If you're unhappy with this game then unsub... forever.

[Jojoya]

I don't really understand your argument. Fun games have been on the decline thanks to the predatory practices I've been referring to.

Monetization has nothing to do with whether a game is fun. It influences what you're willing to pay.

There's a pretty big difference between the two.

I'm also not talking about whether a game is more fun or less fun. Either it's fun to me or it isn't. The base game may be perfectly fun by itself. Any later content releases might add fun or they may not be fun at all. I remember playing Oblivion and having a great time. Later the Shivering Isles DLC was released and I got that. It was disturbing content that I wish I hadn't purchased. Didn't change that the base game was still fun even if others felt it wasn't full featured because it didn't have the DLCs.

Not the games themselves, the development standards set by them. Both of them came out in a complete state and did not require microtransactions to support them. While they will obviously receive updates in the future (Elden Ring has seen many at this point), they have defied the common pitfalls of "games as a live service" in that they were of high quality upon release. Their respective development teams have delivered precisely what they said they would. In fact, I'd say the team behind BG3 went above and beyond.

In other words:
- Games that work right out of the gate, lacking severe bugs
- Games that feel complete, not requiring subsequent patches to fill in the gaps
- Games that are not driven by corporate greed, which is to say that either lack entirely or minimize the intrusiveness of microtransactions.
- Games wherein the developers do listen to player feedback and monitor various statistics to try and keep the game at the highest quality possible
- Games that maintain a high standard of gameplay without sacrificing other elements

I can agree about bugs to a some degree. Games should be free of bugs that are reasonably expected to be caught in their testing environment. They may not be able to catch all bugs when players are using a PC. They may not catch all bugs in a Massively Multiplayer environment because it's not feasible to set up that many clients in a testing environment. Still those bugs should be few in number and quickly fixed. Some developers are bad about that.

MMORPGs will never feel complete because they're a model that relies on long term content editions. You can't use that as a standard for a MMORPG.

I agree that microtransactions shouldn't be intrusive into the game. Thank you YoshiP for putting your foot down and keeping the cash shop separate from FFXIV other than Dreamstore that has to be intentionally enabled in a specific location. I hate the games where you log in and the first thing you see is a cash shop window. As for corporate greed, most games are made to make money. You're not going to get rid of that outside of the tiny indie developers working on a passion project that have other sources of income. Everyone has bills that need to be paid.

I agree about listening to feedback but with the warning that listening doesn't mean doing what that feedback asks. Not everyone agrees with every suggested change. Not implementing the change or getting a personal response doesn't mean they didn't listen.

That last is subjective and so can't be applied to a specific standard. An element that might feel necessary to you may be a useless distraction to another. Sometimes what players want isn't technologically feasible for all player clients the game is intended to be played on. Most game developers aren't going to focus on creating games that only 2% of the player community can play because only they own or can afford the necessary hardware and a good 90% of that 2% may have no interest in the game genre.

Part of why Baldur's Gate 3 has turned out so well is that it's been a playable game for almost 3 years and had been in development 4 years prior to that. Their kickstarter supporters have had access to the game since 2020 to give them feedback prior to the initial release. It's difficult for a company to have a product in development for that amount of time unless they get the financial backing before release of the game. Such backing is a risk since you don't know the game will ever be released. It's worked out in the case of BG3 but how many other games have gone the same route and either failed to end up released or are still in development testing after a decade?

Are you willing to risk some of your money to help a game meet your release standards when there's no guarantee that release will ever happen?\

To my mind the game that just released something truly innovative in the MMORPG group right now is actually a very old one LOTRO. They allow you to pick your difficulty from the moment you roll your character. and the entire world scales to that. Everything from "mobs fall over if you breath on them" to..."I cant even finish a starting quest without a group." If they make this work this is game changing. Mind you that is not a game you would be interested in since it has a pretty aggressive cash shop. Still they came up with something that could be very important going forward in MMORPGs.

How does that work out when you've got 2 players attacking the same creature and one player is set to Very Easy and the other is set to Nightmare (or whatever the difficulty modes are named)?

It sounds a bit like WoW's scale to player level system which didn't work out particularly well (at least in my opinion). The net effect was lower level players frequently ended up more powerful than the higher level players depending on what gear was equipped (think Crystal Tower types of power difference).

Or are most open world zones in LotRO so empty that the chances of encountering another player are small? I remember giving it a try back around 2015 and was turned off by the predatory paywalls. Even then I was encountering fewer players in the open world than I do here. I have no clue how good (or bad) it is now.

I THRIVE on these corporate bootlickers.

Endwalker is lacking. BU3 is showing it's tired. SquareEnix as a company practices crunching. The product we are getting is not nearly what it should be considering how the company throws money at other projects. If anything the cash shop sells and sells, and the game gets cuts and cuts. Then again between forsaken and FFXVI not being the bang they anounced, probably we will see even more cuts in the future... Dawntrail will quickly become the retirement expansion instead of the vacation one.


But someone will white knight. A gatekeeper that will not the unfair, the uninformed, the uncultured haters and trolls in. Oh thank you ever brilliant knight in shining armor! Always remind us for the vigintillion time how yoshida saved the game and thus is not able of nothing bad ever!

Yet here you are paying a subscription. Thank you for your support!

People who never experienced the fall of dalamud arguing that 2.0 shields yoshi p from criticism to people who were here for the fall of dalamud who want the modern game to improve will never not be funny to me

The absolute lack of any sort of acknowledgment that the 2 year backlog of content you have because you started in 2022 and therefore the game had so much content to a person who was drip fed this content on patch is just hilarious

I truly think that the WOW exodus happening in ShB and EW being ShB 2.0 is the worst accidental coincidence this game ever experienced because there is just too many people who never experienced SB and so think this half baked melting pot of nothing e thot simulator is all the game has ever been

What happened a decade ago really doesn't matter.

The game has changed since then.

The development team has changed since then.

The player base has changed since then.

What does matter? Are you having fun is what matters.

Your choice to keep paying for the game even though you're not having fun anymore.