Oh boy. £120 to just unlock the base characters or “dozens and dozens” of hours of grind for each of them.
We’ll see how this goes, but I see this going the way of Suicide Squad. I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.
I’m hopeful. I want to believe what happened to Suicide Squad is an indication that consumers/gamers are less willing to put up with this shit than a few (a couple?) years ago.
No no no WB, you wanted to make it live service, now you deal with it keep adding content for the next 5 years.
Obviously very far from reality, but I wish live service games were required to have a clear, binding plan for how long they’re going to be supported and what’s the exit plan. If they’re a service, they should have an enforceable contract.
That would help buyers not buy a game that is going to be sunset in a year, and/or prevent publishers from releasing cash-grabbing garbage with no evident business plan or idea on why players are going to find the game worthy of giving them money for years.
I bought Tekken 7 to play on the steam deck because of this. I didn’t realise I needed to buy the ultimate edition (or whatever it’s called) and now half the players were hidden behind DLCs, so I feel I paid for half a game. I’m staying away from Tekken for the foreseeable.
If they’re getting money through micro transactions they can charge absolutely precisely £0. I can’t be bothered paying for a game that isn’t complete.
He pointed out that one of WBD’s latest big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.
[…]
“Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?” he said.
I know I’m saying something obvious here, but using this doesn’t mean it needs to be the only source of cooling. You can combine this with air conditioning, but in your example, you can use it to cool the room down from 88 instead of 105. The first 17 degrees are “free”.
Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.
I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.
In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there’s lots of regulation, not that it’s actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it’s not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.
Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I’d class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).
I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!
But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
They wouldn’t happen either if people could stop and think for a second to understand that hyperbole isn’t literal, and that “nobody bought it” clearly means “its sales performance was well under expectations”.
“Online games will now be banned from giving players rewards if they log in every day, if they spend on the game for the first time or if they spend several times on the game consecutively. All are common incentive mechanisms in online games.”
This doesn’t necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it’s a match based game), cities are lively (if it’s a MMORPG), etc.
If the developer can’t appeal to those too, then you’re left with a ghost town of a game that can’t appeal to the whales either.
I don’t think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they’ve put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.
I think it’s the second. Even on No Man’s Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist “as they are” and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it’s exactly as it was.
Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the “random planet generator” it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes “right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?” And the answer is persistent.
However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they’d have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn’t pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a “reroll” if I don’t like them.
I’ve gone as far as to “downgrade” my desktop computer to a combination of MacBook Pro + Steam Deck. The MacBook is heaps faster for any workload other than gaming, so now my most powerful computer fits in my backpack. The Steam deck is such a joy to play with, and thanks to the microSD slot I don’t have to worry about disk space requirements anymore. Yes, it’s not as fast in terms of raw performance, but I don’t care. I can play now on my bed, sofa, or garden. If it doesn’t run on the deck, I don’t care for it. I already have way too many games I haven’t finished.
As a formerly hardcore, now infrequent pirate, I wholeheartedly agree with this.
I’ve even pirated ANSYS at one point because the cracked version was a lot more reliable than the version I had for free, due to shoddy DRM (FlexLM, what a garbage licence management).
All 64 of the countries where it’s illegal to be LGBTQ+ – and yes, it’s all colonialism’s fault (www.thepinknews.com)
We take a look at all the countries and territories where it is still illegal to be gay or LGBTQ+ – and examine the role colonialism played.
MultiVersus is a Smash Bros. clone that feels like a smartphone game, spoiled by its monetisation (www.eurogamer.net)
Escape From Tarkov dev reverses course on limited-time PvE access (www.pcgamesn.com)
Yeah, three steps forward one step back with the screwed up, greedy ass gaming industry.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s Fifth Season Will “Likely” be its Last – Rumour (gamingbolt.com)
TEKKEN 8 — Eddy Gordo Gameplay Trailer (www.youtube.com)
I still don't get why people spend money... there's tons of it for free (sh.itjust.works)
Suicide Squad’s $70 price tag slashed by 40% just a month after launch (www.pcgamesn.com)
Warner Bros. Discusses "Volatile" AAA Console Games, Will Lean Into Free-To-Play And Mobile (www.gamespot.com)
‘We don’t need air con’: how Burkina Faso builds schools that stay cool in 40C heat (www.theguardian.com)
Valve Made $1 Billion From CS Cases Last Year, Data Claims (insider-gaming.com)
This console generation seems skippable
I’ve never skipped a console gen starting from Super NES, PS1 through 4 plus the Switch Oled 5 years after launch of the OG Switch...
China announces rules to reduce spending on video games (www.reuters.com)
“Online games will now be banned from giving players rewards if they log in every day, if they spend on the game for the first time or if they spend several times on the game consecutively. All are common incentive mechanisms in online games.”
Trying to play my old CDROM games on Windows10 and about to lose my marbles. Could you help me?
Okay listen: I am less than tech-savvy, but I tried so many step-intensive things on my dinky PC, to no avail....
No Man's Sky fans playfully plead with Hello Games not to "overpromise" as lead dev describes new game Light No Fire as "the first real open world" (www.gamesradar.com)
HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers (arstechnica.com)
After a chaotic three years, GPU sales are starting to look normal-ish again (arstechnica.com)
Ubisoft is giving away Assassin's Creed: Syndicate for free (register.ubisoft.com)
Creator of Cracked Paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation Mod Will Place "Hidden Mines" in Future Mods (wccftech.com)
The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing "hidden mines" in his future mods....