The same person is currently working on rebalancing Halo 2 as well. I don’t follow it closely enough to have any clue when it’ll be done, but I’m excited to try it when it finally is. H2 had loads of problems when being developed, and I’d love to see the game properly balanced and with extra content.
It kinda is a necessary evil, if you want free content at least. Especially for a website like youtube where you need to host millions of large videos 24/7. That shit ain’t cheap, and even google can’t make money out of thin air. Not that I’m defending youtube or anything, charging $8 a month for premium lite but still giving you ads is insane. Paid services should never have ads.
My problem isn’t with ads, but rather the type of ads used. Like I said a moment ago, I don’t think paid services should ever have ads of any kind. But for free websites, a few side banner ads are fine in my book, while ads in the middle of a page or popup ads or video ads (especially unskippable ones) are a no-go. Essentially anything that doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing is usually something I’m okay with.
just build the most mundane things with our creativity. It always felt so amazing even when the builds were so poor in quality.
I feel this. Nowadays I don’t enjoy building anymore, because I have too high a standard for block palettes and shapes and where things should go and stuff like that. No more square houses built entirely out of diamond blocks and obsidian. No more random japanese pagodas in the middle of my base. No more bulbasaur pixel art. Now it’s way more stressful and less fun I guess. And I even if I can have fun building a single base, I never have the motivation to build anything beyond that, because there’s just too much effort, motivation, and planning required.
I remember one day watching a small youtuber, who I can’t remember right now unfortunately, building a river that passed through a giant rainbow out of wool smack dab in the middle of their base. They talked about how they intentionally stopped trying to build pretty and logical things and just decided to have fun. It was really inspiring and nostalgic to see. So I do that too when I play now, and honestly, it’s actually harder than building “good” looking things. But it’s fun.
They’ve got a release for palworld 1.0 planned for 2026.
His results showed that the longer a game stayed in early access, the weaker its full-release sales tended to be.
I mean, this seems kinda inevitable, no? The longer you’re in early access, the larger the portion of your target audience has likely already bought your game.
That would depend entirely on the game. For example, the game Cassette Beasts has multiple DLC. One adds a small amount of actual new content to the game, and the rest are all cosmetic outfits for your characters. None of these cosmetic DLC are worth buying unless you really like the base game and want to support the developers. Then there’s games like The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, where each of the DLC is a massive expansion to the base game, with the DLC having more content than the base game does at this point and are highly worth getting.
As far as Trails in the Sky is concerned, I know some of its DLC is cosmetic stuff and a lot of it gives you packs of in-game consumables. Doesn’t seem incredibly useful to me, but idk much about the game so I could be wrong.
Deluxe editions for games usually come bundled with DLC for a cheaper price than buying them and the game individually. Take older Call of Duty games for example, where buying the game and each DLC would cost a total of $120, but the deluxe edition with the same content would only cost you $100. So if you knew you were going to end up buying all four DLC, getting the deluxe edition was much cheaper.
In this particular game, I don’t know exactly what will end up in the deluxe edition but there’s already $72 worth of DLC so I imagine a lot of it is going to be included.
So they’re like… low-altitude helicopters?
A Computer Emergency Response Team would be my guess.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_emergency_response_team
Oh hell yeah, I love survivor-likes and this one’s aesthetic is amazing. I can’t wait to add it to my never-ending backlog when it comes out!
Oh yeah, same here. I love gear with massive power in exchange for huge drawbacks you need to work around, so the double edged sickle was right up my alley and quickly became my favorite primary. Not just a heavy pen primary, but a heavy pen assault rifle with infinite ammo and near perfect accuracy. The constant screams of freedom coming out of my character as I burn with passion is an added bonus. Fortunately for me I’ve always liked fire-based weapons in helldivers (freedom’s flame was even my first warbond) so I already had the salamander armor by the time I needed it.
If you can get a friend to carry the stim pistol around for you it’s even more crazy fun.
I felt the same with the smart pistol they have in there. It’s really not even that good compared to my old reliable talon, but damn do I find it fun. The salamander armor (heavy inflammable) allowing the double-edged sickle to overperform is another one that saddened me, though that one isn’t entirely their fault since the DE sickle came out later.
I agree the rotating shop is FOMO. It got a lot better once they updated it to have the 8 or so permanent pages, but even still. There’s no justifiable reason that stuff isn’t just included in the warbonds they’re released with. Fortunately most of it’s pretty skip-able or replaceable.
I don’t think you should be too grateful for it. It’s nice, but it’s not perfect and should still be criticized. Overall I think their monetization is just ‘okay’. Another similar game that does battle passes and FOMO even better is Deep Rock Galactic. Where each season can be retroactively reactivated so you can earn the cosmetics from them, and where the yearly seasonal cosmetic challenges come with the hats from every previous year. Unfortunately DRG is currently on the back burner while the team works on their other games.
(First of all, sorry for the long-ass comment, I didn’t expect to go on this long when I started writing it lol.)
Did you read the article? They were essentially just saying, “We would like to do X, but it’s unfeasible in HD2 so it’s on the bucket list for the next game”. It’s not like they’re saying they have the entire sequel planned out. They even mention at the bottom of the article that HD3 is likely still many years out.
I’d say the game is more pay-to-enjoy than pay-to-win. I don’t think you can really call an exclusively PVE co-op game P2W, but even if you could the base warbond has some of the strongest gear in the game for every faction, and the devs tend to try and keep most of the weapons pretty well balanced overall. Maybe with the exception of democratic demolition, which has had a whole suite of completely OP weapons since it came out and unlocks several new ways to play with thermites and the grenade pistol.
The “social hub” will exist not to socialize but as a place to display your paid content to other players
I disagree with this bit completely. HD2 already has a pretty social community, and there isn’t much drip to show off when you can buy any one of the warbonds at any time for like $10. Maybe people would do it if you had a way to show off everything you own at once, but in HD2 at least that’s impossible. At best people would be showing off their neat event-exclusive capes, but they’re given out to anyone who longs in during a pretty long time frame so even they’re not exactly rare.
As far as why the internet praises HD2… there’s some good and some bad with the game’s monetization. I think the community tends to overlook the bad either because our standards are too low from most other live-service games, because we don’t notice them as a consequence of being veteran players, or we think the good outweighs the bad (or all of the above).
The Good: Unlike most live-service games with battlepasses, HD2 doesn’t abuse scummy tactics like FOMO by making you permanently miss the warbond (battlepass) if you don’t pay or play enough. You can unlock literally any warbond at the same price (with the very new exception of collab warbonds which are bit more expensive) and in any order, and they’re all viable in their own way. And importantly, you can get the premium currency in-game just by playing. The free base-game warbond has as much content as 3 of the other warbonds combined (including nearly enough super credits for your first premium), and you will likely have enough credits from playing the game for two or three new warbonds by the time you finish it. Also worth noting that each warbond comes with 300 super credits, so they’re a bit cheaper than they look on the tin.
The Bad: There are simply too many warbonds now, and to my knowledge the rate at which you earn super credits hasn’t increased even once since the game released. This wasn’t a problem when you only had 3 to buy, but there are now 16 premium warbonds and it takes far too long to grind. Thing is, most members of the community that regularly play and care about updates probably have a lot of them and don’t notice this problem as much. I’m curious if the influx in new xbox users will change this at all? The biggest issue is that you don’t earn more credits on harder difficulties. This means that “grinding” in HD2 doesn’t consist of playing the game and having fun for a while, but instead re-running missions on the first or second difficulty to raid POIs for 4 hours just to get a new warbond. And since extraction takes too long, you’re encouraged to return to the menu while doing this, so you don’t even help with the galactic war at all.
Hmm, that actually sounds right up my alley. I’ll have to try it out!
I’ve heard of it vaguely just because I played a bit of limbus company (and liked the characters more than the gameplay tbh). How’s lobotomy compared to limbus? Is the gameplay similar at all?
Nah, 2 was the series peak.
Tentacles, yeah that’s probably a more niche kink. But cat boys/girls? I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t consider that an upgrade.
I’d like to buy Sea of Stars or Dungeons of Hinterberg. They’ve both been on my wishlist for a while. But I can’t really justify the cost rn, and I already have a huge backlog to work through. So I’ll probably skip this autumn sale as well.