I watch and listen to a lot of Giant Bomb and SkillUp, and both had praise for the multiplayer modes, warts and all. I can’t agree with all games media just being marketing, otherwise you’d never see bad reviews for the likes of those publishers spending all that money on marketing. It may not have worked for you, but doing all of those modes has done very well for the game.
It was also famous for having multiplayer modes that were just fun and didn’t ask you to commit your life to them. Some of those multiplayer modes were really cool.
They sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year. They’re easy to play, they look nice, and they have a lot of content for the money, so you can stretch your dollar.
It seems to be resonating pretty damn well for them. In fact, the competitive multiplayer has been praised for its simplicity and feeling a lot like the kind of multiplayer that we used to get so much of back in the 360 era.
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they’re worse off for it. Assassin’s Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they’re over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it’s much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
No
They sell video games. A lot of them.
The family is buying the shares as well, with Tencent having a minority ownership. Or might, rather. This is a consideration. It isn’t definitely happening.
I’d second Pillars of Eternity II except that it’s not actually on sale. It also doesn’t have gamepad controls, which is disappointing, so Steam Deck controls can be kind of slow.
I agree that the game should have a tutorial. The problem with the temple trial is that it only caters to one play style, so it’s not a good tutorial. I’d call the first game’s tutorial the cave with a handful of rats.
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year’s unanimous game of the year was largely considered a “single player game”, but while it’s definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn’t want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Single-player games are a safer bet for new games…Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it’s correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
What part of that was executive meddling?
I just played through it this year for the first time. It was overall very good, but the beginning and end of it are pretty rough. The beginning is tedious unless you’re playing a strength build, and the end is some real point and click adventure game moon logic to find out how to get to the final area and, in some ways, through it, that I would have never figured out without a walkthrough.
It’s also got great VOIP functionality. And it’s been a hot minute since I’ve used IRC, but you can automate tons of things in Discord around things like user roles. I play an old fighting game that has no ranked system, and all of that functionality, including running weekly tournaments, is handled by a Discord bot that runs on a Raspberri Pi.
The industry has already ruined it for everyone. This is the best plan we’ve got to fix it.
Hoping things will turn out great is for idiots.
I agree. Hence this initiative. Nothing will change without action, is this is the action that EU citizens can feasibly take. I’ve written my legislators, and that’s about all I can do in the US, other than spread the word on social media.
Also: If your only argument is that I am not taking the “Stop Killing Games” movement seriously enough? You don’t have one. Which… is par for the course.
I wasn’t making that argument at all.
I don’t know how much this form factor is catching on over there, but there’s also a mini PC category these days. For $500 and change, you can have a gaming PC that fits in the palm of your hand and is more powerful than a PS4 Pro.
We have to hope they do, because the industry would love to never resolve this on its own. So far there are reasonable laws on the books in places in places like Belgium and Australia for things like loot boxes. Also, you do your argument a real disservice by using childish language like “vidya games” and “oh noes”.
It is a citizens’ initiative for the EU. Ross has been consulting with legal experts and even members of parliament in these territories in order to get this off the ground. This is not some feel-good change.org thing; this has legal ramifications, albeit with an absurdly high threshold to clear.
Gambling is bad and it ruins lives. So let’s get some legislature. Oh noes, now there can be no kissing or depiction of blood in any game because sex ruins lives and so does murder!
This is a strawman. We do legislate gambling already. Several countries have legislated loot boxes already without adding violent content on as a rider.
This initiative, which again, has actual legal implications unlike most petitions you’ve ever heard of, can only ask for so much before it’s in lawmakers’ hands. Terminology like “reasonably functional” is used all over laws on the books, and courts rule on what is reasonable or not. It would be reasonable to say that a video game is no longer functional if you can’t play it anymore. Lobbyists and special interest groups are why we have an industry subsidized by legalized gambling for children and other ways of fucking us over.
It is literally an initiative. Jack Thompson was disbarred, and any kind of assertion between video games and real world violence is long since dismissed. Meanwhile games are willfully designed to leave you with a worse product and little to no indication what you’re actually getting for your money, and that isn’t some theory. Leaving a game in a reasonably functional state without intervention from the game’s publisher is pretty specific, and it just happens to cover some use cases that affect a game company’s bottom line, but that should be the cost of doing business. Developers and publishers can be just as guilty on this when they’ve got the same incentives.
This is the kind of stuff you might know if you already know what’s ahead of you, like if you played it before, but as a first-time player of the game, not knowing what’s coming, I found it to be a poor experience when you only have a melee weapon but specced for guns.