Do streamers call themselves influencers?

So they spent advertising money on freelance shills. Ok, that is just another form of advertising like paying an advertising company to do advertising.

Ubicent?

Tensoft?

On the upside you rarely need a large number of different mats to make aomething, but it can be annoying to organize and since you can build better chests that hold more over time you might end up needing to reorganize stuff every couple biomes if you collect a lot of extra stuff as you go.

But you don’t have to do it all at once either. Just make the new containers as needed and remove the old ones when space is needed. You can always build more house!

Totally worth it at full price, so this is even better!

It is also the only survival game I enjoy. You can’t starve to death, the starting area is not crazy difficult, and the art style makes finding the things you need easy.

The difficulty does ramp up as you go through the biomes, which is where it can get brutal if you are caught off guard. I honestly love the first five or so biomes and there is a ton of replayability with exploring, building bases and outposts, and just seeing what you can do.

Also one of the rare games where I leave the ambient music on.

If nothing else, the total volume of great games that are available to play keeps increasing because of massive improvements in backwards compatibility through steam and other online game distributors.

Are they getting worse overall or are we just comparing all of the current AAA games to the best AAA of the past few decades? Or comparing the current versions of series to the high points, which might just be the first game in the series?

We definitely have a number of high quality AAA games that come out each year. Most prior years had a few high quality AAA games and a lot of mediocre or terrible ones too. It’s kind of like music where the average quality over time is actually pretty consistent, but in any given year there are a lot of turds and there are certain trends that are common to those turds.

90% of every entertainment medium tends to be terrible, but when we look back we mostly remember the 10% that were good and only a few of the absolute worst to laugh at.

If a game is going to have mtx, they shouldn’t be charging for it during a prerelease. They have multiple ethical ways to handle it that would garner better feedback.

1. Leave it out entirely and focus on the gameplay. That is what should be selling the game anyway.

2. Have the mtx but without a way to pay real money. Give the players the option to ‘purchase’ in game currency and give them a running total.

The latter would be reset at release, but would gather feedback on what people want to spend and if the promo process is well implemented.

Both would run counter to the actual purpose of the vast majority of mtx which is fleecing whales and this is EA.

The most ethical implementation of mtx that I know of is actually for a paid game, Helldivers 2. The in game promo stuff is minimal and does not negatively impact the menus or interacting with the ship. The option to buy stuff doesn’t use dark patterns, but it is easily available. When they did set prices too high for a collaboration thing they apologized due to feedback and gave the other half of the stuff that would have been for sale to every single player. It is basically the exact opposite of Call of Duty’s mtx.

I don’t think interacting with your reality is very productive.

So you refuse to accept that people mean what they say and feel the need to defend a for profit company by twisting any complaints into some kind of faked outrage conspiracy.

Have fun with that.

You keep acting like those are different concerns, but the reason for concern is the combination of mtx, free to play, and being in alpha.

Being mad loudly online at a frequent punching bag with a bad reputation is sheer mob-induced dopamine and that’s why that headline exists and why this conversation happens.

Or maybe they are a punching bag because of the things they repeatedly do, did you consider that?

It isn’t like multiversus is the only one that did this. I clearly said they were an example of a larger trend.

People just want to be mad at things because some other things that are unrelated made them mad once and they want to just smear the anger a bit.

Or maybe they are annoyed by the things they gave examples of instead of being some kind of crazy conspiracy.

We all realize that in-game cosmetics aren’t real, right?

Yes, but the unavoidable advertising of those cosmetics frequently drag down the experience when there are multiple click through screens and progress bars on battle passes the player didn’t buy and a ton of other negatives that have nothing to do with whether cosmetics affect game play. Free to play frequently means ‘annoying nag menus’.

I happened to focus on getting their money early and calling a reset of their fake money a refund being misleading.

It also happens that my experience with early access free to play was Multiversus, where they took a moderately OK early access game that added mtx, then went silent for months and came back as a trash version of the same game with even more mtx. This being EA I expect them to go even harder into the mtx at the expense of game play.

They are ‘refunding’ the virtual currency. I would bet at least some lf the items purchased during prerelease will cost more on release.

But the main thing is they are basically trying the ‘free to play’ version of preordering, where they get your money before releasing a finished game.

Depends on the implementation.

If the promotion of mtx.is jarring or overwhelming then even limiting to cosmetics sucks. If something ends and there are multiple click through screens encouraging players to by mtx and other ads within the game to buy the mtx it can become a chore to ignore. Even if gameplay itself is not impacted, the things that happen outside of gameplay can deag down the whole experience.

An example would be those stupid unskippable season pass screens where the bar goes up slowly and it reminds you of what you didn’t get becsuse tou didn’t buy the season pass. A few seconds each time, sure, but it adds up and is clearly trying to goad you into spending money. That shit sucks even if it limited to cosmetics.

Yes, and it was a lot more fun that working.

Maybe you played shitty games?

Loading screens and pretty much all of the 2d customization in the game looks like ai slop.

but we’re at the point where it feels like a lot of media are just adding in sex scenes for the spectacle of it without it serving any particular purpose for narrative development or characterization.

This has been a thing in movies since they existed. A bit less common, but still there, in books and TV. It isn’t anything new, but at least it is becoming less common.

I played the crap out of NWN when it was first released, even did a lot of custom srevers and played as the DM. Bought the enhanced edition and realized that I had completely forgotten how clunky the movement was. Everything else was awesome!

With they had added real time DM tools to BG3 like they had in NWN so I could drop in mobs and add in custom objects on the fly for friends. That would have been as fun as NWN was back in the day!

Light No Fire is the latest project from Hello Games, the studio behind the now-successful No Man’s Sky. Instead of exploring deep space, players will venture into a lively fantasy world with dynamic biomes. Announced in late 2023, the game was unveiled with this trailer:

So the fact that the blew the release of NMS by overpromising makes me skeptical that it will be nearly as immersive as the promo and the claims, but it is possible that they learned and are being truthful.

I’m talking about possible ways of monetizing these types of games, not 2XKO specifically.

free to play

other options like offering the game at a decent price…

That assumes that going all in on mtx an in game currency is the way to go and not other options like offering the game at a decent price and then selling skins and other mtx at reasonable prices.

The game wasn’t great, but was entertaining at the start of the open beta. I think they did a decent job with the characters, the style, and the moves like Shaggy throwing his sandwich. I had hopes that they would improve the netcode and hitboxes, but still got like 40 hours of fun out of it playing in a group with a friend.

The microtransactions were bad to start and only got worse. Charging for seasons in a beta? Stupidly high priced skins? Ugh. Then the went away for a while and the official release made the game playworse, microtransactions bascially assaulted you constantly, and any shred of fun was gone. They did the opposite of the feedback from the beta to chase microtransactions and that is why the game is dead already. They actively killed it.

Now I’m sad again.

Does gran turismo have open world roaming where you can get achievements for knocking down centuries old cactii?.

‘Recovering’ development costs by using a government enforced monopoly on game mechanics.

I love that your criteria for being dead is that you don’t like it.

It sounds like you like the large scale (32 or 64) battle FPS games, whoch are not as popular currently as they do tend into the issue you mention which is not having enough players makes matchmaking drag out happens faster than small team short round games.

I do play block ops 6 because it is one of a few cross platform games one friend enjoys. It isn’t terrible, just an average cod game, but it doesn’t have the vehicle maps like modern warfare and I kinda miss those.

I also play Helldivers 2 which is 3rd person that has first person aim down site options, although it is 4 player vs environment.

I do miss the battlefield games, they were hella fun back when I played them.

While I agree there is a high chance that any particular game tends to go down the monetization path, not all do.

Like anything else, live service does have a place in gaming but it absolutely does not need to be forced into everything.

I am really enjoying Helldivers 2 and it is a live service that is doing a great job of avoiding the FOMO aspect of most live service games while providing the benefits of a worldwide, changing campaign that has content added slowly over time to encourage continued engagement. It also offers daily challenges, but also rewards everyone for group efforts so it doesn’t punish for not playing every day.

The recently did an oopsie by going too high with the in game price on the collab with Killzone that would be the road to being predatory, but they listed to the response and handled it well enough. Sadly, this is the exception and not the rule.

All that money and updates still require restarts.

It apparently works well enough.

I can play any number multiple repetitive/nonlinear games that don’t require keeping track of a story or events. So racing games, most FPS, etc. Right now I can switch between Helldivers 2, Call of Duty, Forza Horizon, Valheim, Tekken, and so on at the drip of a hat. I do end up customizing controls so they are similar within a genre, so HD and COD get trmapped to my standard first person shooter control scheme.

But I cannot stay engaged with more than one game that has a storyline/things to rememeber like the Witcher, Red Dead Redemption 2, or Horizon Zero Dawn even if they have handy in game reminders for what to do. Switching between stories is my dealbreaker for playing at the same time. I also have trouble sticking with a story long enough to complete those types of games which is a bummer because I like the idea of them.

Hell, I’m surprised it is over 10% with how many of the most popular games have been around for years.

That could also be done by having improved techniques to quickly dispatch the rats without needing to also scale up the character’s toughness so their bites are less effective.

They can be a nice addition, but the article is written as them being a necessity for player engagement.

And I agree, but Marvel Rivals’ progression problem goes deeper than its battle pass: there just isn’t a lot to earn or play for.

Games that are fun to play don’t need that crap to keep players engaged.

Looks like you meant to reply to some other post.

I didn’t assume, you broadcasted it with ‘modern identity politics’ bullshit.

They mean ‘women protagonists bad!’