@Auspice
Oddly enough, the best commentary that I've found on all of this - especially as it regards to things like what happened with the NBA this week and the Hearthstone gamer - watch last week's Southpark episode.
Their animated statement on the entire thing is pretty spot on and subsequently why Southpark has been entirely scrubbed from China.
@AeriaNyx
I will admit the early trailers for it had me wondering how someone could actually capture the turn of a person into the embodiment of chaos for a yet to be encountered hero character, and would just be a disaster.
I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I think the movie eventually will be one of those that will be considered best viewed in a theater.
@Jennkryst Elite Dangerous is tons of fun with a dual-stick setup. There's some interesting voice command mods that go beyond the base game's functionality too. Although I'm not sure where they stand now I've not played that game in months.
@Jennkryst
The Hairbrained Scheme Battletech.
Although Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is scheduled to release December 10th.
Anyone who is interested in getting the Battletech game, there's a day or two left before the October Humble Bundle releases and it's the primary game for the monthly at $12. You get the game and ~$25 in DLC with it, on top of whatever other games are released with the monthly.
@Tinuviel
He has a purchasing addiction and the liquid income to do things like that. The past year he's been fascinated with board games of all stripes and has paid into the Kickstarter of about 10 of them.
@Bananerz said in Worst Games:
Star Citizen. I can't play the stupid game that I paid for numerous times over because it never ever will be released. But at least I have a lot of pretend spaceships I can't fly. YAY!
I have a friend who has $5000 in ships for that game and I keep telling him that he'll never get to go anywhere in them. He flips me off a lot.
@Admiral
The next bundle coming up in September starts at Battletech, so the lineup for that monthly bundle does not look too bad.
@Tinuviel
It might have less to do with pre-orders but being able to pre-order games does not help since it goes back to that sense of entitlement that I see in some people who do game pre-orders.
@Tinuviel said in Worst Games:
But typing rage-filled diatribes and sending death threats to level designers on twitter
I understand what you are saying here, and that this happens over game delays is just terrible. I think that this in part is just part of one of the problems with Twitter, albeit as it relates not just to the gaming industry. I do not use Twitter. I think that it encourages, supports, and endorses social toxicity and internet mobbing. I mean take the worst of our online game communities - COD, League, DOTA - and amplify them by 1000 and that is Twitter. So I wish I could be surprised that happens to designers and game developers.
@Ghost
I thought Battleborn was the better of the two games too.
@Auspice
I often find people getting upset at delays confusing. I encourage delays if it will make the game better. I do not think the pre-order culture in the gaming industry is consistent in that it actually helps make better games, though. It usually seems like just a way for the game publisher to dig as deep into the pockets of the player as possible.
Pre-order culture also seems to create some sense of entitlement too. I've known people who were just absolute in that, "I bought my game and you said it would come out on this date. You lied, time to cancel my pre-order and tell everyone I know to cancel theirs too."
But I am guilty of indulging in this culture. There are only two companies that I would find myself willing to preorder from, and of the two only one of them without actually playing in a beta test. That first one is CD Project Red. I pre-ordered The Witcher 3 with no regrets, and it is the way that the company presents itself and their philosophy towards game-design that gives me confidence in my pre-order for Cyberpunk.
The other, oddly enough, is Ubisoft, but I think it's because of the availability of betas they offer. I have pre-ordered Ghost Recon: Breakpoint because I got to play it and that helped finalized my decision on if it was worth the price point of sale or not.
@Auspice
That's a good question.
With Venetica, the story was actually pretty decent and the whole premise of the game was interesting. The problem actually came in combat - the hit boxes for the creatures when in combat were not consistent. It required you to practically stand on top of the creatures and clip into them to be able to hit them at times. There was more than one location where the starting of combat would crash the game to desktop or lock up the computer requiring a soft-reboot. Animations were always off from the dialogue and sometimes the cut scene animations were not complete showing blank faces or just a mouth and pair of eyeballs. Character movement was jilted and stiff which often required a lot of repositioning to access interactable objects.
As you progressed further into the game the "difficulty" increase made enemies spongier in terms of hit points and armor while the character scaling for damage on weapons or protection by armor, or the usefulness of skills, did not scale equally. So you ended up with a game with a ramping difficulty that created longer combats and more frequent deaths until you got through the combat more by luck than skill or character build.
Two Worlds, when it came out was just a buggy hot mess. The game would crash when doing setting transitions. Combat was bugged to such a point that there were enemies with ranged attacks that could see you from the other side of a mountain and clip their attacks through terrain to hit you. The movement controls for the character were terrible, were even standing directly in front of interactable objects would not detect you actually standing there - and requiring you to get on top of the object or position your camera so the character would clip into it to get the interaction command to appear. That's not all the problems but those are some of the worst.
Mars: War Logs was a game that also had a great premise and story idea. This game also had huge issues with hitbox detection for combat and since the early game locked you into melee combat this was a huge issue. It required the character to be practically on top of the monster to hit it, whereas the player had a wider hitbox the creatures could hit in their own melee without entering your melee range. The game also had crashing issues with zone transitions and at one point I encountered a game-breaking bug that would not let the game progress during dialogue in a cut-scene and would crash the game to desktop or lock the computer up altogether requiring a soft reboot. Playing the game through on another save file to see if it was a localization issue in that particular save game file, still presented the same problem.
It would be fair to note that some of these issues could have been patched out since then but I have not revisited the games since their initial releases.
Holy crap what a topic. As a ghost writer I have had to play a lot of games to write reviews for. So here's some of the worst that I have on my review Steam account:
@Wretched
It is perfectly Borderlands. Anything that you would expect out of a Borderlands game - from guns to humor to gameplay is there. That's the best way to describe it, in my opinion.
Does it push any kind of new envelopes? Not really. But it is fun. The PC version is a little buggy at times but they are rolling out patches to fix some of the more glaring issues. The only thing they can't fix is the EGS Launcher is not cloud saving correctly so you risk losing your game and progress if you rely just on that for your save files.
@Auspice
I'll play it. Maybe even write a review for it.
@Ghost
Damn the episode with Hugh was one of my favorite episodes of TNG too.
@Ghost said in General Video Game Thread:
@Livia said in General Video Game Thread:
But honestly it's a surprisingly different game now than it was back then, and a lot of people didn't like the direction it went and just wanted to play it the way it was. Saying it's 'The same WoW' is not really true.
Like I'm sure all those other reasons are spot on the money (heh!) but still.
So are the quests different then?
I just think its a shame because I'd rather see WoW2 than to turn back the clock. I love the Draenei and Worgen, and I worked hard for my Mag'har orc. Theres so much story to experience, and while I get that the earlier state long before the Sylvanas Windrunner and Varian Wrynn arcs better allows players to experience those story arcs before they were made obsolete by the further patches, it still seems far less than what people are paying for.
Level cap goes from 120 to 60, available zones drop down a lot, available races and classes are nearly halved, etc.
Well, the general answer to your question is that yes the quests are different. There's no more zone phasing and all of those changes that they made are now gone, so things are as they were at the start.
People are paying for less, which is clear, but then people doing something for the sake of nostalgia typically do not do a cost/value estimation because they like the nostalgia of it.
@Auspice
I wouldn't be surprised at all. Blizzard, I think, is going to start seeing the monetary pinch in the next few years so they need as many income streams as they can get.
@Ghost
It plays on nostalgia and wants to capture the people who did not get to play vanilla but played later. In addition, the past two expansions, so far as I understand it, have not been all that popular or great so this is a way to capture other people.
The other thing I think has to do with the sudden desire to release and monetize classic is because there were some classic private servers that Blizzard forced to close that had some pretty high player bases. Now that those servers are gone they want to capture what they can of that market.