Hangout The Games Hangout Thread

[xi0]

Maybe Nintendo's market research says something else, but I think they would have been better off releasing a Switch Pro. Even if you release a cheaper version of the Switch hoping to get more DS fans, the games are just going to be more expensive than traditional handheld ones. Better battery doesn't even really seem like a nice tradeoff either, since they're saying it's 20-30% better depending on the game... that's not good enough to be a noteworthy feature IMO.

 

[Jammin]

Nah, I think it's a pretty solid pitch if only to get the price down a $100. That's the main feature they are trying to get out there IMO. I might have considered it had it been available when I was in the market. Because I think of the switch as a handheld more than anything else. If I want to play something on my TV I tend to just use my PS4.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 27, 2019, Original Post Date: Jul 11, 2019 ---

Ugh, the Epic Games store thing finally hit me in a place where it hurts. Mechwarrior 5.

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/0...ayed-again-becomes-epic-games-store-exclusive

Dammit, this especially sucks becuase console isn't even an option with this one. This is Mechwarrior! You suck, Epic.

 

[xi0]

Ugh, the Epic Games store thing finally hit me in a place where it hurts. Mechwarrior 5.

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/0...ayed-again-becomes-epic-games-store-exclusive

Dammit, this especially sucks becuase console isn't even an option with this one. This is Mechwarrior! You suck, Epic.

Russ Bullock has been proven to be caught in a lie back when their website was accidentally updated in April leading to speculation. Essentially he lied his ass off to ensure there would be 3 more months of preorders while minimizing bad press and he himself admitted that he wanted to keep it secret until Gamescom when they planned to release the Closed Beta for backers to soften the blow of the news.

Apparently they had 20k preorders and at least 20% of them were cancelled since this news. The RogueTech mod community for Battletech are saying they cancelled all of theirs, which came out to 4k in total.

It doesn't really matter though since Tim Sweeney graciously paid for copies for everyone already...

 

[Jammin]

Russ Bullock has been proven to be caught in a lie back when their website was accidentally updated in April leading to speculation. Essentially he lied his ass off to ensure there would be 3 more months of preorders while minimizing bad press and he himself admitted that he wanted to keep it secret until Gamescom when they planned to release the Closed Beta for backers to soften the blow of the news.

Apparently they had 20k preorders and at least 20% of them were cancelled since this news. The RogueTech mod community for Battletech are saying they cancelled all of theirs, which came out to 4k in total.

It doesn't really matter though since Tim Sweeney graciously paid for copies for everyone already...

As excited as I was for Mechwarrior 4, I can't imagine myself buying it on Epic. I seriously think this might be the game that the Epic store finally kills.

Because Mechwarrior is such a hardcore PC franchise. Like there is no console audience for this game. There is no casual audience for this game. This is not Borderlands where if they lose a huge chunk of the PC audience they'll be fine since they're mutliplatform with wide appeal. It was never going to sell a million copies. It's so reliant on those passionate fans. Fans that come in looking to play Mechwarrior. If they are linking themselves to the what's become viewed as the PC gaming equivalent of the anti-christ. That passion will die.

Who is going to impulsively buy a slow methodical mech game which you need a joystick to get the best experience from? This is just a recipe for disaster IMO.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 27, 2019, Original Post Date: Jul 27, 2019 ---

To me this just seems like the perfect recipe for a game fall right on it's face.

 

[xi0]

It was never going to sell a million copies.

Well, apparently Bullock is on their Discord telling people the opposite. He's actually under the delusion that it will somehow sell better on EGS. I mean, maybe Piranha Games profit margin might go up due to the Tencent cash infusion, but a game isn't going to sell better on PC by removing it on Steam. No game does, regardless of how hard these sycophants delude themselves. Mechwarrior Online is getting review-bombed as we speak.

Good of them to be offering refunds, unlike with Shenmue 3, but offering to give people's money back when they're intentionally misled is a pretty low fucking bar to set. The greater issue is if developers can just be given a fat check and no longer care how well a game sells or how it's received, where exactly does any sort of accountability come into the picture?

 

[Jammin]

Well, apparently Bullock is on their Discord telling people the opposite. He's actually under the delusion that it will somehow sell better on EGS. I mean, maybe Piranha Games profit margin might go up due to the Tencent cash infusion, but a game isn't going to sell better on PC by removing it on Steam. No game does, regardless of how hard these sycophants delude themselves. Mechwarrior Online is getting review-bombed as we speak.

Good of them to be offering refunds, unlike with Shenmue 3, but offering to give people's money back when they're intentionally misled is a pretty low fucking bar to set. The greater issue is if developers can just be given a fat check and no longer care how well a game sells or how it's received, where exactly does any sort of accountability come into the picture?

I think this might be the game that becomes the cautionary tale people have been looking for this type of thing.

Like I'm not quite as angry the way some people are about this. It annoys me that I'm probably not going to play this game for another year and half but even beyond that I just think it's going to be absolutely disastrous for this game and possibly franchise. I see this as something that is going to cut their sales in half or less for the first year. Which probably weren't going to be sky high to begin with. This is a niche game.

I can pretty much guess what happened. They fed the guy a bunch of bullshit and he bought it without seeing the fine print.

Sales Pitch: Smaller store, easier to be seen.
Fine Print: Mechwarrior fans already know mechwarrior is coming out because we're mechwarrior fans! Everybody else doesn't give a shit. It's not that they don't know it's coming out. It's that they don't care. Why would they? Mechwarior 4 came out like 20 years ago?

Sales Pitch: Fortnite's player base is huge therefor more eyes on store and open it up to a whole new audience.
Fine Print: Fortnite players come to play Fortnite and very little else. Why would they buy a singleplayer centric slow mech sim with a focus on economics? How do they think they're going to make that sale?

Sales Pitch: With Epic money the game can be improved and advertised to sell even more.
Fine Print: By pissing off most of the existing fanbase who actually care about the game and pushing them toward piracy.

Sale Pitch: Metro Exodus sold just fine.
Fine Print: Though it was multiplatform and some reports say that the PC situation pushed more people to consoles, as it did me. Mechwarrior is PC only so people not buying it on PC simply aren't buying it.

Sales Pitch: Epic's cut is smaller than the Steam cut.
Fine Print: It's not actually a discussion of 12% VS 30%. It's 88% on a disliked platform vs 70% on the choice platform. So if you sell 20% less copies as a result you've already lost money in the deal. And I think Mechwarrior stands to lose a much higher percentage than that.

 

[xi0]

I think this might be the game that becomes the cautionary tale people have been looking for this type of thing.

To be frank, this has happened several times already. Maybe it just hits closer to home for you since you're such a fan of the series? I've yet to see if this is a timed exclusive and if so for how long.

Like I'm not quite as angry the way some people are about this. It annoys me that I'm probably not going to play this game for another year and half but even beyond that I just think it's going to be absolutely disastrous for this game and possibly franchise. I see this as something that is going to cut their sales in half or less for the first year. Which probably weren't going to be sky high to begin with. This is a niche game.

Shenmue 3, Phoenix Point, Ashen, The Outer Worlds, etc are all games that I would consider "niche" to one degree or another. The only real mainstream exclusive deal Epic has penned so far has been for Borderlands 3. The fact that Epic has gone after so many popular kickstarter games proves that they're looking for similar sort of games. Hotly anticipated, but still pretty much niche and not too expensive to keep off of Steam's store for a while.

Sales Pitch: Fortnite's player base is huge therefor more eyes on store and open it up to a whole new audience.
Fine Print: Fortnite players come to play Fortnite and very little else. Why would they buy a singleplayer centric slow mech sim with a focus on economics? How do they think they're going to make that sale?

Something like Mechwarrior is definitely the best example of why this line of thinking is such horseshit. Like sure, someone who only plays Fortnite might decide to get this game on a whim because it looks interesting to them and they wouldn't have been exposed to it otherwise, but it clearly wouldn't offset the sales lost by not being on Steam.

Sale Pitch: Metro Exodus sold just fine.
Fine Print: Though it was multiplatform and some reports say that the PC situation pushed more people to consoles, as it did me. Mechwarrior is PC only so people not buying it on PC simply aren't buying it.

The sales figures for Exodus on PC were still completely fudged with no actual numbers for PR reasons. I think they said it sold twice what Last Light over the same amount of time, not even mentioning total sales yet lol. But yeah, really shocking, they actually bothered advertising a game for once and are surprised it sold better at first than the last one...

Sales Pitch: Epic's cut is smaller than the Steam cut.
Fine Print: It's not actually a discussion of 12% VS 30%. It's 88% on a disliked platform vs 70% on the choice platform. So if you sell 20% less copies as a result you've already lost money in the deal. And I think Mechwarrior stands to lose a much higher percentage than that.

This number is intentionally misleading as well. EGS simply offers less services than Steam does, things that EGS doesn't have, like community forums, anticheat, multiplayer servers, workshop support, Steam's CDN for patching, commission-free key generation so developers can sell their keys for full profit wherever they want. Steam's cut is also smaller past certain sales milestones as well. It's not as simple as you getting 88% of the sales on EGS compared to 70% on Steam, but your point is also valid as well. What EGS does have over Steam is a fat wad of cash so you can stay afloat for longer if you're a smaller developer house that's horribly mismanaged.

 

[Jammin]

To be frank, this has happened several times already. Maybe it just hits closer to home for you since you're such a fan of the series? I've yet to see if this is a timed exclusive and if so for how long.


Shenmue 3, Phoenix Point, Ashen, The Outer Worlds, etc are all games that I would consider "niche" to one degree or another. The only real mainstream exclusive deal Epic has penned so far has been for Borderlands 3. The fact that Epic has gone after so many popular kickstarter games proves that they're looking for similar sort of games. Hotly anticipated, but still pretty much niche and not too expensive to keep off of Steam's store for a while.

The big difference here between all those is that none of those are PC only titles.

They are niche but like Phoenix Point also comes out on Xbox. The Outer Worlds comes out on Xbox and PS4. Shenmue 3 also comes out on PS4. Ashen came out on Xbox. So if somebody doesn't wanted to play on Epic there is still an avenue where the company can get that sale. Bullock has put Piranha Games and Mechwarrior in a different boat in that respect.

They've painted themselves into much more of a corner than those other games have. And they are a relatively small privately owned team making a licensed game. They are putting themselves in an extremely delicate position.

 

[Jammin]

Anybody else playing Borderlands 3?

Just got done beating it for the first time. It's odd duck of a game. Gameplay-wise I love everything they've done. On that alone I would say it's great.

That said the story is impressively bad. Like a lot of people, myself included, thought the Presequel story was a downgrade from Borderlands 2. Borderlands 3 is like six downgrades from that. You can kind of see what they wanted to do but it was simultaneously not a good idea and they executed it poorly. It's funny because some side quests are written far better than the main quest so when you hit one of those it almost make it worse by comparison.

 

[xi0]

Anybody else playing Borderlands 3?

Just got done beating it for the first time. It's odd duck of a game. Gameplay-wise I love everything they've done. On that alone I would say it's great.

That said the story is impressively bad. Like a lot of people, myself included, thought the Presequel story was a downgrade from Borderlands 2. Borderlands 3 is like six downgrades from that. You can kind of see what they wanted to do but it was simultaneously not a good idea and they executed it poorly. It's funny because some side quests are written far better than the main quest so when you hit one of those it almost make it worse by comparison.

So it's bad even for a game that never had a a noteworthy story in the first place?

Is it true the the villains are basically youtubers or streamers? Everything I saw in promotions sort of made me wince in all honesty. Knowing what we know now about Pitchford, a lot of what we've seen lately seems "how do you do, fellow kids"-esque to me.

 

[Jammin]

So it's bad even for a game that never had a a noteworthy story in the first place?

Is it true the the villains are basically youtubers or streamers? Everything I saw in promotions sort of made me wince in all honesty. Knowing what we know now about Pitchford, a lot of what we've seen lately seems "how do you do, fellow kids"-esque to me.

It's worse that it looked honestly. All the cutscenes are unskippable too for some reason.

I don't think this one is on Pitchford. There is an interview with the lead writers about what their thought process was. So the streamer thing was their bad idea. The greater problem though isn't the streamer aspect it's just some fundamental writing things. Like there are a lot of Diablos Ex Machina's. So like you'll do a thing. Then suddenly a cutscene will play where the bad guys show up and be one step ahead defeat everybody. Even when there is no logical way for that to be the case. And the playable characters aren't shown or acknowledged as present in any way. Which saps any sense of accomplishment from anything.

Then the Calypso Twins just don't make sense fundamentally as characters. Handsome Jack was a narcissistic sociopath. That makes a degree of sense. Tyreen Calypso especially, has no emotional arc at all. She wants to be powerful. But when you find out her backstory that doesn't support that motivation at all. Troy is just as bad. But with him you can at least see a bit of an arc in the sense that you see him grappling with how he feels about being in his sister's shadow but that's it. With her there isn't even that much.

Then at the end it does this kind of "Girl Power" type thing. But none of it is really earned since your characters are the ones doing literally everything. So they have these characters all patting themselves on the back while your standing there like.... huh? The only one who actually earns anything in this game is Tannis. The rest are 98% dead weight. They may open a door for you. At most.

--- Double Post Merged, Oct 7, 2019, Original Post Date: Oct 7, 2019 ---

It honestly feels like some other characters were supposed to have done something impressive that was cut out and the ending was based on that. And they just forgot to fix it.

 

[xi0]

It's worse that it looked honestly. All the cutscenes are unskippable too for some reason.

I don't think this one is on Pitchford. There is an interview with the lead writers about what their thought process was. So the streamer thing was their bad idea. The greater problem though isn't the streamer aspect it's just some fundamental writing things. Like there are a lot of Diablos Ex Machina's. So like you'll do a thing. Then suddenly a cutscene will play where the bad guys show up and be one step ahead defeat everybody. Even when there is no logical way for that to be the case. And the playable characters aren't shown or acknowledged as present in any way. Which saps any sense of accomplishment from anything.

Then the Calypso Twins just don't make sense fundamentally as characters. Handsome Jack was a narcissistic sociopath. That makes a degree of sense. Tyreen Calypso especially, has no emotional arc at all. She wants to be powerful. But when you find out her backstory that doesn't support that motivation at all. Troy is just as bad. But with him you can at least see a bit of an arc in the sense that you see him grappling with how he feels about being in his sister's shadow but that's it. With her there isn't even that much.

Then at the end it does this kind of "Girl Power" type thing. But none of it is really earned since your characters are the ones doing literally everything. So they have these characters all patting themselves on the back while your standing there like.... huh? The only one who actually earns anything in this game is Tannis. The rest are 98% dead weight. They may open a door for you. At most.

--- Double Post Merged, Oct 7, 2019, Original Post Date: Oct 7, 2019 ---

It honestly feels like some other characters were supposed to have done something impressive that was cut out and the ending was based on that. And they just forgot to fix it.

I never played the Telltale game, but outside of that I always felt like the series was more about attitude/humor rather than telling a meaningful story.

Not that I'll make excuses for them though, what you described sounds pretty cringe.

 

[Jammin]

I never played the Telltale game, but outside of that I always felt like the series was more about attitude/humor rather than telling a meaningful story.

Not that I'll make excuses for them though, what you described sounds pretty cringe.

Well, I thought Borderlands 2 had a pretty good story for what it was. It's a story in a FPS Diablo type game. But it's strength was characters and humor. Like Handsome Jack really was a pretty great villain, in my opinion. And they way it took the previous vault hunters and turned them into actual characters was pretty fun. Thought it really complimented the type of game.

This is like the opposite of that. The story gets in the way of gameplay. And there isn't a whole lot of humor that lands in the main story (in the side story sections it's better for some reason). And the character's are really really poorly handled. They pushed all their chips into an "epic adventure to save pandora" basket. The only bright spots were Vaghn and Rhys. Who are both still pretty entertaining.

All that being said the gameplay is great, On that side of things they really did do an outstanding job. The guns feel even more distinct than in previous games and I found at least one subtype from every manufacturer they I loved to use. They also spiced up common enemies buy giving them random guns like in Borderlands 1. So some of them can actually have pretty good weapons.

 

[scav]

been on fire emblem three houses and gears 5 last couple of months. So many games i wanna pick up but barely have time (my friend pedro, dragon quest builders 2, astral chain, dragon quest 11S, borderlands 3, link awakening remake). then there is outer worlds and luigi mansion 3 coming up it's really hard to keep up

 

[Jammin]

Yeah, we're really spoiled for choice right now.

Just today, Disco Elysium came out. Weird detective RPG. I want to play that.
Trails of Cold Steel III is coming out soon. I want to play that.
Rise to Ruins came out of early access. I want to play that.
Greedfall looks interesting, I want to play that.
Haven't played Man of Medan yet. Want to play that.
Still playing Borderlands 3. I want to play more of that.

So yeah, it's not hard to keep up. It's impossible. Still it's a good problem to have.

 

[xi0]

Since late August I've mostly been playing WoW Classic, but the last week or so I needed a break and revisited Destiny 2 since Bungie broke free from Activision and launched on Steam. It's been decently fun. Apparently people aren't very happy with the latest expansions Shadowkeep though.

 

[Faust]

I actually enjoy playing TFT lol.
Grinding MapleRoyals (MapleStory private server) too

 

[xi0]

On the future of Fallen Heroes

It is with a profound sense of regret that today we announce Divinity: Fallen Heroes has been put on hold, as we fondly celebrate the work done so far. We’ve been working with Logic Artists for over a year since before the announcement on March 27, 2019. Though enthused by the reception...

forums.larian.com

Looks like Larian is shelving Divinity: Fallen Heroes to focus on Baldur's Gate 3. Bad news for people looking for a Divnity X-COM game.

 

[Jammin]

It is a shame but if it wasn't shaping up enough for them to invest in it then it's probably for the best.

 

[scav]

Since late August I've mostly been playing WoW Classic, but the last week or so I needed a break and revisited Destiny 2 since Bungie broke free from Activision and launched on Steam. It's been decently fun. Apparently people aren't very happy with the latest expansions Shadowkeep though.

you got tired of WoW or is it related to the way Blizzard handled the Hong Kong situation?