As for the long term, it plans to evaluate a new partner for matchmaking and to adjust Payday 3’s reliance on online services. That could mean that Starbreeze will remove the game’s always online requirement, but the statement does not explicitly say that will be the case.
When it doesn’t explicitly say that will be the case, I doubt that it will be. But hopefully we’re reaching the turning point where games will stop with the always-online nonsense.
Bloomberg reports that newly-appointed CEO Takashi Kiryu is aiming to improve the company’s profitability by whittling down the number of smaller projects it releases, while focusing on big-budget games with a higher potential to improve profitability.
So you’re disappointed with the sales of these enormous games that spend far too long in development and don’t get the return you want, and your plan is to double down on these games instead of Dragon Quest Builders and Octopath? Here’s an idea: take someone who’s successfully led a smaller game and then give them progressively larger projects to lead. And maybe don’t make a main entry in your marquis series exclusive to a single console in an age where the PC market will likely outsell it.
In-app purchases, requires 3rd party account, and no LAN. I think their biggest rivals are Grim Dawn still getting expansions and that new Titan Quest.
First off, Payday 3 has zero local play. 100% DRM. This means that if their matchmaking system goes down, you don’t get to play the game. Now, this isn’t a complete deal-breaker for me, provided the matchmaker doesn’t go down. After an hour of play, the matchmaker went down for the rest of the night.
And that’s exactly why I’m hoping to convince more people to make this a deal-breaker. The servers going down is inevitable. If they stay up, it’s a bonus that makes your life easier. Of course, for Payday, I’m not expecting LAN, private servers, or split-screen. They make far too much money from funneling you to their cash shop. I just hope that the lack of these features is soon seen as a black mark that makes a game unmarketable.
No, it takes time to spin up a VM that will run PC games from a bygone era using an old version of Windows. We’re talking minutes from the time you click the VM until you can run the game, compared to seconds on a native executable. It’s one method, sure, but it’s not ideal. It’s definitely not simpler or better.
It’s not simple or easy to spin up a VM that will run indie games from 10 years ago.
And yet they’ll still have invasions. Is it so much to ask to take that formula, with co-op that works from a damn menu, without invasions?
The new way is better, and it’s not close. The only thing I miss from the old days is the ability to preserve each individual old version and old meta, whereas these days we just update the new version on top of it. If you’re the kind of player who felt like Happy Chaos ruined Guilty Gear Strive, you can’t really go back to a version before he existed. Up until this latest patch, I felt like the best time in the game’s lifespan so far was right before Happy Chaos launched (for reasons beyond the state that Happy Chaos launched in). Thankfully, this new season is great, but we might not have been so lucky.
People outside of the fighting game sphere would perceive these new games as a “rip off”
I’m going to wager plenty of people inside that sphere would consider them to be a rip-off as well. Super Street Fighter IV didn’t change any more about characters’ gimmicks than your typical seasonal update does in modern games. They had limited ability to patch games back then, and the new boxed copy was all they could do, but this new method allows them to demonstrably keep a larger pool of players online playing the game than the old method did, which provides more value to future purchasers, which theoretically drives more sales before we even get into the economics of Street Fighter costumes. I know when I bought Guilty Gear Xrd Sign, I wasn’t too compelled to pick up Revelator when it came out, since it appeared to be barely different from the version I already had, and no one was really playing that previous one online anyway.
An example would be Super Street Fighter IV launching with 10 new characters and 5 new stages for 40 dollars – a price that is basically in-line with modern “seasons” in the worst case scenario and it can be debated that it was actually a great value when you consider all of the additional work and polish to other UI and gameplay elements.
That’s $40 in 2010 money. It would be more like $56 in today’s dollars.
The size of Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the standard I want it to set anyway. I just want RPGs to be that deep with that level of production value. I finished Act 1 in the time it took me to finish all of Mass Effect 1, and I can’t believe I’ve still got two thirds of the game left. This game is the entire Mass Effect trilogy in one game, but Mass Effect didn’t give me a ton of ideas for different ways to play the game I just finished. You can play a Shepard who kills more with powers than with guns or more with guns than with powers, but it’s nothing like this.
Also, here’s the other standard. The game has multiplayer, but it’s not a horde mode. It’s not a live service hero shooter. It’s just co-op; the video game version of playing tabletop with your friends. It’s got LAN mode and direct IP connection. It’s available DRM-free. It supports controllers and mouse/keyboard really well. Other than that weird Larian launcher that you can disable easily enough, this game is doing everything I need it to do from a software perspective and to stand the test of time in a world where live services inevitably keep dying.
No DLC, but I’ll bet there’s a Tears of the Kingdom Deluxe for the Switch’s successor that has some extra content in it to justify charging you full price again.
If you want SteamOS, your best bet is still Steam Deck. If you don’t mind using Windows on a device that’s not built for it (which does come with the benefit of compatibility and Game Pass), that’s where most of these other options are going. I hear good things about the ROG Ally; seems like that’s the go-to if Steam Deck doesn’t get the job done for you. If you want some thorough reviews to help you out, check out The Phawx on YouTube. That guy has been doing thorough reviews of handheld gaming PCs for a long time now, and you’ll be able to figure out which one is the one for you.
There are options for handheld gaming PCs with better screens, but they’ll come at a higher price and with worse battery life.
There are plenty of low-spec games to be played on PC as well. If you’re talking about multiplayer games, most of them target a lower spec.
The previous two games, 20 years ago. It’s what gave them the reputation of being a studio that made great RPGs. Then they went on to make Neverwinter Nights (another D&D game), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Star Wars with rules very close to D&D), Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.
I’ll use that for things I already have in my library, either from my Windows days or from giveaways, but I’m not going to spend money in their stores when they don’t officially support me as a customer. Unofficial launchers like this could be broken by those storefronts at any time, and they were never guaranteed to work for me. GOG fares better than Epic in this regard, since they do sell Linux games, but I want official cloud saves and automatic updates as well.
All signs point to that program being a failure for them, which is why the exclusivity offers and announcements started drying up, but I guess this is them trying a revised strategy.
Yes, I answered your question with a question because your scenario was as absurd as you perceived mine to be. So I’ll answer yours directly: “yes, but not at that scale”. Because at that scale, it’s a review bomb.
Can you seriously envision a scenario where the worst game of all time is among the most-played?
It’s a free to play multiplayer game. If you continue playing it, you’re providing value for some other player who might spend money, so just by being in the matchmaking pool, they’ve got you where they want you, and they won’t care about your review.
It didn’t even occur to me that this was a result of the patch, but I did notice it start happening recently. When the patch rolled out, I was in a spot in the game where all of my things were taken from me anyway, so I guess I didn’t notice it initially when it first started.