The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook

Im starting to believe the big triple A game industry is starting to collapse, not the gaming industry it self, but the big companies that make generic after generic blockbuster kind of games.

I'm not that hopeful, casual gamers keep buying the same low effort games like Fifa, NBA, Pokemon every year even though they got enshitified 10 years ago. The opinion of game-educated and demanding people that represent a minority of their market will not change those game companies. It's like asking fat food chains to get into Michelin ranking, they don't care. All we can do is allow good quality independent game makers to exist by giving our money to them instead of the fast food games companies.

Yup. The go-to example is that Blizzard made more money off of a single $5 mount in World of Warcraft, than it made on the release of Diablo 3. An entire fucking game launch made less money than a $5 microtransaction. Why would a publishing company bother with creating solid self-contained games, when a single micro transaction can make more money for far less dev time?

Players need to stop purchasing shitty games and shitty microtransactions, because it only encourages devs to keep making them.

It's strange though, because Ubisoft on paper should be something I hate, but when I actually play one (and I'm a single player gamer), they've got fun gameplay, and the store, although it is there, generally keeps out the way and when I accidentally press the button in the menu that goes into it, there's nothing I'd ever consider handing over actual money for. The game never points you at it, or makes you feel it's needed.

I don't even know who it's for. Who buys cosmetics in a single player game? It genuinely feels like it's just been put in to appease the beancounters.

That said I don't get excited enough to buy them at full price, and normally wait until they're on PSPlus or something. There's nothing in most of these AAA games to truly love. They're a sea of merely "alright", and they're all way too long.

Especially as Michael Ironside seems to have gotten over his medical troubles. I know he's 74 now but one last outing as Sam Fisher? Imagine?

Obviously you haven't played Helldivers if you think it's pay to win.

The fuck are you talking about, you can unlock everything without ever once spending money. Even if you DID drop thousands that would only give you more bonds and some cosmetics you can't buy medals. You have to play to unlock things

TL;DR:
It's not hard to earn the ingame currency. No FOMO. Definetly not pay to win, since you get decent equipment, can unlock everything else with little time, it's a PvE Co-Op game with many difficulty levels to serve most player tastes. Buying ingame currency has some dark patterns though, but it's extremely better in comparison to other games with microtransactions.

Long version:
You can earn the paid (and sadly obfuscated) currency by playing the game and collecting some stuff. You don't need to pay at all despite the game's price initially.
It takes me about 15 to 30 hours to get enough of the paid currency in order to buy a warbond (the "battlepass", basically a package of weapons, tools and skins you get access to by buying such a warbond once). And that's me not even trying to farm the currency. I'm sure you can get there a lot faster if you're aiming for farming it.

It's also not pay to win. I understand the first impression, since it's actual different sets of weapons and armour which are locked behind it. But: on the one hand, you still have the standard warbonds which you don't need to unlock using that special currency; there, a decent collection of items is already present in order to find a style with which you can beat the game. On the other hand, it's a PvE Co-Op game with a lot of different difficulties to choose from. You can play it from extremely easy to very hard. It's not intended to be played solo. Although you absolutely can if you're good. That means: winning is easy. Even with equipment you don't like as much.
And let's not forget that it isn't that hard to earn the paid currency by playing the game. Unlocking the paid warbonds that way can be another incentive to play and get a feeling of progression.

What's also very important:
There is no FOMO. The warbonds stay where they are. You can complete any of them at any time in any order you like. Also, even in the ingame shop, there is not really FOMO: there are literally just four items: two helmets and two armours. Those switch every couple of days. But that switch is a cycle. Meaning, after some days those, you've seen on one day, are back.

The devs also made clear in a statement that they explicitly don't want that FOMO stuff and don't want it to be pay to win.

I have more than 200 h in the game and have unlocked every item in every warbond earlier than that. Never paid a cent. Not even for the game itself since I got it as a gift, lol. Also several of the shop items. (That depends on difficulty though. With lower difficulties might take longer.)

Yes, they are not "the paragon of microtransactions". First, because they still have microtransactions at all. Secondly, because it's obfuscated and superlinear (ratio between spent money and amount of received currency is not the same between the packages: you get much more if you spend a bit more). But if you compare that to other games, which employ microtransaction shit, it's waaaaay better and right at the top, after Deep Rock Galactic.

If Larian released mod tools, hasbro will watch the community build an open source of the paid model they were trying to force on everyone

Larian is not making Baldur's Gate 4. Stand down soldier.

larian isn't making bg4, and hasbro are

absolutely

going to fuck it up trying to milk it

Hasn't Larian already said they aren't doing Baldur's Gate 4?

1. Corporations aren't your friends, stop stanning
2. Larian doesn't own Baldur's Gate and wouldn't be the ones making decisions for BG4, that would be Wizards Of The Coast

That's true for virtually every game. Diablo IV: hated by many, considered a major downgrade, Blizzard bad, gets boring, doesn't handle live content updates right... yet go watch the videos with the team that designed the dungeons and the assets, they're extremely passionate, they are proud of their work, they explain how they spent a looooong time just working on little details they thought people would appreciate.

It's super unfair to raise Helldivers and Baldur's Gate to this elevated "worthy passionate developer" status and disregard others while, at the same time, being selectively blind about the issues both of these games had and still have. In fact, Baldur's Gate straight up required months of Microsoft intervention to finally (partially!) fix CPU affinity issues.

Great argument!

Factorio is the best manufacturing/logistics sim by a huge margin. Some of that is technical things, but the biggest contributor is game balance and the complexity curve. They spent years iterating to find a sweet spot.

It is the best, and the benchmark, for the survivalcraft factory RTS genre. They optimised the game to an absolutely ridiculous degree, that it will even run smooth on a Nintendo Switch.

Probably the best game i am playing, 6000h+ into it now. If you like that type of game, you will love factorio.
Has a free demo on steam, so you can try before you buy.

I’m not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side

It's actually inevitable.

Heck, I’d imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they’ll likely update it so it works offline.

I'm pretty sure I can count on my fingers the number of games that have actually patched their online-only functionality to work offline. Off the top of my head, it's just Knockout City, and I think maybe a Gran Turismo game somewhere along the line.

I damned those bugs myself with a combo of napalm, flamethrower, and incendiary breaker.

But in all seriousness there are some huge bugs that can ruin a run you spent almost 40 minutes on... So I also bring a 500kg to deal with those.

Some days I have to restart helldivers after every mission because it crashes during the extraction cutscene.

It’s ok to admit games aren’t perfect while also enjoying them. Helldivers is fun but it’s no paragon of the industry.

Same but i either have an network error or the game closes every other game, which isn't great. Especially after 20 minutes into a mission. I would say i only finish 3 out of 5 games usually. Don't get me wrong, i played like 150 hours, it's still not okay

I wish the game had single player stuff, it looks quite fun.

I have fun playing it too but it's definitely one of the buggiest games I've played, and while most of them aren't game breaking, I have experienced a few pretty bad ones. One of my favourites put giant holes in the terrain across the entire map, causing me to get stuck and die several times lol.

I just left a game where someone was using the Spear to great effect, although they were finding it a bit of a pain to lock. That's pretty different to completely broken.

Or we just have no fucking idea what they are talking about and the game works fine for us.

I do have to generally agree, however this is also easily the weakest part of the game. The game doesn't hand hold you through explaining everything with full screen explanations like some games, and there's a lot going on with the map screen to notice the difficulty and matchmaking functions when you first jump into the game. However, it is right there. The first couple missions it steers you towards are so simple and short you definitely don't need teammates to complete, and from my experience they basically assume you won't have any. After you play a couple short missions alone, it makes sense you'd look at more in the interface, it's not rocket science.

However, the high number of loading screens and animations to get into and out of a party simply to make it "look" nice is absurd. An animation of the ship jumping to a planet, then an animation of you coming out of a pod onto the ship, then if you are kicked an animation of you doing the exact same thing back to your ship, taking 30-60 seconds to run through. Animating it all for a single ship to deploy from, versus a standard matchmaking room is just a waste of time for matchmaking. It looks cool and for friends is awesome, but to just play the game, it's a massive waste of time. This is made even more annoying with players kicking people from their teams for any number of reasons so all of those nice looking loads just waste that time and the kicked player then needs to walk all the way back through their ship to get to the map and try again. This is the most annoying part of getting kicked honestly.

I think part of this is also a good chunk of the community either not knowing how, or not utilizing the party privacy functionality. So people aren't putting themselves into things like friends-only or closed parties when they don't want to play with randoms. And then there's always the toxic players kicking people simply for not playing the meta.

A party leader kicking players within a couple minutes of joining a party should negatively affect that player in some form to ensure people use the privacy system correctly and help stop some of this meta toxicity. Like an inability to call stratagems for some time in mission (and it not counting until actually playing, so they can't just sit on the ship to wait it out). They already have the in game propaganda system setup, declare the player anti-democratic or something to make in game punishment seamless with the lore.

Of course, this can be described as a skill issue. Yet, the OP states that games get better and more polished if you let “Developers cook”, using Helldivers 2 as an example. My reply was that the game is not an example of what I'd call “polished”.