I’m more and more inclined to think AAA-industry is playing the long game. Old school gamers are a niche. Why would you cater to an obnoxious minority demanding finished products when you could be pushing a paradigm shift to a broader and less experienced audience where microtransactions, battlepasses, roadmaps and seasonal content (at least for the 3 months before the company pulls the plug due to lack of players) are par for the course.
Sure, some money is probably lost down the line, but if it’s used to normalize unfinished content and paying premium for skins and other extraneous BS, It’ll pay dividends in the future. And who knows, if you have enough chutzpah you could try applying for tax breaks, framing it as an investment instead of subversion.
For YEARS people played DotA in Warcraft 3, a contentless custom map made by people who weren’t being paid, and EVERYONE was happy, even Blizzard. Why a never ending stream of “content” became the new norm that suddenly nobody could live without seem bonkers to me. Yes I do enjoy getting to customize my heroes in this game but for the most part, I play with the same dozen or so that I liked and haven’t really felt desperate for more.
on the contrary the base game is.
it’s only payable if you want the two other campaigns any specific commander and skins.
you can effectively play it without spending a single penny
you dont need the heart of the swarm campaign
you don’t need the abathur commander or any other commander
you can buy the mecha swarm skin for your swarm race, but you don’t need it
you can climb the starcraft ranks unhindered by your lack of wallet
Did I mention it’s got a PvAI mode?
meaning there was over 25,000 voice lines to that game
I was doing the whole child thing
“blah blah blah” plus one
eventually it ends in infinity and beyond
You mean the same company that said Overwatch 2 was to have PvE and would be separate from Overwatch claims to have recorded over 25,000 lines?
Why…yes, I’ll believe them. Now if you excuse me, I need to put a for sale sign up on the ocean front property I have in my possession that is located in Arizona.
I purchased both the Terran and Zerg editions of SC2, they were both full game price. The expansion approach is well known since forever, the only curious part was that instead of adding playable story for all sides in each edition (expansion), they decided to allow PvP by all races but the story was meant to be one per expansion. Arguably it’s cleaner - some games claim anything but the master race story is fictional, others keep alternating like crazy…
Having to buy two expansions to stay up to date didn’t go very well, so the Protoss was made standalone.
This is a classic issue with any online game by now, and for a decade or more the model has shifted to have a core game with optional upgrades, be it heroes, skins, cars, tracks, trains, continents, planes, ships, countries, trucks, paint jobs… but everyone can play with everyone without investing in the full range first.
WC3 was the same before it was murdered, but the funniest of all was clearly Total Annihilation where everybody installed a mod (and-or unit packs and settings) and all would depend on whether they were compatible.
The Steam reviews are so innocent.
Well, World of Warcraft players would have a word.
They love it. I don’t play WoW for the exact same reason.
I also spent way more on DLC for my favorite game than I would have with a sub.
With wow I still feel like as if I am getting good value for my money regardless how dumb that may sound 20 years later now that gaming has shifted to a free to play model with heavy cash shop monetization.
They have this trading post thing now which is sort of like a monthly battle pass. It asks you to do hundreds of different kind of activities to earn points which you can then spend on cosmetics and one great thing about it is how it managed to revive many forgotten, outdated or ignored aspects of the game and most importantly, made the old world feel alive.
But soon after their greed ruined the whole concept by offering same currency points as a “bonus” to cash shop transactions. They said how they never wanted to sell these for real money but coincidentally made high-resolution currency icons in numbers 100, 250, 750 etc (there are a lot more).
I am partially tempted to go back to World of Warcraft…just to be a draenei warlock.
They been butchering it for years, but it has come to the point of where there is no such thing as lore in the warcraft universe. Just…the game has been butchered so much that it makes The Butcher uncomfortable just looking at it.
New continent is simply amazing and had a lot of base content to last you you a long time but the devs have terribly miscalculated the time it would take for players to grow bored of it and this is happened primarily because of the item level inflation. First three weeks have been incredible with everyone searching for rare mobs in order to gear up but as soon as instances opened up, it all died.
Regardless, it is probably the best and most fun expansion so far for world pvp but they haven’t done anything to capitalize on this beyond only two pvp quests a day, which can be completed even without interacting with other players.
I’ve made an extensive post in the customer support forum on how dragonriding and mounts have been bugged AF for the last month, so far I’ve had a blizzard bot come and peek into the topic asking me to reset my UI and after 30 days the issue is still being ignored, which is ridiculous considering how essential this key expansion feature is to the enjoyment of the game and how often players utilize it.
They just don’t seem to care. Anything else I would understand as not being a priority or being postponed in favor of different bug fixes, but this kind of a problem just showcases how mismanaged their products are.
Diablo 4 is doing horribly as well. Their major focus has now shifted into catching and identifying cheaters, which makes no sense at all since you are either playing a single player game or with other cheating friends. We are talking about a game where you would see random players in your game world for a short second, move on unaffected and forget about them entirely. You can’t even see a hint of the ladder system on the horizon.
Oh I am sure the expansion pack is a blast. I had fun in pretty much all of them save for the last two (which I refused to touch) but lore wise each one was essentially a meat wagon running over the battered corpse that is the lore of warcraft. Novels had done so as well, which is resulted in them writing themselves in a corner and making up villains as they go or going back and using an easter egg (I am looking at you pandaran) that was in a previous game in the warcraft games to inspire a new villain/region/mcguffin in the next expansion pack.
Then, when they DO get a golden opportunity to really expand upon the lore (Warlords of Draenor for example) they mess it up badly.
Honestly at this point anything goes. Bring Arthas back as the avatar of the void? Sure, why not? Sylvanas coming back as an angel that wants to hug everyone? Sure. Velen going off to pick up Illidan so they can be the Starsky and Hutch of Warcraft to then just bounce around the cosmos busting up baddies? Go ahead, wouldn’t surprise me.
Yrel leading the new army of light bois on a crusade that is a mirror image of the Burning Legion? I am calling that right now; it’s happening. There is going to be an expansion pack about it. Bet they’re going to round up all the alternative versions of themselves (because that jar of smelly worms was opened up in Warlords) and have an endless army of yellow glowsticks and snuggles.
They already proved that there is no such thing as permanent death. There are more worlds/dimensions/closets then there are layers to an onion.
If you were to jump into the game right now you’d simply be disappointed in two days after being shoehorned into the most boring activities. No joke, there is so much to do that it took me almost three months to explore everything, discover all the secrets, kill every rare mob.
Unfortunately today none of it feels rewarding enough and you would go straight into instances the moment you reached lvl 70. It is such a waste. Revendreth from Shadowlands has been heralded as one of the most amazing zones ever because of the extreme verticality but these new ones are a vault-jump above that benchmark.
Either way, at some point you simply grow tired of scripted content and the only thing which can make the game feel alive is player activity, hence the missed opportunity with world pvp.
9% of 95000 as of the moment of writing, being currently the worst rated game ever on steam. It is a wonderful sight, now only people need to learn not to put any money on the table too, as once they got it scammers could not care less (*cough* D4 *cough*).
Overwatch 2 is a critically acclaimed, team-based shooter game set in an optimistic future with an 9% of the 94,134 user reviews for this game are positive.
The comments on this diablo 4 video from blizzard are just what you would expect. I couldn’t force myself to watch though all of it but I somehow skipped to the most perfect moment to describe the mindset. She made some dungeons but knows barely anything about the game or how all the pieces fit together to create the final product. Also the showcased gameplay consists only of spamming the A button (at level 50 lol). Everyone would understand if they had focused more on explaining the intricates of level design but I’ve had more interesting conversations drunk while pissing in a toilet of a nightclub.
I love Overwatch, I hold it dearly to my heart, sadly none of them are in this sequel of an abomination, I maybe sounding like a total hater to some, but honestly, I simply do not care in the slightest, some say its a targeted review bombing by TF2 players, which is… true but not really, at best its probably 1%, OW2 is seriously an insult to a good franchise that was well established, with the only thing left for it is barely a husk of its success.
Shame, anyways, back to Baldur’s Gate 3 5th playthrough, Red Dragonborn Barbarian, ANGY SCALEY.
I find it funny that one of the images on the page says, “Critically Acclaimed”, with the “Overwhelmingly Negative” just close by. It’s at 9% positive now.
There are ads in a few places for D:I, D4, and OW2. It’s over. I have a pet theory that when a game has publicity, of any kind, it’s sure to suck. The only exception I recall was Bioshock Infinite. I felt that game was really good. But even then, I was l thinking, “uh oh.” This isn’t good.
LOL! The community section doesn’t even have an Artworks tab! But we have ways around that.