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Ixion had me at the trailer. Not many games or movies hold that kind of sway over me, and I was so richly rewarded for giving it a shot.
My only frustration with the game is how low replay-ability is, and how the overall plot is fixed. You can make some different decisions along the way, but you’re not going to impact the story all that much.
I know I’m probably asking too much of a looter-shooter, but can we just get a new rendition of this game with the writers from BL2? Anthony Burch, where are you?
I’d happily jump on the “spiritual sequel” bandwagon if there is one.
BL3 was good enough as a technical achievement, with solid game-play and mechanics, but the story and writing just wasn’t at the same bar.
On the home-gamer gameplay side, this is a solid list. On the technology side, I think there’s even more that makes sense for a curated museum tour. There were big leaps made in arcade tech through the 80’s and 90’s that were pushing all manner of graphics and sound, head-and-shoulders above the previous generation.
Sega’s “super scaler” boards come to mind, allowing for games like Hang-on, Outrun, and After Burner. Digitized sound samples started with Sinistar and Tempest. Dragon’s Lair amazed everyone with an interactive LaserDisc experience. There were also notable forays into AR with Time Traveler, and VR with Virutality. Lastly, we have the fully-enclosed and immersive cockpit of early Battletech simulators.
This is exactly like the pearl-clutching we had back in the 1980’s around D&D and music lyrics. At least we moved the goalpost from satanic panic and thinly-veiled racism, over to “art that features sexual expression I don’t understand.”
If history is any indicator, their actions are only going to increase awareness of this kind of stuff.
Did they conduct this test in Japan? I ask since we could be losing something in translation. AFAIK, the Japanese people have a habit of being overly polite and not conveying strong emotion publicly, which might explain Kojima’s reaction. If he wanted to provoke a strong reaction in people, they’d say very different things.
Beating most any “hard” video game is always a great feeling just due to the sheer hours that go into it. In some cases, you have to develop the memory and skill to do the whole thing in one sitting. I can’t count how many from the NES era fit this criteria. Top of that list are: Contra, Bionic Commando, and most Zelda and Mega Man games.
The best one happened in the middle of my Dark Souls play-through. I kept having to quit playing after short sessions, as skill and vigor checks kept wrecking me. This lead to anger and rage that just made it impossible to proceed. Once I made the connection that I could concentrate more and flow through combat more easily while calm, I changed tactics to calming my own mind and keeping it that way. The game just “opened up” after that. From there on, it was much more about meditation and breathing than equipment and leveling - skills I now carry with me everywhere. DS literally made me a calmer and more resilient person.
Oh, it’s petty cash to be sure. If you have $100-ish bucks to throw around, you probably aren’t going to miss much by not doing this. Unless, of course, letting someone else take even one dollar from you in this way is against your religion or something (i.e. the principle of the thing). Conversely, if you need the handful of dollars this makes, you probably don’t have that kind of walking-around money in the first place.
Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve’s percentage and then some. Yeah, that’s a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.
It’s also worth noting that the launch PS3 also had a whole PS2 inside of it, which partially explains the inflated price point. I say partially since I’m prrety sure that a PS2 slim cost a lot less than $330 in 2006 dollars; they could have just bundled both consoles or offered a rebate on a PS2 purchase and called it a day.
It’s even easier than that. Both of these genres have design features that require minimal balancing, making for an even faster dev cycle.
Roguelikes side-step the need for traditional game balance by providing meta progression and building inevitable-death-by-impossible-odds into the core game. For Roguelikes that actually have an ending, all the developer needs to do is provide enough meta progression perks to overcome the game’s peak difficulty, for even the worst of players. Everyone else gets bragging rights for beating the game faster than that. Either way, the lack of balance and “fairness” in the core design are features, not flaws.
Deck builders follow in Magic The Gathering’s footsteps: you never need to fully balance it. Ever. The random draw mechanisms, combined with a deep inventory of resource and item/creature/action cards, make it unlikely that a player gets an overpowered hand all the time. Pepper a few ridiculously overpowered cards in there, and it just feels more fun. Plus, if you keep the gravy train going with regular add-ons, the lack of balance is even further masked by all the possible choices. And yes, some player will min/max a deck at great personal expense and wipe the floor with their opponents because it was never fair in the first place, and doing so is a feature.
There’s also the concept of “build to sell” instead of “build to last.” Longevity of a company is not a consideration when the vulture venture capitalists see a bigger return in pawning off their investment instead of reaping dividends. Sadly, this outlook isn’t always knowable by everyone in said company. In my experience, it’s usually impossible to tell unless the company is already in the red or is about to be.
I’m actually starting to think it’s on purpose. Just like with spam email with misspellings and the kind of ear-marks that warns off smart people, the only ones left to click on “win a free iphone” are easily duped. Going after people that are drawn in by iconography and optics, but fail to understand nuance and the substance behind them, may be entirely the point.