bigsocrates

@thepanzini: It's never about the number of people playing it's about the number of people spending. If people are booting up the game just to enjoy it but not buying microtransactions that just costs them money.

I award zero credit for it being hard to build an offline patch. It might, in fact, be really really hard, but they chose to make the game the way they did. It's like building a nightclub with very thin walls and then when neighbors complain it's too loud arguing that it would be hard and expensive to add sound dampening. Ubisoft created this problem. Which, of course, they don't see as a problem because this was always the intent. If they wanted to make a game people could keep playing with the servers off they would have built it the way the Forza Horizon games were built.

But none of this excuses revoking people's licenses. That's nearly unprecedented for paid games on a digital marketplace.

Should have guessed the one that propagated to the top of the list.

#GuessTheGame #702

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#VisualVirtuoso

https://GuessThe.Game/p/702

@chamurai: Uh oh. You know they can smell it, right?

@manburger: Reading back over what I wrote it comes off more negative than I really felt, just because I was disappointed with how the game developed. I was surprised at how much I liked the beginning of the game and the exploration aspect and then I was disappointed in how it progressed. It stayed fun in a lot of ways but it just seems like it lost some of that tightness and focus.

I agree with you that the storytelling was not a highlight. I'm fine with wordless narratives and I'm fine with verbal narratives but I feel like Solar Ash kind of splits the difference in that it uses words but it doesn't really say that much. I mean there definitely is "a story" and there are themes and characters and even, kind of, a character arc, but mostly it just hints at these broader worlds and ideas without delving into them. It's kind of like wordless storytelling in that it creates a lot of questions and room for imagination, but it also takes away some of that magic by spelling out just a little too much while also not spinning these dense, complex, worlds you can sink your teeth into. It is far from the worst story in a game, and in terms of the actual writing it is probably well above average, but in some ways it feels caught between the two concepts of hinting at a world and fully fleshing it out.

I think the Pathless did a little bit of the same thing but a bit better, mostly because its world was easier to grasp than Solar Ash's extremely ambitious sci-fi storytelling, which may be part of the issue. It is presenting a lot of very complicated ideas and interweaving narratives and trying to do so through a handful of audio logs and some conversations with NPCs who are living in different realities.

Never played it.

#GuessTheGame #701

🎮 🟥 🟥 🟥 🟩 ⬜ ⬜

#VisualVirtuoso

https://GuessThe.Game/p/701

I think it's a little odd to discuss Yoshitaka Murayama and his connection to the upcoming Eiyuden Chronicles main game without noting that he recently tragically passed away, never having seen the release of his big spiritual sequel. This makes Eiyuden Chronicles Rising the last game released in his lifetime, and considering that the Suikoden games are so important it makes it a weirdly important game for what it is.

RIP Murayama.

As for the game itself, I actually got every achievement in it when it released into Game Pass. However because the main game was delayed so much it actually ended up being a pretty bad intro game because of that gap. I remember the very basics but it was 2 years ago. That used to be the gap between true sequels not an appetizer game and its associated entre.

My memory is that this game is okay for an indie 2D RPG with platformer elements but felt pretty insubstantial. Not just because of how much of it is about side quests and the limited plot but because of the shallow mechanics and characterization. It definitely feels like a teaser game rather than a stand alone. Not necessarily in how much content it has (quite a bit) but in that it doesn't really feel satisfying to play on its own and doesn't answer any of the questions it poses from a narrative or character perspective. It makes sense given what they were doing, but considering that it's 12 hours to beat it and more like 20 if you want everything, well, that's a big commitment for a game that's all set up.

It's not bad as a breezy, easy, action RPG game, but if you're going to ask 10+ hours to play through a game you should deliver a bit more of a complete narrative arc, even if that feeds into the main game.

There are plenty of full games that are shorter than this "teaser."

Ubisoft really doesn't want you to own your games.

I realize that I'm the only lunatic on these boards who actually cares about The Crew at this point, but while I do think the game has/had some merit, it's not really about The Crew. It's about games preservation and ownership and just games in general.

Ubisoft is taking the vanguard in the position that not only should you not own your games, which from a legal perspective you haven't for quite some time (instead you own a license) but that the companies should maintain total control over them. They should be able to revoke access whenever they want, with or without warning, for no reason at all. With something like The Crew there is at least a little bit of logic in that it's an online only game (even though there was no reason for it to be) and once the servers are down there's no way to play it. However you could still boot up the menus and in theory fans could put together servers in the future, as they have for other games in the past. Ubisoft's desire to stop anyone from having any fun with the thing they bought once Ubisoft decides funtimes are over is presumably why they revoked the licenses, but it goes deeper than that.

The real issue here is that Ubisoft is building more and more online components into even single player games. For now their single player games require a patch from servers in order to work, even if you bought the physical. That means that if the servers some day go down your disc will be useless, let alone your purchased license. And it seems like Ubisoft is planning on building online components into Assassin's Creed games in the future so they may not even be playable offline even if they are primarily single player. They may decide that if fans don't want to stop playing Black Flag and instead pony up for their horrible Skull and Bones game then they will be forced to stop playing Black Flag.

This seems spectacularly short sighted and like a great way to antagonize your most loyal fans, but it's the path Ubisoft has chosen, and if it works for them then others will follow suit. Game companies seem really excited about the idea of being able to take away our games, and as someone who has played his PS3 and games I bought for it a very long time ago as recently as a couple days ago this makes me both angry and nervous. It just feels like the big game publishers are more and more antagonistic towards their playerbases, angry that they can't extract the revenue that their projections say they should be able to from their games, regardless of quality. Whether it's doubling down on live services immediately after the market rejects two big games, jacking up prices (Ubisoft now wants $130 for their most premium version of their new Star Wars game) or this new era of "games are always online and we can shut them down whenever we feel like it" none of it feels good, and it will eventually make even the "casuals" think twice about buying games.

Of course that may be what Ubisoft wants. They want people to subscribe to their Ubisoft service the same way that they do streaming services. The problem is that the value proposition sucks. Ubisoft releases a few big games a year, many of which are not really worth playing, and they want $18 a month for the privilege of playing Skull & Bones and whatever games they bother leaving up from their back catalog. It's a brave, new, horrible, world, and the shutdown and revocation of the Crew is a portent of things to come.

Right now I'm playing through Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, and doing it off a PS3 disc I bought a long time ago. Ubisoft wishes it could stop me. In the future it may be able to.

I don't think this is going to work out the way these companies hope it will, but for now the mainstream industry seems hell bent on forcing its restrictive, destructive, vision on gamers. Ubisoft doesn't care about its games or its customers, only its profits, but what it doesn't seem to understand is that if they keep antagonizing those customers eventually they will go elsewhere, whether that's to other gaming companies or the digital high seas. You're not going to teach people not to care when you take away things they've paid for. You're going to teach them to stop giving you money.

@chamurai: This one was insanely hard and they intentionally hid the ball in a number of ways including listed genre.

@retris: It's very strange behavior. Not just because it makes AEW look second rate but because it's so passive aggressive. During the Monday Night Wars (When both sides pulled this crap) at least the conflict was more direct and on an even playing field. This just feels whiny. And it's complaining about individuals rather then the other company. Taking shots at HHH is fair enough because he's an executive and he kind of took a shot at Ospreay, which was dumb in its own right, but going after Punk so long after he left the company just feels bitter and juvenile. Bitter and juvenile is Punk's brand, not AEW's.

This footage was close enough to the story already out there that it only changes people's minds on the details, and the details are not what matter. Whether or not Punk choked Perry successfully doesn't matter. If he'd been extremely violent or kept coming back for more after the fight broke up it might change things, but as it was we're just lookinb at details.

Tony Khan is a big nerd, which is fine (so am I) and he thinks these details matter when for most people they don't. What he needs is some normal people around him who can give him perspective. On everything from booking to this. And he doesn't have that. Or if he does, he won't listen. In his own way he's like Vince. Not in being an evil bastard (that we know of; but even Punk said he's a nice guy) but in trying to impose his own personal vision on everything and not taking enough feedback. Everyone seemed to think this was a bad idea, but he went through with it anyway, and, as I said, he's on tilt and he's going to keep making bad decisions until someone or something pulls him out of it.

Just focus on Ospreay, Joe, and Swerve, the parts of your show that are really cooking right now, figure out a way to use Mercedes to inject some life into the women's division (NOT what you're doing now) and let Punk be someone else's headache. Sooner or later he'll bite HHH and then that will be WWE's mess. Don't make it yours.

@retris: Punk likes to call himself the best in the world. Nobody is as big a mark for CM Punk as CM Punk is. His version of events also had Joe asking him verbally to lay off. That's not what happened. Or at least not all of it.

That being said...Tony Khan is clearly on tilt and needs someone to tell him to take some deep breaths and stop engaging. It's embarrassing that they aired that and it accomplishes nothing positive for anyone. Except for podcasters and commentators on wrestling who are doing huge numbers off Wrestlemania and get to continue the party for a bit, I guess.