Saturday Morning Gaming: All I Wanted Was A Rehash

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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8 Responses

  1. KenB says:

    I’ve been enjoying Ancient Dungeon VR on the Quest — roguelike dungeon-crawler with pixelated graphic style, basic but very fun. Unfortunately all the slashing and dagger-throwing has aggravated my tennis elbow (which I got originally from too much bow-and-arrowing in “In Death Unchained” VR) — you don’t see this aspect of VR mentioned much in mainstream articles.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to KenB says:

      The death of the Metaverse inspired literally dozens of takes on the twitter but my favorite one of them pointed out that VR’s killer ap should be something like Wheel of Fortune. Hell, maybe make it multiplayer as well so you can play with friends.

      Spin the wheel. Guess a consonant. Buy a vowel.

      Would *I* want a game like this? Heck no.

      But they’re not trying to get me to buy a VR helmet. Letting boomers show up on their favorite game show? That would sell millions of the silly things.Report

      • KenB in reply to Jaybird says:

        I suspect the whole Metaverse thing and the Ready Player One stuff has given a lot of normies the wrong idea about what VR is. “Put this thing on and you can be spinning the wheel with Pat Sajak!” is definitely a more enticing pitch. But there’s a high barrier to surmount — most of my (non-gamer) friends see it as an oddity and aren’t even interested to try it.Report

  2. Fish says:

    I’m as disappointed as you are. I was tentatively hopeful when, at the end of 2022, Cyanide pushed the release date back to mid-February 2023. “Oh good, they’re going to improve the AI!” I thought.

    Nope.

    Graphics-wise, the game looks fantastic. but the news from the closed Beta was disappointing. I’m left with hoping that BB3 gets the “No Man’s Sky” treatment and gets quietly updated/improved well after release, making an actually pretty good game. I won’t be holding my breath.

    Meanwhile, XCOM2’s LWotC mod (playing on Normal difficulty while I figure everything out, with the Chosen themselves sent “on vacation”) has been fun, so I’ll keep playing that.Report

  3. Pinky says:

    There’s not much that they can do against that accusation, though. A buggy release or whatever, you can promise that the patches are on the way. But too many microtransactions?

    Anyway, they might not need the product to be popular. If you have the microtransactions structured well enough, all you need is a few thousand people to be willing to pay a fortune, and the product will be a financial success. And Warhammer is a proven seller.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Pinky says:

      True enough, I guess. If you rely on the whales who spend $300 on the game, it doesn’t matter if you miss out on 9 people willing to spend $30 on it.

      Apparently they’ve fixed the majority of the worst bugs from the first week or so of the pre-launch and people in the discussion pages are saying “it’s a lot better than it was” with a particularly optimistic person saying that in-game transactions are moving from egregiously greedy to merely irritating.

      Nobody is talking about the strength of single-player, though.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

        It’s a good sign that users are feeling less accosted by the advertising.

        My thinking is, today’s money may come from the whales, but tomorrow’s money comes from building up the franchise and the creators’ reputations. Games aren’t Disneyland; you don’t have to maximize revenue from a fixed number of attendees.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Pinky says:

          Gaming as a Service strikes me as a very good way to make money today and go bankrupt tomorrow.

          See, for example, what happened with Avengers. One of the biggest money-makers in movie history, one of the biggest franchises, and it was within months of the movie coming out.

          They came out with a GaaS game for it and…

          Well, they forgot to make it fun.

          If you put too much effort into maximizing advertising and monetization and figuring out the exact sweet spot for the price point… well, you might do very well for yourself and your company.

          Just don’t forget to make the game too.Report