all-knight-party
sometimes I talk about video games. RIP kbin.run
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It’s almost created this double underdog scenario for CDPR. First, they released Witcher 2 and then 3, where their game quality jumped incredibly drastically from the first game.
Then they brought their reputation crashing down to earth on Cyberpunk’s release, but fixed the game well enough that it now feels like an underdog overcoming odds in the public memory. They’ve basically fully recovered their public image, which I’m unsure if they deserve. People can like how it turned out now, but they shouldn’t forget.
Dark Souls, and other from soft souls likes (except Sekiro and Bloodborne).
You are encouraged to play cautiously and intently, otherwise you’ll get slapped by concealed enemies, mobs with unexpected movesets, and being over aggressive and “greedy” during boss fights will end many an attempt. I love these games for that.
Wouldn’t that make it matter more? If your opponent can’t hear well and is relying on visual twitch to get an unseen opponent, but the unseen opponent can hear their location and is already aiming near the location of the opponent when they round a corner, the player with superior audio potentially has a much faster time to aim
I’m a little behind, but I completed AC Odyssey and that was just buy it and that’s it. They had a cash shop for armor sets but it was completely unnecessary and I never even looked at it much less bought anything from it. So provided the releases after that are the same it’s a “there is an MTX shop but the game is balanced without it” situation
MECHANICAL/GAME STRUCTURE SPOILERS
Yeah, you would need to play it at least a couple “rounds” for it to really kick into full effect. It’s a choice heavy game where most choices alter your route in ways that sort of become more and more unique the further you get, until it kicks you back to the start allowing you to make different choices, and the culmination of a few rounds results in a unique true end game.
The ways or fact that this is happening are not clear until you’ve gone through enough to start to see how what you do manipulates the world state, and the true story and meaning behind it all sort of slowly unfolds and even after completion requires some wonder and unpacking on the part of the player to fully enjoy.
I do find it a shame you didn’t get hooked into it, it might just be one of those things where you have to come to it in just the right mood for it to really have full effect.
It’s not super common, but it’s been around in an essentially free form through Garry’s Mod for a very very long time, so most people have had their fill of it there or in modes within other games. Roblox also has one, even Call of Duty Cold War had a prop hunt mode, so it’s a lot harder for paid standalone games to make a dent, but this one does a lot more than just strict prop hunt, I think it deserves more population
I find the biggest difference in itch scratched between Diablo-like ARPGs and Halls of Torment is that the pacing is very different. Diablo has a lot more player control over when there are breaks in the action providing downtime for the player to sort through gear and abilities. Halls of Torment sort of has that when you’re making choices, but it’s waaaay faster
It has a bit of resemblance, in that it’s a dark fantasy action game in which the player character fights a very large number of enemy units in order to level up and increase their power while fighting bosses interspersed throughout, occasionally upgrading abilities and acquiring gear. and of course the art style is directly cribbing Diablo 1.
But in the nitty gritty of how the combat works, how the gear and abilities work, the format of the levels and win condition of the game and pretty much everything else, it’s very different from Diablo.
I couldn’t take this post seriously with how much subjective opinion is stated as fact. Fallout 4 is one of my favorite games, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to its faults and shortcomings. That being said, I can’t read something that’s claiming extremely broad negative things like Fallout 76 is still “broken” and only lives because of MTX" without acknowledging “why people are playing this and microtransacting if the game is broken and irredeemable?” And without defining what is broken and what is not.
I think Starfield was a wake up call for Bethesda. They need to heed it and keep up with the times, get back in touch with the simulational and unique things that they were known for and can still carve a niche out of, and not rest on their laurels as the rest of the gaming landscape innovates around them.
As soon as the unique and interesting mechanics and systems have been eclipsed by Bethesda’s failure to make an exceedingly polished and innovative game, people stop justifying the jank and the public opinion falls off. Starfield is their last sign to turn the ship around.
Voices of the Void a free (likely while it’s in pre-alpha) light simulational game about receiving outer space signals and recording them to sell. You use the currency to clean up, upgrade, and decorate your small facility while moving around the Swiss forest valley you’re in to repair and upkeep the satellite dishes that make the operation function.
It sounds very purely simulational, but there are a lot of secrets and interesting signals that are more than signals. It’s also an Unreal engine game, but features a lot of Source engine love, for example the art style is reminiscent of Half-Life 1, all of the sound effects are EXTREMELY Source game nostalgic, and there’s crouch jumping.
It depends. There are visual novels in which you can set them on auto and just let voice acting play out. I think there’s strong similarities there, though I don’t think anyone could get away with calling a Telltale style narrative game a visual novel, flat out.
But I do think they are doing similar things, they may scratch similar itches.
Definitely not trying to do that. To speak on the idea of visible, inaccessible DLC in a game, it is bad, full stop. I think it’s certainly cynical of the developers to put the doors there and not completely remove them unless you have the DLC installed.
Seeing those seams is something you can’t help but notice, and it absolutely does impact your perception of the game to have them there. What I am saying is that Dead Cells is so thoroughly well made and considered that I was able to tell myself “these doors are locked until I beat the game on a certain boss cell and feel justified to pay for an ‘expansion’ and access new content”.
I can live with that specifically because the doors are not necessary, you just can’t enter them and take a different path, similar to other locked zone doors that are instead locked because of boss cell requirements. The maps are also consistently laid out in terms of direction to get to a certain zone entrance, so once I know it’s there I can avoid that path in the future until I decide to stop playing or buy more content.
If Dead Cells were a lesser game I would be much less forgiving about it, and to be clear, again, the fact that you can see DLC doors for DLC you don’t have is bad design, full stop. It’s just that the game is so good overall, I think it’d be sad for someone to pass it up for that reason, or to think that they’re not getting enough because of it. It’s a shame, but the game’s still awesome.
I don’t think you’re wrong to feel the way you do, but try not to sleep on the game because of it. Even without the paid DLC the base game and free updates have a lot of mileage.
I would doubt you’d hit a progression dead end in that game. you’d have to be god cracked at it and enjoy it enough to play that much and milk what’s already there, and at that point you’d probably want to buy the DLC to extend the variety and experience, because it’s that good to begin with.
I started playing this game before there was DLC. You know what? It was fucking fun.
I think there’s a strong possibility you’re correct, especially with that genre. When it comes to purely competitive games continual new content and adjustments keep the masses coming back, and providing those things long term with no monetization is a business suicidal idea, and I think that strong reasoning like that excuses a lot of the cynicism and bad faith behind MTX in those specific cases provided its still relatively fair.
I give you an A+ for an actual strong argument for MTX (in those and related cases)
Personally, yeah, I find it much less offensive if the extra purchases do not nag you in-game and their presence is not missed or noticed in terms of affecting balance.
For example, Middle Earth Shadow of War infamously let you buy Uruks. Having played the fuck out of that game I can confidently say the game was balanced such that you never needed to do that (apart from the end game grind, but the grind is the gameplay, so if you hit end game and didnt want to grind, you just didn’t wanna keep playing), but having it appear in the menus was jarring and the idea of buying an Uruk with real money juxtaposed next to the mechanical intent of obtaining Uruks through exploration, marking, stalking, and exploiting their weaknesses just stuck out like a cynical sore thumb.
If they put the Uruk purchases outside the game with no in-game ads and I played through Shadow of War and was like “man holy shit, my Uruks cannot keep up with the curve, this is insanely grindy” and I discovered that you could buy them and skip it, I’d say thats dastardly as well.
But the happy medium would be balancing it so it wasn’t necessary, but providing an external purchase to milk that revenue if they really still wanted to. That example is moot now anyway since they eventually removed the MTX Uruks entirely.
I know and understand the whole idea of maximizing artist hours for cosmetic DLC. It’s an understandable reason for it to exist.
However, the big thing about MTX to me is the way it changes my perception of the game and how it feels to interact with it. Playing games without in-game cash shops or MTX allows me to focus on the game itself and feel that what I’ve purchased is one cohesive piece that works in a singular purpose towards a goal of something enjoyable to play and rewarding to explore the content of.
Something like Prey 2016. My entire memory and experience of playing that game is absolutely nothing but the experience of the lore, atmosphere, gameplay, decisions, and the creativity of exploration. At no point was I ever passing over menu options designed to sell me more piecemeal content, I wasn’t wading through a reel of battle pass cosmetics, I wasn’t attempting to ignore little rectangular ads on the main menu asking me to check some skins out.
And again, I totally understand why those things are there and I’m not inherently against their existence, I enjoy many games where those experiences are a part. In the end, I just believe that being free of that stuff absolutely makes a game feel perceptibly better and more pure, more of a game and less of a transparently monetized product.
I also feel like there’s a sort of forbidden knowledge aspect to the whole “maximizing artist labor time for cosmetic MTX”. The best way for cosmetic MTX to happen is to utilize extra possible labor time that couldn’t be used elsewhere. I’d love to believe that any cosmetic MTX took no time or development from any other part of the game. I’d love to believe that no amazing visual design for armor or weapons was held because its more premium appearance would better fit a paid item than a free base game one.
But you’ll never know that for sure. There will always be that inkling of cynical doubt that the cool item got a price tag and the okay one ended up in the base game. That the visual artists are so burnt making constant art for base game and then MTX that their energy couldn’t be focused solely on the core experience. I can assume, I can take the company’s word for it, but I’ll never be able to cleanse my mind of the knowledge that it’s a separate kind of content from the base game.
It’s more of a “are good games with microtransactions good regardless of MTX or in spite of them?”
You can totally have a good game with MTX, but I think it always lowers the quality in some way, and they’re only good in spite. I don’t think OP is suggesting that no MTX guarantees a good game, but that a game should stand on its own merits and sell its whole experience instead of chopping itself up piecemeal
I don’t play Terraria and don’t follow its updates, but the only situation I could assume might justify crunch is if the devs confirmed a date for an update, and they were in danger of failing to meet it. Not justify as in “it would be right for them to crunch”. More like “I could imagine a company would expect the workers to crunch for this”