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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Some people would have laughed you out of the room. A lot of people, myself included, warned that this was the kind of shit we’d spiral into with these microtransactions. It was basically confirmed within a year or two with the absolutely insane amount of money mobile gaming was seeing where the base product was just addictive crap with as many microtransactions shoveled in as possible. These games just completely blew the revenue of actual AAA titles would out of the water. It was basically inevitable and we’re now in a situation where we’ve got a generation of consumers raised on this trash.



  • Old games? Let me throw Final Fantasy Tactics in the mix. Easily my favorite game of all time and one of the only ones I consistently come back to, despite releasing in 1997.

    If you’re not familiar, FFT is a turn-based tactics game which is very different from other mainline FF games in a lot of ways. The story is one of the best, if not the best, in the FF series. For gameplay, you recruit and manage soldiers which progress using a fairly in-depth job system which is also pretty easy to pick up.

    I’m sure you could find a PSX emulator of the original but, honestly, I really recommend the updated War of the Lions edition they did for the PSP. It’s been ported to mobile and is actually a great port. My one tip for anyone who tries it is to make multiple save slots in case you find yourself overwhelmed in a story dungeon/encounter.





  • Apologies for the wall of text.

    Ehhh almost. The best Disney era stuff has been Mandalorian (S1) and Andor, which had, at best, Filoni consulting. Filoni’s stuff is good quality but it’s also fairly simplistic and self-referential, to the point of being almost masturbatory. I think Clone Wars is the best he’s produced and it’s 95% awful kids show with 5% very high quality storytelling mixed in, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt since it was literally intended as a kids show.

    Prequels and sequels were pretty terrible for opposite reasons, as another poster has already mentioned. The original trilogy is pretty high quality, I don’t think that’s even debatable. While New Hope was a pretty bog-standard chosen one/heroic epic story, and maybe/definitely just a rip-off of Hidden Fortress, it gets all the credit for the blend of Eastern and Western themes and concepts. Additionally, for absolutely stunning special effects for the era. Empire is just objectively a good movie, and is definitely when Star Wars peaked. It’s got excellent writing, directing, and cinematography, and did a phenomenal job maintaining the strengths of New Hope while doing a ton of work developing all of the characters and the universe. Jedi is… okay tbh. I put it about on par with the prequels although the Emperor is my favorite character.

    The biggest problem imo with the Disney products lately is exactly that - they are clearly products intended only to capitalize on an already-successful IP, with nothing really to say nor any story to tell. Filoni doesn’t have this problem, but he does have the issues above. If Disney can focus on letting creatives tell the stories they want to tell in the Star Wars Universe instead of just churning out products, I think they’ll be okay.




  • I don't think he's wrong. AAA game prices have been basically the same for 20+ years, while the cost of making games has only gone up. I think this is why a lot of publishers push for progressively more aggressive microtransactions, which can often hide the actual price of the game's content. And greed but that's kind of their job.

    The idea that BG3 and Overwatch 2 released at the same price point is actually ludicrous. With AAA games, the price is standard and if you don't like the game, oh well fuck you. And I would absolutely pay extra for games from developers which invested more, and had a higher standard of quality. Larian could charge $100 for their next CRPG and I'd be all in. Similarly, I don't think minimally viable cash grab titles or smaller, maybe more experimental titles should release for more than like $30.

    I think the indie scene does this pretty well but it's a challenge for AAA, and consumers are somewhat to blame. I think people would balk more at an $80 standard price than a $60 half-complete game with $4k of microtransactions. So of course, studios are going to go with the latter strategy, even though plenty of people hate it.


  • I think that’s a fair argument though I would expect a civilization that advanced and widespread to have adopted standard measures of time. Which I previously would have assumed a “year” to mean something like a full solar orbit of coruscant. There’s no reason for there not to be multiple standards, though, but it would be nice if that’s what they were going for they didn’t just say “year”.