I like that, suddenly is sudden to the listener, all of a sudden is surprising to the story’s characters, and makes the listener anticipate that surprise without being able to warn them about it

I’m a little behind, but I completed AC Odyssey and that was just buy it and that’s it. They had a cash shop for armor sets but it was completely unnecessary and I never even looked at it much less bought anything from it. So provided the releases after that are the same it’s a “there is an MTX shop but the game is balanced without it” situation

Wtf haha. They even left your bucket, like how cold

Zippybot strokin out over here

People hate Ubisoft so much that they’re just not reading the article or your full comments and are downvoting you anyway. What a time to be alive

I can definitely go for that. I think the book in its own right is important for that, and is a great overview of that topic, and wouldve been a lot more impactful if I naturally found it, read it, discussed it with others.

Instead I got the whole overview of what it was trying to do first, had already discussed everything it covers in school, and then they made us read it and it resulted in my experience of “why am I reading this, we sort of went over this in three different ways already”

Had to read Animal Farm for school. Haven’t read it since then, so this could be a now incorrect edgy high school opinion, but I felt that its allegory was so obvious and direct that it had no need to be written and was a waste of time to read when we could’ve just directly discussed communism instead.

It Takes Two. Phenomenal game, decent emotional story behind it

So if it’s worse for the consumer for valve to allow class action lawsuits, then should the consumer see all the other companies who force arbitration as the better outcome?

Periphery’s “Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal”

Big ups for Everything You’ve Come to Expect

I think reading this post halved my brain cells.

I think that besides visual or terminology flavor, the only things that Balatro has in common with poker are the deck of playing cards, and playing poker hands.

Everything else about multipliers, build synergy, bosses, or score thresholds is all video game nerd shit.

There’s no bluffing or calling bluffs, small and big blinds are completely different, there aren’t other hands to play against, no betting, no river, turn, etc.

It’s fuckin good though.

Great story!

Mine would have to be grinding for, collecting, and unlocking the Skyscale. I don’t usually do end game grind stuff, but that one was just so cool I had to go for it. It was at least a week long endeavor involving lists and maps, but so worth it at the end.

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When the penny drops it means that someone realizes something that had been happening to/around them, while they were unaware.

Chrono Trigger, of course. Some legendary tracks in there that transcend their limitations. The Deadbolt OST, Katana ZERO’s OST. Nier Automata, Street Fighter V.

Oblivion and Skyrim as well. Really there are too many excellent game soundtracks to possibly list in a comment

I think there’s a strong possibility you’re correct, especially with that genre. When it comes to purely competitive games continual new content and adjustments keep the masses coming back, and providing those things long term with no monetization is a business suicidal idea, and I think that strong reasoning like that excuses a lot of the cynicism and bad faith behind MTX in those specific cases provided its still relatively fair.

I give you an A+ for an actual strong argument for MTX (in those and related cases)

Personally, yeah, I find it much less offensive if the extra purchases do not nag you in-game and their presence is not missed or noticed in terms of affecting balance.

For example, Middle Earth Shadow of War infamously let you buy Uruks. Having played the fuck out of that game I can confidently say the game was balanced such that you never needed to do that (apart from the end game grind, but the grind is the gameplay, so if you hit end game and didnt want to grind, you just didn’t wanna keep playing), but having it appear in the menus was jarring and the idea of buying an Uruk with real money juxtaposed next to the mechanical intent of obtaining Uruks through exploration, marking, stalking, and exploiting their weaknesses just stuck out like a cynical sore thumb.

If they put the Uruk purchases outside the game with no in-game ads and I played through Shadow of War and was like “man holy shit, my Uruks cannot keep up with the curve, this is insanely grindy” and I discovered that you could buy them and skip it, I’d say thats dastardly as well.

But the happy medium would be balancing it so it wasn’t necessary, but providing an external purchase to milk that revenue if they really still wanted to. That example is moot now anyway since they eventually removed the MTX Uruks entirely.

I know and understand the whole idea of maximizing artist hours for cosmetic DLC. It’s an understandable reason for it to exist.

However, the big thing about MTX to me is the way it changes my perception of the game and how it feels to interact with it. Playing games without in-game cash shops or MTX allows me to focus on the game itself and feel that what I’ve purchased is one cohesive piece that works in a singular purpose towards a goal of something enjoyable to play and rewarding to explore the content of.

Something like Prey 2016. My entire memory and experience of playing that game is absolutely nothing but the experience of the lore, atmosphere, gameplay, decisions, and the creativity of exploration. At no point was I ever passing over menu options designed to sell me more piecemeal content, I wasn’t wading through a reel of battle pass cosmetics, I wasn’t attempting to ignore little rectangular ads on the main menu asking me to check some skins out.

And again, I totally understand why those things are there and I’m not inherently against their existence, I enjoy many games where those experiences are a part. In the end, I just believe that being free of that stuff absolutely makes a game feel perceptibly better and more pure, more of a game and less of a transparently monetized product.

I also feel like there’s a sort of forbidden knowledge aspect to the whole “maximizing artist labor time for cosmetic MTX”. The best way for cosmetic MTX to happen is to utilize extra possible labor time that couldn’t be used elsewhere. I’d love to believe that any cosmetic MTX took no time or development from any other part of the game. I’d love to believe that no amazing visual design for armor or weapons was held because its more premium appearance would better fit a paid item than a free base game one.

But you’ll never know that for sure. There will always be that inkling of cynical doubt that the cool item got a price tag and the okay one ended up in the base game. That the visual artists are so burnt making constant art for base game and then MTX that their energy couldn’t be focused solely on the core experience. I can assume, I can take the company’s word for it, but I’ll never be able to cleanse my mind of the knowledge that it’s a separate kind of content from the base game.