No Man’s Sky was much more lacking at release compared to how they sold the game. And they basically went radio silent for quite a long time.

I don’t see how the two situations are similar.

And No Man’s Sky isn’t that much better now anyways.

Filling fees for an arbitrator may be higher than filing a case in court.

Which is why Valve is making the change. They were potentially paying a lot for these filings.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/column-mass-arbitration-target-valve-accuses-law-firm-litigation-funder-2023-12-08/

Steam is actually pretty decent, by company standards.

They aren’t doing this because they are decent. It’s because they were getting reamed on fees through people choosing the arbitration. I believe it was a law firm basically encouraging people to request arbitration because they would get paid every time a claim was submitted, regardless of the outcome.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/column-mass-arbitration-target-valve-accuses-law-firm-litigation-funder-2023-12-08/

Hard for me not to get excited about a new Monster Hunter.

Still have Rise/Sunbreak sitting on my backlog barely played, but I still hope this one turns out well.

Yeah, I get not wanting to get too hyped about games ahead of time, but it feels like these days people are online to look for the next game to get angry about.

Also most quests are just “talk to npc, use Batman Vision to follow a trail, kill enemy, return”

This applies to a lot of games, even Witcher 3.

Good luck figuring out how to avoid labeling every game ever made as a “skinner box”. It’s basically a jaded person’s definition of what video games are at their core.

If you value your time, you wouldn’t be playing video games at all. As they are nearly an entertaining way to waste time.

All games waste either time, money, or both. So I guess we just have to make video games illegal now. Oh well. Was fun while it lasted.

Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.

I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.

The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.

Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.

But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.

How about we focus on that issue first?

But both are gambling.

Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.

People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.

This gen felt like a waste of money to me, with only minute differences at a huge cost.

Nah, SSDs are a massive upgrade, even ignoring everything else.

I could never go back to the spinning disk hard drives.

I feel like your post was being overly dramatic and then I noticed your comment about Starfield being a one out of ten game, and at that point it’s hard to take you seriously.

The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray.

Fallout 76 may not be an amazing game, but they’ve turned it into something pretty enjoyable to play, and from my experience a couple years ago “broken” as an adjective doesn’t really make sense as the game ran and played perfectly well.

They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours.

So, clearly you are just trying to push an agenda for some reason and are just making things up whole cloth at this point. I’m not sure what fantasy world you are living in but this isn’t based in reality. It’s just something you’ve made up in your head.

Also, I don’t see the point in doom-posting about a game that’s years away from release. What’s the reason for fantasizing about a game’s failure? Is it that people enjoy drama like the recent Concord release and are trying to look for future games to chase the same high?

Patch notes for anyone interested: https://www.nomanssky.com/2024/09/aquarius-update/

My PS3 can play at most a decade worth of games. It is obsolete.

Sure, but so is the PC that someone bought around the time the original Doom was released.

I think the more likely relation is to credit ratings or something similar, since the “AAA” is based around budgets and financial investments.

he games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”.

Is there any evidence of this being the case? Personally, I don’t remember anything other than “AAA” back in the day, with other variations coming about much later as budgets grew and people wanted more specific delineations.

It’s been funny seeing the Playstation controller slowly morph into an Xbox controller. Which is great because I definitely preferred the Xbox controller since the 360.

I still prefer the offset sticks on the Xbox controller though.

Haha, yup. I knew something looked off.

To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.

To be a bit of a pedant, “AAA” was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term “AA” came around afterwards as a way to distinguish games that fell between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.

Edit: Corrected spelling.

Bummer that we aren’t even getting a chance to play it.

Sad to see the state of the MMO genre at this point. It looks like we might be hitting a point where there aren’t going to be any new games going forward. I expect most online games will stick to the smaller scales like Destiny or Diablo 4 and just avoid all the complexities that come with large scale persistent worlds.