goosemunch

"It doesn't do anything new"

It happens frequently, even with seasoned reviewers here at GB, and uttered as they dismiss the game forever even though the game might execute everything perfectly and do it better than any game prior. My counter argument is that it doesn't have to do anything new, because by the same token you could say SMW isn't worth your time since it doesn't do anything new and simply iterates over all the new ideas SMB3 brought to the table.

@efesell: Hrmm, maybe you're just too good at this game. I mean, people do "soul level 1 run" of these games, so every build may be viable if you're good enough at it, but for people who suck like me, they might as well be an invisible wall.

In my experience, some bosses are either impossible or trivial depending on gear, but with limited re-spec opportunities, there's not much point to experimentation (which indeed forces me to go elsewhere and level up more until I can tank through with inefficient build and be grumpy about it). I remember one miniboss in particular I was stuck for 3 days, looked up tips online, which led to equipping a different shield, which allowed me to beat it on the very next try.

I'm really not a big fan of the fact that certain bosses favour particular build or playstyle over all others. More so than any of the previous soulsborne games. I guess the intent is that players with different builds may hit different walls at different times, so that they can go wander around and explore the world in different order, until they're overleveled enough to power through the older encounters that used to give em trouble.

Anyway, after a couple of encounters that made me realize that the gear matters way more than skill, the magic is completely gone for me. There's a seed of doubt now whenever I run into a wall, it's because I chose the wrong build unluckily and blame the game for artificially gating me. There's absolutely no joy in beating the bosses anymore. I'm not sure if I'm going to get back to the game.

@gyratyne: I might also add that the kind of person who have enough disposable income to pay for their own milk is ironically an adult who's lactose intolerant and can't consume milk in large quantities.

If I had to theorize, they're just testing to see what type of content jives with the public at large. It's impossible to accurately gauge what types of show people want to watch when you only take the premium viewer numbers into account due to selection bias.

1 and 2 are my absolute favourites (not a huge fan of 3, 4, or Tales). I don't like the art in the teaser trailer, but the people involved is enough to get me hyped.

I was in constant amazement for the first half of the game, then my opinion gradually soured... and by the end I hated it. Some of the later battles were needlessly exhausting. Puzzle solving was my favourite part, but even after finally figuring out what to do, executing on the solution was nigh impossible (especially with mushy inaccurate xbox360 D-pad. You know exactly which puzzle I'm talking about), so I just gave up and looked up the true ending on Youtube. Fuck this game.

One of the biggest frustation dealing with DRMs is that the corpo sycophants come out of the woodwork and argue on behalf of publishers despite the fact that people complaining about DRM is trying to make things better for all of us (on both user experience and game preservation front).

Like back in 2007 when Bioshock first implemented 2-install limit: you install the game twice and your copy of the game was gone forever. You couldn't uninstall, contact support, or anything, to get it back. A lot of us were very vocal to remove the 2-install limit (2K eventually caved and increased the limit to 5 and released licence revocation tool), but from the day one there were sick fucks on the forums voluntarily becoming 2K mouthpiece saying "2 installs is more than enough. Nobody plays though a game more than twice!"

"Create a desktop shortcut" was in there for as long as I can remember. I used it pretty often, primarily because every time a game was patched, the shortcut on the desktop no longer worked and you had to delete it and recreate it (It's very annoying. I don't know if they fixed that or not)

I don't normally use desktop shortcuts, but I found that it's the only reliable way to add Gamepass app to Nvidia's Gamestream if I want to play remotely (through Steam Link etc).

Yeah, I don't agree with this either.

• Games did indeed increase in price with most AAA games carving content into season passes and DLCs and deluxe editions etc. Microtransactions in a F2P game? sure. But if I paid a full price for it, I don't want any distractions and ads for microtransactions breaking my immersion.
• The publishers increasingly take bigger portion of games sold. Majority of sales per title now come from digital, and that's 1/3rd of the manufacture, retail and distribution cost they no longer have to bear.
• Yes the games got more expensive to make but they're just victims of their own making. Nobody asked higher and higher production value in AAA games. Most people don't give a shit about high fidelity and perfectly happy to play games that look like shit like Among Us or whatever. AAA success isn't so much about production value but rather marketing.
• There's economy of scale at work with market growing much larger. Same reason that flat-screen TVs no longer cost $20k to buy these days. Granted this is a weak argument since numbers change dramatically depending on who you ask. I might argue that the number of AAA titles being released is declining so they're competing for larger slices of pie (but then there are larger overall number of games and live-service games all competing for your time/dollar)
• It's not like we have more disposable income - wages might look like they kept up with inflation, but many argue that the way inflation measured is flawed and don't take into account a lot of other crap that exploded in price like rent/housing/health care/education/etc, many families converting to duel-income households just to keep up.
• AAA publishers are posting record revenue year over year with insane profit and not exactly hurting for money. Now, would they be barely keeping their head above water if it weren't for microtransactions? Who can say... (I'm guessing no)
• At least I'd feel better if the money went to the right people, but it's all going to the publishers and CEO bonuses (for AAA publishers at least) while laying off developers who worked hard on the game.