Why are we not always mecha-posting? Why am I not always mecha-posting?

Oh yeah, I forgot. Superhero games.

He should just pull himself up by the bootstraps and save for some rainy-day studios

Same here. At least Arkane Lyon is still around (as far as I can tell) so maybe Dishonored still has hope. These closures still hurt though

Um, no? Communism is when game devs put that little shadow under the skirts of my 15-year-old anime game waifus so that I can’t see their panties

Me, the last Gamer, lined up on the wall after the fall of gaming:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Boycotts over censorship on the forums of Reddit… I watched grown men online mald and turn red over pronoun choices… All these moments will be lost to time, like progress to crashes… Time to die.”

Inter-agency rivalry but it’s the CIA Blades clashing with the FBI Morag Tong

I agree with the sentiment (despite my quoted comment lol) that emotional reactions don’t always need to be comfortable in games, just consensual on the player’s part. Especially when portraying evil actions in an RPG.

My issue here is that there are zero real options to complete this quest other than engaging in chattel slavery. Hell, even killing the slaver and the ashkhan afterward still gives you a message that you shouldn’t have killed them, which breaks the immersion and the satisfaction. Like, the game complains even if you do the quest and kill them later, which feels to me like the writers/programmers didn’t even think that players would want some kind of justice or anything. Devoid of the context, it just seems incomplete or rushed.

Vivec

Sweet! Great to hear that some of the tedium and grind has been cut down without sacrificing the game quality. I always love the idea of super complex old-school MMOs and RPGs, but none of them actually capture me when I actually pick them up and play them. FFXI always looked like it could fix that problem for me simply because I love me some Final Fantasy lol

Is FFXI easy to get into these days (as someone who has played nearly every FF game including plenty of XIV)? I’m very curious about it, but MMOs have never been my kinda thing

If I’m being honest, and I don’t mean this in an insulting way at all, I do not believe you’ve really considered this issue deeply before in the past. I think your definition and defense of the game is very “vibes”-based. And, look, that’s okay. Most people aren’t borderline obsessive over stuff like this and just live their lives, which is fine and normal. But coming to the defense of a game because you have some outlandish definition of a term that I think most people are somewhat settled on is a bold move.

Okay, I’m really not a fan of your tone, nor your insinuation that I am “borderline obsessive” about the game in a way that is not “fine or normal”. I respect your experience and what you have previously seen of pay-2-win discourse. I admit it was wrong of me to use the term “usual definition”. It was not my intention to imply that my experience is the objectively correct one, nor to demean any different takes on the issue. I merely intended to offer the perspective I have personally seen online about pay-2-win mechanics, even if it was a perspective you have not seen before. The internet is full of gaming discourse, and it is only natural that many definitions and descriptions exist.

That being said, I certainly do not deserve the way you have worded your reply to me. I would have loved to discuss the matter further if you had simply rejected my definition and offered more of your own perspective. Your comment comes across as needlessly hostile, describing my honest perspective as some sort of freakish screed by an overly-obsessive gamer.

Like, “literally the first time I’ve ever heard it described as such in 40 years of my life”? “Most people aren’t borderline obsessive over stuff like this”? “…you have some outlandish definition”? “…I think most people are somewhat settled on is a bold move”? “not only have I never heard of but seems so outside the normal discourse I’ve never even considered it”?

Where do you get off typing in such an inordinate, degrading tone to a comrade on this website? Over a simple video game discussion? Type like this all you want to Reddit libs, but I certainly don’t appreciate it here. The degree that you have gone to in order to thoroughly trash my perspective in the span of a single reply is beyond the pale. If you wanted to reply, you should have stuck with your first paragraph, which is much more reasonable, and has the MMO perspective that I personally did not consider. If my original comment came across as smug or rude, I promise you it was unintended, and would have expressed myself more clearly if you had said so. But I will certainly not discuss this with you now.

Next time, if you feel the need to type: “I don’t mean this in an insulting way at all”, think about rewriting your comment.

When I saw these guys and their gear in Morrowind, all I could ever see were dollar signs

I can’t tell if this is a joke post or not because “Every two minutes my party calls me gay” sounds like typical Hexbear gamer mocking, but the rest are legitimate complaints?

This makes me think, what are the legal required amounts of sweat and bathwater to turn a body of liquid into sweaty bathwater? If a gamer girl bathes in the ocean, the whole ocean does not become gamer girl bathwater. So clearly, there is a maximum volume of water before it becomes too diluted to classify as bathwater.

Anyway, I’m sure the Romans fought wars over this issue.

Fully agree with you that the game is its own thing. The closest thing to Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just Dragon’s Dogma 1 haha.

Can you believe that when the first game came out, people compared it not only to Dark Souls, but Skyrim?

Not losing your shit over small encroachments is how we got from $2.50 horse armour to every single game locking costumes behind a paywall

You are familiar with the expression: give them an inch and they will take a mile? The slipppery slope? The thin end of the wedge?

I’m not defending Capcom or microtransactions, but this argument seems kinda anti-materialist. No amount of “voting with our wallets” would have ever stopped capitalist executives from monetizing the hell out of anything they could to a more blatant extent. It’s baked into the capitalist system of milking art for profit.

I think this definition is different from the usual definition of pay-2-win. The way I’ve always seen it described, “pay-2-win” refers to a micro/macro transaction that more or less renders the general content meaningless. So in an 80-hour long game, it would give you the items and gear that would allow you to skip the first 75 hours of it. Persona 5 is a decent example, allowing you to summon level 80+ personas from the very start of the game (well, as soon as you unlock above-level fusions).

The microtransactions in Dragon’s Dogma 2 give you an advantage, certainly, and are a scummy practice by out of touch Capcom executives. But in my experience, your definition of pay-2-win is not the common one. That’s why people here agree with your points but are confused about your conclusion

Yeah, Devil May Cry 5 (same devs) had the exact same thing. The mtx items could all be very easily earned just by playing the game normally, and nothing was locked behind real money. Capcom just loves the bad publicity for whatever reason

The difference is that Bioshock, Saint’s Row, and Stalker are all actually good games.

Ubisoft has no intention of churning out anything but hot garbage, so I’d rather my hot garbage look like Assassin’s Creed than Tom Clancy. I was busy playing Metal Gear Solid and Ace Combat anyway, so I just liked seeing the cool Assassin coats. Plus I’ll take “you fistfight the pope” over “the Russians and Chinese have teamed up to declare war on freedom because they’re evil.”

Also, Unity is only a decent stealth game imo because it added a crouch button and actually tried to make the level layout promote stealth and hiding. I miss the AC era where they tried to put an emphasis on hiding in crowds and using distractions, even if it was complete dogshit because the games were ass.