Fenixp

Studios which succeeded in delivering what they said in their KS, word-to-word, are in the minority. Why? Because game development is a long and non-trivial process. Anyone who thinks that you can create a set of goals and not shift it in the in coming years, especially in the face of circumstances you could have not possibly predicted, should not crowdfund. All things like these do is finally show people crowdfunding for what it actually is and if you're unwilling to accept that, crowdfunding is not for you, plain and simple. So, at the end of the day, only people who actually -understand- what crowdfunding is will stick with it, and I call that a big win.

Good point about existing preorders. That is a pretty bull move - altho I assume those can be cancelled anytime? There's breaking promises and then then there's merely changing circumstances. - "We won't release the game on GOG or Steam" is definitely breaking a promise and a bit of a **** move - "We will release on the platform that'll help make the game a better product, but we'll deliver the product we've prmised on the platforms we've promised as well" are simply changing circumstances base on conditions the devs could not possibly foresee in advance. I mean, if this simply ends up meaning a better game that you really wanted to be made, isn't another year of wait time kinda irrelevant? Julian Gollop, the dude who IIRC runs development of the game, stated the cash they got from Epic will literally keep the studio afloat for the years to come. If he's not exaggerating and the game'll come to Steam at a later point, there's not really a whole lot he's got to lose - don't forget most people don't follow internet drama.

Back when KS bomb blew up, people were making a silly mistake - they were confusing crowdfunding with preorders. The outrage about Phoenix Point and 1 year Epic exclusivity is the same thing all over again. Don't forget - to crowdfund something is to give patronage to a product that very well might never even see the light of the day. When you crowdfund a game, you should primarily be concerned about quality of the dream you helped come to light, not about something as silly as where does the downloaded data come from (especially when said downloaded data will be available on the promised platforms with a small-ish time gap) Similarly, when you do crowdfund a product, there's a good chance it'll never even see the light of day, or that it'll be entirely different from what you've expected it to be. Main difference between crowdfunding and pre-order is that when you pre-order, you know which product you'll get and when. When you crowdfund, you flush a bunch of money down the toilet in the hopes it'll bring something cool in the future. So, far as I'm concerned, if this means Phoenix Point will end up a better game, it's the right move - both for the game and for the backers. After all, games get postponed for more than a year, and, at the end of the day, quality game which is as well-known as Phoenix Point will sell well. If, however, you crowdfunded the game to get it on Steam/GOG as opposed to allow it to exist, well... You did so for all the wrong reasons and getting a refund is the only reasonable thing to do. Edit: Incidentally, Some clarification on the Epic deal

Eh, at the end of the day, if you want to be successful in your creative endeavor, your loyalty should primarily be with your actual creators / employees and only after them with your consumers. Consumers will abandon you quickly enough after delivering a bad product while, on the other hand, they'll flood to a quality one, regardless of platform - for which you need a creative team that actually gets paid and sticks around. Additionally, we now know there has to a bunch of money involved

I brought myself to like 10 million masks in Hollow Knight and I still can't even get past stage 2 of The Radiance. So I'm giving up and watching the ending on Youtube, my reaction time is just not good enough to beat that fight. Edit: Oh god, I just saw what follows on Youtube, thank God I gave up on that fight. I mean, what the hell? I think I'll hold off on buying Silksong until I can find out whether the difficulty increased or decreased from the original Hollow Knight - I'd be a lot more frustrated if I got stuck somewhere during the game for similar reasons.

Meh, I cut beating Hollow Knight to under like a minute or so - the fight's rather easy at this point. I'm still unable to even get through it without getting damaged a couple of times tho. If by "getting worse" you mean the Godmaster content, I'm skipping that. I'm just not good enough at platformers to get through even the first gauntlet, let alone any of the other ones, so for me that's just wasted time.

Damn it, The Radiance fight in The Hollow Knight is a bitch - I've been giving it attempts for the past week or so and just can't beat the damn thing. 'Spose I'm finally hitting a limit of how much time I'm willing to invest into beating a boss in a videogame - I got to see one ending at least.

I never played Anthemn so I don't know **** about its progression, but I can definitely see it happening if plan for weapons would be for all of them to be equally viable sidegrades, with increasing level merely unlocking more options (like active/passive abilities and such) for said weapons. You could then easily get into a situation where base lvl 1 gun would emit the highest damage numbers. While I am just talking out of my ass when it comes to Anthemn, all I'm saying is that there's more ways of doing progression than just liear damage progression and a weapon that dishes out a lot of single-target DPS sounds like the ideal newb gun to me. Edit: I mean, in Warframe, the weapon you get at the very start of the game should, theoretically, be just as viable as the one you get 100h down the line - they differ in behavior, but the only thing that leads to damage progression are mods, which are transferable from one weapon to another. I quite like that system as, suddenly, you get to choose which weapons you enjoy to use as opposed to using whatever has the highest damage number at the time.

No, 'game as a service' can mean several things, depending on who you ask. a) Yes, it can also be a MP game which, without dedicated servers, will only function as long as the developer/publisher actively supports it b) 'Games as a service' may also be a term used to refer to subscription-based game streaming - in other words, you pay a monthly subscription like you would for Netflix, you never install a game on your computer but instead stream it from servers provided by the publisher - therefore, the publisher has full control over which version of a game do you play and whether you can even play it. A lighter version of this is something that, say, EA already does with Origin, where the games you're subscribed to are installed on your hard drive, but they phone home more or less every time you try to start them to see whether you can still play them. c) 'Game as a service' may be even be a SP game which, however, requires semi-constant internet connection to support a constant stream of developer updates and content additions (like Ass Creed: Odyssey) while, at the same time, constantly offering players microtransactions in case they wish to skip some of the grind (which I understand wasn't really present in Ass Creed Odyssey on release, but that may change - see the bit about constant stream of developer updates)

Y'know I'm not entirely sure why would they switch to generic third person action game in the first place, it's not like we're in early 2000s (more like late 1990s? Damn my memory's terrible) and every 3rd iteration of a platformer needs to be 3D to show off devs have mastered the tech

Likelihood of foretold events coming true increases geometrically with font size used to predict said events. Science.

That's at least 40 more minutes of your life spent just watching videos on news which can be conveyed in two paragraphs that you can skim through in, like, 3. Incidentally, here's the source that won't waste your time if we absolutely must have a separate thread on this as opposed to it being posted to News section - writer himself experienced weird shutdowns with Anthem, seemingly related to the console overheating.

So, multiple things happened: a) I kinda gave up on Warframe. I mean, I assume I'll still play it every now and again when I feel like it, but I got to a point where there is very little progression or variety. I still think the game plays great and I want to see what they do with it in the following updates - but, as it stands, the grind's too much for me to go through it and prices too steep for me to significantly accelerate it. So... That's that. b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqH-iwA0ZmU Yeah, they... Grabbed Mario, Rabbids (which is apparently a Rayman spinoff I never even heard of before) and made a super polished XCOM-like in Mushroom Kingdom, with most prominent Mario characters (and their Rabbid version, naturally) making appearance, all with their own semi-unique weapons, tools and (presumably?) skill trees. The game is colorful and silly and, apparently, gets rather difficult later on, so there's that to look forward to. Anyway, weaponized Mario, yay!

Wait, Vampires are just really old ghosts? "We figured you people aren't scared of immaterial figures so we'll frighten you with rampant murder"?

Slowly going through Mars in Warframe. Additionally, I've managed to get myself to a level where the easiest bounty mission in Plains of Eidolon is just about doable, so I'm doing it, hoping for it to drop the Gara component - it does drop other rare resources as well so that's neat. Aaand working on the Archwing launcher to be able to ... Well ... Launch ... The Archwing into the plains for more mobility. I've also done a few of the Archwing missions and ... Well, albeit I suppose it should not come as a surprise, the 6 degrees of freedom combat in Warframe is just not as good as the ground-based one, altho I definitely appreciate the mechs-with-swords-in-space thing. (turns out swords aren't that useful in spess combat, all things considered) After finishing Hollow Knight, I also got in the mood for another metroidvania, so I'm going through Guacameele, which is really good. Not Hollow Knight levels of good, but it's a brawler with its own specifics and fun, unique twists on mechanics, so, y'know... That's fun.

He's -way- too good for some of his assessments to really be applicable to me, but it's certainly interesting to see viewpoints of a person with that kind of skill (I mean... Damn.) Thank you for pointing him out.

In the grim dark future of the 21st millenium, the world is ruled by the super-rich caste of sell-out journalists who direct the sheep at the entertainment they want consumed. In their diabolical scheme, the poor wage slaves are forced to spend the last of their hard-earned currency to purchase entertainment that these powerful journalists approved! ... I'm sorry, that's so ridiculous I've had to laugh out loud. Anyway, a) Running about, wishing for a company's demise is just in extremely poor taste, especially when it's happening on a semi-competitive company's discussion boards. b) I just don't understand how can a person get so emotionally involved with a company that doesn't give a tosh about said person that he'd actively spit this kind of bile in their general direction, but hey, it's the internet - I suppose it's simply in the work description of some posters to ... USE THEIR SELL-OUT FORUM POST POWER TO POST SAID BILE! Mwehehehehehe.

- The Stalker has found me in Warame. And I died. ... Damn. The bastard caught me in the middle of a defense mission, like wave 8 or some such so it spawned pretty powerful enemies - and in the midst of them was running a shadowy being that messed me up. Anyway, surprising and rather cool. - Crafting the first Archwing! Apparently I still need the launcher to be able to use it in Plains of Eidolon, but the archwing missions will unlock! - I've done the first few missions on Mars, which is rather neat - ... And I've got a full new set of gear ready for use, so now I'm just trying to get the final bits of Rhino frame to be able to re-play some low-level content with brand new unranked gear However, aside from these things, the monetization's starting to kick in - in the form of weapon and warframe slots. By crafting Rhino, my single free Warframe slot will be gone and by clicking away a message during crafting, I've spent like 12 platinum on 2 weapon slots, so bleh. I've also accidentally pressed a button when messing around with mods on some screen on other, so I'm now stuck with 8 platinum out of the starting 50 - and there doesn't seem to be any other way of unlocking more slots than via platinum! (Yeah I know I can get it on player market if I grind the right items, but screw that - I suppose I'll drop some money on the game sooner or later anyway, considering how much fun it is)

a) If you needed to remove corpses by attrition, you were playing the game very wrong b) The "badly thought-out targeting mechanic" is one of the staples of positioning-based turn-based systems. Again, if that's not what you're in for, the game's clearly not targeted at you. For the rest of us, corpses quite nicely deal with the issue of challenge dropping rapidly by just cutting down enemy front liners.

Both corpses and stalling are fantastic ideas dealing with issues that many turn-based tactics games never quite managed to get resolved in a reasonable manner. If Darkest Dungeon's mechanics are 'bad' for these reasons then most similar systems are bad by definition, in which case you're not exactly the game's target audience - wanting something to change because you don't enjoy what it wants to be is exactly what I'm referring to when talking about 'castrating develper's vision'

Nah, one of the things I admire about Red Hook and their development of Darkest Dungeon is that regardless of hate they receive, they'll stick to their creative vision and create a game they want created, not a castrated version their community would force upon them. I'm quite hoping that's what they'll do for the second one as well.

So, I just figured you can find lootboxes of sort in Warframe. There's a special mission type with a mixed composition of enemies from a bunch of different factions that you need to complete to open them. The act of opening itself is achieved by a whole lot of unmitigated murder. Y'know, you can be other free-2-play dev and make sure that your lootboxes are locked by a key which you'll be only ever able to get using real money or extremely rare currency, or you can be Digital Extremes and tell player to go and murder fun and, up to that point, unseen enemy compositions in absurd numbers to unlock it. Incidentally, I started a quest to get a big cat of sorts, because big cats of sorts can, I assume, help with murder. Edit: Oh right I also crafted dual swords which somehow feel a lot more satisfying to use than their single version, so that's a thing I'm doing. I also found Mr. Shotty replacement, believe it or not - and it's a high-precision rifle of all things. Murder over vast distance is as much fun as murder in close-quarters, so yay!

https://youtu.be/pFAknD_9U7c

All right, after putting about 20 hours into Warframe (inside like 6 days, mad!), I've got Things to say. First of all, the core gameplay is fantastic. Seriously, the guns feel great, meele's even better and when you're doing content for which you're not underlevelled, Digital Extremes somehow managed to create a looter shooter which doesn't need spongy enemies to function - so you're murderizing dudes left, right and center while zooming around and using abilities that can cause anything raging from instant death of a bunch of guys all the way to a small extinction event. (Unless under-levelled) you never feel like you're shooting enemies with peas and slapping them around with a rubber duck - weapons have weight to them and they're balanced enough to allow you to just pick your poison and stick with it. There's also functional stealth and parkour system, both of which are an optimal way of getting through some levels - optimal, but not required. And while we're at picking your poison, while I may just not have progressed far enough to see any of it, there doesn't seem to be such a thing as a 'superior' weapon that you'd find in, say, Borderlands. All weapons seem to be sidegrades with varied behavior, but none seem to necessarily be more powerful than another one - and if that does turn out to be the case, I'm going to love this system. See, there's mods that can be levelled up and made more powerful. These mods are what makes weapons more powerful and they're transferable between weapons of the same class - so you can totally use a different weapon and have it as powerful as the one you were using previously simply by transferring those (that's not entirely true, there's also a gear levelling system, but let's forget that for now) Yeah, loving this design, loving the gameplay. I'm even ejoying exploring the individual levels a whole lot, albeit procedural generation can sometimes create bits which make absolutely no sense - still, exploration is fun and when you find something rare, you feel rather good about it. Now, for the Switch port. Let me just say that the little console has no damn right of running something this pretty, but... It does! The performance was a bit dodgy once I started, but it turned out there's actually quite a lot of graphics settings to fine-tune it to a fidelity you find acceptable while getting table performance (so I basically turned off all the graphical bells and whistles and while I barely notice the difference in how the game looks, I sure do see the difference in how it performs - the thing's running silky smooth.) The game's absolutely enjoyable in both handheld and docked modes - what I find a bit more irritating is that, even in solo mode, it just refuses to handle the console going to sleep and then waking up - when you do so, the game restarts, abandoning whatever mission you were doing at the time. Anyway, if Warframe is something you find remotely interesting but go "Eww! Free to play!", give it a shot. It's really good - and that's coming from a guy who did so in the past, bounced off and decided he'll never play it again. ... But did. And damn.

You mean using shakedown tactics to extort money from people who may or may not have pirated their game in a cute "Guilty until proved innocent" move while working with technology that's just inherently inaccurate for pinpointing individuals? I do't know, seems like something Activision's shareholders may enjoy.