Nelots
@Nelots@piefed.zip
- Comment on Microsoft reportedly estimated that Game Pass led to $300 million in lost sales of Black Ops 6, with 82% of copies sold being on the Game Pass-less PlayStation 5 18 hours ago:
Not a very helpful metric outside of showing how popular game pass is. How many people bought/kept game pass just for cod? Seemingly a lot, according to record high game pass subscriptions during cod’s launch. In just four months, the old standard game pass cost nearly as much as cod would.
Which just goes to show why they increased its price and removed cod from all but the most expensive tiers. Now Game Pass Ultimate, the only tier on Xbox that now comes with cod, costs nearly as much as the entire game after just a two month membership. I’m sure they’re making boat loads more through game pass than individual sales.
- Comment on Sony trying to warn the player they're settling for a lesser horse 4 days ago:
Ghost of Tsushima, I believe.
- Comment on PlayStation 5 Digital Edition with 1TB SSD downgraded to 825GB listed at the same price — CFI-2116 revision emerges overseas on Amazon 2 weeks ago:
You could argue that 200GB isn’t a lot, and that’s true in a way since some AAA titles — specifically, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War — are pushing over 300GB of installed size..
That just makes 200GB sound even bigger to me. The loss of 200GB isn’t as important when you go from being able to install 25 games down to 20. You really don’t need that many installed so you can cope. But when your available space drops from 5 games to 4? That’s a much bigger deal.
- Comment on A Destiny-style social hub is "on the feature list" for Helldivers 3, says Arrowhead CEO 3 weeks ago:
Oh yeah, same here. I love gear with massive 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.
- Comment on A Destiny-style social hub is "on the feature list" for Helldivers 3, says Arrowhead CEO 3 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on A Destiny-style social hub is "on the feature list" for Helldivers 3, says Arrowhead CEO 3 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on A Destiny-style social hub is "on the feature list" for Helldivers 3, says Arrowhead CEO 3 weeks ago:
(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.
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.