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Honestly, many of them you know full well, but that’s because yes, they are that good:
- Minecraft
- TES III Morrowind and TES V Skyrim
- The Witcher 1 and 3
- Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Dishonored 1 and 2
- Warcraft III and World of Warcraft
Completely deserve their legendary status
Star Citizen is an insane phenomenon to me. It’s a good game and a massive fraud at the same time, and one fuels the other.
Let’s give credit where credit is due - the game is incredibly immersive. The massive social element, ability to walk and explore things outside your ships and rovers, to customize them, to create all the inventive ways to make money and to prevent hostiles from doing the same is fascinating. It’s…believable, immersive, real. No other game has nailed it just so accurately, and I would invite you to experience it by yourself, but…
But once the player’s attention is caught, they become a milking cow. You want to develop in game? You have to pay up big time, lest you want all your ships and money go away with an update. They don’t go loud about their wipes, and most players face them when they’ve reached a certain point in the game - at which point they either lose all progress, or start to buy their ships for cash. For, like, hundreds or thousands of dollars per ship.
While this may sound bollocks to someone who haven’t played it, but the way it is normalized in the community combined with the element of frustration of losing everything in a universe player now cares about really drives folks to spend massive sums on the game.
Back in the pre-war era, I remember a person from Ukraine (a country with per capita GDP of ~$5000, or 1/16th that of the US) secretly stashing over $1000 to buy a new ship, adding to his ship park of $4000. His family (wife and two kids) haven’t been on a good vacation for years, and this amount of money would allow them to do so several times over in the southern Ukraine, but he bought some virtual ships. No, really. He was a clan leader, so he felt like he had to have all the nicest ships at his disposal, and his only grief was that he couldn’t afford the $8000 and $21000 ship packs.
The way community psychology works in the game is insane, and I believe a study could be made on how exactly was this all pulled off. Catch with a good premise, and make sure to never let the player go. I’mma be clear - what made me leave the game is not the sudden realization of its predatory practices, but simply the fact my computer started lagging heavily in the new areas, and me not having money to upgrade at the moment. I did consider buying a $400 ship just to have a decent hauler after wipes though, despite myself living in a not-so-rich of a country. Looking back at my Star Citizen experience though, I see how crazy it would be.
I would certainly love to see Morrowind remake.
Oblivion is at least playable for newer gamers. It’s not a good experience, but it is manageable.
Morrowind, for all its immense benefits, makes everyone who entered the game scene after 2010 scream in terror. I personally never left Balmora, because it’s just a terrible experience by modern standards (graphics, character animation, controls, battle mechanics…), which is a great shame because the game seems to be great otherwise.
TES I and II, while deserving recognition, are very Doom-like in terms of gameplay, and I don’t believe an adequate remake could be made, because they are so different they can’t adequately be turned into a modern experience.
So, I guess for me all hopes are for Skywind, so I could finally walk the streets of Vivec without the need to fork my eyes.
I’m sorry to hear about your situation - I’m in a somewhat similar financial position myself - but people are people, and in any income bracket there are things to be concerned about.
For you and me, it’s getting enough money to eat. For someone else, it is affording a Switch. For others, it’s the rise in the price of caviar forcing them into cheaper options.
Interestingly enough, all of this causes a significant amount of stress, and should you eventually get more money to spare, then after a brief euphoria you’ll have the same worries about Switch prices and other things you don’t seem to care about now.
In any case, I wish you all the best and hope you’ll find your way out of a situation. Hope your spouse gets the surgery and becomes able to work, you have your teeth, and everyone lives a bit happier going forward.
I don’t think the game wanted to paint an “unbridgeable gap” here, as the author says. The way Mio and Zoe get more into each other’s stories is exactly the testament to the way this gap can be closed through a unique shared experience, and to the way one genre can enrich the other.
I play Split Fiction with my girlfriend, and she is a fantasy fangirl, while I am very sci-fi, so the characters land just perfectly. And I can’t help but notice that, as Mio and Zoe get more open-minded and try to look into the root of how those two preferences formed, me and my girlfriend also get more passionate for each other’s interests.
And that’s one of the most powerful things about the game. It helps to deconstruct our notions and perceptions about both genres, and become more open to each other’s vision.
I don’t think it’s even possible to untangle storytelling from experience in TES games. Their magic is that they immerse the player in a way no other game ever managed to, in my opinion. Every stone is part of the lore. And when you put those games into the time context they belong, you see the masterpiece.
That said, Avowed did a fairly good job, and storytelling has also advanced in 14 years since the last TES game.
Personal preferences and experiences aside, consoles are a big source of e-waste - they come as an addition to your (presumably already existing) PC, can only be used to play certain games (you might need several different consoles to cover all of the exclusives), they can’t be upgraded and lose their relevance over time as games stop being released for older models.
True; however, the point raised is probably about the claim made in the article that ND would not keep up with rising costs of AAA game development on its own.
So, according to co-founder, it was not a case of a successful company pumping in even more revenue, but rather ensuring its very survival. At the time, plenty of even large indie companies have closed, so this is somewhat believable.
Sure, but, to be fair, RSI has made decent work at polishing those angles. There’s still plenty wrong about the mechanics, and it’s buggy as hell too, but overall, I’d say I can immerse in SC in a way I cannot with any other game.
What kills SC in my opinion is not the “uncanny valley” feeling but rather the obvious greed and laziness of developers that essentially trapped themselves into profiting more off the unfinished game, thereby incentivizing themselves to stagnate. The game is very good as far as general gameplay is concerned - but the development incentives are screwed, and as a result, what could be a game of the century is now nothing but an empty promise or, at best, a sandbox.
That’s not exactly what I meant.
What I meant is that Star Citizen wants to be an immersive simulator, the kind of game that makes you feel whatever happens to you to be real and actual.
Terraria doesn’t pretend to be real - it’s magical and funny and silly and that’s its charm. It might absolutely be immersive - but in another way. It’s a game you come to to have some fun and wonderful experiences - not the game that grows to be your second life.
Now I make it sound predatory, and in part it is, but alas, hope I got my point across.
I think those games hit different brackets.
Star Citizen simply wouldn’t be Star Citizen and would never take off if it looked like Terraria. A major part of its charm is how much life-like immersion it creates - things feel very real, not toyish, and you actually experience spaceflight and everything in between. And for that to work - and for people to spend hundreds of bucks on what is ultimately just a game - you need game graphics to be as great as you can pull off.
System will work, but it will gradually get less and less secure, which can get quite bad.
There is an insane amount of ways to break Windows XP and even Windows 7, it’s basically script kiddie’s level of knowledge.
And there are real exploits out in the wild that target such systems specifically - while the pool of potential victims is smaller, they’re very easy to target unless they are competently firewalled.
I’m not aware of how things are now, but at least previously you couldn’t really use Proton outside of Steam.
So I assume OC defends Steam as the only platform that can smoothly run games with Proton instead of regular Wine, which does not work as well for certain games and/or requires tedious configuration.
Why do you think so?
I may advise you to track previous actions and their outcomes. More often than not, it does work.