I get it.

I sometimes put AAA games on my wishlist anyway.
Not to buy them on release but to get alerted when they go on discount at some point down the line, which is generally how I use my wishlist mostly.

I have some unreleased indie games on there as well, but those I might just buy full price anyway whenever I feel like it or have a little extra free time to play a bit more at a time.

Nice review, thank you.

I am pretty sure Epic has given this game away for free in the past so you may have access to it without having to buy it.

I think it is worth a try if you want a relatively relaxed platformer experience (or you are a hardcore gamer and want to try the final boss unprepared, which I am told is quite the challenge).

You comment and comment and explain and explain shit that everyone already knows.

It is like you just recently learned what marketing is and now you feel like you know some big secret.

Just to make it short.
Every product in the world is marketed in a way to motivate consumers to buy.
That is not inherently immoral.

You said every successful game monetizes by maximizing addiction and frustration.

I have proven you wrong by naming games that just DO NOT MAXIMIZE FRUSTRATION.

Yeah off course even those games dangle stuff in front of you that you are supposed to buy.
That’s the whole business model of f2p games.

But there are different ways to get to the players money.

There are those that indeed trigger responses to frustration.
This is absolutely prevalent in mobile games or even those million deckbuilder games.

But there just are also games that use other ways to make players buy mtx.
Again, you can play PoE, LoL, CS and many other games for literal thousands of hours without ever getting coaxed into frustrating barriers like a Diablo Immortals would do to players.

You said there aren’t. So you were wrong.

So have fun running around with a goalpost in your hand, I am done.

right?

No, still wrong.

Obviously it is something that is not given to you for free.
It is a product and the developers/publishers are doing business after all.

And yes Sherlock, it is qol functionality that people playing the endgame might want and that is not included in the free version of the game.
But every functionality that any player ever needs is available for far less than what any other AAA title costs up front.

PoE is mainly financed by purely cosmetic supporter packs and whales.
Is that much more ethical than what you described? Maybe not.

But it sure as hell is not banking on frustrating the average user and thus a completely different form of monetization than the one that you just doubled down on insisting is the only one there is.
So again as I said, you are just plain wrong.

Oh and in CS I don’t think you can buy any functionality at all.
Only cosmetics, that don’t do anything for you in the game.

Any successful example is optimized for addiction and frustration.

That is just plain wrong.
Addiction I guess but frustration definitely not necessarily.
There are countless examples of highly successful games that do not monetize like that.

You can happily play PoE for thousands of hours without paying a penny; if you want to get into trading drop like 20 bucks for some stash tabs and you are ready to go again for absolutely any content the game has to offer.

CS or LoL also work just fine for f2p players.

And I say that as a player that fucking hates the new generation of soulless live service games.

I am not in love with this artstyle but if the gameplay is as crisp as one should expect from Evil Empire I will probably give this a chance.

Elden Ring runs just fine on my Deck, but it drains my battery pretty fast.

But I have a refurbished non OLED deck so ymmv.

I’d argue there is only micro in chess and no macro, but I get your point.

Those Larian Studios people seem pretty nice from what one can hear.

Lovecraftian art is inspired by the tone and the mystery of Lovecrafts works and not by his racism.

But that aside I didn’t downvote you for your first sentence.
I personally wouldn’t even have downvoted you for your second sentence, even though I strongly disagree with it.

I downvoted you for your edit, which ironically is totally tone deaf.
Noone downvoted the fact, that you called the dude some stuff. You got downvoted for attacking Valve over an innocent sale of supernatural mystery games.

Having read some of his works, it sometimes is scarring to read how he pictures arabic or black peope.

He definitely let his personal racism seep into his stories.
So I think the argument can be made, that one shouldn’t just consume his works without critically reflecting on the author.

There is one story set in Egypt that I remember, where the open racism kept on breaking my immersion repeatedly.

But I agree that calling Valve tone deaf for highlighting lovecraftian games misses the spot.
Lovecraftian art is inspired by the tone and the mystery of Lovecrafts works and not of his racism.

Totally different genre, but I liked how Celeste approached this.

If you struggle to complete it there are tons of accessibility options to make the game more approachable.

And the content necessary to finish the games story is not too much, while giving challenging -well- challenges to anyone who wants to spend more time with the game.

And you clear the game screen by screen making it possible to only play it a short bit at a time.

It’s almost a bonus that the story and soundtrack are fucking beautiful.

Financial success.

Is it good?

And does it include a rootkit?

At least the Blizzard RTS community seems to be pretty optimistic to me.

And Frost Giant seemed to be aware that their niche is made up of competitive RTS gamers that hate, hate, hate pay to win.

If you like reading and are into the Witcher I have just the thing for you.

Was it ever different with Konami?

I watched some video on the Castlevania franchise a while ago and the amount of corporate fuckery even early on made it sound like a miracle there were some pretty good games among them, even before SotN.

I didn’t watch the video but the newer Pokémon games are actually bad by different measures.

The graphics of the newest one (whatever it is called) is at least a whole generation behind other Switch titles and still it suffers from FPS drops and textures that just pop up while already in view.
That is just objectively bad.

That they never really innovated very much on the turn based RPG formula or that the newer games are very easy are things that I don’t even mind, especially because the games are supposed to be accessible for children.
That could make for a nice relaxing game after a long day of work.

But I am not willing to pay 70 something bucks for a game that is so obviously made without the necessary care for the product.

Do you need to be like super good to enjoy this (as it seems to get comparisons to Kaizo smw) or can you play this casually?

I actually got a spot in the closed alpha this month.

It feels pretty good so far even though unfortunately I can’t play as much as I would like due to my job and aspects of my personal life taking a lot of time right now.
I plan on getting at least a couple more games in this weekend.

Usually I am against huge mergers like this because they rarely benefit the customer, but ActiBlizzard was about as bad as it gets anyway.

Selfishly I hope maybe at least one decent RTS might come from this before everything gets enshittyfied again.
I realize though that OG Warcraft/Starcraft were not the big motivators for MS so the chance is probably slim.

Well depending on how inaccurate you are willing to tolerate there is the demake.

But that wasn’t for me.

Today it will be me to go on everyone’s nerves with the obligatory
"When Bloodborne?

At this rate I will eventually emulate it on my PC.

I wanted to buy one full price game this fall.
I decided against AC6, so LoP and BG3 were frontrunners.

Well that’s an easy choice now.

That’s true.

I may play this at some point, but I am surely not buying it while I have DS2 unfinished, because I started ER, DS3 and Sekiro wait in my Steam Library and Epic gave away Nioh.

Damn I have a full time job and Soulslikes are not the only games I enjoy.

I think even From software alone publishes games faster than I finish them.

Thanks.

When I finally get my deck I will give it a try.
Trading is for wfh days then.

Do you enjoy PoE with a controller?

I didn’t like it when I triedit once, but I might give it another chance.

I have bought GD specifically because someone said it was better on controller than PoE and I kinda wanted to play on the couch when I was sick a while ago.

At least for a couple of hours as a necromancer it worked pretty well.

For now I went back to PoE with K&M, but I don’t rule out, that I might give GD another shot.
And if I do, I will try again with the controller.

I appreciate your response but I have to disagree.

Today I have a bit of free time and might get in a bit of gaming.
But it won’t be POE because I didn’t really enjoy the last two builds that I played a couple of seasons ago and the one with zombies I played before that doesn’t seem super viable anymore.
So I would need to find another build, update my PoB, update my Lootfilter, look if all the trade plug-ins still work and then my free Saturday is half over.

None of those things are enjoyable complexity for me where I can express skill or individuality.
But if I just play without 3rd party stuff I will have a shit build, struggle with the acts and be useless in the endgame.

And that makes me kinda sad because actually playing POE is more enjoyable than the other games you suggested and I don’t agree with the sentiment that there is no place for a more casual POE experience.

Still if a fish is rotting from the head you have to cut it off.

Doesn’t instantly make it a tasty meal, but it is a necessary first step.

I mean they seem to work for the bottom line of the companies.
But what do I care about that.

As long as I don’t have to buy new inventory tabs I don’t really mind.
Actually I think it is a good idea to start with a relatively clean slate, POE is pretty loaded with mechanics and maybe they can skim some off.

I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I would like it if I could jump back into the game every couple of seasons without having to follow a build guide or being dead lost and using like 5 different 3rd party tools.
I don’t have a lot of time for gaming anymore and I want to play other games, too.

Then again I know there are people that love the complexity.

Are those any good?

Alyx.