Ares42

@redhotchilimist: I'm guessing you're not using air combat ? I said it in the other thread too, but comparing it to Arkham feels wrong to me. In Arkham you have three different defensive moves you have to switch between depending on attacks, in this game everything is answered by dodging, and if you take it to the air 90% of the dodging is done automatically for you. Also, everyone but the big guys are vulnerable to the air launcher. Even the shield guys which are supposed to be resilient to it gets knocked up by the web swing.

@sweep: I don't think anyone is trying to argue that there aren't differences in the abuse people get on the internet, merely that even as a white male you have to be completely ignorant to not realize that it's a problem (and if they've spent any significant time playing games online even they should have enough personal experiences with online abuse to understand it). The only reason they would come to the conclusion that there's no need for moderation is purely because they're out of touch with internet culture.

Re-reading the quote I'm left wondering where they got their data from. Like, the idea that people play to the audience is a somewhat reasonable theory, but do they have any actual data to back this up ?

I wouldn't say it's a 1:1 translation. Firstly the Arkham combat is mechanically denser, but also the pace is different. In this game you can pretty much target one dude, knock him out, move on to the next, knock him out etc etc only having to dodge now and again if there are guys shooting at you (and even then you don't always have to actively dodge). Arkham is much more about crowd control and precise targeting and countering. The air combat in this game basically makes you immune to melee combatants as long as you don't get overly greedy, and the inherent mobility (even during attacks) makes it very easy to avoid any sort of threatening situation.

As for this game being one button combat, it's not, but it's much more in the "light, heavy attack" box than the "attack, counter" box. It's been a while since I played a DMC, but I'd be more inclined to compare it to that.

@ntm: I know people have mentioned it, but the difference is that it's usually used as a major argument as to what makes the game experience of these games suffer. You have other collectathons trying to do fairly interesting things but getting dinged purely for being collectathons and then this game does extremely generic things and it gets mostly swept under the rug. From what I've played so far this game would've struggled to compete with a game like Prototype if it wasn't for the fact that you're playing Spiderman and doing Spiderman things.

Man, having put a few hours into this game I can't help but think of peoples hypocrisy when it comes to this style of open-world games. Just because the title says Spiderman and the developer doesn't say Ubisoft this game is getting high praise all over the place when it's pretty much just another run of the mill collectathon with all the bits and bobs people complain about being old, boring busy work. Not that I'm complaining, I've come to terms with the fact that I enjoy all these "bad" features.

The fact that we have all these games now that have an actual lifespan is a real bummer. Wildstar was one of those games I always thought I should go back and play again at some point, but I guess I never will now. Although I guess if Warhammer Online has managed to stay alive with private servers even Wildstar might have a chance of not completely vanishing as well.

@gundato:The problem is that the traditional card game model is neither f2p nor traditional multiplayer, they're both. With a game like Overwatch you pay an initial fee and that's everything that's required. If you want to spend more money that's fine, but if you don't you can still keep playing and be competitive. That allows the user base to stay fairly fresh as old players don't constantly meet a paywall and new players don't need to invest a bunch of money to catch up. The traditional card game model both requires old players to constantly keep reinvesting in the product and new players have a gigantic initial investment requirement just to get through the door. Both of these together is just murder for player retention.

If Artifact was just pay $60 play as much as you want with all the cards that would be fine, but then they'd lose out on the whole card economy which is arguably the entire point of the genre. If you want to keep the card economy you're pretty much required to drop the initial investment to keep the user base healthy and sustainable. Basically, card games were already operating fairly similarly to f2p games, but they were f2p games with a heavy initial investment (like a $60 AAA game with micro-trans). Removing that investment allowed them to reap benefits of being f2p. By implementing the old model again all you accomplish is to go back to when card games were still struggling to gain any real traction.

@paulkemp: If you do daily quests and play fairly regularly you can easily keep up with the release schedule of HS without paying, I have for the last 2-3 years. The problem is that you start at a negative. You have to get up to par on the base collection first, and if you never do that you're in a constant state of catch-up. I got my brother into the game about 2 years ago, and after a few months of reaching the gold limit almost every day he was at a point where he could stay competitive as well without investing.

As for the original article, they seem completely oblivious to the benefits of f2p and how it's been essential for games like HS and Fortnite to become successful. The whole "it's not pay to win, it's pay to participate" quote just illustrates a complete misunderstanding of the concept. That's not to say the game won't see any success, but in a market where every other competitor (even Magic at this point) is f2p it's hard to imagine Artifact will be able to compete in any real way.

This is an old school way of thinking at this point. The success of these types of card games rely on the fact that there's a big active user base. Being f2p is a requirement to sustain this. Magic has tried for years and years to compete in the digital market with it's traditional model, and it's only now finally with Magic Arena that it's starting to make some headway. Can you even imagine if other multiplayer games implemented this sort of approach ? Their user base would whittle and die in months, if not weeks. We've already seen how detrimental segregating the user base with DLC can be. On the other hand you see a game like Elder Scrolls Legends going from being a complete failure to somewhat a somewhat sustainable product purely by going to mobile thus increasing its user base.

I thought there was a thread like this not too long ago, but I can't find it. Anyways, I actually ended up replaying the game last year, and had a great time with it, again. While it absolutely doesn't do anything new, original or great with the gameplay it's still one of the few videogame stories that has stuck with me. The presentation in the game is just amazing and the story itself just straddles that line of being good, fun and entertaining really well.