Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Yeah Ghost Recon is kinda special a game so gak the devs will sell you stuff so you don't actually have to play it through to the end.

I even heard that the uninstall button costs 5$ to use but it's the best value thing in the game.

More seriously I played the Beta and it's just not a good game but as a Ghost Recon game it's a fething travesty. Even Wildlands for its many faults felt more like GR and was actually fun in small doses or with friends.

It basicly feels like a Division 2 mod more than it's own game and we all know how much people were desperate for more Division *snigger*

As for the micro transactions I have seen shovelware mobile games with less aggressive microtansaction schemes, I think the only reason we have seen less of a backlash is due to ActiBlizz gaking the bed so spectacularly and pulling the heat off them.

More seriously I played the Beta and it's just not a good game but as a Ghost Recon game it's a fething travesty. Even Wildlands for its many faults felt more like GR and was actually fun in small doses or with friends.

It basicly feels like a Division 2 mod more than it's own game and we all know how much people were desperate for more Division *snigger*

Harsh but fair imo.
But considering ubisofts spree of meh to bad games recently....


Oh and also winnieh the pooh was not happy with some Blizzard emplooyees.

Man I used to loved the Ghost Recon games. I was so excited to see it coming back with wildlands, Then AAA greed happened. I didn't even bother following the news for breakpoint. Future Soldier is just gonna have to stay the final game in the series for me I guess.

balmong7 wrote:
Man I used to loved the Ghost Recon games. I was so excited to see it coming back with wildlands, Then AAA greed happened. I didn't even bother following the news for breakpoint. Future Soldier is just gonna have to stay the final game in the series for me I guess.

Could be worse though.
Considering C&C mobile fate.

Once a glorious game in the form of the Red Alert 2 or Generals, now a rotting carcass that shouldn't even exist in the first place.

What happened? EA happened.
Sad to see that Ubisoft is the same terminal disease for many great titles and series.

 Hawky wrote:
Once a glorious game in the form of the Red Alert 2 or Generals, now a rotting carcass that shouldn't even exist in the first place.

What happened? EA happened.
Sad to see that Ubisoft is the same terminal disease for many great titles and series.

I feel more like this :
A publisher is more like steel.
It provides support and stabilizes Processes.

EA, Activision and consorts are more like uranium or lead. .
They poison everything they touch, are toxic in behaviour (cough Actibliz cough) and longterm damaging.

Not Online!!! wrote:






Hu, seems like i missed to link these.

It's so bad and ubified that, well Sterling is drunk and the other two aussies jumped on it.

So I've been playing it since Saturday and there is nothing wrong with the game. I understand that the weekend patches already fixed a number of issues with the game. So far, my experience with it has been great. I'm enjoying to story and the game play, and I really, really like the way they created and handled all their side-quests here. Personally, I think the internet is once again running things way out of proportion in order to feed the need for outrage.

A game can still be mediocre and be fun for people, especially when played in a group.

The thing is, is it fun enough to justify and maintain the games as a service audience it needs? *shrug*

 Vertrucio wrote:
A game can still be mediocre and be fun for people, especially when played in a group.

The thing is, is it fun enough to justify and maintain the games as a service audience it needs? *shrug*

Everything is / can befun if you do it with friends.


On another note, how long will it take until the whole Actibliz China bs blows over.
I for one am kinda done with ugly pooh.

It's not going to blow over, because the conflict at the core of the whole thing isn't a one-off.

Actiblizz, like a lot of western companies, want loadsamoney from the Chinese market. They also, like a lot of companies in gaming, have a chunk of their shares owned by Tencent. China aren't going to stop repressing human rights and engaging in sundry other dodgy dealings any time soon, and they're not going to stop trying to leverage soft-power to contain & shut-down criticism of their actions.

People might get bored and drift away from the whole blitzchung/Hong Kong affair, but it's only a matter of time until the next deployment of corporate power in defence of Chinese interests in a way that resonates with western audiences(because that's been going on for years without most people caring enough to even know it's happening), and then we begin again.

That's actually why the folk trying to turn Mei into a symbol for the Hong Kong protests are so clever IMO - they recognise that the only way to force a change from these companies is to try and poison the wells and salt the earth, to make maintaining relations with the Chinese regime impossible not by appealing to the ethics and empathy of corporate culture - they have neither to appeal to - but by triggering the hypersensitive regime itself so much that they cut ties.

It's clever, but Activision will just replace Mei with a new, Chinese friendly character in the game, likely exclusively for players in that region.

 LunarSol wrote:
It's clever, but Activision will just replace Mei with a new, Chinese friendly character in the game, likely exclusively for players in that region.

That in its self would be a victory as it will lead to more bad press as Blizz remove a symbol of democracy from the game at the behest of there Chinese masters

Also somthing to note regarding why they over reacted in the 1st place cod mobile has still not had the nod from the chinese government yet for release.

 Vertrucio wrote:
A game can still be mediocre and be fun for people, especially when played in a group.

The thing is, is it fun enough to justify and maintain the games as a service audience it needs? *shrug*

Games as "lIvE SeRvIcEs" really sours me.

And I say that as someone who is currently enjoying Destiny 2 a lot. I just, won't spend any money on it outside of buying the expansions.

 Togusa wrote:

 Vertrucio wrote:
A game can still be mediocre and be fun for people, especially when played in a group.

The thing is, is it fun enough to justify and maintain the games as a service audience it needs? *shrug*

Games as "lIvE SeRvIcEs" really sours me.

And I say that as someone who is currently enjoying Destiny 2 a lot. I just, won't spend any money on it outside of buying the expansions.

It also dooms good games by bad publishers.

Honestly, I just find its lead to games that are boring. They're compelling in the sense that I feel the need to keep playing, but they don't, to borrow the phrase, really spark joy moment to moment. This isn't totally a result of the live service open world design; as I go back and replay games you can see the padding required to allow players to spend hundreds of hours on a single game creep in to various degrees back to the SNES era, but the MMO bubble is where you really see busy work take the industry by storm. I've gotten better about skipping sidequests in general, but I still find myself accomplishing nothing after a couple hours in most games and would rather have cleared a half dozen levels in a retro or retro inspired game.

Basically work with a paycheck at the end of a month?

Except your paycheck is a random lootbox

Another look at the excruciating mediocrity and endless literally-everything-is-on-sale crap of Breakpoint, by Angry Joe:

 Togusa wrote:

 Vertrucio wrote:
A game can still be mediocre and be fun for people, especially when played in a group.

The thing is, is it fun enough to justify and maintain the games as a service audience it needs? *shrug*

Games as "lIvE SeRvIcEs" really sours me.

And I say that as someone who is currently enjoying Destiny 2 a lot. I just, won't spend any money on it outside of buying the expansions.

Isn't that kinda reinforcing what the big publishers are saying though, that loot boxes are optional and don't prevent you from enjoying the game?

 Kroem wrote:

 Togusa wrote:

 Vertrucio wrote:
A game can still be mediocre and be fun for people, especially when played in a group.

The thing is, is it fun enough to justify and maintain the games as a service audience it needs? *shrug*

Games as "lIvE SeRvIcEs" really sours me.

And I say that as someone who is currently enjoying Destiny 2 a lot. I just, won't spend any money on it outside of buying the expansions.

Isn't that kinda reinforcing what the big publishers are saying though, that loot boxes are optional and don't prevent you from enjoying the game?

Well, speaking as a person who has yet to buy any silver for D2, or spend 1 dime on a lootbox in Overwatch, yeah. They are very optional.

People who buy lootboxes and other pieces of offered paid content, typically have zero impulse control.

Or the urge to spend 60 hours playing a 20 hour game, aka the Ubi forkwittery of selling a soultion to a problem they made, although part of me is impressed by the sheer balls of sticking a MMO idea into a single player games just cos they knew they could

I generally don't buy that garbage, but I also find the progression of a lot of these games pretty dull and the moment to moment gameplay a little too repetitive to hold my attention long without progress.

I just look to the mobile market. The heyday of Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Where's My Water, Plants vs Zombies and the like made my phone my primary gaming device. Their respective sequels were all full of miserable busywork, forced delays and lots of random things to buy. I don't even have a games folder on my main screen anymore. I haven't used it for gaming in years.

 LunarSol wrote:
I generally don't buy that garbage, but I also find the progression of a lot of these games pretty dull and the moment to moment gameplay a little too repetitive to hold my attention long without progress.

For me this is a huge issue. Many of these games have very simplistic and repetitive gameplay. They can be a lot of fun, but once you're gaming to just grind and "earn" you can very fast lose the fun in actually playing the game itself. It becomes a chore because you've got to game and win multiple times as fast as you can in order to get the next "unlock" reward.

From my eye more and more mmo style games ave moving that reward further and further away, which puts more pressure on you to pay with real money to unlock it now or faster (boosters) so that the game returns to that fun point where you gain suitable reward for your invested time.



For an MMO type game I can at least appreciate the ongoing costs of keeping the game going. However its clear that there's been a big move toward making high profits off titles now and that developers are pushing things to maximise profits.

For Ubi and their idea to put this business model into singleplayer games I think is horrible. At least with a singleplayer game there isn't the ongoing need for any costs from the developer in the same way there is for an mmo. So its pure greed and profit that tey are gunning for. Esp ontop of charging AAA prices just to get the game

The games are artificially stretched out to whittle down your controll and generate an issue and sell you the solution to it.

Also, the whole goal isn't to get your money Togusa, but the money of people that have addictive tendencies and or that have allready ended up on blcklists for casinos for reasons.
Oh and to genereate the next generation of addicts.

One of the big side effects of raid culture for me is that its created a large culture of risk minimization in order to maximize reward efficiency. When the goal of a challenge dungeon was simply to defeat the superboss, you tried, and failed and tried again. You learned from failure and your near victories were exhilarating. And that's honestly fine if that's the goal.

The problem is, MMOs and WOW in particular changed the goal from "beat the superboss" to "beat the superboss every day" and that put a ton of demand on perfectly optimized play intolerant of mistakes in which failure wasn't a learning experience but an actual loss of opportunity to find out if you randomly got to progress or not.

I've pretty much entirely retreated to platformers and single player action games these days. I feel like a successful raid is the biggest waste of my time because there's no real engagement. It's so mechanical and the only real reward is the promise of doing it again tomorrow. I want games that push back but for the most part, all they seem to push is sheer volume of repetitive tasks.

Breakpoint is scummy with regards to the stuff they are trying to pull off with it, but it feels rather kiddy compared to the stuff EA or Activision have done in the past. Though they can always go all out later down the road like they did with Wildlands and gradually roll out more scummy stuff over time. Biggest offender in the game right now is the battle crate system, where you can unlock free stuff like skins, unique weapons and vehicles by completing special missions. Downside to this is.. you can only earn so many points every day, making it a hard task to unlock everything they've got on offer there before the season is over. So, later this season they'll be releasing a booster that allows you to earn more points each and unlock stuff faster.. Costs real money obviously. The system isn't helped either by the missions mostly giving you a paltry amount of points and always being the same, turning it into a daily grind that takes up quite a chunk of time to fill out the meter. Faction leaders give you special missions that pay out big, but.. are always the same each and every day. Just in a different location, but same laptop you need to hack, same truck you need to hijack.

Locking a lot of the cosmetics and camo behind real money is also a massive downer, as Wildlands had a lot of this stuff out and available from the first time you boot up the game. So, cough up if you want to look like a crayon eater or chair force commando. Though some of the "pay real money stuff" winds up as a drop in the game, as rare as it is. Probably a bug. Breaking the camo up into weapon and uniform categories is also awful.

That said, what they didn't do much to my surprise was artificially slowing down XP gains or the lower amount of drops and the quality of those, getting to max XP level and to a comfortable gear level that opens up the entire map to you is piss easy and doesn't require any boosters or the like. Buying replacement weaponry at the ingame store using the common ingame currency (which is also dropped everywhere at copious amounts, so again no boosters needed Ubi!) is also suspiciously user-friendly, always giving you level appropriate gear with a good chance of getting purple or gold level quality goods.

I like the game, open world is my kind of thing, but looking at my list of bullet points breaking things down into good (good shooting mechanics, fun stealth, a large map), bad (bugs, stealth kills) and ugly (season pass, lack of an ending to the campaign(!), bugs).. it's okay, buy at discount and play in coop, as that's where the game really shines.

That said, what they didn't do much to my surprise was artificially slowing down XP gains or the lower amount of drops and the quality of those, getting to max XP level and to a comfortable gear level that opens up the entire map to you is piss easy and doesn't require any boosters or the like. Buying replacement weaponry at the ingame store using the common ingame currency (which is also dropped everywhere at copious amounts, so again no boosters needed Ubi!) is also suspiciously user-friendly, always giving you level appropriate gear with a good chance of getting purple or gold level quality goods.

Oh they did but alot less so then odysee, because they got quite a lot of gak from that debacle left over.

Removed

 LunarSol wrote:
One of the big side effects of raid culture for me is that its created a large culture of risk minimization in order to maximize reward efficiency. When the goal of a challenge dungeon was simply to defeat the superboss, you tried, and failed and tried again. You learned from failure and your near victories were exhilarating. And that's honestly fine if that's the goal.

The problem is, MMOs and WOW in particular changed the goal from "beat the superboss" to "beat the superboss every day" and that put a ton of demand on perfectly optimized play intolerant of mistakes in which failure wasn't a learning experience but an actual loss of opportunity to find out if you randomly got to progress or not.

I've pretty much entirely retreated to platformers and single player action games these days. I feel like a successful raid is the biggest waste of my time because there's no real engagement. It's so mechanical and the only real reward is the promise of doing it again tomorrow. I want games that push back but for the most part, all they seem to push is sheer volume of repetitive tasks.

This is also very true and something I dislike as well. It takes the game out of the game and creates a very stressy game environment for any random team ups. Esp for any on the team who don't play to the meta/play perfectly etc... It's not helped that many of these team games often only reward plays with personal actions, so you get a whole set of issues where people don't like you "stealing their kill" and such.
It's shifting the whole concept of the game from the actual raid or battle or whatever and into earning for the dailies and such.


To my mind its basically taking working concepts too far into the extreme which renders them less enjoyable but no less functional.

 LunarSol wrote:
One of the big side effects of raid culture for me is that its created a large culture of risk minimization in order to maximize reward efficiency. When the goal of a challenge dungeon was simply to defeat the superboss, you tried, and failed and tried again. You learned from failure and your near victories were exhilarating. And that's honestly fine if that's the goal.

The problem is, MMOs and WOW in particular changed the goal from "beat the superboss" to "beat the superboss every day" and that put a ton of demand on perfectly optimized play intolerant of mistakes in which failure wasn't a learning experience but an actual loss of opportunity to find out if you randomly got to progress or not.

I've pretty much entirely retreated to platformers and single player action games these days. I feel like a successful raid is the biggest waste of my time because there's no real engagement. It's so mechanical and the only real reward is the promise of doing it again tomorrow. I want games that push back but for the most part, all they seem to push is sheer volume of repetitive tasks.

WoW doesn't let you do that every day, so that's a weird place to put blame. Raids and world bosses are on weekly timers, and progress is entirely an illusion at this point.
The big thing that contributes to intolerance of failure is they're a massive investment of time and herding idiots, so failing at them is essentially wasted effort. One that most players will happily blame on other members of the group.

However, you're right about no engagement. Personally, I feel part of it is they're set up (storywise) as once in a lifetime events, as you murder the current Big Bad and bring the story arc to what passes for a satisfactory conclusion- there isn't any reason to do that again and again, other than rewards. The weird part is the rewards for current (and the expansion just past) content really suck, unless you're really chasing the necklace (or in Legion, artifact) XP bar, which is what substitutes for character progression these days. But there are other ways to get that the don't involve managing a group or grinding through millions of HP over the course of several hours.

On the other hand, if you go back to raids 2-3 expansions back, you can farm boatloads of gold which you can throw at pretty much anything in the game and item (and therefor character customization options) drop a lot more (in current raids, you have a % chance to get one item, in legacy raids (ie, not legion or BFA) you're guaranteed to get five. They aren't useful gear anymore, but clearing each raid is a couple thousand gold for basically no effort, far less time, and no other people screwing things up.

I like the statement that the AAA games industry is feeling like it is all the same.

Also i'd like to add the Ubification of games especially in "liveservice " bs game type as one of the driving forces for this.,

Voss wrote:

WoW doesn't let you do that every day, so that's a weird place to put blame. Raids and world bosses are on weekly timers, and progress is entirely an illusion at this point.
The big thing that contributes to intolerance of failure is they're a massive investment of time and herding idiots, so failing at them is essentially wasted effort. One that most players will happily blame on other members of the group.

It's a weird example simply because I don't really play WOW and don't know the current specifics. It's just really the only remaining MMO of its style with enough cultural reference to use as shorthand for the raid experience. It's just where I felt things really break down for me, as gaming shifted from accomplishing things in the game to accomplishing the same things day after day in the hopes of being blessed by the RNG. I got really disconnected from where games were going as they felt increasing less about what you do and more about what you get. WoW is just the most well known example of games where everyone seemed to be trying to skip as much content as possible to hit the level cap and get to the "good" part.