Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes
Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes
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.
I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you'd have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.
Now it bothers me that I'd need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I'd throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.
That may be true but with that kind of success behind them, one would assume they have the budget to finish their games without needing the support of the crutch that is the Early Access model.
Stellaris is one of my all time favorite games, but the late game really becomes unplayable from lag. I have over 1000 hours in it because I love it's modding and the immersion possible with it, but the performance is a real problem.
They have tried to address this too, with minor success, but that doesn't help when the start of each month from 2350 onwards takes seconds to load.
The problem is they broke the streak of doing that with Imperator, so now there's no trust
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".
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
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..
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
All you need is a good story ... so you can see why people are scrutinising everything else.
Paradox's games don't really do storytelling in a traditional sense. They're strategy and management games. Some of them are pretty damn good at creating stories dynamically through gameplay, or providing a frame upon which you can create your own stories, but they were never intended to be narrative experiences
the recent avatar game is a great example of actually hitting the mark visually and superficially (probably one of the better looking games I've ever played) and the physics and gameplay in the world are pretty damn good. but people complain the story is boring. and yeah it's not amazing. I don't think it's terrible, and it's a game really built to explore the environment rather than complete missions.
it's near impossible to get that perfect game that hits every single button possible. I truly think we gamers need to settle down a bit as a whole. Sure buggy messes that are unplayable are not something we should tolerate, but I think we need to stop treating everything that isn't perfect as a pile of shit
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 recently played the Little Nightmares DLC. It came out in 2017, and there were game breaking bugs still left in. I think people have just been burned so many times by unfinished products at this point
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?
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.