Encrypt-Keeper
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Idk man I’ve been a PC gamer for decades, and in my long career in IT have been a subject matter expert on both Linux and Windows systems and this is just straight up cope.
Drivers and compatibility issues and such are much better now than they were 15 years ago, but at the end of the day you buy a console and you get a guaranteed 8-10 years of running every game with zero problems. Thats something we will never, ever get on PC. It’s just not possible.
It’s more cost efficient, and less of a headache to deal with anomalous problems like bugs and driver issues that can be as specific to your unique combination of PC hardware.
I recently bought RE Requiem and updated my graphics card drivers for it. They introduced a bug that would stop 2/3 of my GPUs fans from spinning at random. People who bought that game and played it on their PS5 didn’t have that problem.
You couldn’t zip line with the carrier initially, that came with the directors cut.
The zip line networks were definitely too strong in the first game, but that’s still leagues better than DS2 because with zip lines you at least have to complete a delivery to get the network online, then go out and set up your zip lines. It took some setup work.
In DS2 you just throw your cargo in a truck and go. It’s a little too effortless in a game where effort is supposed to be the point.
CIV VI really dives into board game-like qualities and while it’s a double edged sword, I think what it does, it does very well. There is room in the series for experimentation and trying new angles. The problem with VII is it doesn’t seem to even know what it wants to be or how it wants to do it. It’s unfortunately a mess that I don’t think they can fix.
Well the problem is it seems they’ve given up on the classic Zelda formula. Botw sorta ate it and spit out the bones, which is why I dislike the game so much. It’s a pod person that replaced Zelda and is living in its place, instead of just being its own thing.
Meanwhile you have another legacy game series like Resident Evil that in the same span of time seems to have figured out how to evolve the formula twice now into something new without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!
Well that sorta says it all. You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.
The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others
So that’s just it, all the others aren’t like that. The fact that BOTW is, is just lazy. It sorta Flanderized itself.
What about all the NPCs in all the towns?
What about them?
There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?
Because none of those things are dungeons. Not in any substantial way we’ve come to expect from a Zelda game at least. There are 120 separate and yet identical puzzle rooms with no unique characteristics between them, and 4 boss fights that sort of act like 1/4 of a Zelda dungeon that all share a single theme. There isn’t really a single dungeon or temple in BOTW.
The music was great
It was serviceable ambiance, not all that unique or memorable. It did its job but not nearly the level the series is known for.
Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?
Idk but BOTW had 15-30 base species types accounting for unique bosses but not every single sub variant. Ocarina of Time from 1998 has over 70. And there was more regional diversity compared to BOTW which is very same across the whole map overall.
The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!)
Exploration in older Zelda titles had more rewarding, unique items and treasures to find when exploring, and the way you would explore would change as the game progressed and you unlocked more gadgets. BOTW is as you said just a collection of the same handful of incremental upgrade items copy-pasted hundreds of times. And it never evolves because the game is designed specifically so that the gameplay does not evolve over the course of a playthrough. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a collectathon but BOTW used it in place of more substantial exploration rewards, and is the exact thing everyone would dog on if the game was published by Ubisoft and not Nintendo.
Botw is a fine game, it just doesn’t do anything to scratch the Zelda game itch. It’s just a different game.
I mean ultimately it’s a matter of personal opinion, but there’s a reason so many legacy Zelda songs are so beloved and memorable, and have been sampled and remixed to death over decades and nobody really talks about or remembers any particular themes from BOTW.
Like I don’t remember music from BOTW being bad, I just don’t remember it at all
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As a die hard Zelda fan, I was beyond hyped for this one. Probably my biggest letdown in all of gaming.
- No real story to follow
- No cast of interesting characters outside of optional collectible flashbacks
- Repetitive, lifeless gameplay. No real dungeons or temples, every “mini dungeon” that does exist is the same copy pasted theme.
- No score of memorable unique music, just the MiNiMaLiSm of some understated occasional piano.
- Atrocious lack of enemy variety.
- a focus on exploration that rewards you with precious little given that any weapons your find will just break, and there are no unique combat or traversal items to unlock.
Came back to my save a couple times to push through, but the entire game is just the same 4 activities copy pasted 300 times with no variation or progression that makes your 50th hour unique from your first. It’s like. Soulless kowtow to Ubisoft game design in a once beautiful and innovative game series. Makes me mad just thinking about it lol.
The last 10 years or so, there was a sort of “Old RE” and “New RE” set of fans. The new games have really kept their distance from existing lore, and the gameplay has been very different from the older games.
This is the first new Resident Evil game in a long time that promises to bring the old lore back to the forefront, as well as merging the two styles of game.
Now that several of the points you’ve made have been proven concretely wrong, and you just keep moving the goal posts further and further each time, I feel like your argument has been muddied to the point that I don’t really know what it is anymore. “Yeah Xbox was the first to build a product like that, but we used to have 30 different products that did some of those things, entirely separately from each other without any integration or cohesion, most of which have been largely lost to time because the way Xbox did it was so much better it became the expected standard for the next 20 years for everyone else to copy, so therefore they don’t get any credit”
OK.
Let’s recap:
- You thought that infrastructure doesn’t have an associated cost in the real world like it does on Xbox and PlayStation.
We proved that was wrong because there are all kinds of fees, taxes, and mechanisms in the real world that exist to fund infrastructure.
- You thought that game developers on PC invented the unified identity system that’s now an industry standard, which is the thing you’re paying that subscription for.
We proved that was wrong because Xbox Live was the first to do it in 2008. Prior to Xbox, there was no app that provided this functionality.
- You thought that the infrastructure behind these things doesn’t cost any many and that Xbox only started charging for it out of greed because they were making billions of dollars in profit with or without it.
We proved that you don’t know the difference between revenue and profit, or the fact that this infrastructure and hardware subsidization lead to Xbox being unprofitable for years after you thought they were profitable.
Now you’re changing directions to other products that did something entirely unrelated to what we’re talking about, in order to find some parallel in an entirely different market. We’re REALLY grasping at straws here now.
Think of any other system that incorporated already existing features together to form a more convenient enjoyable experience and you’ll see that there isn’t a subscription fee.
Such as?
Public malls
You mean those things that have proven to be economical failures? This just disproves your own point??
smart phones (still replaces multiple products without a data plan)
So hardware that doesn’t cost you a dime to use day to day unless you… use their infrastructure to make it interact with other people in a more convenient way? You mean exactly like Xbox Live
Like you’re arguing against yourself at this point so you don’t really need me anymore? I’m just going to “declare victory and walk away” so to speak unless you can figure out what point you wanna make. I’m not going to give you anymore of my time to this game of whack-a-mole.
Xbox Live, the very thing we’re talking about, was the original unified party system. Prior to it, there were third party voice chat systems and third party lobby systems, but these were disparate systems you had to maintain separate identities for. Difference games supported different lobby systems so you couldn’t even have just one of each either. Xbox was the first to tie these things together under one “Gamertag” as one persistent presence and identity you could use to coordinate all your friends together in to chat, join in games through, collect persistent achievements, etc.
Many years later we now have that on PC via Steam, but even then that doesn’t cover all games on the platform since there are games locked to Epic, Uplay, or indie games sold direct through a website.
To be fair you would need to take into account every available piece of software to make the determination if those features were available for PC before, at the same time, or after consoles
Taking into account every available piece of software, those features appeared on PC 15 years or so after consoles. And only really achieved similar feature parity with early consoles in 2018, and only if you buy all your games from Steam.
Big successful companies generally don’t come up with big new good ideas, they steal them from other products that have already been proven.
In this case the PC company Valve “stole” them from Xbox and Sony. That doesn’t really help your argument at all here, on the contrary it just goes to show how much easier valve has had it as all they’ve had to do is follow a blueprint, keeping their costs lower which uniquely helps them subsidize them.
In 2004 the Microsoft video game division reported profits of 2.75 billion.
In 2004 the Xbox division of Microsoft reported $0 in profits. Xbox division became profitable for the first time in 2008. Know what was the driving force behind that sustained profitability?
Do I really need to tell you the answer or do you think you can guess?
Yeah sorry, what is this… Like the third time I’ve stated this? PC did all of the things you’re claiming without an extra subscription fee.
It did not do all those things. Not until very recently, and only through Steam. You can say it as many times as you want, that doesn’t make it true lol.
My point is they didn’t need to, as evidenced by someone else who did the exact same thing without the subscription model.
Sony did it for awhile without the subscription model too. Thats not evidence that they didn’t need to. The cost of infrastructure needed to maintain this model has gone up in the last 25 years with more players, higher expectations, and added complexity contributing to more manpower and higher salary expectations.
A free service doesn’t scale very well when it gets exponentially more expensive to maintain as time goes on. Sony was able to subsidize that service at one point in time but very understandably they can’t do that in the big 26. They already sell the hardware at a loss, if they continued to provide that infrastructure for free, leaving them only with commission on PS store sales, but also we don’t want them to take that big a cut from game developers, and we want them to still provide disk drives so we can buy and share games outside their store, and also we don’t want them to buy studios and make games exclusive to their platform… like corporate greed is one thing but also god forbid we just pay a reasonable price for the things we use.
Valve on the other hand doesn’t have to worry about this because they were never in the hardware game to begin with, and now with the Steam Machine they’ve already confirmed they’re not subsidizing hardware.
We already discussed this. The Playstation Plus subscription isnt paying for
internetMultiplayer infrastructure.
It is. The party system, voice chat services, and the ability to join on or invite friends in a universal way regardless of the game without having to make an account for that game all requires expensive infrastructure and manpower to build and maintain.
Oh I was… So Xbox game pass released in 2002, PlayStation followed much later in 2010.
Xbox GamePass released in 2017 and has nothing to do with multiplayer. The multiplayer service Xbox live released in 2002 and PlayStation followed in 2006. You’re not beating the allegations.
the subscription “fee” isn’t what fixed multiplayer design, that was fixed by… Game developers.
Game developers were uninvolved in the fix for multiplayer design. Game developers are unsurprisingly, only involved in the development of their game. The reliable third party social systems were designed by engineers at Xbox and Sony, and on the PC side at Valve. Multiplayer existed on consoles prior to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, but just like their PC counterpart, it was clunky, unintuitive, and inconsistent between games. The PlayStation network and XBL were created as a direct result of those issues.
I mean where they spend the money is irrelevant.
So it’s ok to pay money for infrastructure for your car to use, but when you have to pay for the infrastructure for your video games it’s robbery? Now I feel like you’re the one being arbitrary.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet
This tells me you weren’t around for the early days of PC gaming. On the contrary, PC gaming went through a couple phases when it came to online multiplayer. Early multiplayer games often didn’t have matchmaking or dedicated server discovery at all, then there was the Gamespy era where a bunch of games delegated their multiplayer matchmaking to a third party with limited functionality and ads unless you paid a premium subscription.
It was the game consoles that really fixed multiplayer early on with their party systems that persisted outside of each game. Today Steam has similar functionality, but Valve is just eating those costs, just as Sony used to. Difference is Valve doesn’t have to sell you your computer at a loss, they they can have loss leaders like that in different areas.
It works pretty well. The console network fees fund infrastructure, the employees that run the infrastructure, etc. neither the gas tax nor the console network fees are arbitrary. As for the “required renewal despite not using it” thing we just have other things for that in the form of vehicle registration.
This is a big reason why I’m hyped for Steam machine.