BougieBirdie

I haven’t played the game, so I’m not sure how accurate my help would be. It would be helpful to be able to look at some tooltips from these skills. But to my eye this looks like a talent / build system that’s fairly common in ARPGS.

My most basic assumption is that every so often you’ll level up and be able to pick one of these skills. They’ll provide some kind of effect which is tied to an active skill (Red, Blue, and Purple appear to be likely), or a passive bonus (Orange, Yellow, and Green I’d guesss).

The arrows are throwing me off a little bit because sometimes they point in both directions, and other times they appear to loop. Usually these might mark a pre-requisite skill, so if it shows [A] <-- [B] then that implies that before you can acquire A you must first acquire B.

If I had to guess, [A] <–> [B] implies either you can freely choose between A and B, or perhaps once you select A you must select B before you can select A again.

The loops feel weird though (notably in the yellow block). I guess that means that whatever skill you start with, you must then select clockwise from there.

There’s a great variety in how games will implement this sort of thing, but in general there’s usually a way to get a tooltip with a more complete description of what each thing does. Usually that would be by hovering over the icon, but some games include an encyclopedia of effects if they’re particularly involved.

The order in which you acquire these skills often influences your playstyle. Some people are going to prefer to get abilities that seem powerful quickly, and other people like to strategically synergize their build. For my part, I tend to prefer acquiring passive bonuses that increase my experience/luck/currency to more easily game the system.

I’m old enough to remember the chainsaw controller

Dumb fuck!

(/s this is the meme, I wish you the best)

I believe Marie Curie was the first nuclear woman.

Probably also the first radioactive woman. What a badass

When my cat does this, I sit on her (gently).

I figure she does the same to me, so it’s fair play.

I think the long distance transmission lines are kind of neat. They often become roosts for hawks and eagles here, gives you a chance to see some nature near the city.

The linked comic is ugly as sin though, that’s a high voltage rat nest. And I’m sure there’s a happy medium to be found with that sort of electrical pole, but it doesn’t give me the feeling of serenity that the high tension towers do.

Underground transformers seem to be the better approach for denser connectivity

Oh yeah, and if you want any online services, you’ll want to look up what those cost. I don’t know if they offer a family discount for multiple accounts

I guess ultimately it depends on what kind of games your family likes

As you mention, party games you only need one. If your family’s into single player or portables then each person needs one

How is it affordable? Well, it isn’t really. Although I guess a switch probably retails for about half the cost of a PS5

It’s funny though, if you compare it to other consoles, I think people are far less likely to buy an Xbox or Playstation for each family member. And yet, people would do that for the gameboy and DS without batting an eye. The switch is trying to be everything, for better or worse.

When we got ours, we were pretty content having just one and then playing party games or taking turns on single player games. Sooner or later though, we had to get another so we could play pokemon together. Which is a shame because my interest in pokemon seems to have suddenly fallen off a cliff and now my switch is collecting dust

So I guess all that to say: your mileage may vary

Who is protected by rules that keep you on the path? Who am I impressing by taking the ten seconds out of my day to stay on the pavement?

I don’t have much respect for grass. Take the shortcut and relish the rare opportunity to be near nature in the city

This looks like a screenshot from 7 Days to Die

This appears to be a farming plot that a player has buried into the terrain. Due to limitations in the engine, the terrain renders weirdly when it’s deformed this way. This creates a weird sort of edge in the terrain, which appears to be made of dirt, stone, and grass

Let’s be real, Satan would be a shitposter

Personally, I like the southern twang.

It feels almost lyrical

Yeah, but that requires him to go through effort to make a new account.

It’s easier for him to tell someone else to strip features and make the platform worse than it already is

I’m surprised and relieved to hear such a salient take.

It’s not really surprising that if the big names in gaming spend an enormous amount of budget on a game that it’s not automatically going to be a hit. After all, a large chunk of that time and money is spent on further monetizing the game. The more monetization features they work on, the less attractive a game becomes to the player. It feels like that should just be common sense, I’m surprised a bunch of business majors never learned that they need a good product.

Like, honestly, a game isn’t going to automatically generate enormous profit just because a lot of money has been spent on it. It also has to be a decent game in its own right.

This is something that indie gamers have been saying probably as long as there’s been indie gaming. Maybe it will carry more weight when a suit says it. But then, he’s a former executive, so maybe it won’t have as much impact as it should.

Time for an anecdote:
I can think of two Blizzard games that I really enjoyed until they had a 2.0 release. Both used the 2.0 as an opportunity to change their monetization model in favour of squeezing more cash from players. They’re Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm was free, but had a cash shop where you could buy cosmetics. Each cosmetic was listed for individual purchase. There were bundles, but if you really wanted just a single skin you could buy it for about $5-$15. That’s not an unreasonable price and I was happy to support a free game by buying the occasional skin for my favourite heroes.

When Heroes of the Storm had their 2.0 rework, they changed the cosmetic shop to be based entirely on lootboxes. You could no longer get the things you specifically wanted and had to rely on random chance. You could of course get more lootboxes by throwing more money at the game, but you’d have to buy way more lootboxes for a chance to get the thing you wanted. That turned me and a lot of players off of the game, and it wasn’t long after 2.0 that Blizzard stopped active development and put the game in maintenance mode.

Funny enough, Overwatch did the opposite, but it was still a step towards greed and super frustrating. In the original release, you had a lootbox based economy and a cosmetic shop where you could spend currency earned from the lootboxes to buy skins. Lootboxes were available for free as you played, but also available for purchase. You could ultimately get whatever you wanted just by playing the game enough.

When Overwatch 2 came out, the model switched to free-to-play and battlepasses. The free stuff you could get was limited to something like half the battlepass cosmetics (you can buy the pass to unlock more), and the cosmetic shop became a cash shop with insane valuation of skins. I think the average skin is like $30, and often they’re only available in bundles where you have to spend even more to also get skins that you might not care about.

In an attempt to reach more market, Overwatch 2 was released on Steam. This was the first (and I think only?) platform that Overwatch got released to where users can leave reviews on the game. It has a 20% recommendation rate, which is categorized as “Mostly Negative” and makes it one of the worst releases of all time on Steam. And this is for a game that you can play for free - it costs you nothing and people are trying to warn you not to waste your time.

The reworks between Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch are both examples of studios taking a beloved game in its own right, and lobotomizing it to make it more profitable. Never forget what they’ve taken from us.

I’m pretty dialed into indie games. What kind of games do you like? I might be able to recommend some. I get most of my indie recommendations through word of mouth or curators.

The steam store page has an algorithm tuned to your preferences. If you’ve already been playing a lot of live service games, then it assumes you must like them. Once you start showing an interest in other games, you can probably just cruise through your discovery queue.

To skip the algorithm, you can try looking at the steam store web page in a private / incognito window. But if most of the money makers are live service or free-to-play then that may just be the default offering.

I’d love to see more developers with this attitude.

Atmosphere? Love it. Dread? Great! Darkness? Tolerable. Jump Scare? No thank you.

Jump scares are like the fart jokes of horror. Cheap thrills, low craftsmanship, and turns people off of the market.

And that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the occasional jump scare. They can be tastefully made, or used sparingly. Less is often more with these, and it helps add to the tension knowing it might come up again. But if they’re just non stop they lose their payoff quickly.

I agree that it’d be nice if they depreciated in value like in the days of physical media.

In those days though, the store only has a certain amount of shelf space. So in that sense it makes sense that they depreciated because a new game is always going to have a higher perceived value.

Digital storefronts don’t have that problem. The game can be shared infinitely without accruing a ton of publishing costs. There’s always more shelf space.

In this sense, there’s no financial motivation to depreciate. And we all know the social responsibility of big companies will be to only do what they’re forced to do.

We often feel games ought to depreciate because that’s how it’s always been. But just because that’s how it’s always been doesn’t mean that’s how it always will be.

Battlefield is an interesting case though where each game in the franchise is highly derivative of the previous game. So if each new game is essentially an upgrade of the previous one, then I’d agree that there should be an expectation that the older version is less expensive.

The same could be said about many of the giant titles. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and most major sports games come to mind.

One final thing to think of is that many games have continuing development. It’s basically the early access model (a whole other can of worms), and you could argue that many of these games appreciate in value. Some notables have - Factorio comes to mind.

I don’t think Battlefield 2042 falls into that category though

Discounts on games creates a sense of urgency in the buyer, as most discounts are temporary. Since discounts are often shown on the front page of a storefront, it gets a lot of eyeballs on it. If someone’s wishlisted the game then they’ll even usually get a direct notification.

Another way to look at it is that the game is always available at the full price. But if you’re a patient gamer then you can expect to get a lower price eventually.

Depending on how much discretionary income you have, you might be forced to wait for a sale. Or the difference in price might be no object to you. Or you may have to hoist the black flag.

Something else to consider is that the perceived value of the game differs from buyer to buyer. If I’m a big fan of a niche genre, I might be willing to spend more on a weird game than the average user. A $30 game might be worth it for me, but you might only think it’s worth $20

And more to that point, it’s extremely difficult to nail down the exact value of a game. What honestly separates a $12 game from a $15 game when they both offer a unique experience?

Anyway, all this to say, I don’t think having sales on games is strictly a predatory thing. Sometimes a discount is the only way you’ll get eyeballs on your game, or a way to reach more of the market that wouldn’t have otherwise bought your game.

I do agree that modern AAA prices are out there. I don’t pay very much for games now, and usually AAA prices me right out of the market

Did anybody else have parents who made too much money to qualify for student loans, but never put away money for college?

Big Dick only costs tree fiddy? What a bargain!