BRNK

The reason I have a problem with preordering is because it does three separate and harmful things:

1. It shifts the incentive for publishers from ensuring that they make good products that review well, get good word of mouth and sell well as a result to a glitzy marketing campaign that makes whatever promises it needs to in order to boost presales. In other words, the incentive shifts from quality to packaging.

2. It weakens the consumer's only leverage: spending power. If/when things go awry with a game, a publisher is far less likely to respond meaningfully, generously, or ethically if they already have all our money. If we want our spending power to retain any leverage for the kinds of practices we'd like to see or not see in the gaming industry, we need to keep dollars until products are complete.

3. When things go wrong (like in the case of No Man's Sky), developers are left to bridge the gap between preorder expectation and reality. This one is admittedly a bit nebulous, but the reframing from publishers taking a risk on a game they think will do well to publishers counting on a game that has presold well invariably puts more pressure on the developer. Why subject developers to even more abuse and stress? As a rule no one sets out to make a bad game -they're way too much work to waste the time- and most of the negative trends we talk about in games come from the publishing side, so why not make publishers shoulder a fairer share of the burden?

Of course, I'm not saying that people that preorder video games are bad, or that they shouldn't be aloud to, just that I think there's a pretty strong ethical argument not to. Like eating meat. I understand that it's much better for the planet if I don't...but I like hamburgers. We all pick our battles,

I'm an illustrator! Aside from your standard print freelance, I got the opportunity to work for a (very) big AAA game company here in NY for a few months and now I'm painting backgrounds for an upcoming animated show. I like freelancing, though promotion is stressful... I think I'm going to see where this TV thing takes me. Studio work is a nice balance.

The next box after complaining here had two legendaries and a purple in it, lol. The average is still about 1 cool thing per 10 levels.

I think it's kinda funny that after the DOTA debacle, Blizzard out TF2'd Valve.

Good lord, seeing how many skins he gets in the first 5 crates makes my blood boil.

The drop rate on skins is rough. I'm level 24 and have only gotten 3 skins, all blue. I'm never going to spend extra money on crates, though, because no matter how frustrating it may be to get shit drops (I've had like 10 dupe sprays out of the hundreds that exist) the price on the crates is ludicrous. Feels pretty shitty, tbh.

This article advocates simultaneously the virtue of the free market and free speech and then demands the regulation of others' speech and postulates that the market shouldn't shape the face of games. It is one giant contradiction.

I've never understood how the "anti-PC" argument amounts to more than "I want to say/do shitty things but not take responsibility for them." No one on the side of empathy (because empathy for others is what we're really talking about here) is advocating the restriction of others' speech...simply our freedom to call out assholes for being them.

Am I the only one completely transfixed by Warren's legs?

I can totally empathize with your frustration, getting into NT was rough for me too. The thing I think this game does really successfully, though, is providing you with the tools and information to mitigate bullshit deaths. You eventually start doing things subconsciously that prevent stupid deaths from you early time with the game... like leaving one weak enemy in a safe area to kill last, holding off on explosive weapons until you have boiling skin, and learning not to be lured into danger by pickups. Also, getting a solid idea for the general value of mutations helps a lot. I looked around the NT community for this and learned some general build order stuff that made the game much more fun pretty immediately.

Agreed. I think the "giant box of junk you can disassemble and make into other stuff" is really cool...but it's totally ancillary. I get the impression Bethesda spent all this time getting the crafting working, but didn't have the time to figure out an interesting and meaningful way to integrate it into the Fallout formula. It's very much set off to the side, removed from the core of the game.

I really wish the junk/crafting system was integrated into some sort of greater economy. Imagine having fighting factions that needed specific components to build specific things in order to conquer towns and gain territory. Imagine helping your chosen AI faction in a territory war. Imagine the drama of descending on a factory to get parts for bots and meeting a rival scavanging team knowing that if you die, you have to face sentry bots instead of protectrons in the larger territory battle.

I know that now I'm just fantasizing about a game Bethesda never set out to make...but I can't help but feel let down by their lack of adventurousness.