He points out that Sega's own reddit posts said costs are relatively flat, while CA (as a Sega subsidiary) is claiming costs are up. CA has expanded other teams (increasing their own costs), while WH III has had lackluster updates (reskins and smaller DLCs) compared to say... Medieval II Kingdoms.
I have to agree: CA has been caught with its hand in the DLC cookie jar and if they're allowed they will make these prices their new normal.
To be fair to that game, it had a lot going for it. It was one of the earliest Vampire Survivor ripoffs, which was one of the biggest indie games of last year. And it let people collect waifus (the one gambling hit VS was missing) of their actual oshis who have an inbuilt massive audience.
Then all the Hololive girls started playing it and making it look good, which drove positive attention in droves.
I doubt many games could actually top it with all that going for it.
It's also legitimately good. The most recent update has finally put the difficulty level at right where I've always hoped all VS-like games would be at.
Right, I was just pointing out that its a bit more than just a little indie fangame.
But Blizzard wouldn't be putting themselves on Steam, and opening themselves up to this kind of mockery, if they had even close to an respectable amount of players to begin with.
Also true. That's something ironically most VS clones failed as well. They try to charge "indie game prices" where the original that people were still playing was 3$ and that was one of the biggest keys to its success.
On that note, the only bad thing I've heard about Baldur's Gate 3 is the absurd character creation (can't change your face or physicality one bit, but your genitals? Have at it.) and obsession with weird sex. Right now, that's enough to not get a purchase from me. That said, supposedly the game is huge, plays well, and is COMPLETE. And all the other devs are seething over its reception, going so far as to say "you need to lower your expectations when it comes to games."
I'm certain they rushed the release date to avoid starfield. They talked about the upper city for months up until even the last dev livestream and yet it was completely cut at the last second? Very weird. One companion is also completely bugged and another only has a bad end due to said cut content.
For any NPCs throughout the game that have mentioned or hinted at being in a relationship, I think I've come across maybe 3 straight couples total compared to what feels like a dozen gay ones, and a 4th straight couple that breaks up in front of you for the woman to run off with her lesbian lover. At some point all this shit just feels flat out unbelievable, because in no way could the population sustain itself if 75% of the population was gay. This is including part of act 3 so far. This point has been souring my experience of the game more than anything else.
I've also come across a "female" shorty race (forget if dwarf, halfling, or gnome because I wasn't paying that much attention) with a beard and a female VA, but so far this is the only one, and they were basically a useless throwaway NPC.
population sustain itself if 75% of the population was gay
Sustainable population in fantasy settings with high mortality rates have not been taken in to account since they decided Skyrim having 50/50 male and female fighters.
Now we just notice it more since while we are seeing 50/50 men/women in real world we do not have 75% gays - yet.
The lesbian/gay romance shit always breaks immersion for me, be it in games or movies or shows. In movies/shows they always have to make SURE you know they are gay/lesbian (either outright saying it within the first two lines or "showing" it).
I'm currently playing it and is fun. The game is everything that I dislike, lots of sex stuff that the game forces on you, propaganda about immigrants, it is manipulative, the dialogue is very modern, insane diversity with loads of girl power for a medieval setting.
The diversity is very annoying, not only do you have all races but all species except for thieflings and gyth and there is no difference in culture or attitude. The days of elves as something other then long eared humans are gone.
And again the modern style of speaking is so jarring, imagine talking to random NPCs and they talk like a modern day collage girl that is on a diet of strong and independent.
Is a leftist game to an extreme, I understand there is even a drag queen later in the game.
But it also plays very nice, fighting is challenging and feels rewarding, items and levels are meaningful, there is a lot of thought put in to resolving various situation by out of the box thinking. The story so far is ok, you have a strong motivation and there is a lot of mystery.
My point, this game will shift the gaming industry even more to the left, to an insane degree. I can guarantee that gaming devs are already pushing for more gay and trans stuff because now they have proof that gay se and diversity sells.
I'm kinda surprised how they deal with goblins. They are absolutely 100% little shits that deserve everything coming to them. Even when you try to see it their way they find a way to make you regret it.
That was kind of based. The new DnD has no good and evil anymore and you can see it in the game sometimes but the goblins are just annoying.
You do not get to outright kill them though, you have the option to talk to them and they are surprisingly trusting.
That is another thing that bothers me about the dialogue, it feels completely artificial to move things along. Why are people trusting when this was basically a war zone. There was no coordination on the goblin either, the situation and reality made no sense.
Honestly I hate how bad the game is while still being addictive and fun.
Is not about if it was good or bad, it was what made it different from others. It was a staple of DnD and it was important to how the world was built.
Evil was evil, rather then everything just be gray.
The idea of not having things be good or evil comes from a leftist concept, like how a black dude killed an old white guy and then said the old guy called him the n-word and leftists considered it justified. Murder of an older, defenseless man was considered justified on one word.
That is why we no longer have good and evil in DnD, not because it hurt storytelling.
My point, this game will shift the gaming industry even more to the left, to an insane degree. I can guarantee that gaming devs are already pushing for more gay and trans stuff because now they have proof that gay se and diversity sells.
One game (one!) escapes the linked traits of incompetence and abject hatred that characterizes woke games, and that's going to make a difference? The industry is already far left, there's a black female main character in 7/10 games, and eventually they're going to run out of money.
Back when I was growing up, everyone played Gears and Halo, not just the nerds. Idk who the hell is buying games nowadays outside of lootbox addict adults and kids.
This is poor speculation on my part but I think a lot of media was beginning to see that it was not profitable to be woke, it was still pushing forward despite it but it was going to end.
Now they can better blame failures on other factors simply because BG3 is a success, you can't claim force diversity, gender theory or gay/trans sex does not sell when it clearly sells. At the very least is not a factor that affects sales anymore so why change it.
Idk you're assuming that they're weighing the evidence with some degree of rationality, when most signs point to the decision makers wanting to burn cash.
It would put us in a weird spot if we continued to see woke games that play well though. That's kind of like saying it would be tough if we invented wet fire.
With the character creator what annoys me the most: a lot of if not all the female faces look like a troon. If you have the chance look at some of the jawlines, even I don't have such a chiseled jawline some of the so called female have. But if you point it out you'll have people call you coomer brain and "hur dur anime ruins everything, this is what real women look like".
Yeah its almost hilariously obvious how it went from "that wierd game where a vampire has gay sex with a bear" to "THE LITERAL GREATEST GAME EVER MADE THAT MAKES EVERY STUDIO LOOK BAD."
I know it's a minor thing compared to everything else, but my biggest issue with Creative Assembly on this was their initial announcement email of the new DLC. Which was not sent from their Total War e-mail account but from the email account of Hyenas (which is Creative Assembly's upcoming multiplayer hero extraction shooter, cause it's not like that market is heavily over-saturated at the moment ).
Yeah, it was just a case of some marketing person selecting the wrong e-mail address when sending it. But, to me it's just showing where CA's focus and concern is at the moment. And if you can't be bothered to put the correct e-mail address on your marketing emails, what else can't you be bothered to do?
The major problem isn't even the dlc and its price (although it is terrible), but the fact that they don't fix bugs and only introduce new ones without ever fixing them. Some paid dlc Lords are practically useless right now with these bugs.
The DLC policies of Sega and CA are atrocious, the engine is still chocking, it's uglier than the first one, the content for the price you are paying and so called "unique legendary lords with unique mechanics" is wishful thinking at best.
But.
More than 2 players coop and simultaneous turn? Holy shit I and my small cell of nerds have been asking for that for years and boy are we having a blast, being able to gift specific units to anyone in your battle is also very cool, the wife love to screw around with the big ass bear while I hammer and anvil yet another Orc invasion.
I had a similar feeling about Three Kingdoms. I loved the changes they made to diplomacy and "spear vs. cavalry" balance being done in a very novel but genius way that I wish they copied. And I did like that they gave options where you could either play with the "Romance" mode where it is over-the-top "Hyper-General going Dynasty Warriors on the enemy" or you could play "Historical" mode which made it more traditional.
But then every DLC seemed to causes some issue with the game, the DLC fell flat on its face compared to the base game, and CA said "Oops. We are killing the game now and stopping support. Lol, Lmao."
It is amazing to me how far they have fallen since even just a few years ago.
Seconded. Like, WH3 is such a step back in so many ways over WH2 (let alone my favorite Shogun 2) that almost anyone could probably write an essay on it.
But its the first one that doesn't feel like a single player game with poorly tacked on multiplayer. Its finally able to be played with your bros in a manner that feels downright fun, which means its almost more fun than any other based on just coop power alone.
Saying they used to be worth it isn't exactly accurate. It was always hit and miss.
Most of the DLC for the first game was hot garbage, with the literal first released one for the Chaos Warriors being the standard for just how bad they could be. Shit it took until a DLC pack for the second game to make Wood Elves or Beastmen worth picking up.
They just put a lot of effort into making Tomg Kangz and Vamp Coast good, probably because of how much hate all of the race packs from Warhammer 1 got. Otherwise the Lord Packs were still hit and miss for both games.
I also stopped following a lot of big gaming brands, but from what I remember, weren't they always kind of DLC-hungry? Didn't they charge for a blood and gore DLC and they said the reason was to avoid a higher rating from the ESRB/UKIE?
I also stopped following a lot of big gaming brands, but from what I remember, weren't they always kind of DLC-hungry? Didn't they charge for a blood and gore DLC and they said the reason was to avoid a higher rating from the ESRB/UKIE?
Was about to make my own post today on the utterly pathetic fanboy crowd-following of the totalwar subreddit up until last year's launch and now. Two of the top twenty posts are just a Two Minutes Hate on Arch and Volound, two of the the harshest but constructive critics of the franchise. Many old-school genre enjoyers (not the artificial historical vs fantasy division), modders, etc were either pro Arch or otherwise unenthusiastic about the company before it was cool to hate on them.
The historical war gamers always have a bitch fit over total warhammer because it is far more popular than their boring ass shit. So they do stuff like this. Mind you I haven gotten any of the DLC for TW3, nor do I intend to so I guess it doesn't bother me.
The irony being that you can ask the Historical TW players which games they like, and its the same 2-3 from over a decade ago because not one of them give a shit about Atilla or TK or Troy.
Which shows its less about quality (of which there are a lot of valid points) and more about "we don't like our autism sim is getting mainstream popular."
Well I admit I am not keeping up. When I went to update-play WH2 it cost me like 100 dollars. You are right that is a lot. I guess I am just a sucker for abuse.
However like most gamers I know now they're probably going to be releasing about 10 - 20 different DLC separately if that and it's getting completely out of control even by most peoples' standards
I will say, for what it is worth, Paradox has redone their DLC policy to be a bit less money-grubbing. From what I have seen of the dev diaries thus far, it looks like a huge step forward from just the barebones, and the new Paradox policy on DLC is going to be that important shit will not be locked behind the paywall. So any major updates to the core will be in the free update, while the DLC will only affect changes made by the DLC.
Not saying you have to change your mind on it or get it before you feel it is ready, but I think Paradox is actually continuing to live up to their name and somehow change their entire way.
I agree with the overall point though about Warhammer 3. When it was first released, I loved it and thoroughly enjoyed both the campaign and the new factions. But it seems like every update the break the game more (much like they did with Three Kingdoms) and they seem to refuse to fix it. I know that there have been suggestions they take after Paradox and make a team dedicated to bug squishing their games, but CA seems to be offended by the accusation.
I think Arch was going on mentioning this too as if we didn't push back, they'd make it their policy going forward
All major studios seem to have run out of 'goodwill' nowadays, hell Overwatch 2 has less players than an Indie fan game made of Hololive vtubers..
Yeah. the archcast has done two videos on it:
One.
Two.
He points out that Sega's own reddit posts said costs are relatively flat, while CA (as a Sega subsidiary) is claiming costs are up. CA has expanded other teams (increasing their own costs), while WH III has had lackluster updates (reskins and smaller DLCs) compared to say... Medieval II Kingdoms.
I have to agree: CA has been caught with its hand in the DLC cookie jar and if they're allowed they will make these prices their new normal.
To be fair to that game, it had a lot going for it. It was one of the earliest Vampire Survivor ripoffs, which was one of the biggest indie games of last year. And it let people collect waifus (the one gambling hit VS was missing) of their actual oshis who have an inbuilt massive audience.
Then all the Hololive girls started playing it and making it look good, which drove positive attention in droves.
I doubt many games could actually top it with all that going for it.
It's also legitimately good. The most recent update has finally put the difficulty level at right where I've always hoped all VS-like games would be at.
What game are you all talking about?
True, but then you compare that to Blizzard and Blizzard should at least have thousands more players......if they weren't so shit at their jobs.
Right, I was just pointing out that its a bit more than just a little indie fangame.
But Blizzard wouldn't be putting themselves on Steam, and opening themselves up to this kind of mockery, if they had even close to an respectable amount of players to begin with.
It is also free. You can have a lot of leeway with "free".
Also true. That's something ironically most VS clones failed as well. They try to charge "indie game prices" where the original that people were still playing was 3$ and that was one of the biggest keys to its success.
On that note, the only bad thing I've heard about Baldur's Gate 3 is the absurd character creation (can't change your face or physicality one bit, but your genitals? Have at it.) and obsession with weird sex. Right now, that's enough to not get a purchase from me. That said, supposedly the game is huge, plays well, and is COMPLETE. And all the other devs are seething over its reception, going so far as to say "you need to lower your expectations when it comes to games."
Apparently it plays well until act 3, then it’s a rushed, buggy mess.
Ah so a true larian studios title after all
Really works in their favour since I never finish more than 33% of a Larian title.
Ah so the MGSV issue where you can clearly tell when the original team stopped work and a new team was quickly finishing to get it out.
I'm certain they rushed the release date to avoid starfield. They talked about the upper city for months up until even the last dev livestream and yet it was completely cut at the last second? Very weird. One companion is also completely bugged and another only has a bad end due to said cut content.
For any NPCs throughout the game that have mentioned or hinted at being in a relationship, I think I've come across maybe 3 straight couples total compared to what feels like a dozen gay ones, and a 4th straight couple that breaks up in front of you for the woman to run off with her lesbian lover. At some point all this shit just feels flat out unbelievable, because in no way could the population sustain itself if 75% of the population was gay. This is including part of act 3 so far. This point has been souring my experience of the game more than anything else.
I've also come across a "female" shorty race (forget if dwarf, halfling, or gnome because I wasn't paying that much attention) with a beard and a female VA, but so far this is the only one, and they were basically a useless throwaway NPC.
Sustainable population in fantasy settings with high mortality rates have not been taken in to account since they decided Skyrim having 50/50 male and female fighters. Now we just notice it more since while we are seeing 50/50 men/women in real world we do not have 75% gays - yet.
The lesbian/gay romance shit always breaks immersion for me, be it in games or movies or shows. In movies/shows they always have to make SURE you know they are gay/lesbian (either outright saying it within the first two lines or "showing" it).
I'm currently playing it and is fun. The game is everything that I dislike, lots of sex stuff that the game forces on you, propaganda about immigrants, it is manipulative, the dialogue is very modern, insane diversity with loads of girl power for a medieval setting. The diversity is very annoying, not only do you have all races but all species except for thieflings and gyth and there is no difference in culture or attitude. The days of elves as something other then long eared humans are gone. And again the modern style of speaking is so jarring, imagine talking to random NPCs and they talk like a modern day collage girl that is on a diet of strong and independent.
Is a leftist game to an extreme, I understand there is even a drag queen later in the game.
But it also plays very nice, fighting is challenging and feels rewarding, items and levels are meaningful, there is a lot of thought put in to resolving various situation by out of the box thinking. The story so far is ok, you have a strong motivation and there is a lot of mystery.
My point, this game will shift the gaming industry even more to the left, to an insane degree. I can guarantee that gaming devs are already pushing for more gay and trans stuff because now they have proof that gay se and diversity sells.
I'm kinda surprised how they deal with goblins. They are absolutely 100% little shits that deserve everything coming to them. Even when you try to see it their way they find a way to make you regret it.
That was kind of based. The new DnD has no good and evil anymore and you can see it in the game sometimes but the goblins are just annoying. You do not get to outright kill them though, you have the option to talk to them and they are surprisingly trusting. That is another thing that bothers me about the dialogue, it feels completely artificial to move things along. Why are people trusting when this was basically a war zone. There was no coordination on the goblin either, the situation and reality made no sense.
Honestly I hate how bad the game is while still being addictive and fun.
Is not about if it was good or bad, it was what made it different from others. It was a staple of DnD and it was important to how the world was built. Evil was evil, rather then everything just be gray.
The idea of not having things be good or evil comes from a leftist concept, like how a black dude killed an old white guy and then said the old guy called him the n-word and leftists considered it justified. Murder of an older, defenseless man was considered justified on one word.
That is why we no longer have good and evil in DnD, not because it hurt storytelling.
One game (one!) escapes the linked traits of incompetence and abject hatred that characterizes woke games, and that's going to make a difference? The industry is already far left, there's a black female main character in 7/10 games, and eventually they're going to run out of money.
Back when I was growing up, everyone played Gears and Halo, not just the nerds. Idk who the hell is buying games nowadays outside of lootbox addict adults and kids.
This is poor speculation on my part but I think a lot of media was beginning to see that it was not profitable to be woke, it was still pushing forward despite it but it was going to end.
Now they can better blame failures on other factors simply because BG3 is a success, you can't claim force diversity, gender theory or gay/trans sex does not sell when it clearly sells. At the very least is not a factor that affects sales anymore so why change it.
Idk you're assuming that they're weighing the evidence with some degree of rationality, when most signs point to the decision makers wanting to burn cash.
It would put us in a weird spot if we continued to see woke games that play well though. That's kind of like saying it would be tough if we invented wet fire.
With the character creator what annoys me the most: a lot of if not all the female faces look like a troon. If you have the chance look at some of the jawlines, even I don't have such a chiseled jawline some of the so called female have. But if you point it out you'll have people call you coomer brain and "hur dur anime ruins everything, this is what real women look like".
Yeah there are at most two tolerable faces per race. Mods have already implemented so many better ones by now.
Any mods in particular? I've not had time to play and also only found one good female drow face.
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/205
That seemed like a thinly veiled marketing campaign to me. "OH MY GOD guys their game is SO GOOD I don't think we can ever top this guys!"
Yeah its almost hilariously obvious how it went from "that wierd game where a vampire has gay sex with a bear" to "THE LITERAL GREATEST GAME EVER MADE THAT MAKES EVERY STUDIO LOOK BAD."
Totally not suspicious at all.
But I already played Shadows of Amn...
I know it's a minor thing compared to everything else, but my biggest issue with Creative Assembly on this was their initial announcement email of the new DLC. Which was not sent from their Total War e-mail account but from the email account of Hyenas (which is Creative Assembly's upcoming multiplayer hero extraction shooter, cause it's not like that market is heavily over-saturated at the moment ).
Yeah, it was just a case of some marketing person selecting the wrong e-mail address when sending it. But, to me it's just showing where CA's focus and concern is at the moment. And if you can't be bothered to put the correct e-mail address on your marketing emails, what else can't you be bothered to do?
The major problem isn't even the dlc and its price (although it is terrible), but the fact that they don't fix bugs and only introduce new ones without ever fixing them. Some paid dlc Lords are practically useless right now with these bugs.
Total War Warhammer 3 is in a weird place for me.
The DLC policies of Sega and CA are atrocious, the engine is still chocking, it's uglier than the first one, the content for the price you are paying and so called "unique legendary lords with unique mechanics" is wishful thinking at best.
But.
More than 2 players coop and simultaneous turn? Holy shit I and my small cell of nerds have been asking for that for years and boy are we having a blast, being able to gift specific units to anyone in your battle is also very cool, the wife love to screw around with the big ass bear while I hammer and anvil yet another Orc invasion.
Weird, very weird.
I had a similar feeling about Three Kingdoms. I loved the changes they made to diplomacy and "spear vs. cavalry" balance being done in a very novel but genius way that I wish they copied. And I did like that they gave options where you could either play with the "Romance" mode where it is over-the-top "Hyper-General going Dynasty Warriors on the enemy" or you could play "Historical" mode which made it more traditional.
But then every DLC seemed to causes some issue with the game, the DLC fell flat on its face compared to the base game, and CA said "Oops. We are killing the game now and stopping support. Lol, Lmao."
It is amazing to me how far they have fallen since even just a few years ago.
Seconded. Like, WH3 is such a step back in so many ways over WH2 (let alone my favorite Shogun 2) that almost anyone could probably write an essay on it.
But its the first one that doesn't feel like a single player game with poorly tacked on multiplayer. Its finally able to be played with your bros in a manner that feels downright fun, which means its almost more fun than any other based on just coop power alone.
CA's DLCs used to be worth it. Vampire Coast for example was spectacular. TWW2 was in most respects amazing.
TWW3 is a joke in comparison.
Saying they used to be worth it isn't exactly accurate. It was always hit and miss.
Most of the DLC for the first game was hot garbage, with the literal first released one for the Chaos Warriors being the standard for just how bad they could be. Shit it took until a DLC pack for the second game to make Wood Elves or Beastmen worth picking up.
They just put a lot of effort into making Tomg Kangz and Vamp Coast good, probably because of how much hate all of the race packs from Warhammer 1 got. Otherwise the Lord Packs were still hit and miss for both games.
What did they do with the DLC?
150% price increase, and a reduction in content.
I also stopped following a lot of big gaming brands, but from what I remember, weren't they always kind of DLC-hungry? Didn't they charge for a blood and gore DLC and they said the reason was to avoid a higher rating from the ESRB/UKIE?
I also stopped following a lot of big gaming brands, but from what I remember, weren't they always kind of DLC-hungry? Didn't they charge for a blood and gore DLC and they said the reason was to avoid a higher rating from the ESRB/UKIE?
The great thing about predatory DLC practices is they make CreamAPI so easy to choose and use.
Was about to make my own post today on the utterly pathetic fanboy crowd-following of the totalwar subreddit up until last year's launch and now. Two of the top twenty posts are just a Two Minutes Hate on Arch and Volound, two of the the harshest but constructive critics of the franchise. Many old-school genre enjoyers (not the artificial historical vs fantasy division), modders, etc were either pro Arch or otherwise unenthusiastic about the company before it was cool to hate on them.
The historical war gamers always have a bitch fit over total warhammer because it is far more popular than their boring ass shit. So they do stuff like this. Mind you I haven gotten any of the DLC for TW3, nor do I intend to so I guess it doesn't bother me.
The irony being that you can ask the Historical TW players which games they like, and its the same 2-3 from over a decade ago because not one of them give a shit about Atilla or TK or Troy.
Which shows its less about quality (of which there are a lot of valid points) and more about "we don't like our autism sim is getting mainstream popular."
In order to play WH3 properly, you have to buy like 3 games. I dunno why they're complaining about DLC. It's a club. Pay the dues or don't.
Well I admit I am not keeping up. When I went to update-play WH2 it cost me like 100 dollars. You are right that is a lot. I guess I am just a sucker for abuse.
I will say, for what it is worth, Paradox has redone their DLC policy to be a bit less money-grubbing. From what I have seen of the dev diaries thus far, it looks like a huge step forward from just the barebones, and the new Paradox policy on DLC is going to be that important shit will not be locked behind the paywall. So any major updates to the core will be in the free update, while the DLC will only affect changes made by the DLC.
Not saying you have to change your mind on it or get it before you feel it is ready, but I think Paradox is actually continuing to live up to their name and somehow change their entire way.
I agree with the overall point though about Warhammer 3. When it was first released, I loved it and thoroughly enjoyed both the campaign and the new factions. But it seems like every update the break the game more (much like they did with Three Kingdoms) and they seem to refuse to fix it. I know that there have been suggestions they take after Paradox and make a team dedicated to bug squishing their games, but CA seems to be offended by the accusation.