worth it.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Demon Souls was 135 at EB but if you go to EB in Australia I really don't have any sympathy. They're a scam.
I go there cos they price match with my local jbhifi and I often trade in games, the moment they stop doing price matching I will stop going there. But yeah their brand new game prices are outrageous, jbhifi and others always have better deals
0
Options
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
It is worth noting I don't buy any physical games anymore, only digital. I checked and BG3 on Steam is $115 NZ for same thing, so steam wins once again.
Yeah I’ve been eyeing MS Flight Sim for ages but the digital deluxe is $180au.
Can’t even imagine what the NZ price is
Premium Deluxe edition is 189 NZD. So not that bad, if you consider spending what I live off post rent for a week on a game reasonable!
But yeah. It fucking sucks.
Especially as a beneficiary, I don't exactly have a lot of money in the first place, and the gouging is no fun.
Like FF7R, I'd like to get. But even on sale it's 80+ NZD. Just... No.
My general rule of thumb is to check isthereanydeal, then check currency converters.
Usually for indie games, steam is already giving me a solid deal - it's AA+ games that gouge incredibly. They also seem to never discount their base price. Sekiro is another one that's stayed stupid expensive.
Tech prices are even worse. I'm saving up for a new computer very very slowly, and just the graphics card alone is going to be 1.5k NZD+ (for a 4070/4080 type deal).
Some of it's genuinely economy of scale issues on-top of the fact we're an island nation that's hugely isolated. To put our isolation in context for folks: you can fit the entirety of Europe in between NZ and Australia, the continent closest to us.
Buying silicone moulds for candle making once cost me as much in shipping due to the weight as the mould themselves did
A lot of it is just greed though - Adobe notoriously gouges the shit out of us.
As a reminder, the industry was making record profit when they went from $50 to $60 US as the standard price. They were making several times more when the push for $70 started.
They are making even more now and EA and Ubisoft both just started the, "Games are too expensive to make," shit again and its clear we'll start seeing $75 or $80 by this time next year.
Hevach on
+2
Options
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
The thing that pisses me off with digital prices is none of the physical costs are there. There's no production shipping, warehouse or distribution costs.
And yet, you get charged the exact same amount. From what I remember this is a retailer thing - charge the same online or Gamestop/EB/etc will refuse to stock your game. But it fucking sucks, and is one of the reasons I ended up buying Switch games physical when I intended to be entirely digital.
Yeah I’ve been eyeing MS Flight Sim for ages but the digital deluxe is $180au.
Can’t even imagine what the NZ price is
Premium Deluxe edition is 189 NZD. So not that bad, if you consider spending what I live off post rent for a week on a game reasonable!
But yeah. It fucking sucks.
Especially as a beneficiary, I don't exactly have a lot of money in the first place, and the gouging is no fun.
Like FF7R, I'd like to get. But even on sale it's 80+ NZD. Just... No.
My general rule of thumb is to check isthereanydeal, then check currency converters.
Usually for indie games, steam is already giving me a solid deal - it's AA+ games that gouge incredibly. They also seem to never discount their base price. Sekiro is another one that's stayed stupid expensive.
Tech prices are even worse. I'm saving up for a new computer very very slowly, and just the graphics card alone is going to be 1.5k NZD+ (for a 4070/4080 type deal).
Some of it's genuinely economy of scale issues on-top of the fact we're an island nation that's hugely isolated. To put our isolation in context for folks: you can fit the entirety of Europe in between NZ and Australia, the continent closest to us.
Buying silicone moulds for candle making once cost me as much in shipping due to the weight as the mould themselves did
A lot of it is just greed though - Adobe notoriously gouges the shit out of us.
If it's not specifically (over)taxed, digital only stuff being that ridiculous price is just bullshit.
Which leads me to think out loud, in the gray-area kind of way: Using a VPN from third-party sites (GMG, Fanatical) gives you a key from the region you buy from. It's only changing the Steam region store that becomes a bit of a bigger hurdle.
I wouldn't mind the rising cost of AAA games quite so much if they weren't also bursting at the seams with additional monetisation. Fuck all the way off with making a game $120AUD then going "haha whoopsie that isn't the complete game" and offering the Deluxe Fuck You Edition with more content, release day DLC, lootboxes, battlepasses, and so on.
I wouldn't mind the rising cost of AAA games quite so much if they weren't also bursting at the seams with additional monetisation. Fuck all the way off with making a game $120AUD then going "haha whoopsie that isn't the complete game" and offering the Deluxe Fuck You Edition with more content, release day DLC, lootboxes, battlepasses, and so on.
This is about where I'm at.
If games are too expensive to make, well first maybe make the games less big you motherfuckers, you're the ones who kept insisting Bigness was synonymous with Greatness - but failing that, sure, I'll pay extra upfront for a very large game if the game doesn't involve four additional layers of monetization. What I'm not going to be chill about is a game going on 80 euros and THEN having a hundred more euros of microtransactions and also seasonal battlepasses and who knows what else.
(Release day DLC I don't actually care terribly about - for most of these games there's a bunch of time between the game going gold and actually releasing, it's possible for a team to finish their first DLC plan by the time stuff actually gets to stores. Sure, whatever. But the multilayered monetization and hamstringing the game to sell you the solution to an intentional problem stuff? Nope, that dog won't hunt, monsignor)
I wouldn't mind the rising cost of AAA games quite so much if they weren't also bursting at the seams with additional monetisation. Fuck all the way off with making a game $120AUD then going "haha whoopsie that isn't the complete game" and offering the Deluxe Fuck You Edition with more content, release day DLC, lootboxes, battlepasses, and so on.
This is about where I'm at.
If games are too expensive to make, well first maybe make the games less big you motherfuckers, you're the ones who kept insisting Bigness was synonymous with Greatness - but failing that, sure, I'll pay extra upfront for a very large game if the game doesn't involve four additional layers of monetization. What I'm not going to be chill about is a game going on 80 euros and THEN having a hundred more euros of microtransactions and also seasonal battlepasses and who knows what else.
(Release day DLC I don't actually care terribly about - for most of these games there's a bunch of time between the game going gold and actually releasing, it's possible for a team to finish their first DLC plan by the time stuff actually gets to stores. Sure, whatever. But the multilayered monetization and hamstringing the game to sell you the solution to an intentional problem stuff? Nope, that dog won't hunt, monsignor)
The monetization thing gets even more shady when you consider how publishers hold off on turning it on until a week or two after release, when reviews and public opinion already have some momentum. They obviously know it would get them shit if it was day one.
( < . . .
+2
Options
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
edited October 2023
release date DLC is so dumb. I can accept some small cosmetic thing as a pre-order bonus, but don't insult everyone who paid full price for your game by dumping paid DLC on them day one. I get there's time between going gold and release day, but that should be focused on day one patch/bug fixes IMO considering the state a lot of games are releasing in at launch
Zavian on
+1
Options
KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
*runs in*
Steam Nextfest, October 9th to October 16th!
*runs back out again*
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
+5
Options
cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
GOG is having a couple killer sales, namely on all the SNK things:
One minor bit of Starfield lore I hated is that somehow, during the migration off Earth and into space, they let dogs go extinct.
And I'm just ... no. That would not happen. Live specimens, frozen embryos, I don't care, we would find a way.
Humans and dogs are symbiotic species at this point, and have been for thousands of years.
Wherever there are humans, as long as we are human, there will be dogs. Especially on the frontier.
Researching the canis massacre where thousands of colonists were murdered to save the alpha breeds (reengineered dog breeds to taking them back to wolves) would make for an interesting questline
when I posted that elsewhere, a friend replied:
Look. It's a Bethesda game. We all know that it's actually for an incredibly dumb technical reason.
They will, at some future date, reveal a magic frozen dog vault DLC, which you can purchase in order to get a dog.
Once they've worked out how to make the physics engine stop sticking quadrupeds to the ceiling or whatever it is.
(The dogs will be implemented as hats, on invisible humanoids.)
I wouldn't mind the rising cost of AAA games quite so much if they weren't also bursting at the seams with additional monetisation. Fuck all the way off with making a game $120AUD then going "haha whoopsie that isn't the complete game" and offering the Deluxe Fuck You Edition with more content, release day DLC, lootboxes, battlepasses, and so on.
This is about where I'm at.
If games are too expensive to make, well first maybe make the games less big you motherfuckers, you're the ones who kept insisting Bigness was synonymous with Greatness - but failing that, sure, I'll pay extra upfront for a very large game if the game doesn't involve four additional layers of monetization. What I'm not going to be chill about is a game going on 80 euros and THEN having a hundred more euros of microtransactions and also seasonal battlepasses and who knows what else.
(Release day DLC I don't actually care terribly about - for most of these games there's a bunch of time between the game going gold and actually releasing, it's possible for a team to finish their first DLC plan by the time stuff actually gets to stores. Sure, whatever. But the multilayered monetization and hamstringing the game to sell you the solution to an intentional problem stuff? Nope, that dog won't hunt, monsignor)
I don’t know how much they really save from making the game less big though.
Like I think in a lot of cases (though not necessarily all)it makes the game a lot better to be smaller and more focused, but at the same time I don’t think adding 10 more story irrelevant provinces in Valhalla where you aid a random saxon guy on consolidating his kingdom in exchange for swearing fealty to the Norse really is what broke the bank there. To a certain degree I am sure they say “we’ve already made these assets, reusing them to make another region gives us 5 hours more content and all we have to do is record some voice lines an have a level designer place some already made stuff” and it seems like a bargain when you really want to put that “100+ hours” bullet point in your advertising.
The thing that pisses me off with digital prices is none of the physical costs are there. There's no production shipping, warehouse or distribution costs.
And yet, you get charged the exact same amount. From what I remember this is a retailer thing - charge the same online or Gamestop/EB/etc will refuse to stock your game. But it fucking sucks, and is one of the reasons I ended up buying Switch games physical when I intended to be entirely digital.
Switch in particular I still buy physical on because not only is it often cheaper, the patching tends to be less egregious (especially on Nintendo's own games) in my experience, so the physical game isn't just a license key like a disc-based console game in particular can easily turn into. Also, on a slightly more cynical level, because Nintendo's history with online stores has given me zero reason at all to trust they'll keep any online services whatsoever up for a single second longer than they'll absolutely have to.
I did buy a couple of the F1 games - when I was still getting them at launch - physical on PC. F1 2017 and F1 2018, before EA *spits* got their grubby paws on the series. They were both cheaper, and included Steam keys, so why not - and I was pleasantly surprised to discover there were in fact a number of DVDs in each; rather than chucking in one (or none) and saying "download the rest" like some other publishers do, there were 3 or 4 DVDs in there stuffed to the gills with data to install from, so kudos to Codemasters for doing physical PC games right as late as at least 2018 for those for whom that's actually an added convenience.
None of this surprises me, but I've been frustrated with what felt like to me the free pass Bethesda games got with Skyrim. Which was just shockingly broken on a gameplay level for a triple A game.
YMMV and all of that, obviously- everyone here knows I'm a gameplay snob.
Digression of a sort: part of the reason I'm a gameplay snob is because gameplay is how you interact with the world of the game.
Just like how the choice between first person, third person or even second person narration dramatically shapes how you experience a novel, of the choice of lighting and directorial technique shapes how you experience a movie
Games by their very nature are interactive, and how they let you interact says a lot about the world your character inhabits. It can also be a significant source of friction - Skyrim's choice of location is immensely mountainous... Yet the gameplay makes no allowances for climbing other than most well known of mountaineering beasts, horses.
This may not be a problem for a lot of people, but for me at least that disconnect between realistic presentation and very gamey/artificial mechanics itches something fierce.
Compare and contrast Breath of the Wild/Tears which are both more explicitly cartoony and fantastical, but also have a much better level of interactivity with the world. Thusly, I don't experience the same friction from them.
I wouldn't say I'm a gameplay snob, but when I'm presented with an obstacle that I'd expect a common sense way around (like climbing it) and that feature wasn't added, not even for a ledge just barely higher than I can jump . . . if the game is an RPG, I'm likely to call BS. If it's a collectathon or a metroidvania, I'm more likely to be understanding. The type of game plus the gameplay is what commonly defines the kind of experience I'll have, even past the story. Like, I dug the story of God of War (Norse Edition), but if the gameplay felt utterly horrible (to me it didn't) I wouldn't have been able to chug through for the story.
For me, good mechanical and gameplay systems can cover for a bad story, but bad interactive systems can't cover for a good story.
Yep, I'm much the same. I'll also draw a line here between bad story where it's actively offensive/dumb/whatever, and just wafer thin story. BoTW's main plot isn't winning any awards for depth, but it works.
I'm sad Ubisoft never did more with the grow home/grow up games. Climbing was real fun and tactile in them, had a really good feel to them more on rails effect that AssCreed, or especially Horizon Zero Dawn (I really hate when games do this seemingly free climb, but it's super on rails and specific, it feels very artificial)
I had not! If nothing else that's awfully pretty and evocative going by that trailer. I'll have to remember to wishlist it
I've also got to grab No Mans Sky at some point. They keep doing 50% off sales... Which just means it costs 50 bucks and that's still somewhat steep for me
Definitely give the demo on Steam a go, then. It has a very charming style and the climbing gameplay is very, very rewarding: the tether system is just great fun. Even if there are obvious routes, it's free enough to let you do your thing within it's gameplay rules and even during just the demo (which can be quickly completed in 30 minutes) you can see positibilities.
It's also coming out on Game Pass, if that works for you too.
The time period between going gold and release doesn't matter anymore. The reason it was a thing is because it took time to get the game onto the physical media, but since nowadays they don't even do that they just have a "key" on the disc so you need to download the full game from them anyway regardless if you bought physical or digital.
It's also very obvious to tell what content was made as a way to kill time during that period and what content was planned to be cut from the base game as DLC since the very start.
The time period between going gold and release doesn't matter anymore. The reason it was a thing is because it took time to get the game onto the physical media, but since nowadays they don't even do that they just have a "key" on the disc so you need to download the full game from them anyway regardless if you bought physical or digital.
It's also very obvious to tell what content was made as a way to kill time during that period and what content was planned to be cut from the base game as DLC since the very start.
It still takes time to get the game onto physical media in the case of console physical releases on all platforms (regardless of how much day-one patching they'll get, consoles aren't to "the disc is just a key at launch" yet), and, even if my example above might be questionable as it's now five years old, still might occasionally happen on PC physical releases here and there.
The time period between going gold and release doesn't matter anymore. The reason it was a thing is because it took time to get the game onto the physical media, but since nowadays they don't even do that they just have a "key" on the disc so you need to download the full game from them anyway regardless if you bought physical or digital.
It's also very obvious to tell what content was made as a way to kill time during that period and what content was planned to be cut from the base game as DLC since the very start.
It still takes time to get the game onto physical media in the case of console physical releases on all platforms (regardless of how much day-one patching they'll get, consoles aren't to "the disc is just a key at launch" yet), and, even if my example above might be questionable as it's now five years old, still might occasionally happen on PC physical releases here and there.
There's also time getting the release certified for console release. And even if day-1 patches are there, there must be a "gold" release fully certified at some point before that.
( < . . .
+4
Options
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Playing some Quake 2 64. I get the smaller levels, as the N64 wasn't as powerful as a PC. But holy monster closets batman! Like every fucking corridor has a monster closet of some kind. And they often respawn when you have to backtrack. and they're high level enemies, like the enemies you face in the last half of the PC game, the game puts you against them with your shotgun and blaster.
Added to that the game is stingy as fuck with ammo! It's Quake, not Resident Evil you fucks.
There are a ton of really interesting DEMOS on the NEXT FEST. The biggest surprise for me is definitely GANGS OF SHERWOOD. I had zero clue what this thing was, why it was feature prominently and what the hell it even is. What it seems to be is a wonderfully janky VERMINTIDE - with some actually decent gameplay. The controls need to be tightened up a little and I'm not sure what's going on with the healing system (had to turn difficulty down to normal) but it seems like it could be fine if there's deep enough character progression.
. . .also TALOS II is just. It's pretty much the game you were hoping it would be. Everything is just better (full movement freedom), though if you've played TALOS I, you'll fly through the demo.
I am kind of shocked at some of the titles I don't see in this; particularly ESPIOCRACY which was a game I was looking forward to playing in 2023 and now looks like it is just in limbo (not really but now it's just sitting at a vague 2024).
Posts
I had not! If nothing else that's awfully pretty and evocative going by that trailer. I'll have to remember to wishlist it
I've also got to grab No Mans Sky at some point. They keep doing 50% off sales... Which just means it costs 50 bucks and that's still somewhat steep for me
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
first thing I noticed when booting it up? It has options to change input icons!
this seems like a small thing, but it's a huge pet peeve of mine as I use a DS4 controller; there's so many games that just default to using Xbox icons and don't even have PSX input icons, even when they have PS4/5 ports! refreshing to see a dev go ahead and just have that as an option in Settings
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
What kind of blighted wasteland do you live in where a $60 game is $100? Because that's just beyond insane.
New Zealand.
Most games here cost $80 to as much as $160 these days. It's why I am such a prick about certain things like quality in some of my posts. We pay a fucking ton for games and when something straight up fails to work, like Lamplighters League, it's just extra bad on top of the extremely high price.
While I do have a laundry list of gameplay improvements I'd really want to see in ES6 (not least of which is talking with people from Arkane on how to make melee combat feel better kind of like how they got some feedback from id on making Fallout 4's shooting feel better than 3's did), I think it's worth pointing out that at the time of Skyrim, Bethesda only had around 200 or so people IIRC. That's tiny, a fraction of what Ubisoft devotes to making a AAA game even back then. While Skyrim sold AAA numbers, it didn't really have the resources of a AAA project.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
That feels insane to me, and yet I also just calculated a conversion of $59.99 into NZ currency, and it came out to . . . $100.48. And I'm sure the "price" in each place is kept at "equal", which means certain countries get screwed over. It just doesn't feel . . . right.
No I'm Australian, our prices should be similar. 0.94 exchange rate. 160 is insane.
$160 wasn't Final Fantasy XVII, it was $135 NZ. I think Starfield was like $184 on Xbox for the special edition that gave 5 days early access or whatever. Lies of P for special edition was $120. Baldurs Gate 3 was $130 for the early access edition and so forth. Basically I figure if I'm going to get reamed on price, I might as well also get the edition that lets me play the game really early while I am at it. I can't recall what I bought that was that weird price, but it might have included DLC or a season pass with it.
new games creeping up to $150 and beyond, so much for it being cheaper to ship 1's and 0's around the world instead of physical media.
Bravely Default / 3DS Friend Code = 3394-3571-1609
Honestly, I feel Square has gotten largely better, when they're not doing some paint-huffing, foot-shooting bullshit.
Like, I compare 7 and 7R and it's not just the budget for very pretty facial animation or whatever - R is just so much clearer on what it wants to be, what its thesis is and what its characters are. You can tell there's been a couple decades of practice on, like, storytelling, happening in the meantime.
But then you have the moments when Square just goes "hey, you know what, NFTs!" or whatever other harebrained fucking idiocy and you lose alll hope on them again.
So I hold down alt to staff
I hold down tab to work the stormwater installation and controls
I can control supplies through the recipe window
Okay, seal mission. Managed by a fantasy walrus. Doing that tomorrow.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
FF16 was 90 on release here at JB or Big W.
Kinda explains why you are basically a ball of hatred for some games, if I was paying that much the game better be fucking spectacular.
The most I've paid here is about 110 and that was for new release Demon Souls. I usually pay between 60 and 90.
But yes JB is the reason I got a disc version of a ps5. Sure swapping disc is awful, but being able to get much cheaper new games at JB is worth it.
I go there cos they price match with my local jbhifi and I often trade in games, the moment they stop doing price matching I will stop going there. But yeah their brand new game prices are outrageous, jbhifi and others always have better deals
That's a deeply painful way to live.
I couldn't do it.
Can’t even imagine what the NZ price is
Premium Deluxe edition is 189 NZD. So not that bad, if you consider spending what I live off post rent for a week on a game reasonable!
But yeah. It fucking sucks.
Especially as a beneficiary, I don't exactly have a lot of money in the first place, and the gouging is no fun.
Like FF7R, I'd like to get. But even on sale it's 80+ NZD. Just... No.
My general rule of thumb is to check isthereanydeal, then check currency converters.
Usually for indie games, steam is already giving me a solid deal - it's AA+ games that gouge incredibly. They also seem to never discount their base price. Sekiro is another one that's stayed stupid expensive.
Tech prices are even worse. I'm saving up for a new computer very very slowly, and just the graphics card alone is going to be 1.5k NZD+ (for a 4070/4080 type deal).
Some of it's genuinely economy of scale issues on-top of the fact we're an island nation that's hugely isolated. To put our isolation in context for folks: you can fit the entirety of Europe in between NZ and Australia, the continent closest to us.
Buying silicone moulds for candle making once cost me as much in shipping due to the weight as the mould themselves did
A lot of it is just greed though - Adobe notoriously gouges the shit out of us.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Physical are insane, too, at this point.
As a reminder, the industry was making record profit when they went from $50 to $60 US as the standard price. They were making several times more when the push for $70 started.
They are making even more now and EA and Ubisoft both just started the, "Games are too expensive to make," shit again and its clear we'll start seeing $75 or $80 by this time next year.
And yet, you get charged the exact same amount. From what I remember this is a retailer thing - charge the same online or Gamestop/EB/etc will refuse to stock your game. But it fucking sucks, and is one of the reasons I ended up buying Switch games physical when I intended to be entirely digital.
If it's not specifically (over)taxed, digital only stuff being that ridiculous price is just bullshit.
Which leads me to think out loud, in the gray-area kind of way: Using a VPN from third-party sites (GMG, Fanatical) gives you a key from the region you buy from. It's only changing the Steam region store that becomes a bit of a bigger hurdle.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
This is about where I'm at.
If games are too expensive to make, well first maybe make the games less big you motherfuckers, you're the ones who kept insisting Bigness was synonymous with Greatness - but failing that, sure, I'll pay extra upfront for a very large game if the game doesn't involve four additional layers of monetization. What I'm not going to be chill about is a game going on 80 euros and THEN having a hundred more euros of microtransactions and also seasonal battlepasses and who knows what else.
(Release day DLC I don't actually care terribly about - for most of these games there's a bunch of time between the game going gold and actually releasing, it's possible for a team to finish their first DLC plan by the time stuff actually gets to stores. Sure, whatever. But the multilayered monetization and hamstringing the game to sell you the solution to an intentional problem stuff? Nope, that dog won't hunt, monsignor)
The monetization thing gets even more shady when you consider how publishers hold off on turning it on until a week or two after release, when reviews and public opinion already have some momentum. They obviously know it would get them shit if it was day one.
Steam Nextfest, October 9th to October 16th!
*runs back out again*
And the Contra bundle, which is maybe worthwhile?
There were already
I don’t know how much they really save from making the game less big though.
Like I think in a lot of cases (though not necessarily all)it makes the game a lot better to be smaller and more focused, but at the same time I don’t think adding 10 more story irrelevant provinces in Valhalla where you aid a random saxon guy on consolidating his kingdom in exchange for swearing fealty to the Norse really is what broke the bank there. To a certain degree I am sure they say “we’ve already made these assets, reusing them to make another region gives us 5 hours more content and all we have to do is record some voice lines an have a level designer place some already made stuff” and it seems like a bargain when you really want to put that “100+ hours” bullet point in your advertising.
Switch in particular I still buy physical on because not only is it often cheaper, the patching tends to be less egregious (especially on Nintendo's own games) in my experience, so the physical game isn't just a license key like a disc-based console game in particular can easily turn into. Also, on a slightly more cynical level, because Nintendo's history with online stores has given me zero reason at all to trust they'll keep any online services whatsoever up for a single second longer than they'll absolutely have to.
I did buy a couple of the F1 games - when I was still getting them at launch - physical on PC. F1 2017 and F1 2018, before EA *spits* got their grubby paws on the series. They were both cheaper, and included Steam keys, so why not - and I was pleasantly surprised to discover there were in fact a number of DVDs in each; rather than chucking in one (or none) and saying "download the rest" like some other publishers do, there were 3 or 4 DVDs in there stuffed to the gills with data to install from, so kudos to Codemasters for doing physical PC games right as late as at least 2018 for those for whom that's actually an added convenience.
Steam | XBL
Definitely give the demo on Steam a go, then. It has a very charming style and the climbing gameplay is very, very rewarding: the tether system is just great fun. Even if there are obvious routes, it's free enough to let you do your thing within it's gameplay rules and even during just the demo (which can be quickly completed in 30 minutes) you can see positibilities.
It's also coming out on Game Pass, if that works for you too.
It's also very obvious to tell what content was made as a way to kill time during that period and what content was planned to be cut from the base game as DLC since the very start.
It still takes time to get the game onto physical media in the case of console physical releases on all platforms (regardless of how much day-one patching they'll get, consoles aren't to "the disc is just a key at launch" yet), and, even if my example above might be questionable as it's now five years old, still might occasionally happen on PC physical releases here and there.
Steam | XBL
There's also time getting the release certified for console release. And even if day-1 patches are there, there must be a "gold" release fully certified at some point before that.
Added to that the game is stingy as fuck with ammo! It's Quake, not Resident Evil you fucks.
. . .also TALOS II is just. It's pretty much the game you were hoping it would be. Everything is just better (full movement freedom), though if you've played TALOS I, you'll fly through the demo.
I am kind of shocked at some of the titles I don't see in this; particularly ESPIOCRACY which was a game I was looking forward to playing in 2023 and now looks like it is just in limbo (not really but now it's just sitting at a vague 2024).