Counterpoint: games were more expensive in the past, sometimes even before adjusting for inflation. Goldeneye was $70 new.
The problem is that back then you bought a complete game to play forever. Now you buy an unfinished mess that despite costing as much, makes it abundantly clear that the game isn’t yours through DRM and in your face micro transactions.
Whenever investors get involved things go downhill. If the only two parties are a buyer and a seller, the only way the seller can make money is by making a product the buyer wants to buy. But investors don’t care about the product. They may not even understand the product. They only care that the product makes money.
AAA studios are failing because they want to please investors, not buyers.
murder bears
intensive Care Bears
It’s lead free solder. I think that affects how the joints look.
Been sitting on this one for over a year. I really enjoyed Tunic, and it seems Outer Wilds is a similar experience, relying on the player not knowing what’s coming.
“fighting the medium” is an excellent phrase! Never played Firewatch, though I have made some stumbling attempts at creative writing, and it’s made me realize that certain things are very difficult to convey organically in words. How do you get across to a first time reader that an alien isn’t actually shrugging or winking or pointing with an index finger, but expressing the same thing through non human body language? And then how do you do it over and over and over again, because when posting stories to a forum you have to assume this is everyone’s first time reading.
In a visual medium like a webcomic, it’s super simple to convey it through a combo of dialogue and visuals. Even the nature of the story itself has to fit the medium. With a comic, people expect short self-contained scenes or character interactions that may or may not connect to form a story arc. This is what I like to write about, little snippets that serve to build the world, just a few lines of dialogue or a paragraph describing a scene, but that’s not what people expect from prose. They want meatier stuff.
Makes me wonder what would be impossible to express altogether in one medium vs another.
I’m only on the periphery of the fandom, mostly just watch lore videos and play a few video games. The AdMech is my favorite faction. As for how real the machine cult is, it seems to depend heavily on the writer. My personal head canon is that the machine god is an actual warp entity like Isha and the other Eldar gods before Saanesh nommed them. If emotions and beliefs manifest as warp entities, then the Omnissiah should be one regardless of how the AdMech came to believe in it.
If you like Dead Cells, check out their new game, Windblown!
Just tried it. I’m not usually one to take a risk on early access games, but the devs have a good track record. It looks good overall from what little I’ve managed to see. It iterates well on what Dead Cells established.
A friend and I tried playing Don’t Starve Together. We kept dying before progressing very far.
Its fanbase is small but very passionate judging by the content I see on YouTube. Lots of fan theories and lore videos and even fan animations. I forget where I first heard about the game, but it was a video about games that were badly reviewed initially but went on to gain some sort of following. The premise of trying to survive in a world that wasn’t made with you in mind really resonates with me, but I can’t get into it. The platforming is clunky and the visuals are hard for me to parse.
Rainworld. It just doesn’t feel fun to play.
EDIT:
Also any roguelike that isn’t Dead Cells. I keep telling myself I like them but the permadeath mechanic is beyond frustrating. Not sure why I’ve stuck with Dead Cells, maybe it’s because you still meaningfully progress between runs.
Civ games seem to have acquired a reputation for being underbaked at launch, at least I hear that from others. I only got into the game with Civ V and that a fair bit after it came out. Seems like people are holding up the vanilla new release to its predecessor with all expansions.
But yes it’s a bummer there’s no local multiplayer yet.
I think wikis have taken over that niche, at least for more popular games.
It was my understanding that it was a misconception that companies are legally bound to have an ROI or whatever. Not an economist so IDK. I just remember hearing that from several places. Regardless, the buyer-seller relationship is “I give you money, and you give me a product or service”. The investor-seller relationship is “We give you money, and you give us more money, and we don’t care how you do it.”