harmonea

Lol, instead of addressing what argument? Your argument is entirely “nuh-uh, you are frustrated. I know you are because my argument would fall apart if you weren’t, so you are. It’s just that you like being frustrated.”

It’s just not the case. There are rare good ones out there, and if that frustrates you into claiming I’m some masochist and therefore my enjoyment is somehow invalid, that’s your own whole subscription of issues.

So I’ve heard

You’re writing all live service games as being based on frustration when that absolutely isn’t the case, so I have to think you have too many preconceived notions on this subject to actually be open to a conversation about it.

Oh well. No game is for everyone and sometimes the pay content is worth it just because it’s damn awesome.

While absolutely too many things are charged for in gaming today (exp boosts? skip potions? cheat armor that was already fully developed at launch? all ways to get your company on my high seas list)… in the specific case where (1) new content is continuously being developed AND (2) the game is not asking for mandatory spending to continue playing (e.g. no expansion pack to purchase, no subscription fees), I don’t think the concept of charging for in-game content at all is abusive.

If I buy once and then a year later some optional paid cosmetics or other goodies are added, I think that’s permissible. And if I’m in a free to play live service game, I recognize the ongoing dev costs need to get covered somewhere.

I do vastly prefer those companies that give their games TLC and updates for free, and I’m not saying the standard pricing for optional purchases in the modern market are reasonable. But I think the existence of in-game purchases, if not their current state, can make sense sometimes.

I didn’t say they should cave to fans save give them what they want. I just think there was a way to say this without being mean about wanting it.

Anyway, I don’t have a horse in this race, I still haven’t played this. Just commenting on how I think I’d feel if that were me. I’ve played a fair few games where the ending left me wanting a lot more, and not always because the game was just that good.

I feel like this is an overly negative light to paint something fans of your game seem to want. There’s an undercurrent of “your wish is bad and you should feel bad” to this.

I appreciate that CDPR has a strong vision for what they want their game to be, but I think if I were one of those fans who wanted to see more of the post-ending setting, I would feel a bit gut-punched by how thoroughly dissed and dismissed my kind of love for the game was.

Maybe CDPR is okay with that though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just pick a good frame and wiggle the parts in Live2D or something.

The hilarious part is that hoyo is constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be done with live2d; it’s heavily used in Genshin character teasers, and their otome game uses it extensively. They’re really good at this. Why get AI involved?

Corrected archive link - OP’s is missing a character so it’s not working

The same Neuralink whose primate test cases all had to be euthanized after their procedures due to a whole host of problems that were claimed to have nothing to do with the implants? That Neuralink?

I think I’ll stick with my PC, Bob.

People are clamoring around you in a huge chorus of it’s fine just roll with it but frankly, I think your point of view is totally valid. While Larian did a great job making every path a valid way to the ending, you can really only ever lock yourself out of content with your choices.

Go too far down one of two branching paths? Hope you can pass a big fat skill check or two, or that one companion will bail. Hope you didn’t like that character or want to see more of that content. (Oh, and if you do pass the skill checks, 10 minutes later the companion is like “ugh no it’s fine you were right, forget I ever wanted to go that way even though I’ve been obsessed with it for the last 20 hours” in the name of railroading the character back in line.)

Get interested in the wrong quest too early? Hope you didn’t want to finish the main side objective in that one area. No no, even though all the characters are still present, you don’t get to finish it. Because we said so. Shoo along to the next place. Go. Get.

And here’s hoping you don’t get curious about the “evil” path - you lose multiple companions and a whole-ass cast of side characters that are meant to follow you through the game and gain one (1) bit of interesting new content to replace them. Is it still interesting? Absolutely, but it’s a consolation prize compared to how much you lose.

It took me 3 playthroughs or so before I finally felt like I was on a save where I was having a good 80%+ of the intended experience. And yeah, you can replay it for what you missed, but not everyone has time for that, especially in a game this immense. I know I’ve started it up to make my fourth character about half a dozen times and Alt-F4ed during character creation as soon as I think about going through the parts I’ve thoroughly combed already.

BG3 is my GOTY by a long shot, but people should have more sympathy for this outlook. There are definitely right paths and wrong paths, and while they all lead to the end, the wrong paths have a lot less to look at and a healthy amount of rubbing your face in the fact that you did stuff in the wrong order (“Perhaps you could have…” ok thanks, narrator).

Are they still working on buffing the shit out of the same modern day protagonist as before or what? I only got about halfway through Odyssey (but looked up the ending) and skipped Valhalla.

Huh. I guess you’re one of those that waits for people to tell you things in the comments, makes weird extrapolations about it, and jumps to conclusions rather than just clicking the OP link and absorbing the information there?

How did you even get that from what I said?

And literally the second tweet the dev made was “they’ve never sent any replies to me” so he’s clearly been trying?

I’m usually more understanding of people missing information, but it took you more time and effort to jump to these conclusions and write a totally incorrect defense of Epic than it would have to just see that the info is right there.

No, there was absolutely no claim that it was an innocent mistake, I’m not sure why that was written there. It’s just a promise to look into it, no more no less.

The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

Agreed; I don’t even understand why procedural generation is popular anymore. It was novel in its first uses, but where devs see convenient shortcuts and marketers see “infinite replayability,” I see “this shit is all going to feel identical after like 5 tries tops.”

Oh look, it’s the skybox from 3 planets ago with the ruin from 2 planets ago and the enemy selection from 5 planets ago. And I think this might be a new shade of blue in the grass, or is that just the skybox casting a weird hue over everything?

Much refreshing, very discover, wow.

Guessing you didn’t see the recent news about Epic doing a big layoff and shedding properties recently?

The fact that they even tried to pretend it wasn’t retroactive because they didn’t charge for old install counts. Like, does it charge games that were released under different terms? Yes? Then it’s retroactive!

It’s pretty much all he does unless he finds an Obra Dinn-tier darling.

Except for Gollum, he was weirdly defensive of that for a game that pulled every AAA anti-consumer trick in the book without at least the decency to be bland.

Oh, I’m positive yours is by far the more common experience - I haven’t met anyone who agreed with me about it, haha. (But starting with “unpopular opinion, but…” is so tainted by popular opinions seeking attention that I couldn’t bring myself to say it)

And yeah, the puzzles were simple, but the world was cool enough (until the ending loljk’d it all) that I enjoyed spending time in it even doing the simple stuff.

This is a hard question to answer, because the really unfun ones either get dropped so fast I forget I ever played them unless someone jogs my memory by naming them directly, or I’m willing to just shrug and say “this is probably great to some people, but it’s not a genre I like.” I guess for this category, I would point to The Witness. I heard so many recommendations for it, but aside from the occasional “oh, neat” when I saw how a puzzle was placed in the world instead of on a board, I couldn’t tolerate it for nearly as long as it wanted me to keep doing the thing.

The game I memorably should have enjoyed - that I had the highest hopes for (and the biggest subsequent disappointment for) was Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

At first, I loved the deeply disturbed main character and grim Norse fantasy world being crafted around me, but the combat felt so disjointed from the story (on purpose) that it felt like there was one guy on the dev team who liked combat who everyone was afraid to piss off, so they had to make concessions and put one token immersion-wrecking battle in every so often. And it’s mad that Senua has two entire character traits - “psychotic” and “warrior” - and one of them managed to feel immersion breaking.

Then the ending destroyed the bits of the game I DID like and made me feel like a tool for ever having bought into the grim fantasy world to begin with. That shit is everyone’s most hated ending trope, and I walked away from the game feeling like I’d wasted my time.

At least it was short.

You have to understand that most accounting departments treat month-end with the same gravity as year-end. My job’s accounts payable department starts sending month end deadline reminders on the 15th. It’s absurd how much they focus on it.

(This is not an excuse for their abhorrent treatment of an employee, mind you, but it might help explain the twisted logic behind “end of July” possibly working against her.)