Yeah OP did a great job in composition but that lighting looks like the surface of the moon.

Who seriously believes that?

If an artist consents to the use of their song in a specific way, it’s not a matter of belief at all. It just is tacit approval. So when the government does this without consent, until the moment the artist responds, the implication is that the artist has approved it. Which isn’t as big a deal if a private entity does it, but it’s a much bigger deal when the federal government does it.

The current government strategy of illegal use of copyrighted materials, often with the full understanding that the artist/IP owners will not consent to it should really have a harsher punishment to it. The DHS social media pages in particular keep using songs without artist permission because they know it will be taken down but by that point it doesn’t matter and they just steal another song. Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist, this should absolutely count as the rights of the artists to free speech are being infringed upon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

He who has never tasted bread would be contented by porridge.

They’re trying to cut costs to pay for the loans they took to make the acquisition

Those poor players lol

They are inherently a sweat fest by their very nature and they appeal to a crowd that enjoys high risk high reward gameplay. Theres nothing wrong with you for not being into it. Not everybody’s dream job is being a fireman and running into burning buildings before lunch either.

But it’s one of those niche genres that scratch an itch that more casual games don’t.

I hear the game is supposed to be fun so I suppose I should give it a shot. But styling they give the characters and weapons, essentially junk weapons and raiders from Fallout wearing whatever goofy scrap they can find puts me so far off. Like not everything has to be perfectly tacticool but like, something closer to the Metro series would be dope

I saw a post saying it’s untrue but their only evidence seemed to be that their Target had not removed anything g last time they checked. Meanwhile I have seen a half dozen posts from employees and customers showing the Xbox stuff being removed. A month from now I’m sure it’ll be clearer on what’s happened.

Not sure I’d describe that spreadsheet simulator as casual lol

Make V’s voice actor sucks so much. It is the cringiest shit on earth. It’s remarkable compared to how organic Jackie sounds.

The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.

I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.

Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.

I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.

I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:

• They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
• Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
• Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
• Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.

Valve literally can’t charge you for their user services because you’re not stuck on their hardware. The very moment they do, they’ll lose all the user goodwill that has made them the default in their space and everybody can just pack up and move to another storefront or even just pirate their games. Valve has to eat those costs at the expense of everything else.”, they have no choice.

Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online

What you’re both failing to grasp here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.

As console adoption increased, so did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.

it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player

Every other console did not have free multiplayer. Xbox Live always cost money.

You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…? Buddy that shit costs literal millions a year.

Nintendos online user services were never free. They went from not having them, to having them and charging money.

And yes Steam is eating a metric shit ton of costs to give you those services for free. Because PCs are an open platform, they have to compete to keep you on their storefront. They eat all those costs because you don’t have to buy new hardware in order to switch.

These are very, very simple concepts you’re failing to grasp.

Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.

They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.

I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.

Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.

Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money.you already made your money back by selling them the ownership.

No lie you can and do fix Minthara and become one of the most wholesome a devoted couples in the game.

I don’t mind subscriptions for ongoing infrastructure as much. My problem is with using a subscription to replace ownership.

I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.

I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.

Fret not, anything they aren’t going to actively milk will likely be sold off to try and pay back the $20 billion dollar loan they took to make this purchase.

Well there was just some base level of hope in the back of some people’s minds that one day they might get their shit together and now that hope is entirely gone.

I’m seeing a lot of games with what seems like a much steeper discount than usual. First thing I do when there’s a steam sale is look at my wishlist and sort by discount and there are a lot of games on sale for 90% off, many of which only a couple dollars.

They are because those same people are boycotting anyway for two other reasons.

• The game features a female lead this time around.
• the voice and performance actress of the player character is left wing

It’s so funny that this was their mindset when it doesn’t run well on my PC which cost close to $2,000.

Randy is so out of touch he thinks people with $2,000 available in discretionary spend are “the poors”.

There’s a difference between a game being way outside of your specs because it’s graphically very advanced and your hardware is old, and a game just being unoptimized slop that expects its users to deal with by throwing higher specs at a fixable problem.

I have a brand new 5070ti that can play all kinds of UE5 games with much better graphics than BL4 at 4k resolution with ray tracing at a decent frame rate without relying on frame gen. And I’m in the top few percentiles here.

Sure, but powerful systems don’t run it too well either. Especially given how mediocre the game looks visually.

Right but how do you know that didn’t impact the score? For all we know they knocked it down a point for that.

How do you know that?

Depends on the game. In a looter shooter like Borderlands, it’s the looting and shooting

They noted the perforemance issues in their review

It’s only subjective in that it’s not entirely impossible for at least one person out there to enjoy the mechanic. However at the same time there has been a general consensus made that it’s not a good mechanic. Your opinion may be the equal of any one other persons opinion, but what I think you’re not understanding is that is that it’s not the equal of the many opinions of the majority of people. If you expect your one opinion to hold the same value as the collective opinions of everyone else, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

as a sort of olive branch of understanding that opinions are opinions.

That’s not a great example to your point because the weapon degradation mechanic of BOTW is also widely regarded as a bad mechanic. It’s the most disliked mechanic in that game.

I think he’s being upvoted and you’re being downvoted because boss runbacks have been around for a long time and both the industry and community have since come to a consensus that they’re just objectively bad game design. They don’t add anything of value to a game and their existence is a detriment to the experience. I don’t think you’ll find a single person who holds the opinion that they’re fun. People like yourself may tolerate them, but a tolerable inconvenience is not the same thing as fun. You’ve actually gone exceptionally out of your way to avoid calling them fun.

Like with anything, not all personal opinions are going to be held in equal regard. And your take here is going to be an outlier so I wouldn’t be surprised if you continue to get this reception.

Well they removed the ability to play as “A civilization” in the game called “Civilization” so yeah everyone I know has swore off it.

What I would also note is that the story in BG3 is still very linear. The branching paths are small deviations along the main path and can affect the ending, but the story doesn’t really change a whole lot so it’s not as daunting as it sounds.

The differences in choices in BG3 are more like flavor so that the story doesn’t railroad you into a certain character archetype. Replaying BG3 and making different choices mainly just rewards you with different companions and cutscenes, new paths through the 3 main areas, and more or less different side quests or even parallel main quests.

In the endless exploration, yes. In the myriad of other slapped together mechanics that don’t really tie into the exploration at all, no.

The exploration of new planets is well implemented, but that’s existed since the game launched. If you were happy with that then, you’ll be happy with it now. But the game was panned due to there not really being anything else to it. And after all these years and added mechanics there still sort of isn’t.

I don’t play the game, I prefer games that are fun on their own without me having to create my own.

I don’t agree with that at all. Giving your players a rewarding reason to interact with the games systems is a foundational pillar of game design.

This game has added so many systems over the years, but it still just hasn’t really grown into anything of substance. It’s a game where the only real “thing to do” is mindless busywork. 200 new systems, all created to a standard of absolute minimum viability, none of them are very rewarding on their own, and none of them really create interesting interactions with each other. It’s like they every system was added with the idea that they’re optional, which makes them all feel unnecessary.

You can build bases now, but there’s no real reason to other than to do so. There are settlements you can become the leader of? But what that entails is essentially nothing. The game is designed from the ground up for you to move from planet to planet without lingering too long on any particular one, and yet they added a bunch of mechanics based around specific planets.

It’s a really bizarre product.