And have we come full circle to god damn horse armor.
The fact that this meme misattributes horse armor to Skyrim instead of Oblivion is bothering me way more than it should
Kids these days don’t know shit man. Skyrim had been out long enough to concieve a kid and watch him graduate. Oblivion might as well have been a DOS title to them.
So I put a boot on my disk, which was the style at the time
A while back in some discord server I was in someone posted a meme that had a siltstrider in it and they didn’t even know what it is. Someone said it looked like a half finished HL2 model.
After so many re-releases of Skyrim, I kind of forgot there were TES games before it…
Morrowind is still dope.
Stop 👏 playing 👏 games 👏 that 👏 rip 👏 you 👏 off 👏
Or just stop playing games that exist as shitty GACHA vending machines.
It isn’t even the cost per-say. Its the fact that mounts were implemented in D4 as a practical afterthought. They barely affect gameplay, you can’t take them into dungeons, they don’t have any kind of skill progression or character synergy on their own right. Barely more than a TF2 fancy hat.
I got D4 at base price on release, played the main act, and shelved it months ago. I can’t imagine still playing a game that’s been nothing but bloody runs since that initial release. Nevermind paying $60 for a fucking cosmetics improvement while I grind mobs for incremental stat increases at the level cap.
At least Diablo is easier to quit than games that literally condition players into a gambling addiction. But all this is easier said than done.
I mean Diablo is pretty addicting too lol, one of my friends dropped out of school for Diablo. Then again, one of my friends almost dropped out of school for Modern Warfare 2 - not that it wasn’t fun of course (most fun CoD imo).
Yeah, but grinding loot for free doesn’t cause the same amount of harm as compulsively spending on lootboxes.
Also stop pre-ordering games that aren’t complete.
If youre still playing D4, I dont know what to tell you. Most people who pay attention to industry news and the game design philosophy of Blizzard knew well enough to pass it over.
Now I feel all the more right for skipping over it. To be honest, I didn’t mind Diablo 3 once it had all its content and was no longer a dual-wield credit card simulator. It was a pretty fun game by the end IMO. Diablo 4 didn’t feel right to me so I just skipped it.
I was hoping in vain that Blizzard might pivot even a little when they saw the backlash but nah people continue to throw money away on bullshit so of course Blizzard wouldn’t
Do you guys not have phones?
Meanwhile, Helldivers 2’s armor is like 2 bucks, and you can find the currency in-game.
Its nice to see a low cost microtransaction, and nice to see that you can get the currency in game but really thats just the same as it was a few years back before it went full 100 dollar for a reskin mode.
You are defending a game by pointing out that its money grabbing methods are less greedy than another company.
Games wont make the billions and billions they make now if they move away from the in game purchases models but they also evidently dont need billions and billions to operate.
Some of the best games on the market were made on small budgets by indie developers and sell well because the are fun and people actually want to play them.
I would argue that on online game kinda needs a stream of revenue that’s doesn’t only come from the first purchase, since that will stagnate.
Maybe we don’t make every game a live service. Remember halo 2, game was fantastic and no micro transactions in sight if you don’t count xbl.
For Democracy!
What happened to the micro part of microtransactions? This is why I only bought one skin in Genshin Impact since they give you extra funny money for your first time to get it, but a second skin will double than the first so I’m never buying one ever again.
Macrotransactions.
I will only pay if I get Robin Williams. This is the hill I will die on.
Dumb fucks kept giving shitty publishers like Activision and Ubisoft money for microtransactions, so those companies did what any good capitalist would do: see how much you can fleece the idiots.
I saw a post a couple years back in the Red Dead subreddit where someone posted a screenshot of their character. They had something like thousands of gold bars, and when someone asked how he had so many, the OP actually said that they spend $100 a month on the gold packs. Each month.
see how much you can fleece the idiots.
At least Genshin Impact had a fucking plot, too. I can stomach dropping an extra $30 on a game after the first 100 hours. But D4 just stopped being a story after release. I was having fun exploring the world and plot in Genshin for the better part of two years (thanks, COVID!) I cleared D4 in a month. Cleared it again with another class. Got bored and shelved it.
Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention
The world was big enough and rich enough that I could mostly ignore the dungeons and never really feel like grinding. I just kinda wandered around chasing quest-lines and having fun. I didn’t sweat the 5* heroes and never really had a problem with the PvE aspect of the game. Admittedly, I wasn’t doing end-game content or playing anything remotely competitively.
Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
Sure. Its a game full of psychological landmines. And if you’re in your 30s and you’ve learned how to dance through the bullshit, then its easy. But if you’re playing this game as a twelve year old and constantly getting spammed by the Wallet Inspector to give up another $20, less so.
But… I can’t do anything about that. What really gets me is that the country where this game is produced (China) has better and more comprehensive regulations to limit exploitation of end-users than the countries where the majority of players come from (Japan, Korea, USA). I believe there was even some amount of controversy in how hard the western-oriented interfaces sold in-game purchases, relative to the domestic versions.
You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.
I didn’t max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.
That’s not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.
I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn’t gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.
China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it’s still not enough, and it doesn’t seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.
I mean, enough would be loading these senior executives and marketing directors into a cannon and firing them into the ocean. But I agree, even the most stringent rules always seem to be attacking the edges of the problem.
I buy the monthly cards in advance and use the gems they give you from that, best value way of getting them
This sort of thing is exactly why I mostly just play retro games.
Indie games ftw!
I did that for a while, but I discovered my local library has a great selection of games. I went from spending a few hundo on games a year to buying two a year - Christmas and birthday, and doing the rest of my gaming exploring their catalogue. It’s been great on my wallet. Hooray libraries.
Somehow that’s not surprising, which is sad.
This year‘s CK3 DLC package is also very close in price to the „base game.“ Naturally, it provides nowhere near as much content and I refuse to believe it requires nearly as much work to make either.
Paradox DLC policy is why I don’t play Paradox games anymore.
If I were to only play 1 game ever, then the DLC system might be ok, it’s basically a subscription system. But since I’d only play a campaign every other year or so, I’m not going to fork out that much money for 1 campaign. And it’s way too annoying to play some game with obvious parts missing + in game ads, so now Paradox gets no more money from me.
I feel Paradox DLCs are the better way of DLCs. They add good content but you absolutely can enjoy the game without them
They add good content but you absolutely can enjoy the game without them
Respectfully…such as?
Kind of like Monster Hunter Rise’s DLC being almost the same price as the game, while having no campaign at all, unlike Iceborne.
I buy base Paradox games just so i can mod the cracked version with all dlc through steam.
Care to elaborate?
English is not my first language. So basically how it works is you buy the base game and then you can download mods on workshop. Then you download the cracked version (preferably with the latest patch.) Then you launch the game through steam and select the modlist you wanna play, then you launch the cracked version and it will have that same modlist. I tried it with CK3, HOI4 and Stellaris but i bet it’s the same with all of their games. Only thing that sucks is you can’t easily download the latest patch for cracked version, but you can stop steam updates while you finish one playthrough or something. Hope this helps if you need better explanation dm me
i got plenty of hate when i said years ago this is where the mtx slippery slope would get us
If they still play honestly …
And I’m sure several whales have already bought it
And it looks like the result of a transporter malfunction involving Baron Rivendare’s Deathcharger and Butt Stallion.
Hahahaha! I hadn’t seen it before! And people are expected to (and some do) spend money on that?
Holy information density batman! That’s a fucking mess to look at there’s so much going on it stopped being cool looking
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Game journalism these days…
Listen, I don’t play nor like Diablo 4 but is this headline not a little bit misleading since you get the mount skin as a bonus for buying 70€ worth of their stupid premium currency? So you actually pay for the currency and not the mount…
Again the disclaimer that I do not play Diablo 4, nor do I defend Blizzard or microtransactions and I’m a true supporter that the coolest looking stuff should be exclusively achievable by actually playing the freaking game and not fucking pay for it!
If you excuse me now, got to continue playing Last Epoch which is even in its early access fucking amazing.
