Always good to see someone in the industry push back on all of these shitty tactics the AAA publishers want to push.
I’m at 750 hours in this game which I spent $70 on. More games like this please. Even if they’re multi years apart I’d rather play a game like BG3 that has immense replayability than some random looter shooter that is trying to mine my wallet using every dark pattern known to humanity.
I swore off buying ‘new’ games close to their release dates because I was sick of overpriced, unfinished games that are just trying to squeeze every cent out of me. Then BG3 came out and everyone raved how great it was, but I stuck to my principles and said I’d play it a year or so after its release. Then someone pointed out to me that the game plays well, has no charge for online play, doesn’t have microtransactions, and is complete. So I bought it, figuring that this is the type of game we should be rewarding, and I’ve not been disappointed.
To be entirely fair, BG3 has its share of bugs and act 3 is not as polished as the first two.
But still, it is by far the most polished AAA game I’ve seen in a long time, and very satisfying, too. So I’m ok with some roughness
In fairness, pretty much all games have some bugs, even far after launch. The issue is launching games that are clearly not finished.
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BG3 and Diablo 4 coming out the same year as legacy franchises of PC really shows how far the industry has fallen.
My husband has a game pass sub for Xbox and he’s only bought 3 games this year; Diablo 4, Mortal Kombat, and BG3. Diablo 4 got broken almost immediately with shitty patches and he seriously regrets wasting the money. Mortal Kombat at least will be a slow burner as they space out the drops for the extra characters. But BG3 he’s been playing non-stop since Thanksgiving. (Like to the point where he checked in with me to ask if I was annoyed at listening to the audio constantly.) That game was well worth the price I just wish more games were like this.
(Like to the point where he checked in with me to ask if I was annoyed at listening to the audio constantly.)
I remember asking my other half if the sound was annoying her, and she told me she enjoys the stories in the game.
I enjoyed the story of the game but after watching Asterion’s sacrifice ritual for the tenth time I put my earbuds in and listened to a podcast for a bit. 😂
Played D4 because my friends were playing it. It’s such a boring piece of shit. Somehow it loses everything fun the past 2 entries had.
That sucks to hear.
You say 2, so at this point im wondering if youre in the “d1/d2 rules” camp, or the “d2/d3 rules” camp haha
I meant D2 and D3. I never played D1 unfortunately. Was too big into NexusTK at that point.
Never too late. Its 9.20 on GOG, and together with devilutionX you can play it nicely today. Ive personally played it on my modded switch through devilutionx :p
As far as intellectual properties go, yes. But, I’d argue that these two games also show us how the IP’s are less relevant than how good the game is and how it’s monetized (or in the case of BG3, not at all).
I don’t think that’s a fair analysis. Diablo 4 sold extremely well and it did it primarily off being another Diablo game. BG3 has been selling incredibly well but I can’t say that’s not because it is in Faerun and it’s hard to tell because it is a great game. People love it for more than the world and the elements given to it by being in a franchise. Yet, DOS2 had a lot of the same elements but it’s not nearly as popular despite how I might love its world more.
I don’t even care about the replayability. I can see myself at some point going for another run at BG3, but that’s a big commitment and I think I’m going to play BG1 and 2 before then, and plenty of other games.
I care if it’s an interesting and enjoyable experience. I’d gladly play another Outer Wilds, even though it’s hardly replayable, because it was such a good and unique experience. I don’t care to play yet another Assassin’s Creed or whatever other garbage that isn’t interesting after you’ve tried it once and also purposefully wastes your time with stuff that is not designed to improve the experience, only playtime.
Yeah I sometimes really don’t like the “hours of entertainment” argument because it almost overvalues bloated experiences over tight ones.
I’ve played <=3 hour games that have left more impact than some 200 hour games
I would say 99% of the time if the game took 100+h to play and was a story focused game then it was a waste of time. BG3 is an exception here. From a quick search, RDR2 takes 50h and it isn’t a short game. Would you watch a 100+h movie? Of course not. There’s almost no way a well told story is taking that long, unless it’s some kind of Immersive experience or something.
That said, plenty of non-story games will take much longer. If the focus is good gameplay, there’s a near limitless amount of time it can take. If there’s story interwoven, it could take any amount of time. I’ve put far more than 100h into a ton of indie games that do interesting things with their gameplay. You just don’t see that experimentation coming from the AAA space normally because it’s not guaranteed profit.
Would you watch a 100+h movie? Of course not.
People do binge watch TV series.
True, but even then it’d have to be 100 episodes if every episode is 1h, which it usually isn’t. That’s be around 10 or more seasons, depending on the show. I can’t think of a show with that many episodes off the top of my head. I’m sure it exists, but it’s a hell of a lot. Game of Thrones is apparently 70h14m. If your story is taking more time to tell than GoT, it’s probably taking too long.
plenty of non-story games will take much longer
Yup. Satisfactory doesn’t have much of a story (although it’s still early access) but I think I’m cloae to 1,000 hours on it.
I like the idea of Satisfactory, but I can’t enjoy it for some reason. I’ve played too much Factorio and it has too many quality of life things that Satisfactory is missing. With the number of overhaul mods, there’s no end to how much Factorio can be played either.
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I bought it when the alpha was released.
Like two years of act 1 had me around 200 hours before it even released. Act 1 did seem bigger back then tho, the intro especially.
I’ve moved from PC to PS5 since and I’m definitely going to rebuy on PS5 eventually. It’s the only game I still play on PC these days.
I’m interested. What made you switch recently? Seems like most migrate over to PC from console and not the other way around. For cozy couch play I’ve gotten myself a 50’ hdmi cable and a wireless controller, with an apk on my phone that let’s me control the pc so I don’t have to go back to it to start a game or anything.
PS5 controller and missing out on all the PS4 exclusives in addition to this gen.
The controller sounds gimmicky if you haven’t tried it, but for racing and shooters it’s insanely immersive.
I think there’s more support for it on PC now, but I don’t know if the haptic triggers work. CoD feels like you’re pulling an actual trigger and for racing brake/throttle is realistic in an inexplicabe way.
BG3 is probably the only game I’ll double buy tho, and that’s just because of how great it is.
Oh. Controller support is great now. Thanks to steam and steam deck, most pc games fully support Xbox and ps5 controllers. I do a large portion of my PC gaming with controllers, although now with my steam deck, most of my gaming has been done on that. Adult life left me with fewer large time gaming blocks to play, so it’s been wonderful for me.
I have yet to play it, but I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
I’d happily pay, say, $10 for a dlc that adds actual content when the base game is absolutely solid or excellent. What I won’t pay for is excessively expensive dlc or dlc that adds very little. I am also heavily unlikely to purchase any dlc that is poorly reviewed, even for a good game.
Shame things like that are so rare. Hoping BG3’s success opens the doors again.
FromSoft immediately springs to mind for DLC I’ll happily throw cheddar at. They always add a hefty chunk of new weapons/armor, new areas to explore, and spicy new boss fights that fuck my shit up.
Heavily biased, they’re one of my favorite developers, but definitely never regret throwing money at FromSoft crew.
Man fromsoft has me kinda mad tho. I paid full price for ds1 (prepare to die ed) years ago and had plenty of fun gittn gud (except pvp i was always a scrub).
Im happy with the money i spent and the time i had, BUT!
When they released the newest version which was basically just the qol improvements, 60fps mod, and dsfix rolled into it they had the fuggen gall to try and charge me 20 bucks to upgrade.
Now, i can’t show my friends my favorite version because you can’t even buy mine. I have a game deliberately ruined for profit reasons in my steam library, and all the hours ive spent on their games and all the fun ive had, all have this black mark now. I keep thinking as i play elden ring, well they do it to this one too? Will this happen to all my fromsoft titles? I don’t know, and can no longer as easily recommend them to my friends. Fromsoft cost themselves a lot of goodwill from me, all for a measly 20 bucks.
people generally dont have the time to go through an rpg, hence why rpgs in general are seen as niche in terms of overall sales as a genre. this includes mmos, where mmos were a lot more plentiful 2 or even a decade ago, compared to now.
Tbh I really enjoy shorter games that are reasonably priced.
I probably only find the time to play 1-2 150+ hr game a year. The rest of my free time is spent socializing, dealing with shit like college, or playing shorter games that I can knock out in multiple 1-2 hour sessions within two weeks
I hate how so many games are demanding of your time today, or feed off that annoying FOMO feeling.
I’m happy that I know Baldurs gate will always be there and I’m really not going to miss out on anything important. Maybe I’ll get to it next year lol
The campaign only takes like 40 hours maybe. 60 for your first run if you’re an explorer. I only have so much time in it because I want to see every cut scene and that takes multiple characters. You could definitely play BG3 in shorter sessions. It’s very slow paced if you want it to be.
Suprisingly human take from a Baldur’s Gate 3 boss. Usually, they just wait in a chamber and want to slice you in half.
Fuck everything about them having like 3 actions while I get one at a 35% hit rate. Goddamn…
Are you effectively synergising your party? Martial characters have multiple actions, while casters typically get one.
If you’re frustrated with 35% hit chances then you could focus on using some members of your party to debuff the enemy and buff the hard hitters; this has much better damage output than all 4 party members just slinging attacks with hit chances below 65%. If you want to just blast with all 4 characters then that’s a valid play but it isn’t guaranteed to be viable.
Probably not. It’s my first time playing anything like this, so I picked druid. Bear for tanking, badger for knocking mobs around, and spider for AOE. Otherwise, using Wyll, Shadowheart, and Kalach. I’m not having much trouble, except for when the gith scout party glitches out and got involved in literally every combat no matter where on the map, but I rolled back a few hours and didn’t let them spawn on the map yet. Just frustrated feeling so relatively weak, even if I’m generally winning encounters.
If you’re winning encounters but it requires effort, I’d consider that pretty well balanced. The good guys don’t always win if they make stupid moves. I decided I wanted to burn the goblin camp to the ground. I had to fight from rafters and use some cheesy tactics to win that fight. It was hard as fuck, but if you decide 4 people can take on an army it should be hard.
Weirdly, that was easy. I split up my team, targeted the wine barrels, iced up some of the camp floor, dropped Spike Growth, and just went to town. The hard part was that one guy inside on the throne. He had two attacks and action surge, and would one-shot whomever je targeted. The goblins were cake.
Managing spell slots is tricky, though. Have to decide carefully whether using any is warranted for a given fight.
Reevaluate your party and where you’re attacking from(height, darkness, etc). I have a couple level 8 or 9 fighters that have multi-attack, so it evens out a bit soon enough. Under some circumstances, with a high initiative, multi-attack, then action surge, my fighters can debilitate an enemy before they even know they’re in a fight.
I have nothing like that. My peeps are at level 3 and I’ve lost Lae’Zel since the tutorial. But good to know.
I do like the gamepass model, but just like Netflix, it only works because it’s the most diverse, as soon as more publishers make their own it will suck again. No I will not pay 10x the price of a subscription for a new AAA game, indies are the only ones still having fair prices in Brazil.
Even now Gamepass is only worth it for one or two months to play some indie games, maybe Yakuza if you’re into that. It just doesn’t make sense to have a long time subscription there like it used to be with Netflix a while ago. Most of the good stuff is older and most people already own that, I suppose.
gamepass has decent value if you have a group of friends who like to jump around playing random coop titles, as you have a low risk value critea to try a game to see if youd like it as a group.
I disagree since I love indies too, so it also saves me a lot of money that they have new ones every month, I can also try early access titles without getting scammed.
Nah they had AAA titles from day one like starfield, total war Warhammer 3, wasteland 3, ect. Those make it worth it.
As publishers roll out thier own crap the quality will drop but at the moment I’ve saved quite a bit of money keeping game pass.
I doubt you saved any money paying monthly unless you pay for a month, play the shit out of whatever during the month then never pay again until some other title appears that might be worth it.
Movie industry right now: oof, a hundred competing services was a bad idea, now what do we do?
Games industry right now: let’s do what the movie industry did
And just like netflix, the goal is to get people hooked on the service and up prices/squeeze out money in other ways once they hit a good amount of market share.
GamePass right now is unsustainable. That’s why Microsoft never talks about it making profit, and they obscure GamePass in their financials by rolling it in to another business grouping. On top of that, there’s also Phil Spencer in the FTC leaks saying not as many people have signed up as he’d have liked.
The industry is already squeezing us by charging literally 10 times the sub price for a new AAA game.
Love the immediate contrast between this and the dude from Ubisoft where he claimed that people just need to get used to not owning games. Larian is definitely the way to run a company.
It’s already been normalized for music and videos for people to subscribe instead of owning. It may just be a matter of time for video games, or it may be that there are real lasting differences between video games and other types of media.
Of course, there are several sorts of games you can’t own already, and many games that are all but inaccessible as abandonware type things, so that process is at least somewhat started.
The indie scene in Video Gaming is FAR stronger than the Indie Scene for at least movies, which I think will cement the ownership vs subscription in a stronger way than music and videos had. Digital ownership does have its worrying traits, but I still think Video Game ownership will stay strong at least as long as Gaben is alive, past that, if Valve DOES nosedive, well the internet’ll still internet
It’s because of Unreal/Unity/Godot…we have extremely powerful and relatively free/cheap tools that ANYONE can use.
Making movies takes a much higher initial budget
It’s more or less the case that all the music streaming services have all the music, so you can pick the one that offers the best balance of price, features, and other things like amount of money they pay out to artists, and then listen to whatever you want. That works pretty well for consumers, and streaming services don’t get to dictate what music gets made.
TV and movie streaming services have basically ended up in a situation where everything’s on exactly one service, and you need to pick which ones you pay for based on which have the things you most want to watch, even when that means tolerating an interface that barely works or annoys you with ads or trailers for things you’d never watch. This works fairly crappily for consumers, and streaming services pick everything.
Video game subscriptions seem to be going for the latter approach, and so overall, things are probably going to suck. Hopefully, nothing important ends up solely available via subscription, though, and experiencing the sucking remains opt-in.
Not that I want to defend Ubisoft, but I interpreted that statement similarly to this one, just from a different perspective.
Ubisoft wants to do the subscription model but the exec said it’s just not viable until gamers are willing to accept it. I didn’t get an implication that they would make gamers accept it, I think that’s what he was ultimately saying, it won’t happen until they do. Though tbf, I didn’t read that article, maybe he said more that made the statement less ambiguous. The quote in the title just seemed like a statement of fact rather than a statement of agenda. Ubisoft doesn’t have the power to make gamers accept that and acting like they do will hurt their bottom line rather than help it (is how I interpreted that statement).
Stop defending the trash or giving them the benefit of the doubt. Ubisoft is about profit, not making games good, or better or for your enjoyment. They 100% want to push subscription models.
When’s the last time a good honest company pulled this kinda horse shit… https://streamable.com/5np9o5
Companies need to earn trust, and that trust should be removed the minute the try to pull shit like what’s in the video link, or other bullshit.
He is our man in shining armor…literally.
The problem is it gets polluted by greed and the publishers want it both ways: they want £60 front, for half a game. The second half of the game is sliced into 3 - for an extra £20 a pop.
You mean £5-20/month for 3 years as a “season pass”
Yes, and autobill, which assumes that around 70% of subscribers will forget about it and never use it.
My wife and I have spent this last month essentially doing a Spring Cleaning of our subscriptions and memberships, and holy hell is it satisfying to just cancel things without any fucks given.
Sony with Spiderman 3 be like: 50$ part 1, 50$ part 2, 50$ multiplayer, for those out of the loop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UubAtaGfqHE
Sega
Nintendo too
Forcing subscription would probably be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I have no desire to pay for a gaming subscription. I play one or two games at a time, tops. The excuse that it gives me access to an entire library of games I DGAF about is the same bullshit cable companies did. Give you one or two channels (games) you want and a bunch of shit you don’t want so you have to subscribe to the next service to get the one or two things you want from them.
I want freedom. Offer both so everyone can pick the model that best matches their usage pattern. A GamePass+GeForceNow combo is nice if you want to play a diverse library of games without having to install terrabytes of game data. Also if you only want to play stuff a short while (hello ADHD), a subscription might be better than full price.
But again: freedom. I don’t want to be forced into subscriptions but neither would I want someone to forbid me from subscribing.
Totally agree. However, I think the word you’re describing is choice rather than freedom. You’re always free to purchase what you want, nobody forcing you. It’s just good to have choices.
Not sure what happened but it looks like your comment got tripled posted.
He wanted to emphasize that he likes freedom.
Haha, that made me exhale faster than usual.
(I deleted the duplicates now… and I’ll be more careful with retry behaviors.)
Damn. More than 3. The instance I posted from has some problems and my mobile client retried over and over. Apparently the HTTP status code didn’t match the result.
Once the other instance is responsive again, I’ll clean up. I killed the mobile app now.
Subscriptions need to go down, down, down, down the river.
I won’t subscribe or buy micros, I only want to play fun games
Subscription games to me are only good when there’s nothing good. Something to do in between.
They’re never on the same level of quality as a finished product. Even for the high points that are really high, the low points are disappointingly low
Because games are made subscription-based for profit, so the incentive isn’t making a good game or giving the players more content or whatever.
The games that want to give the players more actual content have no subscription, like Terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, Stardew Valley or other fantastic games that keep getting free updates.
Maybe you could exclude early WoW from that statement but current WoW definitely fits in the greedy bag too.
At this point I’m thinking about buying BG3 even though it’s not the typicla game for me, just to support the devs and their good mentality towards gamers 🙏
I think I need to buy a certain game juat to support a certain point of view…
Spoke to my adult offspring who said yes, he has whatever iteration of PS, but plays single player games, because with work and familial responsibilities, who has money to waste on subscriptions when time is limited?
You also can’t step away from a multi-player game whenever you want, which is a huge problem when you have kids and a spouse. Your attention will almost always be needed the moment things heat up in your game.
This is one more thing I like about singleplayer BG3. Even in the middle of a fight I can get up and do whatever.
I learned too late that the menu doesn’t actually pause BG3. Turn based mode will pause the world in a bubble around you, but NPCs will still carry on their patrols and conversations outside of that bubble. So don’t just open the menu and walk away, thinking you’re safe. Put it on turn based mode. I experienced a total party kill because I thought it was paused when we were standing in fire. LOL
Yep. I play one game that’s single player until weekend team tournaments. As soon as I get infinite loves for n time, the phone is ringing and people are on my doorstep.
Forced subscriptions are the new cancer.
Honest question, outside of MMOs, do we have any forced subscriptions? I suppose battle pass is a sub of sorts.
