Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It’s ridiculous that there’s so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it’s a higher percentage? It’s also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn’t like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer’s store.

A couple years ago it wasn’t thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.

You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.

I didn’t max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.

That’s not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.

I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn’t gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.

China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it’s still not enough, and it doesn’t seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.

Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.

Just because we don’t usually see backlash it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. The average player puts up with absolutely rigged games which treat paying for advantages as fairness.

Personally I only see cheating as a problem if it affects people who haven’t agreed to it, but the solution is not preventing all modification. Games are better off for modding and customization. They could cut off modified games from having matchmaking or any input on a global game mode while still allowing players to run their own servers however they want.

I’m also a progression-driven player yet I’m suspicious of a game that introduces anti-cheats alongside microtransactions. When microtransactions are involved, the pace of progression tends to be affected to incentive people to pay, and at that point I’d rather play in a hacked server that has a more reasonable progression.

If it was just about letting the player maintain the pace of progression however is most satisfying, I’m sure there are better ways to do that client-side. But these days game companies are all too happy to equivocate “company controlled” with “fair” or “fun”, and it’s curious that in this framing nothing is unfair as long as they get money.

Cheap? I must have missed that part.

Interestingly I think the 2D Zeldas aged less than the early 3D ones. ALttP is pretty good to this day.

I’m almost certain this is why so much blurring and flare was pushed as “realism” a couple generations ago. The devs and artists needed their eyes checked.

As someone that already has to deal with a somewhat blurry perception, I don’t want any more of that, ever.

The games really need an option to just turn off tutorials. I imagine it’s a little bit trickier than that because they need to be designed in a way a small child won’t accidentally turn it on without realizing. But there must be a way to do it.

Persona 1 and 2. As a Persona fan I see some people saying how great they are, and the story does seem interesting, but I can’t deal with that map movement, battle system and endless random battles.

Really, any RPG with random battles is a little harder to get into compared to overworld monsters you can avoid or target at your own pace.

Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn’t publicly traded. It’s investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.

Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.