we’re tired of being sold a shit sandwich that may someday become edible? wow who would have ever predicted this utterly unprecedented turn of events except absolutely fucking everybody.
Mm, is that why Silent Hill 2 sits on ‘Overmevmingly positive’ while still plagued by serious performance issues?
The statement is simply not true; gamers are willing to swallow just about anything if sold correctly.
If only steam had a way to mark games as “hey, this game is in beta, expect issues”. I don’t know, making it clear that we were accessing it early or something…
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I’d be willing to tolerate games being a bit buggy if they up front said “we know this game has issues. You can try it now or you can wait until we fix them”.
Problem is when things like Kerbal Space Program 2 happen, and they release a buggy mess and charge full price for it and then abandon the project.
I feel like established publishers (Take 2, Codemasters come to mind) should be specifically excluded from the Early Access program, or perhaps price limits should be imposed on games in the program…
Realistically early access launches are just launches. Some games get a boost and surge when they go 1.0, but the vast majority don’t. Using the ea tag may put more people off than the buggyness, and people forget about the game 3 years later when it hits 1.0. I think paradox knew about it and just decided it would reduce sales more then the bug reports would.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t think games with major bugs should be released as a 1.0 product if they are asking a high price. There are great games that started ea and became great, but it was a risk for them when they did that.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was a true early access title and it was a massive hit when hit 1.0
I wish the tagging system was expanded to include more details.
While I think it’s helpful to know if a game is “souls like”, i also want to know if the game has a ending, or will be in continual development, or if it’s good as a pick up and put down game…
Ah Paradox is finding their model of releasing unfinished games and getting around to solving it later less appealing!
That is a little disappointing, actually, as Paradox made some damn good games this way. Crusader Kings 2, Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris were all made like that.
I mean, have you looked at HoI4 lately?
Look, I get it, but the state of DLC in Paradox games has moved beyond even the memes. I think they took those as inspiration. There’s a fucking monthly pass now!
I deeply enjoy their games, but the DLC bloat confounds me.
QA is part of the game development process and its supposed to happen before it reaches end users. They’ve made some good games but they can’t act all surprised that selling a game and letting users be free QA doesn’t cut it.
I’m tired of broken games and at this point I’m not even mad at the publishers/devs anymore. I’m mad at the gamers. Like it’s really not Bethesda’s fault they keep releasing unfinished garbage. Why actually spend time making a decent game when the brain dead consumers will buy it anyways.
I was looking forward to cities 2. When I heard it had crippling performance issues, I decided to wait. Still haven’t gotten back around to it. There are just too many other games that already work for me to put up with broken new releases.
It was the sheer quantity of dlc stuff along with the second one having potential performance issues that kept me way and away from it for now. I’ll check back in at a 50-90% off sale.
I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
I did like Sim City a fair bit.
Honestly, I think the bar for games these days is totally warped. People expect these cinematic masterpieces with ultra-realistic graphics in gigantic 3d landscapes with massive autonomy, extensive character creation options, full voice acting, juiced up complex mechanics, and zero bugs, and they want it yesterday. If it costs more than a full tank of gas they’ll say it’s too expensive, and if it isn’t fully patched on day 1 they’ll call it unfinished.
It seems almost obvious that simpler 2D games are a better and more satisfying alternative in this landscape. No wonder AAA studios seem like they’re racing to the bottom.
How are you supposed to get all that and also have a decent story or a sense of cohesion? We need to simplify.
If you look at games that get overwhelmingly positive on steam, most of them have only ok graphics and they cost like 30 dollars. It’s the feeling of the game that matters. Is it fun?
What’s that meme? Hold on… I can dust it off since it’s still applicable. Oh, right! “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I mean it!”
I don’t need it to be super epic in scope and graphically mind blowing. I just want a tight, focused, well thought out game that isn’t buggy af. And it doesn’t have to be flawless day 1, but there should be some pretty good communication and patches in the first month.
“We need to simplify” indie games are doing just fine. It’s almost like super massive studios take much more money to make games with less replay value.
And who expects cinematic masterpieces? Most gamers skip the cutscenes and all dialog lol
Studios make the games pretty for pre sale hype. Getting people interested without game play.
And who expects cinematic masterpieces? Most gamers skip the cutscenes and all dialog lol
Citation needed
Yeah, hard agree with what they’re saying and like the fact that they’re delaying prison architect 2 in light of that.
Lately and because some early access games have caught my eye, I’ve been thinking about how I don’t have as much time for gaming and want the complete experience right away. If I play a game before it’s fixed or before all the content is out, most likely I’ll never play the game at it’s best because I’ve moved on already.
See, in a lot of games generas I could look past performance issues, but with city builders? Yah, nah, good performance is kind of core. It’s basically impossible to make cities of much more than 40,000 unless you have a monstrosity of a CPU, and even then your game will be chugging. Scale of city is fundamentally limited by the performance, you can just make a larger, more interesting city in cities skylines at the moment. There are some interesting game play changes from from the first, but not interesting enough to make up for the limitations to scale.
Victoria 3 also has some big performance issues. Like paradox games have always been known to slow down in the late game, but you basically can’t get through the end game in Victoria 3 unless you’re willing to run the game in the background. Again, this is even on good, modern, mid range CPUs.
I got into the millions with a mid-to-high end CPU and was… fine. I mean, fine at 40-ish fps, not fine at 240 fps.
To me the bigger issues were with balance and broken features that were hard to diagnose because city builders are so opaque by design. I can play a strategy game at 30 fps, been doing that for decades, but I need to have some way to figure out how the game is supposed to work.
In any case, it’s less that I’m not “accepting” of games being broken, it’s that I think I and everybody else are starting to wise up to the fact that you can just… wait. Why play CS2 at launch if you can give it a year while you do something else and play a better version of it that costs half as much?
