jakob187

I picked DOOM just as a personal preference, but then I saw just how many people had voted for DOOM. I didn't realize it was THAT popular, especially for something like GOTY. Holy shit!

My top five, in no particular order:

1. DOOM
2. Dark Souls 3
3. Overwatch
4. The Witness
5. Battlefield 1

Honestly, it hasn't really been a year where there was just one clear WOW game. DOOM isn't even really that game. DOOM is more of just a "I can't believe the game didn't suck" kind of thing, followed by "this is actually pretty damn good" feeling. Basically, I knew those other four games would be solid: Dark Souls is a known quantity, Blizzard is a known quantity, Battlefield 1 had enough out before the game's release to show people that "yes, this is the Battlefield game you've been wanting for a while," and The Witness was "hey, if you like Myst, here's one of those." DOOM was "what the fuck is this game even going to be," and even from all the early shit...that beta...multiplayer test...E3 showing...ALL of it just seemed like it was a shit game. The surprise that it wasn't a garbage fire on release is the thing that gives it that extra punch, I think.

Way too little too late. They could do a million updates, but the luster is gone and the lies were too grand. I enjoyed the game when it first came out, but it wore thin after about a week. I've had no desire to go back to it, and there's not really anything they can do to bring me back, especially just adding things that other survival games already have.

Didn't Activision say this same shit whenever they were putting redemption codes for Call of Duty Classic in special editions of Modern Warfare 2? I can't quite remember if it was the same thing, where they said "we won't sell it outside of the game."

Nonetheless, I'm willing to guarantee that you can buy it separate from Infinite Warfare within the next twelve months. Those bastards at Activision like money a lot, and they know that people care more about COD4 Remastered than Infinite Warfare. Hell, we've yet to have a single customer come into our LAN center that wanted to play Infinite Warfare, but all of them want to play COD4 Remastered.

Twelve months. I might even be willing to drop that estimate down to six if the sales for Infinite Warfare continue to be shit by comparison of previous COD titles.

Sweet. I mean, I already have Dirt Rally (which IMO is vastly superior), but I never got to play Dirt 3, so this will be a pleasant treat!

I think I might be one of the few people that walked away from "San Junipero" feeling absolute dread and despair. I've thought for many years about the idea of people retaining themselves within the cloud. The ideas were introduced to me by Transmetropolitan, and it just seemed like the worst thing ever. Knowing that you are dead but your consciousness is still alive? It was terrifying to me. The idea that you die and that's it is what I prescribe, and that was the thing that I completely feared about the future of mankind.

Maybe it's because I have these constant existential ideas while I'm laying awake at night.

"What happens if I'm buried and the world blows up? My body is gone completely, along with everyone around. That grave meant nothing at the end of it all."
"If we created immortal life through living in the cloud, would we at some point forget that we lived in the cloud? Can you forget when you don't have a mind? What happens when the power goes out? The servers go down? You have no sense of it coming upon you, no sense of it happening. Just immediate disconnection."
"If people reside within the cloud, can they create new experiences? Can they feel sensations? Why spend an afterlife where nothing you do matters?"

Then you take all of that and trap it inside this story of love. Love is one of the most engaging and strongest emotions we have. Think of that feeling your heart makes when you see that person you love. Think of how it sinks into your stomach when they disappoint you. Think of all of the emotion that comes along with love. Can those two feel that emotion? Can they GENUINELY feel it? Part of the thing that makes emotion so powerful is not the mental capability of it, but the PHYSICAL feeling of it. Without that, the emotion - IMO - is not genuine, and it is just residual bleck.

That fourth episode really fucked with me, man. Such a great episode.

All the others are fine, but I don't feel like they were firing on the same cylinders as the previous two seasons had. Watching all three of them back to back, season 3 definitely felt the weakest, save for "San Junipero," "Nosedive," and "Hated in the Nation." It just felt like this season, more than the previous ones, were more focused on the "how technology affects our lives" rather than actually digging into these emotional ways that we as humans act and interact, then showing how technology has allowed us to disenfranchise those emotions from our life.

When you consider that Fuhrer Trump will most likely just claim eminent domain on the shit and take it from you anyways, land is a pretty dumb big purchase.

Land.

Sure, but if you separate the two and then charge $40 for each of them, you end up with more money by the end of it. Add microtransactions to the multiplayer and it's a veritable gold mine.

Shit. What am I doing? They might read this. NO! NO, I'M JUST KIDDING, GAME COMPANIES! THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA!

What were the sales like on Black Ops III for Xbox 360? It was a multiplayer-only thing, right? Didn't they end up offering some kind of multiplayer-only package for Black Ops III on PC as well?

@spaceinsomniac: However, the example you put forth was showing 100k users tracked for achievement progress/campaign completion or 70k tracked or 120k tracked. Numbers that small cannot present nearly a large enough picture, much the same way that polls cannot. You need a larger base of numbers to pull statistics from. I would relate that all to election polls (as you brought up), but this isn't a thing about politics and polls. It's just about wanting more than a few hundred-thousand for the metrics to be presented...which as you'll see down below...

There we go. THAT is a stat number I can get behind. When you consider that Sony sold MILLIONS of copies, we can get a far better idea than 300k can tell us. It's not the full number of people out there, but it's a much larger sample size to get a better metric from.

That's literally all I was looking for. I didn't know that PSN tracks trophies at an OS level or where to even find that information, so thank you.

This settles everything, and I can now safely say that there is an audience for the campaigns. Now my curiosity arises as to why Activision and other companies aren't separating the two products and releasing them as separate games: a single player-only and a multiplayer-only. I'm curious if it has to do with overall time spent on one particular game, whether the single player ones would just get bought, die out, and then be nothing.

@spaceinsomniac: So you're saying that, of some 300k tracked on a website, a percentage of them completed the campaign...in a game franchise that sells around 20 MILLION copies per game?

Out of 20 million people, there are less than 100k people who will complete the campaign?

Let's even go so far as to say that it was 1 million people that completed the campaign out of 20 million that will buy the game (and that's a low figure if you consider that Black Ops III sold around 32 million copies). That's a part of the game that takes, according to someone who develops single-player campaigns, up to around 75% of a game's budget. Is that 75% of the budget worth it for 1 million people? Also, in that same article, it points out that Vince Zampella himself claims only about 5% of people will ever fully complete a single player campaign in shooters.

Nonetheless, I need much wider metrics to believe that campaigns are that much of a holy grail for shooter games, because trying to say that 300,000 people who have achievements tracked is some type of reliable data against 20 million just supports my argument.