Dang, this is a disappointing read. This might be an unpopular take, but I have been steadily losing respect for FromSoft over the years due to them essentially following the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became very successful, and from that point on they’ve just been remaking that one game over and over with slightly different coats of paint. I was hoping they’d break out of that pattern with AC6 and do something original for a change, although I was also keenly aware there was a risk that, being the sixth game in the series, it would be just another AC. The fact that it’s apparently just another Souls is somehow even worse.
the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release
Why would they need to do that? If it’s years down the line, there shouldn’t be any bugs left to fix by that point. And offline single-player games don’t need regular content drops. Sure, an expansion or two might be nice, but those don’t come free. Only online games need to constantly feed their players new content in order to keep them hooked and coming back to buy more MTX.
Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?
Oh sales would plummet for sure, but it would still make a profit, just not as much. If From Soft and Larian can do it, everyone can. They just don’t wanna. (see below)
At the end companies are not inherently “evil” they just look for what works and what doesn’t by trial and error
That really depends on your definition of “works”. Sure, it’s a business, but what’s the goal? To me there seems to be a noticeable difference between companies that want to make good games, for which the business side of things is just a means to an end, and companies that want to make as much money as possible, where the games are the means to that end. Is that latter category ‘evil’? Maybe not strictly speaking, but I have no concern for those companies whatsoever, they can go fuck themselves.
Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.
The same goes for single-player offline games, though. There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you’ve seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.
you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase
If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust.
That would require every player even new ones to make very complex loot filters and understand what loot is valuable and not to automate it.
No, it wouldn’t, because it would not be mandatory (just like loot filters themselves aren’t).
Every item in PoE that is automatically picked up doesn’t take up inventory space (Metamorph organs, Expedition fragments, Sulphite, Azurite).
You’re this close to getting it. The extremely limited inventory space in PoE and other ARPGs is a severe design defect, the games would be much better if inventory space was simply infinite. I’ve had a long and complex discussion about this very topic with someone just a day or two ago, so I don’t feel like explaining myself on this point all over again. Feel free to check that if you’re interested.
It also feeds into the dopamine loop, when you get an exciting drop you see it on the ground it doesn’t automatically just get sucked into your inventory.
That would be much better solved by having a pop-up show you the exciting drop as you automatically pick it up. That way the player would still get their dopamine hit without the game also constantly filling their annoyance meter by making them pick up garbage manually.
You get tens of hours of high-quality gameplay for free when you go through the campaign. How is that not saying much?
Because the high quality doesn’t come in until way later. When you’re playing through the campaign for the first time, you have neither the knowledge nor the resources to make a proper build, so the gameplay is very bland in comparison to what you can do later. Which means that the fact that the campaign is so long is actually a negative. It’s a tutorial that takes like twenty hours to slog through. This seems to be a common problem with free-to-play games. Warframe devs acknowledge and joke about the fact that the game starts getting good a hundred hours in.
In modern ARPGs, you automatically pick up currency just by being near it. In PoE, you have to individually click each currency item to pick it up. Given that PoE has a very sophisticated loot filter system, I find it very strange that it requires so much clicking to pick stuff up. You’ve already decided what loot you want to pick up when you set up your loot filter, so the clicking is mostly superfluous and could be automated. IMO that would make the game play much better, since having to stop to pick up loot interrupts the gameplay and breaks the flow.
It’s an online ARPG, the campaign is basically just a tutorial, the real meat of the game is in the endgame. So yes, you’re right that you can finish the campaign just fine without making any purchases, but that’s not saying much. Also, the low drop rates will kick your butt throughout the campaign and forever after regardless of whether you make a purchase or not.
I also have a lot of playtime in it, but most of it wasn’t really quality time. I tried real hard to like the game, but in hindsight I should’ve given up on it way sooner. Even with all the tabs, inventory management is still a nightmare. I hate the currency system with a passion, I resent the fact that there’s no loot vacuum, I despise having to manually identify items. I don’t like trading, and trying to find my own gear was like being rolled around in a zorbing ball made out of sandpaper. There’s way too much friction in the system for no good reason. I love the core gameplay, the monsters have cool designs and are fun to kill, the skills feel punchy and satisfying to use… It’s just the overarching structure built around that that ruins it for me. Shame.
It looks cool, but frankly I’m far more interested in how it’s going to be monetized. I bought into PoE early access back in the day but stopped playing after a few years because I got fed up with how its game design is compromised in order to accommodate its business model. Specialized stash tabs for currency, maps, cards, etc. are basically a mandatory purchase, since inventory management is hell without them. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but IMO deliberately introducing game design problems, such as tedious inventory management, so that you can sell the solutions is a scummy practice. The same goes for drop rates, which are frustratingly low in order to force you to trade instead of finding your gear yourself, since in order to trade effectively, you need to buy a few premium tabs. Even though I actually made all these purchases to overcome these artificial hindrances, being squeezed like that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I just couldn’t enjoy the game anymore. If they keep this up in PoE2, I’m going to steer well clear.
It was great while it lasted, but I stopped using Trillian simply because people stopped using the networks it supported. I used it for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The latter three don’t even exist anymore, and ICQ is a shadow of its former self owned by some Russians now. Some people migrated over to Skype, some I just lost contact with altogether. Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.
I’m skeptical. Trillian still exists, but hardly anyone uses it. It can’t connect to a bunch of services because their operators decided to disable third-party access, and I remember that even back in the day it was constantly playing catch-up with network updates that broke compatibility. “One chat app to rule them all” is a neat idea, but I don’t see it working in practice.
Votes should be inversely weighted by age. The vote of someone who’s going to clock out before the next election even rolls around shouldn’t be worth the same as the vote of someone who’s going to have to live with the consequences for half a century or more.