To be clear, I'm not fully against microtransaction models. If a F2P game has gameplay I like and I feel the microtransaction model is fair, then I will gladly toss them some money for the time I've put into the game. As an example, I played Neverwinter back in the day when I still had a machine with a Windows partition and I liked the game enough and it had a really fair model where you could absolutely reach max level and do end game stuff without ever spending a penny and you would be at barely any disadvantage to people that spent a bunch of money. I wound up spending like $40 or $50 on stuff, not even gear that made my character better but mounts and stuff that I thought just looked cool. I thought it was a fair price for the 100 or so hours I put into the game. On the other hand, if the microtransaction model is aggressive then that company will never get a dime from me because **** them.

That said, microtransations in a game that you already have to pay up front for doesn't sit well with me.

Anyway, I've derailed this thread enough. Apologies.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This ensures that I will never play this game. I was already not liking the sound of the game, but at F2P I could have at least tried it for free to find out for myself whether or not it's something I was willing to invest time into. With a price barrier in front of me, there's no chance I'll try it. Also, I guarantee this will have microtransactions, if not from the get go then somewhere down the line. There's no way a MMO is sustainable without either a sub or microtransactions, unless they plan to put out paid expansions every 3 or 4 months.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: XodetaetlThe devs did fix the only bug the game had with Wine though, so it's perfectly playable on Linux.

Discussion here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/261570/discussions/0/617330406660903267/%29 [External Link]
And fixed in patch 1: "Fixed text rendering when playing in DX9 mode."

No thanks.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Vulkan can't come soon enough. From all accounts it's actually "finished" it just needs to go through the review process. The sooner it comes out the sooner developers and porting companies can take advantage of it. I don't expect it to make it into many, if any, existing games/ports, but hopefully it sees widespread adoption in projects just getting started or ones part way through development now and it puts us on an even playing field in terms of ease of use and performance with Windows and DX.

I look forward to the day that OpenGL and X11 are both relics of the past only supported on Linux for legacy reasons. Vulkan seems like it's right around the corner and Wayland is making strides, though I still think it's a couple years away from becoming the default.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: BeamboomOk - I'm realizing you're the kind who thinks everything was better before (no offence intended).

I don't think he is. It's just that we think content is more important than presentation. But I'm quite sure it's just a basic difference in what we enjoy and look for in a game. And I say we, as I find it very easy to identify with Keyrock based on his side of the conversation.

In any case, A great game is a great game, even if it could have been made ten or twenty years ago. You're seriously missing out if you pick your games based on their budget, but that's your prerogative. Naturally the game is even more enjoyable if it also looks and sounds nice, but these are just potential cherries on the cake, not the cake itself.

Exactly. It's obvious that we and Beamboom simply have different priorities in our games. Beamboom seems to prioritize production value, and that's fine, there is value in having nice looking games on Linux, it's what is most likely to legitimize Linux as a gaming platform in the eyes of the mainstream masses, since they tend to gravitate toward bombastic games.

For me, writing and depth are the priority, production value is a bonus. I would like to have production value in addition to depth of writing and depth of mechanics, but production value is not necessary for me to enjoy a game. My top 3 games right now that give me Windows envy that came out this year are Age of Decadence, Underrail, and Rebel Galaxy. Of those 3, 2 look like 10+ year old games and 1 looks nice but far from AAA.

As for my statement regarding BioWare, it's not a case of I just think everything made in the past is better. Games have come a long way in many ways. I would never trade the UI improvements of modern games for the clunky UIs of old games, for example. However, in terms of writing, it's plain to see (to me at least) how far BioWare has fallen off. The very game series you cited as an example, Mass Effect, serves as a perfect example of that very thing. Look at the writing from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect 1 had a pretty good and concise story with a memorable and interesting antagonist. By Mass Effect 3 the story had devolved into a mess with little rhyme or reason other than to make Shepard into Space Jesus, included the mess that was Kai Leng, and ended with the train wreck that was the Starchild God. The ending to Mass Effect 3 is complete and utter rubbish.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If we were talking about BioWare from 10 years ago, I might agree about their writing prowess. The BioWare of today is a shadow of its former self, though still better than the average AAA studio in the writing department, I guess.

I'll happily take a game like Undertale over 98% of the AAA games that came out this year.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: KeyrockBut games have budgets and independent studios, in particular, have to work with rather limited budgets. Voice actors don't work for free, their services can become rather expensive when your game has a lot of dialogue. If budgets were unlimited then I would like to have everything voice acted also. But given the limited budget of smaller studios, I'd much rather do a lot more reading of quality writing than listen to voice actors read cringeworthy lines.

Keyrock, let me just introduce this reply by saying that I believe we in essence are quite in agreement - it's just our priorities as gamers that differs.

And the above quote is why I'm no fan of indies. They can only offer what they can offer and many of them go well beyond what the budgets realistically could do, but it's not enough. Video games today are not something made in a basement by a couple of buddies. It just isn't. For me, indie games are like the free "ebooks" available for Kindle & co by unsigned writers.
Sorry to say so, but they are crap. Some of them have a good idea for the book, some have good segments or plots, but oh my god how they need an editor and a professional publisher to push them to go that extra mile to polish the product. They are not what they could have been. It's the exact same with "indies".

I disagree. I would argue, for what I consider to be a quality game, indies have delivered far more than AAA in recent years. Gaming has become big business and more than ever publishers are looking to make as much money as possible and since gaming is no longer a niche hobby but fairly mainstream, they are looking to reach as broad an audience as possible. They do this by dumbing down streamlining games so that they are as "accessible" and appeal to as wide an audience as possible. It's like the old saying about menus at a restaurant: "If the menu at the restaurant has a hundred different dishes you can be sure none of them are particularly good." It's because those restaurants don't specialize, they don't focus on a single palette, they try to make something that will appeal to everyone and so they make 100 mediocre dishes instead of 7 or 8 really good ones. Gaming used to be more specialized when gaming was still niche, and some indies still are, but AAA are all trying to appeal to as many different palettes as possible and are pumping out soulless, homogenized tripe. And sure, the games tend to look nice, because the suits know that bling sells, but the games are devoid of personality and depth. AAA games these days are Michael Bay movies. Sure they have pretty explosions and great effects, but the stories are more hole than plot and the characters are cardboard cutouts. There is nothing wrong with liking Michael Bay movies, if that's what does it for you then by all means, enjoy them, but I like something with some substance and depth, not just flash on the surface.

Take for example Fallout 4. Nevermind the game being buggy as all hell at launch and Bethesda getting a free pass from 99% of the press like always, we'll disregard this for now. The game is relatively pretty and has a giant sprawling open world with tons of stuff for you to do. It even has arguably the best shooting mechanics of the first/third person games in the series (not that that's much of a feat). Yet that game is a hollow shell. It's a Fallout game in setting, but setting only. That game is barely a RPG. The character system has been stripped down to almost nothing, the dialogue system is a joke, truly meaningful choices are almost non-existent. Just about everything that made the Fallout games great, and I'm talking Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas here, is gone, the soul of the series has completely been ripped out and discarded in favor of making a shooter with a Fallout coat of paint because shooters are popular. Remember how in Fallout games you could often approach problems in many different ways and find different and creative solutions? You choices now are shoot your way through the problem or shoot your way through the problem. But hey, they shoehorned in crafting and a really tedious and clunky base building mechanic because those are all the rage these days.

Maybe an even better example is Star Wars: Battlefront. Undoubtedly one of the most graphically impressive games ever made. It looks stunning. It's also an empty withering husk of a game. The game features a shockingly small number of maps, is missing many of the most beloved modes from past titles, has terrible balance issues, unsatisfying gunplay, and downright abysmal respawn problems. It is the posterchild of the style over substance that much of AAA development has become.

Quoting: KeyrockI mean, the attempts at humor in D: OS are pretty damn ham-fisted, to put it mildly.

It's very simple, to put it that way. But then again I'm so used to crappy dialogue and disappointing stories in games that I hold my expectations low in that regard. I'm quite forgiving as long as it delivers on more important parts (to me):

That's where we differ. The hilariously barebones and poorly written game stories from years past don't cut it for me any more, I expect more from my video game. I expect meaty stories with interesting characters and character development over the course of the game. Would I like to have that in the shiny and lovely to look at package that is AAA game? Sure, that would be great, but outside of CD Projekt RED and Rockstar, hardly any AAA seems to do that these days. They're too busy putting all their resources into shinier graphics and more bombastic stepieces. The indies are generally the place to go for innovation, meaningful stories, and well written characters these days.

I guess my different view likely comes from the fact that I grew up on point & click adventures and RPGs, two of the most story-focused traditional video game genres, and thus I'm generally quite story-focused as a gamer. I still hold Planescape: Torment as the greatest RPG ever made over 15 years after it was released and even though it looks quite dated by today's standards and it had the worst combat of all the Infinity Engine games because the story, characters, and character development in that game are still the benchmark by which all other games are measured.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: KeyrockThen again, I quite enjoy reading, I'm weird like that.

So do I - but then I will read books, not start a game. Games are an interactive audio/visual media. Therefore I both expect audio and video content as well as my input to matter. To have the "actors" hold up text signs for me to read takes us back to the age of silent movies (if we compare with other media).

But games have budgets and independent studios, in particular, have to work with rather limited budgets. Voice actors don't work for free, their services can become rather expensive when your game has a lot of dialogue. If budgets were unlimited then I would like to have everything voice acted also. But given the limited budget of smaller studios, I'd much rather do a lot more reading of quality writing than listen to voice actors read cringeworthy lines. I mean, the attempts at humor in D: OS are pretty damn ham-fisted, to put it mildly. If you feel a developer's money is better spent on voice actors than quality writers, that's your prerogative. I'd much rather have high quality writing in text form.

As for the look of the game, I'm not keen on D: OS's particular brand of stylized art. I mean, the graphics are nicely high res and the particle effects are nice, I just don't much like the art style. I honestly found the Shadowrun games more pleasing to the eye.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Given my mild interest in this game, I find this news disappointing. Oh well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomThe writing, perhaps. Problem is, the Shadowrun games look so outdated and technically dull, so I never got motivated to bother reading the "walls of text" as they were thrown towards me. I'm sorry but text adventures just doesn't cut it in 2015.

I thought the Shadownrun games looked quite nice. The character models left something to be desired, but the 2D backgrounds were beautiful IMHO, particularly in Hong Kong. As for text, I'll happily ready pages upon pages of well written text rather than listen to a bunch of voice acted fanfic-level writing, which is the level I'd put D: OS's writing at. I would have much rather Larian had spent some of the money they did on voice acting to hire a decent writer instead. Then again, I quite enjoy reading, I'm weird like that.

On the plus side, the D: OS port seems to be a really good port, at least on my machine (after a year and a half it damn well better be), and the Steam Controller support is great, though I went back to m&kb after giving it a whirl for about an hour since m&kb is intrinsically a superior control method for an isometric game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments