I mean, the game spends a lot of time and effort saying that they are in fact retarded for acting like that. The entire point of the MC's character arc is learning how stupid those tactics are and how they are doomed to fail the moment they face an outside problem. Heck the first 20 seconds of the game are them telling you that, followed by the first stealth section, and the entire ending.
The only time it ever even pretends the "by any means necessary" has a downside is the section you are talking about where the Mongols learn from your actions that the poison plant exists and how it works, leading to them getting worse because of your actions and committing outright genocide in the last area.
Meh
And that's how we end up here. Shrugging "mehs" as we justify it to ourselves.
10-20 years ago you had to buy a MMORPG, the expansions AND a monthly subscription.
20 years ago I bought Guild Wars. It didn't have a sub then and still doesn't. I bought it once and got a full game I could play online forever, and each expansion until the final was treated as a full separate game you could buy and play on its own. Heck I can still play it just fine and its got a solid population even now.
MMOs are also a unique beast designed to be obsessed over with their skinner box nature, knowing that FOMO power will both increase your chances of spending money on their cash shops with minimal dev time needed to keep them updating and running.
Glad its once again "because I don't like something, its trash and everyone who likes it is retarded normies."
Its a game with fun combat and a solid story mostly free of any modern wokeness (which is why mainstream media hated it on release, because of its "racism"). That's why people are buying it, its fun and it has a reputation for being so without any strings besides the open world being tacked on. Fortunately because its tacked on its so useless that you can also nearly completely ignore it and just chain missions. Not a defense of it, but literally nobody defends it either.
I refuse to double dip, especially full price, so I can't speak of any changes this Director's Cut and new island made from the original. But the entire reason anyone liked it was because the combat was fun and just felt good to play, as well as being a legitimate stealth game in an industry that hates those.
Which is how F2P games and their predatory nature takes off. As in, the entire reason the idea of battle passes took off in the first place, to milk people who got foot in the doored into paying again and again.
Part of the way these industries work is that they always take lessons taught to them from consumers, and then run them into the extremes. If you say "its okay this time because I benefit" then they will make sure the next time they do, and then keep going until the consumer gets minimal benefit at all.
Sure you'll win today and get a free/cheap game, but that decisions still has repurcussions on the industry going forward. And they will never make choices that are pro-consumer as those will always run contrary to their legal requirements to their Board of Directors' bullshit. And every little company who bucks that trend will get gobbled up by those massive Corporations soon enough.
"I'm not going to buy this AAA game unless it costs more than the GDP of a small country just to make."
It was inevitable when the graphical appearance of a game was the biggest "challenge" for most of video game's early life. The mechanical complexity of something like an action game or an RPG didn't really jump a lot from the 80s-00s, so the focus was entirely on being less blocky and ugly.
And because each game that was "mindblowing" did usually become a massive seller, it taught those companies to chase that shit forever. Look at the just released Hellblade 2, which thought that having absurdly realistic character motions and graphics would turn a niche cult sequel into a huge seller.
Its also partially a problem that games journos don't get blamed for enough. Because they will write gushing articles about beautiful graphics over and over, but their sheer lack of gaming skill or knowledge means they can't really understand or hype up anything else. So Game Corporations, who still treat games journalism as a legitimate focus, will push graphics to get that article mill going.
Unironically, I think if gamergate had happened a decade prior and prevented the strong bond between games journos and Game Corpos from forming, the graphical fidelity (and thereby budget explosion) focus might never have happened.
I only even considered it because the "all DLC legendary edition" is constantly on sale for like 17$ after only a year, likely because the flop was that bad. And I got like 60 hours after a single run off that price so it ended up being a great deal.
And as someone who doesn't really like Marvel outside Spiderman and a few niche storylines, its less MCU centric than expected and actually treats most of the characters with the respect the comics haven't in decades. Even the annoying ones you can just shit talk to your heart's content about how stupid they are, a benefit to its social system.
You can feel XCOM influence in the combat, but yeah its fully a deckbuilder. No cover, no miss RNG, power dyanmics flipped so that you are the absurdly powerful one being taken down by half a dozen humans.
But it still suffers the the problem XCOM2 does, in that Jake Solomon fucking hates patience. So every fight is built to punish you for not going full speed at all times, which means the defensive characters and the one "random effect" one is completely useless because you don't get the chance to set up or deal with inconsistency. Overwatch move from XCOM1 truly mindbroke the man.
Though for what its worth, it being a deckbuilder but not a roguelike is very different feel that what the word usually evokes. Being able to just pick your cards as permanent skills you build around is very different than Slay the Spire type. Its actually the 8 card limit that effects you more than the cards you have.
That's just how it goes when people constantly go "cosmetic only is fine" and "MTX is the bad word and only applies for 'buying power.'"
People have brought this on themselves for propping up "power" as the only thing that is negative from DLC packs, and let themselves be nickle and dimed on cosmetics without a single care.
Because god forbid you be able to unlock things in a fucking video game. Nah you need to pay 2.99$ for the Chaos skin their art guy already finished in the last 6 months of development while it was only coding left.
The difference with Gary is that the state was abdicating its duty by not quickly executing a child molester
He was literally in cuffs getting off the plane to be taken to trial. Everyone has a right to trial to prove their guilt, even if its obvious and egregious of that guilt. Because as I said:
the problem with laws is always that the moment you make them, they will be abused to the worst ways by the worst people.
I don't care about protecting pedos or criminal. Heck I think druggies should be executed en masse. But I know the moment we cut down those protections fully from even the corrupted state they are in now, it'll be used to kill all of us long before it kills the evil.
Both Gary and the cucked man had a similar situation. Highly emotional and extreme situations, in which they reacted in ways we can all understand. That's why "crime of passion" laws exist, so that those people can still be tried and convicted of their clear lawbreaking but not punished so wildly that everyone's sense of justice is perverted.
I mean, I've never heard it not used in the scenario you just described. Where a guy is in a situation where his emotions can overload so suddenly from such a level of disrespect that his actions are not indicative of his overall normal nature.
Which I don't disagree with either. There are some situations where reasonable men can be expected to act unreasonable and their actions therein shouldn't be held as heavy. Everybody's favorite dad Gary Plauche committed clear murder, but we can all see the "passion" that lead to it and don't want him to be truly punished for it. I'd even say the legal system was broken if it tried to be so rigid.
But the problem with laws is always that the moment you make them, they will be abused to the worst ways by the worst people. Suddenly "a man committing violence after being cheated on" is on equal legal footing as "he heard the word nigger, he couldn't stop himself."
The tranny subreddits are filled with angry cope posts about how miserable and envious trannies are of random people and how easy it is for them to "pass naturally" while they put in massive effort to still be clockable. And that's just reddit, the front facing social media, so you can only imagine how insane they sound in their private discords and such.
So even if you were a retard and thereby pro-tranny, this is an issue that should be addressed regardless because that kind of malady of the mind is only going to end in violence.
Unless this is just more pedo shit, which with trannies its a solid 50/50.
This is just the end point where Nazi becomes just a word for "bad guys." People have no good frame of reference for comparing anything else, because basically every other big bad group gets protected for being Lefties or part of the "Right Side of History."
So everything bad is Nazi because they are purely evil baddie bads.
Chimera was dropped with minimal fanfare for 10$ on release. It felt more like a wacky spinoff game made with spare time instead of something proper. I think they even said it was non-canonical at the time.
Considering how poorly balanced it is and how many new ideas it just haphazardly through into the game, it very much comes across as a testing ground type game for "hero units" and "RPG progression" that other games in its genre use (like Fire Emblem) being mixed with XCOM.
Digimon Survive managed to likely burn off most of the steam the franchise had built from Cyber Sluts (especially its PC release). Which further kills any chance of us getting a followup to Digimon World 2 once again.
Its one thing to delay a game by like two years. Its another to market it heavily on the strategy game portions, only for it to release and be almost entirely a VN where the strategy game portions feel painfully tacked on just to pretend it isn't a VN. Doesn't even matter if the story was very good when VNs are a very special type of genre that even fans of it need a proper mood to play.
Also in a more roundabout way Midnight Suns managed to kill XCOM in a real tragic way.
Its one of the best deckbuilder/card battler games out there, mostly by virtue of not being a fucking roguelike, but came out way too late in the Marvel popularity to gain any traction and put Niko, the most insufferable and ugly thing I've ever seen, as one of the first characters you get. And it managed to combine that card battler system well with the strategic portions left over from XCOM where positioning becomes incredibly important and a properly built team can just dance around enemies that should dab on them. Heck the fact that they managed to make every Hero's deck be built around their characterization is wild.
And since its Firaxis its so easily moddable you can just remove or trivialize the parts you don't like, for those who hate the socialization aspect or some of the costumes.
But it failed hard enough that Jake Solomon was forced to resign, as was the CEO who was replaced by a woman, which kills nu-Firaxis pretty dead and leaves the Terror From the Deep hook from XCOM2 likely never resolved.
The thing that carries ME3 and gives people a lot of those "its good until the ending" opinions is that the ending of some of your companion stories are incredible and many of them do well in terms of feeling like a 3 game story.
The entire Garrus finale alone is a better storyline than most games have period.
Because that's clearly what they wanted the game to be from ME2. One where the background story is mostly secondary to the character moments with your team, which is a retarded way of doing things but it shows heavily in where the strongest and clearly most in depth parts of ME3 were compared to the garbage.
I'm no legal historian, but I wager that once we opened the precedent with "crimes of passion" as a legal defense that it was all downhill from there. Because its a real quick turnaround from "charges lowered because of intent" to increasing them too.
Its not even purity testing.
They left their "real fans" out to dry and get harassed, mocked, and shit on for "losing" for weeks until the game left the news cycle. Now they go back and try to appease them once there is no longer any consequence to doing so, as the narratives have moved on from caring what they do.
Its the most cowardly form of appeasement. They bent the knee and let the anti-censorship side take all the hits for them (and collected the handful of profits off the pro-side buying to stick it to the chuds), then quietly gave them a pity handjob in the back later.
The only way this is a "win" is if you only cared about jerking off. On any of the actual stances about the industry and principles this is still a loss.
Which only works in a post-X society. One where those same powers assume that all businesses that need to exist are already existing and that violence has been replaced by money maneuvers.
Which is why they immediately also started importing 3rd worlders into those same countries, because they recognized that wasn't true and they still needed grunt labor and physically able idiots.
Both of those are in response to him already killing people and being an obvious issue by the final act of the movie. I doubt mom would have done anything if he hadn't killed dad, and dad only did so because he killed uncle (I think, one of the bodies they found).
But a lot of the prior people are just either dumb kids doing normal kid bullying or normal adults either trying to discipline him or being annoying busybodies. The kind of thing that feels really overwhelmingly bad as a kid and makes you want to "get even" because you don't understand it.
So he uses power he shouldn't have to act on unrestrained kid emotions, and it goes wildly bad. Which is less "omg he is so evil" and more "kids don't react well to having zero limitations."
The Collector by John Fowles, is an amazing look at what is probably a budding killer (ironically, it directly inspired 3 separate serial killers, 2 of which based their crimes directly on it) as he meanders pathetically through life. Unlike most murderer type books, Clegg is an utterly pathetic man who is so beta he cannot even fathom social functioning. So instead he kidnaps a girl to hopefully "convince her to love him."
Which makes it so horrifying is that despite his sad, weak willed nature, he is still able to commit atrocities in pursuit of something almost beautiful. There are dozens of erotic romance novels with the same premise, but instead of Clegg its an alpha chad so its so hot, but because its him its got this layer of creep and uncomfortable horror about his every action. Including how easy it is to feel bad for him.
He was also discovered long after his death to have hated Jews, gays, and Muslims if that makes it better for you. I don't think it shows in his work.
GoT is very much a slow burn in the first zone, to a point where its an absolutely slog at times if you try to do all the open world stuff.
I think in the latter half of the second zone, when all the characters start to get to their climaxes in their arcs is when it shines most in terms of writing and characters.
Until then its really just a case of "do you find the combat fun on its own?" Which I did, and it carried me until the writing and pace picked up. But if its not making the time fly by for you, then its probably just not your game and that's not a bad thing for anyone.