Fallout 76 having a $15 monthly subscription setup is an interesting choice for a game that didn’t even have enough content to justify $60 in the first place
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I don’t know the details but they also hadn’t bought the web domain named for their subscription someone else did and plastered it with a bunch of reddit hate on bethesda.
We live in a wild timeline.
I watched a video on it that summarized my opinion fairly well.
I like subscription models. If it were just a sub, I’d be fine. The problem is they’re double dipping with micro-transactions, and on top of that… what you’re getting isn’t very good. The sixteen dollars worth of atoms is pretty okay, if you use atoms regularly, but everything else?
The servers aren’t even technically servers. They’re instances you can control. It’s difficult to explain, but a good sign that they’re not independent servers? People can still get into them regardless of your permissions. They’re just instanced versions of the regular server you’re paying for access to. Each and every function, except for the Atoms, is broken in some way.
If the ‘private instances’ were actually servers, like people are wanting, I’d be fine with paying a small subscription for it. They’re not, however.
Edit —> also the game is pants
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I guarantee you if they ever allow mods in Fallout 76 it will only be possible on the private servers that are part of the subscription.
I’m not sure what to think about Bethesda right now. They release games so slowly that its hard to tell if something is really wrong with them or not, but the whole Fallout 76 situation is just… weird. A literal asset flip multiplayer game with barely any content with a whale-hunting style monetization scheme… are they trending toward becoming a big dumb greedy evil corporation that pumps out heavily monetized trash, or is this just a misstep?
I mean, Bethesda basically invented microtransactions with their infamous “horse armor” DLC. But they quickly reversed course and microtransactions weren’t seen in their games again until 76. Oh and arguably the paid mods of Skyrim and Fallout 4 I guess, but I don’t see those as categorically bad because letting modders get paid is sort of a good thing.
I’m anxious to see their next games because I’m a little worried about them. Are Starfield and TES 6 gonna be “games as a service” messes which are no fun to play?
If I can’t (for free) mod TES 6 into practically a different game with hundreds of mods I am done with them as a company
If making AAA titles profitable is such a problem for companies that they resort to sneaky backdoor charges, I wish they’d just… increase the price of their games?
I’m not gonna want to play a game that has important features like modding or private servers locked behind a subscription or additional fee. Those sorts of charges are annoying from a cost perspective, but worst of all they disrupt the actual design of the game.
But if a company that I know I like makes a high quality game and just says, “here it is, but its $120”… I might be OK with it? I’d pay double the typical asking price for another game of Skyrim’s quality, but I wouldn’t play it at all if it was saddled with always-online features/barriers to modding/game-altering microtransactions
I’m with you on this one. When you look per hour, at $120 a good game is a steal compared to almost any other form of entertainment.
In MMOs in particular there is nowhere I can go to pay more money for a better game. Just an endless sea of “free” games were I can spend 10 even 100 times more than what WoW or FFXIV charge just to rub how rich I am in the face of free players.
I can only imagine the deafening chorus of wails that would arise if a game company tried to charge $120. If it wasn’t clearly the greatest game of all time it would just be endless skewered on social media and pointed to as a sign of corporate greed.
If they doubled the asking price, that’d put double the pressure on them to actually release quality. I admit, I’m a little anxious of wasting money on games that turn out to be actual garbage, but… I suppose maybe it’ll help kill pre-order culture off a lil bit lol.
Of course, this would also be extremely prohibitive to people who struggle justifying paying -sixty- dollars for a triple a release, even the good ones.
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I spent $1 on The Outer Worlds and so far it’s worth it. It feels a little bland and slow-paced but it is an adventure RPG I suppose.
It plays like a very high-quality Fallout 4 mod, but without the Fallout-family bugs and glitches. So far everything’s worked fine and the game is very, very smooth.
they wouldn’t need to raise prices to 120 dollars if they released good games with good quality dlc and if the people of high standing in the company didn’t demand so much money
This isn’t actually the case. Like, yeah, CEOs are greedy but the amount of work that goes into games nowadays is worth way more than it used to be. The price of games has remained $50-$60 for decades now, while the amount of work that goes into them is constantly rising, regardless of the actual quality of the game.
Games should be $100+ now. Gamers would go insane if prices went up, though, so gamers-at-large are content to pay $60 for a game and then hundreds more on expansions, DLCs, and microtransactions. Granted it’s spaced out over time, but…
edit: it goes without saying that this also ties in to how abused game industry employees are. They get the same pay for quadruple the work and all the crunchtime and other horror stories. Fronting $100+ for a game would (hopefully) help alleviate that somewhat, but there might not be any realistic hope of turning back now outside of unionization which should also very much be a thing.
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It is pretty crazy how game prices are so static. $60 in 1990, adjusted for inflation, is like $115 today.
And then consider the sorts of games being released in 1990. People were paying the equivalent of $115 for some janky sierra on-line adventure game programmed in 6 months by five people (to grossly generalize the early 90s PC gaming situation). Now we have games made by hundreds of people for millions of dollars over several years and the price hasn’t even kept up with inflation.
Yeah, it’s insane and responsible for a good deal of the horrible climate within game companies. Not solely responsible, but still.
I don’t remember the last time I paid full price for a video game. I guess maybe BfA if we’re counting that.
A big part of it is that employers have a lot more power over jobs people think are cool.
If you’re making something boring as dirt, like accounting software, there are just less people lining up outside your door to apply. So those employers are forced to try harder to retain people.
I also just finished the storyline for the new SWtOR expansion…
I think I’m just going to go and rename the expacs accordingly for the story of my Sith Inquisitor and Lana Beniko.
SoR: Sithy and Best Woman take on a Ancient Legend Gone Insane.
KotFE: Sithy and Most Devoted Woman Challenge an Evil Empire.
KntET: Sithy and Best Wife Finish the Evil Empire.
Onslaugh: Sithy and Hecc’in Wife Take Over a World.
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How’d you like it? I’m moseying over to see if SWTOR will hook me again and those stories will be a big part of that.
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So hey…Moons of Madness is a thing that recently released. I may have made a purchase.
The TL;DR at the start: Good for what it is, even though the focus should be narrower.
So I picked up the newly released Moons of Madness game basically sight-unseen. First I knew about it, it’d popped into my Steam Homepage and described as “Sci-Fi meets Lovecraft” and it was only $20. SOLD!
I know what you are thinking “A fool and his money…” but I blew through the game in eight hours, and I was satisfied. Satisfied enough I’m actually thinking of another run through the game.
So what IS Moons of Madness? Well, it’s a fairly linear walking simulator with some puzzles attached to it. And I know when you boil a game down to the term “Walking Simulator” a lot of people lose interest. Well, keep in mind Alien: Isolation would also classify itself as a Walking Simulator with some puzzles and a crafting system. Moons of Madness keeps things interesting and even incorporates a boss fight into the game so I never felt like “This is it?” That being said, I’m also a 36 year old man who is coming to the horrifying conclusion that modern, cutting edge gaming isn’t geared for my aging reflexes and reaction speeds…so maybe “Walking Simulators” just appeal to me a bit.
So what is Moons of Madness about? It’s a secret manned mission on Mars, working for a company known as the Orochi Group. Huh, that sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Anyway, you play the role of a repair tech named Shane Newhart and after a nightmare, you need to help out to get your base up to snuff as another crew in inbound (As replacements? Reinforcements? It’s never specified). Things…go awry from there.
I don’t want to spoil the story in any great detail, but I had my suspicions when I saw it was a Funcom published game. Moons of Madness is a stand alone tie-in game with Funcom’s Maintenance-Mode MMO The Secret World (Now rebranded as The Secret World Legends). Thankfully, knowledge of the setting isn’t required though it does get a bit infuriating for those, like me, who played TSW but not to any kind of completion thus references felt only half-understood.
But I feel the game itself would lend that air even if I was well versed in TSW’s lore. Moons of Madness tries to be a lot over its five to eight hour run time. It tries to be a scifi take on the classic Lovecraft story “The Mountains of Madness”, the most obvious reference. It tries to be a Secret World story. It tries to be a cautionary tale about science unbound by morality. It tries to be a supernatural tale. It tries. It tries.
It.
tries.
The problem is the game wants to be too many things at once. This is a game where the Necronomicon exists alongside cloning facilities and battle androids. And typing that out it sounds awesome. Again, I’m considering after writing this to dive back into a second run at the game so there’s something to be said that the premise works…but it’s busy. It’s very, very busy. And that causes the game to suffer, tonally. That’s increased by the decision to have your character comment on everything. You won’t be entering a room or area in this game without Shane having something to say about it.
Which is fine, since let’s face it…we all narrate our own experiences for the audience of ourselves and in stressful situations I can’t really blame a person in the midst of it to comment on things if only to keep their own sanity. But the problem comes from Shane’s insistent and nigh-hysterical “WHAT WAS THAT?!” moments combined with a tense moment of the score and the obvious visual accompaniment. The writing calls attention to itself at points where the audio and visual storytelling ought to be really driving the focus. There were a lot of times in the game where in Shane remarked upon something that I, the player, hadn’t actually SEEN yet…thus the game sort of ruined its own surprises in a way.
Overall, Moons of Madness is a fun romp, and definitely a worthwhile look at during this Halloween season. It just didn’t trust itself when it ought to, and tried to do more, storywise, then it really should have. I’m still going to play it again, though.
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It begins. Next year’s my Big One, and I relate to this 100%. It’s on my wish list for when it goes super cheap. It sounds worth the purchase!
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