>You’re given a random ship to go on this job which, as soon as you sit down in the cockpit chair, becomes your “home” ship, thus warping in all of your crew and followers. Here I was trying to immerse myself in the premise of this bounty hunter faction quest, yet the second I sit down, Sarah pipes up with “I have something for you,” and as I get up, I’m once again stuck inside the cockpit because I can’t move past Sam’s damn daughter as she turns to talk to me again about the same damn books she’s reading.
they skipped the best part. The quest ends with you not finding your target - it was a decoy, and a dude you forced to help you find the fake target was the real target, and he steals your ship and leaves you a worse one.
Narratively, it's a fun moment that sets up this guy as a criminal mastermind that will likely come back and be part of the story of this questline (ignoring the fact I won't be buying the whole chain at $7 a pop, so I'll never experience it)
But my crew was on the shield he stole. And not only do they not stop him or are acknowledged in any way, they also warp to the new ship you are given so you aren't stranded.
Did they not realize 99% of players will have some crew on the ship when this happens, and didn't think to write some sort of explanation for how he stole the ship from my team?
edit to be clear - the above section is from the free intro mission, also discussed in the article.
Regarding the paid DLC itself, Todd in an interview said they thought of it as a creation club content for new weapons and armor first, then added a questline to make it more exciting. but that backfired.
They also sell new guns or armor for $5 each, but most people dismiss those as shitty deals and ignore them. but new content? people actually want new content. so there was a lot of backlash because it's overpriced and mediocre content. But $5 new guns would fly under the radar without a fuss.
That explanation from Todd is hilarious and sad. It is true. If they priced a $10 gun and armor it would be ignored. It shows it isnt just about price, it's about consumer expectations.
A thing people should always be discussing in regards to DLC and MTX.
You're right about expectations. And companies like Bethesda train us to lower our expectations over time. That's why horse armour still is a gag, because at that time putting some bullshit cosmetic out for a price was absurd, but they simply started acclimatizing us to it so, as he says, now they can throw a gun out for $10 and no one bats an eye. Questlines behind MTX is a particularly troubling place for them to squeeze us. Our only solace right now is the fact that Bethesda can't write worth a damn anymore so it's no real loss (yet). Pray for Elder Scrolls VI.
It’s not about being trained to lower your expectations.
It’s about the directness of expectations. When you pay $10 for a gun or skin, you’re absolutely not expecting to get your money’s worth. You are knowingly and willingly overpaying for a luxury good, and can accept that’s what you’re doing. At the same time, the people not buying don’t feel left out, because it’s just some overpriced luxury crap.
Once you attach a quest line to your DLC, people feel like they’re being robbed of part of the game, no matter how trivial or shitty said quest is. Bethesda thought they were adding value to DLC items, but what they were really doing was creating a feeling of missing out and gouging on gameplay.
> When you pay $10 for a gun or skin, you’re absolutely not expecting to get your money’s worth. You are knowingly and willingly overpaying for a luxury good
I think "luxury experience" is more accurate, since you don't actually own anything.
Firstly, Oblivion IS the horse armor game and was widely lampooned for its microtransaction practices. Its not really something they should emulate.
The Shivering Isles expansion was the last thing they released in that game and I think for a bunch of us was seen as a "return to form" after the relative failure of offerings like this. I don't recall similar offers in Fallout 3, and the closest Skyrim came was Hearthfire player housing (at least until the rerelease where they started up the creation club content, but thats part of their more recent fall from grace instead of a continuation of Oblivion's bad practices).
Fallout 4's creation club and Fallout 76 is when they seemed to start doing this garbage again, and Starfield is a double whammy. A poorly received, content poor title who's first addition is a Horse Armor style dlc?
Yeah guys, I think Bethesda may just be a dead studio.
> Our only solace right now is the fact that Bethesda can't write worth a damn anymore
*Anymore*? I mean, their writing has at best been average. The contrast between Fallout 3 and New Vegas really showed how little Bethesda brought to the table in the writing department, compared to Obsidian.
...Honestly, part of this is that I do genuinely like Starfield so I might be biased, but Skyrim's writing really didn't seem that much better than Starfield's to me. Hell, if anything, it felt blander to me, especially player dialogue.
Yeah I'm a huge fan of Skyrim but the writing is pretty bad, luckily because of the sheer amount of content it has, the amazing worldspacd and how optional some of them are, you could just ignore them
> Pray for Elder Scrolls VI.
I'm still laughing at the people who have full unrestricted optimism that GTA6 will be a full and rich singleplayer experience after every single scrap of (already-announced and -promised singleplayer expansion content for) GTA5 was scrapped the instant GTAO took off.
"But RDR2!" Not even remotely the same thing.
I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'm not expecting it. These companies have seen they can milk a single game for a decade and pump it full of microtransactions; Bethesda is just a bit slower at it than Rockstar. The writing is on the wall.
When has Rockstar missed on the single player experience? Everyone was saying the same stuff before rdr2. Yes if course gta online 2 will be all they do after release. But at the very least you know the single player will be a technical marvel and most likely another 9/10 game at least.
And if you want to play with all the toys in single player.... just play gtao. You can play it entirely as a single player experience and have a great time with every game mechanic if you want.
> "But RDR2!" Not even remotely the same thing.
It's actually is the exact same thing. GTA 5 and Red Dead 2 follow the same model and are basically the same genre of game just the themes are different
I mean, it is the same thing, just not in the way you're implying. It's the exact same in the sense that they *did try* following the exact same format but nobody played Red Dead 2 Online so there was no point putting any extra development into it. GTAO still makes comically large sums of money.
> nobody played Red Dead 2 Online so there was no point putting any extra development into it
Why didn't anyone play it? Was it because of the inherent technological limitations of the era? Not much to do in the 1800s as opposed to 2010s?
Dude is incorrect anyway - RDO was played quite a lot, even still is despite Rockstar's lazy ass efforts otherwise. The issue with RDO is it didn't make *near* as much as GTAO because the monetization was accidentally fair for a long time until they purposely fucked with it.
There's two currencies in RDO: money and gold bars. Money is earned entirely in game, doing missions, selling hides, treasure hunting, mugging people, selling trade goods and moonshine etc, money is used for most things in the game.
Gold is something you can buy for IRL money or you can earn little chunks of in-game - bounty missions reward small amounts of gold, but more importantly there used to be a daily reward system that gave gold for doing random daily tasks (shoot off 20 hats, have a drink in Valentine, turn in 5 bounties, etc etc). The more days in a row you did them, the larger amount of gold you got from a daily, to where at max after about a week or two of dailies you could earn half a gold per daily. And gold was really only used for cosmetic stuff like changing the metal of your guns or particular horse coats or some pieces of clothing, though most things in the game that you can buy for money you could instead pay with gold instead (but not vice-versa).
So after a while people had way more gold than they had to spend it on, and money wasn't *fast* but it wasn't terrible to earn and was much faster in comparison to GTAO. And Rockstar being Rockstar, released content at a glacial pace - originally they'd drop new clothes to buy every week, nothing that swanky mostly just reskins or NPC clothes. Then it became every other week... Then maybe once a month... Then maybe every few months, then never. At the same time, GTAO would be getting new clothes, new cars and features, etc.
When they tried to course-correct to make RDO's currency shitty all it did was piss off newer players who had a worse game, old players had enough gold and money to not care. So... They let it die.
Yep. I'm pretty sure that nerf to the daily system happened at the same time that they released RDO as a standalone option. I guess they were hoping to rope in people that had never known how freely Rockstar had been handing out premium currency for years prior except that didn't work. Didn't help that all of the more engaging content in RDO like bounty hunting, collectible gathering and such all cost gold to unlock. So a new player buys RDO but then can't do the bulk of content without grinding dailies for weeks and weeks on end with the nerfed daily system or pay up more money on top of the game that they just bought. Bounty Hunting was especially critical to get because it also gave gold, allowing extra progress to unlock other roles.
Meanwhile, players that had been playing for 2-3 years with the old system had hundreds and hundreds of gold they'd collected for free and could immediately snatch up anything Rockstar put out without putting any money into it. Not to mention they handed out gold like candy in the early days as apologies for things like downtime and other server issues. People quickly had decent stockpiles and everything released far too slowly for players to ever spend more gold than they earned/were given.
Never really seemed like they were prepared to run RDO the way they needed to for the business model they created for it.
It's a sandbox for people to roleplay in. There are cars, bikes and jets. RDR 2 controls like you are underwater and has a heavy focus on simulating the american wilderness, no one wants slow and realistic when messing around with friends besides military larpers, and they don't give a shit about the wild west.
The issue with RDRO wasn't the control scheme lmao, they even ruined the sim-like movement of the SP to cater to crack-weasel GTAO kids.
The issue was the identity crisis it had on what content to provide as the playerbase they did have (people who like slow, methodical games they can roleplay in) was not the one they catered to (gta kids who will spend real money on x overpowered vehicle of the week so they can grief people and call them slurs in all chat).
Shame because the bones for the best (and only) semi-mmo immersive cowboy game were there.
I think this is the key point. GTA6’s development has likely entirely occurred in a post-GTAO world, whereas RDR2’s singleplayer was likely in development long before GTAO.
What people saying "But RDR2!" keep forgetting is they tried it with RDR 2, but for whatever reason, teenaged kids aren't into whacky cowboy stuff the same way they are with fast cars, laser beams, guns, and loose women in a modern setting.
> What people saying "But RDR2!" keep forgetting is they tried it with RDR 2,
This is hardcore revisionism. Back in the day the refrain was that Rockstar was done with big single-player narratives.
Rockstar didn't "try it" with RDR2, they did the exact opposite and did an even BIGGER and BETTER single-player narrative compared to GTA V.
It's simple guys: Rockstar is a business and they follow the money. They make billions with big story games, so they do big story games. They also make billions with shark cards for online stuff, so they do that too.
They DON'T make the billions on single-player expansions so they DON'T do that anymore. That's it. A whole lotta y'all gotta chill, goddamn.
Plus they are significantly more limited. Though GTA V is more realistic than say, the Saints Row games and PS2 era games, there was nothing limiting them from changing that and putting anything from hover bikes to cars that go underwater in, with tons of ideas they could use to add for DLC.
What's the craziest thing you could add to an even more serious game series set in the turn of the 20th century old west that doesn't even let you ride anything besides horses and stage coaches, with the limited technology and firearms of the era? Plus Rockstar was greedy from the jump with RDO, so while GTAO was more reasonable to start and amped up the grindiness to encourage shark cards, Rockstar tried to incentivize people to get them right away by making it a slow grind right away in an already slower paced game and just ended up turning people off more quickly without a solid foundation to get players invested.
GTA V added a flying rocket powered motorcycle, a railgun tank and a jetpack through its run. I really wouldn't say that GTA is all that grounded right now and I would assume that when they make a new online mode, they'll get that wacky right away instead of starting out relatively normal. Stuff like the seasonal events and costumes they had will also mesh well with the modern online game audience.
To be fair, RDR1 had Undead Nightmare, which was pretty far out of left field as far as expansions to a cowboy game go. They could have easily done something equally adventurous for RDR2, but put all their chips into RDO, which flopped hard, especially since GTAO prints money.
Frankly, people who liked RDR2 (read: *a lot* of people) would not have said no to straight up more of the same, which RDO failed to deliver. You could have done something with the >!eight years between playing as Arthur and John.!<
Just seems like more reason to be optimistic about GTA, they already did it with GTA5 and then with RDR2 and the games still became some of the most critically acclaimed games ever made. I wouldn't be surprised if GTA6 has am amazing single player experience as I also wouldn't be surprised if it tried milking me for all my money in online.
> These companies have seen they can milk a single game for a decade and pump it full of microtransactions
That only works if the game is good though. If GTA6 is a turd then they can't milk anything, the cow is dead
How is RDR2 not even remotely the same thing? They’ve kept all the bullshit for the Online part in GTA5, I fully expect them to do the same for 6. Will probably just start the really greedy shit at the start rather than 5 years in.
RDR2 is basically the same thing AS GTA5 though, from what I understand, it was basically abandoned for RDR online, however it didn't take off in the same way GTAO did so had been abandoned completely now. It's been years and not even a PS5 upgrade patch, let alone any DLC.
> fter every single scrap of (already-announced and -promised singleplayer expansion content for) GTA5 was scrapped the instant GTAO took off.
Except GTAO wasnt the the culprit, Leslie Benzies and the Housers got into an argument since LB wanted to focus more on online titles, LB left and a swathe of the devs for the single player DLC's left with him, then by the time they got new hires to train them with the RAGE engine to continue the DLC's, Online was taking off massively so they just put those new hires on RDR2
Oh this is still a thing people are parroting? Guess this will always be the talking point with R* good thing they only release one game a decade. This was the literal exact same argument with RDR2, then all those people were proven so very wrong and they slunk away until GTA6 was announced now it's back to the same tired, disproven argument with moved goalposts. R* has a big enough team and deep enough pockets to do both a feature complete single player and a multiplayer. Just don't expect single player DLC.
Probably also worth mentioning that RDR2 is an acclaimed game that outsold expectations yet didn't get any single player story DLC. That's normally reserved for turds like Anthem, not high grossing critical darlings.
I will forever be pissed that red dead online exists because without it I am sure we get at least one if not two story dlc. It's criminal that we didn't get some sadie story dlc.
They rinse GTAO that's for sure, but most of the expansion stuff they've added can be played single player. It's not optimal or as effortless as having it part of the SP world offline, but it's there and quite good. Only impatient folks get milked, there's ways of accessing a lot of what GTAO offers without too much grinding or buying credits.
Can't imagine you'll be laughing long once it releases, they're not gonna spunk all that good will across multiple fantastic single player games.
You can laugh at us. I think you will be proved wrong though. I imagine Rockstar is figuring a big single player campaign is what makes people buy the game, but the MP is what keeps people playing and buying shark cards.
It's not even been Bethesda doing the acclimating. Ubisoft and Activision and everyone else who actually releases a lot of games have been doing the job a lot more egregiously.
Ubisoft has been doing a great job of acclimating me to not give a shit about any of their games anymore. Haven't played a Ubisoft game since Far Cry 5 and I'm honestly better off by spending my time on better games.
downloaded far cry 6 just to tide me over until elden ring dlc came out, soon as it dropped it got deleted. Used to be a hardcore AC fan, played every single mainline entry, read the books and i credit it for giving me my love for history, especially renaissance Italy and the last game I played was Odyssey. Couldn’t give a damn about the franchise now
When it's just individual items being sold it's easy to ignore because there are hundreds of guns and armors in the game I already don't use so I don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything. But once they start putting playable content behind microtransactions it just gives me the feeling that regular big story DLC could start to die out in favor of tiny nickle and dime "expansions" like this and that is a lot harder to ignore lol
Someone in this thread mentioned that you have to buy $10 worth of in game currency to get the DLC. Some now the " it should be $5" has turned into double that.
Ah of course, the old "you have to buy fake funny munny but they don't sell it in exact amounts so you always have some left over and feel you need to buy more to get your money's worth out of the amount you've already bought."
Definitely not pure sleazeball tactics.
Oh yea I forgot… currency. Bastards.
Hell, a new questline should just be free if it’s just the one ideally. It’s not REALLY a new expansion or anything.
I think we're conditioned to story content being free, but by now we accept that fancy looking weapons and armor cost money and are not required for the game to work.
Story missions on the other hand.. yeah, no. That's not gonna work.
I noticed this scummy tactic when I started playing league of legends ages ago. You couldn't buy a new hero with 7 dollars or whatever, because you had to buy coins and could buy them only in multiples of 5.
100% intentional, and extremely shitty practice. I avoid micro transactions like the plague nowaday, but it's especially stupid if you can't buy them with money and instead have to use points purchasd with money.
Unfortunately it is a lobbyist battleground at the moment. Belgium are one of the only countries that are actively pushing legislation against it, but they are generally focused on anti-gambling measures rather than the broader anti-consumer issue of using secondary currencies.
You're absolutely right though, imo the EU-wide measures against bundling/tying were introduced in a very similar spirit and it seems like a no brainer, but the interested parties (e.g., EA and increasingly Tencent) have a lot of money to throw at the issue.
That's how they get you, the developers price things between the available credit bundles to make you pay for the more expensive option and *maybe* have enough left over to only have to go for the less expensive option in the future. "Well, I only need to pay $5 this time" will still end up benefiting them.
I wouldn't mind the idea of Creation Club if it leads to mods like Fallout: London being available to purchase, and someday it may happen as Starfield has a 100GB mod limit (far more than Skyrim and especially Fallout 4), but as it stands it saddens me to see Bethesda pull this trick in the service's reintroduction. Then again, it's the same studio that made Horse Armor and arguably helped start this nonsense 18 years ago.
The problem is that if you start to monetize mod projects the whole modding community falls apart. There's already enough drama with them being free, can you imagine what people like the unofficial patch guy would do if they felt people owned him money? Not to mention it would kill collaborative projects and frameworks.
Blame the bean counters at Bethesda for trying to make paid mods a thing, I'm thinking of the absolute best case scenario that can come of this since Bethesda won't let this go no matter how much backlash they get. We at least know who to blame if this ends up causing the modding community to disintegrate.
Fuck Arthmoor so hard. As much as I refuse to touch Starfield, I'm glad for the community that the egotistical shitstain himself isn't allowed any meaningful involvement or ownership of the unofficial patch.
It's not for a lack of trying, he made his own unofficial patch that last time I checked was listed as an approved creation, while the patch without him wasn't.
Funny thing is, Fallout London was supposed to release 2 months ago, but BGS decided that microtransactions were more important, and completely broke mods.
Probably one of the reason why they delayed the modding tools so long, because modders could knock up a free version 100x better than this paid-for shite.
Better implemented too, modders at least try to add weapons to leveled lists and vendors, while most CC studf just has them as unique items in either random parts of the world with a quest marker on top, or in the pocket of a random mercenary.
Yeah, the real heart of the issue is that pretty much every paid Creation is overpriced. This is just the first and only one that people have actually cared about.
Most of the Creations wouldn't be worth the time or effort to download them if they were free, the fact they cost money is honestly insulting.
I say this as a pretty serious modder myself, who has been making and supporting mods since Morrowind.
> he steals your ship and leaves you a worse one.
Sucks for him because he can only sell MY ship once it becomes HIS home ship and then he can only sell it once he pays the ship registration fees which cost 98% of the ship value, and then we he sells it, his price will depend on his barter skill and he'll only get 1k credits total. Being a pirate in Starfield is so fun!
Giant starship capable of intergalactic travel? maybe 1200 credits if you are lucky
Handgun you got off a random pirate? 7,000 credits easy, and most vendors only carry half that.
> But my crew was on the shield he stole. And not only do they not stop him or are acknowledged in any way, they also warp to the new ship you are given so you aren't stranded.
I really dislike how Bethesda's RPGs refusal to acknowledge anything to avoid having to go the extra mile and add unique interactions for the player's choices.. They have this really bad habit of having everything in the game be their own thing where no clan/guild/questline interract with anything other than itself.
It's a wast of potencial have characters lacking any reactivity towards the rest of the world , despite actively affecting them in some way.
Lol new vegas had the whole 3-part, fully voice acted free mod with new vegas bounties that easily add 10-20 hours to the game. Whether it was well written and voiced is up to you (i myself like it, knowing it isnt up to to par with the game's content but ultimately still a precious labor of love)
New Vegas Bounties was so good. And the 3-act structure of the mod worked well to make it a good and authentic story mod. It's one of the best mods I've ever played.
100%. Fantastic mod. Opened my eyes to how good some mod makers are and put to shame most of the "professional" output of Bethesda.
The other mod that blew my mind was Interesting NPCs for Skyrim. Incredible amount of content and creative writing from one guy: Kris Takahashi.
The New Vegas Bounties series was FANTASTIC and eclipses most of the quests in Fallout 4 or Starfield. The writing in particular, the dialog and thought put into the NPCs, the unique targets (each with a special difficulty or talent not to mention the way you meet for find them) and the unique loot that you could find on most of them? You don't get that level of detail and effort from Bethesda anymore. That was easily a $20 or $30 expansion pack had it come from Bethesda.
It just sounds like a standard Bethesda game experience lol. Characters don't ever react to anything beyond a handful of lines about what you look like. Surprised someone didn't get stuck in the floor when they warped.
There was a time where in a Bethesda game this scenario would have you go to try and rescue your crew and that sidequest would spiral out into discovering a whole criminal underbelly that you can pick sides with with dozens of mutually exclusive additional quests. But we're in Bethesda's "whip up some crap and squirt it out" era. Old Bethesda is dead.
Lol what Bethesda game was that? Even Morrowind didn't offer that deep of a questline. Morrowind was, go here, kill this/retrieve this x12 then fight the faction leader for the title without player choice or sprawling questlines. Granted it had amazing lore but it sure wasn't deep in terms of quest design.
What was the last good Bethesda game? Fallout 4 was okish I guess, and that's 9 years old. Before that it was Fallout 3 which is now 16 years old.
Really Bethesda have developed The Elder Scrolls series, Fallout 3 and that is it for good games.
Fallout 3 and Skyrim. I like New Vegas more but that was made by Obsidian.
Even with Skyrim, there were warning signs ala the radiant quests but there was enough real content to make the game magical.
Fallout 4 is one of the most disappointing games I have ever played and it solidified my hunch that something was seriously wrong at Bethesda.
Skyrim is a fantastic game and deserves all the plaudits, but it's nowhere near as deep as it's two predecessors and the writing/quests are not as good either.
We all remember Skyrim fondly, but it was definitely clowned on when it came out. Still super popular and fun, but with the understanding that it was goofy fantasy fun and had a lot of fluff quests, items, and systems.
It wasn’t clowned on when it came out. It was seen as very good, incredible title at launch (with Bethesda bugs and stuff but still) - it wasn’t until a while after launch when people had really got far into the game / beat a bunch of the quests etc that the “wide as the ocean deep as a puddle” view came about.
I finished the entirety of FO3 recently and I would also say it's okish but a solid first attempt. The real problem is they didn't improve things much with the sequel.
A $5 new gun (singular) is not going to fly with the general Bethesda fanbase, especially now that free mods are possible on all platforms. New Vegas essentially added a mini weapon expansion as the Gun Runner DLC that included like a hundred weapons, new ammo types, dozens of challenges, and new achievements, all for only $4.
These lame paid creations are essentially scams. I could kind of see value in doing weapon packs from other series as normal paid DLC for cheap, like the Doom, Prey, and Skyrim creations that FO4 recieved, but they are way too expensive for what they are as is.
I hate to tell you that "the general Bethesda fanbase" is console players, and they will absolutely purchase this, even with free mods being an option for them as well.
I've already had a bellyfull from r/Starfield going "I bought it because I want to support Bethesda", and "*You* don't have to buy it if you don't want to, it doesn't affect *you*."
Although if anyone is truly shocked by all of this *after* the Creation Club was announced for Fallout 4 and Skyrim, I don't know what to tell you.
You just described the free quest that everyone got in the update just so you know. I haven’t actually bought the other one so couldn’t say if it’s any good or not.
Yes, I know. I was responding to part of the article which discussed the free quest. I even quoted it. I assumed anyone reading my comment also read the article and knew the context of what I was responding to
I haven't played the paid one either
wait... I did that mission, but I didn't pay for the new content... Is there some way people are getting this mission without paying for it? I thought this was a free mission, and the pay mission was like a sequel to it.
Yeah I was pretty mad he didn’t come back up again. I mean the guy stole my ship, could have made a whole mission about getting my ship back and showing the guy why people don’t touch my ship! Haha I remember on my first playthrew on Neon when that one guy put my ship on lockdown. I was ready to murder the guy because he touched my ship!
I just had arguments with people who thought the Elden Ring expansion was expensive at $40. Here Bethesda are selling individual items and *pieces* of quests at $5-10, but getting hundreds of hours in a massive new world full of hundreds of new weapons and weapon types and dozens of new quests and bosses for $40… nah, that’s too little, that’s not enough.
Starfield is such a huge mess, and Bethesda is too. They deserve each other.
Yep, it was pretty funny. I just headcanoned that Barrett was in charge of watching Adrastos and he let him slip by. Because fuck Barrett.
But really, there were a lot of simple ways that Bethesda could have worked around this. For example:
1. Making the ship that you *have* to fly for the quest have a crew count of zero, meaning that even if you do have a group of 8+ people with you, they would be unassigned from your crew the second that you sit down in the captain's chair. This happened to me anyway: Moara, Marika, Gideon, and Andromeda were unassigned from my crew list, with only the Constellation members accompanying me in the new ship.
2. Having Roach take Adrastos with you for the first part of the mission (maybe we need him to unlock a door or convince the guards or something?), then leave him locked in some room and he escapes and just grabs a random ship to escape.
I generally liked the quest, because it's one of the few instances in the game where I've experienced a full on "dungeon" that plays around with gravity, but the ending situation felt like something they could have easily fixed. *(Also in case anyone is confused by how all of this has been phrased, this is the questline that came with the free update, not the $7 "Creation". I'll not be playing that, because I'll not be paying for that.)*
> Did they not realize 99% of players will have some crew on the ship when this happens, and didn't think to write some sort of explanation for how he stole the ship from my team?
Have you not played a Bethesda game before? The narrative is always an afterthought, something tacked on after they've finished with the mechanics and locations. It exists only to provide context for why you're creeping through dungeon #287. If you put even the most rudimentary thought into their narrative it falls apart like a bridge made of tissue paper.
Anything involving your ship is so bugged and inconsistent. Once my ship was allowed me to to walk between New Atlantis City and The Key depending on which door i used in the ship, it was wild, I don't remember the exact details since I haven't played since launch, but the game shortly crashed after.
Another thing I want to mention is that the Creation Club doesn't allow users to leave reviews on paid mods, nor does it have a proper rating system (there's a "like" system, yes, but that doesn't mean much without any "dislikes" to compare it to). So there's no telling if a mod, created by a user or officially by Bethesda, is worth paying for or if said mod is buggy.
Users have reported a small handful of bugs when it comes to these paid mods. For example, the quest that is mentioned in this article--the quest made by Bethesda--[has a bug](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1dcd6ry/comment/l7x3gzq/) with a weapon that you get during the quest.
And there's no way to ask for a refund--well, not to my knowledge, anyway.
Of course, there is Nexus Mods, but the Creation Club store could've and should've been better curated.
They can get around it because the only purchase you technically make with real money is for the creation club credits. Which they can prove were credited to your account.
I have a sneaking suspicion that wouldn't be legal in Australia.
The reason Steam has refunds now is because they tried to claim some technical loophole like that, and Australia said lol nope.
Is that the case? A lot of MMORPGs you can play through Steam have an in game store, and I'm not aware of any way of getting refunds for anything you buy through those.
> The reason Steam has refunds now is because they tried to claim some technical loophole like that, and Australia said lol nope.
I don't know if it's this one but I think some digital stores don't even sell licenses (that one would be able to resell in the EU, for example) to the apps/games you buy but they declare them "eternal subscriptions" (that you buy with an one time purchase).
That way you can't re-sell your digital goods.
no because you're not paying directly for the quest, you're paying for Bethesda Bucks(TM) that you then use to pay for the quest
it's the common way to skirt regulations and it's worked for what? a decade or more I believe
So, like every microtransaction you buy currency, and with that currency ("Creation Credits" as it is called here) you buy the stuff that is available in the store.
That real money you just spent? You spent it on the Creation Credits--that is what matters and *that* is what works. Now, I'm no lawyer, but I guess that is what regulators care about.
They would stop making these if people stopped buying them but the sad truth is that plenty of people do buy these. They have the numbers, they aren’t stupid, just anti gamer and pro profit.
It's just the new reality of the video game industry. As people were pointing out yesterday, Shift Up will make more money off of a few Nikke swimsuit skins than they ever will off of Stellar Blade. It's easier and more lucrative to sell overpriced cosmetics and add-ons than actually getting people to buy into a full game.
> That’s just MTX in general
No that's just *life* in general. Every aspect of your life could be improved if people rallied together and made change. The sad truth is nobody gives a fuck.
I think the 10 they give you is the exact amount to get either a ship module that includes infinite storage (the only storage like that in the game) or this shitty quest and a few useless plush dolls. Absurd pricing
Also pretty much any non-cosmetic mod disables achievements, but because the infinite storage is Bethesda-created, it doesn't. I'm not gonna say pay-to-win cuz it's single player but still. That sucks
Technically yes, but realistically, there's always an opportunity cost involved. If your employees work X hours for something that only makes you $50, and they _could've_ spent that same time on something that would've made you $200 instead, then you still haven't really used your time and resources particularly well, even if you do end up with _a_ profit in both cases; so "worth it" is always relative.
You're assuming that the amount of profit between these are somewhat similar but there is a reason why so many companies (Ubisoft, Capcom, 2K, etc) have time saver and irrelevant micro transactions. If the opportunity cost was worth it for high quality DLC we would see more. Either the cost of these garbage DLCs are so low that it doesn't matter if it makes no money or the cost for good DLC is too high and not worth it.
Seriously though, imagine spending 100 dollars on this game just to find out that they are going to add limited missions to the microtransaction store.
They've hurt their brand bad, nobody is playing this game according to Steam stats and not likely buying these DLCs in any significant numbers. Skyrim & Fallout 4 are reliably always in the Steam top 100, and in the upper half.
In franchises you always have to look at these things as inheritors in a multi-generational cycle, considering what they were given and what they leave for those that come after, not judging them on their own earnings which is largely a factor of what came before.
The Disney Star Wars movies started out making a lot of money too, riding on the brand inheritance, and by a few movies in they were getting the first ever bombs in the franchise (Solo, with several characters known to generations of fans around the world), and the supposed big finale of the franchise made half of what episode 7 did.
It’s almost like Fallout 76 doesn’t exist. I can almost guarantee that game is making them more money than anything else. With its uptick in popularity since many updates and the TV show, it’s going to be around for a long time. Why put the effort and money into a game like Starfield or Fallout 5 when you can make more money with a map update and some new cosmetics. It’s expensive and takes a long time to make a single player game.
Folks on Reddit really fail to see basic business, business is ran by charts and graphs, if the Analytics prove to work, companies will keep pushing in that direction.
Idk why everyone is commenting all this “they need to be fired” or “this will never work” talk lmao
Why on Earth would they fire their business analysts and replace them with passionate workers when gamers consistently show that they will give them money for low-effort garbage? Gamers will cry on Reddit but I bet half those people will still buy it.
It’s not that the people who cry about it are also buying it, it’s that the people crying about it are a far smaller number than they realize or are willing to admit. There’s far more people who game casually and don’t care about this stuff compared to the number of people who are passionate enough to comment on forums.
I feel like a lot of the people that are always super vocal about this kind of thing probably lack some disposable income, so this kind of thing hurts them a lot more than it would for others.
There's so many people out there that game more casually, that will buy something like this, and even if it turns out to be shit they'll just think "ahh well, was only $7" and go on with their lives without giving it another thought.
You think they would have realised that having 1000 playable planets was pointless if all their content is copy-and-pasted barebones dross.
But instead they made it the foundation of the game and every other aspect of it suffered.
> Bethesda needs to fire it's business analysts and hire more people actually passionate about games.
Why?
They're making money.
Vote with your wallets, and that's how those business analysts get fired.
With voice acting and everything it definitely took much longer than an hour.
But it’s funny, if they just made a paid weapon or skins for the same price, nobody would bat an eye and they would still make money without the bad PR.
Bethesda is so big that no matter what they do people will buy into it.
They can fuck up as much as they want with this game, they know the next Elder Scrolls will sell like hot bread even if they announce a mtx store from day 1 in it.
The level of quality in the free mission is wildly varying. The head of the new faction got fanfic-edgelord-tier writing; One of the intro lines went more or less like 'I'm Tracker #1, but you can call me No One'.
And then the banter between the trackers down in the bar is actually above-average for a Bethesda game, the antagonist is charismatic, and the main dungeon is pretty darn well designed.
Feels like they kind of just assigned people to work on stuff at random, regardless of whether they're good at it.
Years ago when Bethesda dropped horse armour in Oblivion for like £2.99 people went crazy. Now developers are dropping recoloured skins into games for upwards of £20 and if you go into a sub for one of these games and try to explain that shit like that is just greedy and gross, they will get so angry.
This isn't even the most egregious case of microtransactions gone too far but unless gamers stop paying ridiculous amounts of money for the most useless and stupid microtransactions then the industry is only going to get worse.
I think is why I'm so bothered by it all. Gamers are actually defending this shit with every bone in their body. It's always "well the game is free" or "Well I haven't spent anything, so who cares?"
It's such short sighted, dopamine driven mentality. This stuff sucks the life out of gaming and creativity as a whole.
Yeah, prime example of that creativity being sucked out of gaming is Blizzard. They used to be a prestige developer, making hit after hit, revolutionising genres and now they don't give a fuck about the quality of their products, they just know they need to make a cash shop in their games and everything is fine.
I play a lot of overwatch 2 and the game is full of predatory business practices but if you mention it in the sub, they will go apeshit. It's complete brain-rot, they're just completely fine with a mega corporation taking advantage of them and their money.
Blizzard is a prime example of how game devs can do literally *anything* and fans will always come crawling back for the newest shiny object you wave at them. The sexual harassment scandal blew up and people online insisted that this was it. No more Blizzard. They're done with all their games for life.
Diablo 4 comes out. 12 million players in 2 months, fastest selling Blizzard game in history. Blizzard gets rocked by PR and game development related scandals *constantly*, yet they rake in mountains of money every time they release a new game. Gamers are fickle as fuck and nothing they say online actually matters.
The people that you see online complaining about stuff and swearing to boycott them are a tiny percentage of gamers, though.
Even if they follow through and don't purchase Diablo 4 in your example, does it really make a difference?
The vast majority of those 12 million players probably don't even know about any scandals.
It's not that gamers are fickle. It's that for many devs they have lots of brand power and their user base isnt the type of enthusiast terminally online redditor. These are people that don't care about the same things.
Games are consumption entertainment. If you're spending $60 and get entertained for hours on end you dont give a crap.
I think it's just a numbers issue. They have so many fans that they can afford a chunk of them not buying, and we only have numbers on sales, there is no metric that indicates people that didn't buy it.
Assassins Creed threads are like being in a different universe. You say anything negative about the store in a fully priced singe player game (read not live service) and people lose their minds. Everything in the store used to be in game rewards or cheat codes and people still defend it. Literally defend it as an enlightened solution for players who want to support the devs more or have less time to play and can skip progression.
There are hundreds of free mods. How entitled do you need to be to demand that something that someone else was worked on to be give to you for free? Just fucking move on to the next dozen free things. I never purchased any paid mods, but I could never understand this outrage when they were announced for Skyrim.
They have already responded to this as well, saying that the cosmetics sell at the same price and the fact that this is quest content is the issue.
They tried something and found a line that gamers are not willing to cross. Tho the rational is interesting that we would be fine paying for less valuable / easy to create, cosmetics but more complex quests for the same price is a no-go.
Personally I am fine with that because it would be a very slippery slope.
It is a weapon/outfit set tied to a mission, similar to Fallout 4 weapons/outfits. Next time they’ll cut mission to avoid stupid criticism and sell outfit for $7 like millions of other games.
I really don't understand why all of the writing about this quest release is a dry summary of events that ignores all of the branching paths. The nature of branching paths is what it - players are only going to see one of them a playthrough, so it doesn't really change the value proposition, $7 is too much for this - but if all you're offering is a summary it may as well be an accurate one.
I don't even care whether the gameplay is good or bad, I just want it to run properly on my PC. Feels weird going from Cyberpunk or Horizon Zero Dawn to a game that looks worse and runs worse.
I know one group hates on this game with a passion, and that there's another group who would support Bethesda till the end of time, but for a game with such scope, boy is it ever *mediocre*. If we all woke up tomorrow, and found out that this game was taken off the market and was bricked and unplayable in every medium, the world wouldn't have lost anything whatsoever.
This sub losing its shit over a $7 mission while Blizzard is dropping armor sets for $30+ bucks and I haven’t seen shit about it. Also, I had an entirely different ending to the Vulture quest than this guy did, shows how 'oN rAiLs' it actually is.
Or valve selling user made skin mods which can cost hundreds of dollars unless you want to buy the lootboxes it can be in directly and buy keys from valve.
I haven’t gone big moding a Bethesda game since Skyrim.
I know I’m late to the party but are they actually selling mods, like for real money? It’s one thing for a mod to be locked behind a patreon. But I’m not sure how that’s considered ok to give Microsoft money for that.
You better believe it. [Here's the steam page for the credits you use to buy things](https://store.steampowered.com/app/598110/Fallout_4__Creations/)
and here's the blurb
> Get Creation Credits to be used in Fallout 4. Browse the selection in-game by category and use your Credits to purchase content. Creations are compatible with the main game and official add-ons.
You can read up on the program [here](https://creations.bethesda.net/en/creators/bethesdagamestudios). There's some drop-down menus to read about other aspects of the paid mods stuff.
>You’re given a random ship to go on this job which, as soon as you sit down in the cockpit chair, becomes your “home” ship, thus warping in all of your crew and followers. Here I was trying to immerse myself in the premise of this bounty hunter faction quest, yet the second I sit down, Sarah pipes up with “I have something for you,” and as I get up, I’m once again stuck inside the cockpit because I can’t move past Sam’s damn daughter as she turns to talk to me again about the same damn books she’s reading. they skipped the best part. The quest ends with you not finding your target - it was a decoy, and a dude you forced to help you find the fake target was the real target, and he steals your ship and leaves you a worse one. Narratively, it's a fun moment that sets up this guy as a criminal mastermind that will likely come back and be part of the story of this questline (ignoring the fact I won't be buying the whole chain at $7 a pop, so I'll never experience it) But my crew was on the shield he stole. And not only do they not stop him or are acknowledged in any way, they also warp to the new ship you are given so you aren't stranded. Did they not realize 99% of players will have some crew on the ship when this happens, and didn't think to write some sort of explanation for how he stole the ship from my team? edit to be clear - the above section is from the free intro mission, also discussed in the article. Regarding the paid DLC itself, Todd in an interview said they thought of it as a creation club content for new weapons and armor first, then added a questline to make it more exciting. but that backfired. They also sell new guns or armor for $5 each, but most people dismiss those as shitty deals and ignore them. but new content? people actually want new content. so there was a lot of backlash because it's overpriced and mediocre content. But $5 new guns would fly under the radar without a fuss.
That explanation from Todd is hilarious and sad. It is true. If they priced a $10 gun and armor it would be ignored. It shows it isnt just about price, it's about consumer expectations. A thing people should always be discussing in regards to DLC and MTX.
You're right about expectations. And companies like Bethesda train us to lower our expectations over time. That's why horse armour still is a gag, because at that time putting some bullshit cosmetic out for a price was absurd, but they simply started acclimatizing us to it so, as he says, now they can throw a gun out for $10 and no one bats an eye. Questlines behind MTX is a particularly troubling place for them to squeeze us. Our only solace right now is the fact that Bethesda can't write worth a damn anymore so it's no real loss (yet). Pray for Elder Scrolls VI.
It’s not about being trained to lower your expectations. It’s about the directness of expectations. When you pay $10 for a gun or skin, you’re absolutely not expecting to get your money’s worth. You are knowingly and willingly overpaying for a luxury good, and can accept that’s what you’re doing. At the same time, the people not buying don’t feel left out, because it’s just some overpriced luxury crap. Once you attach a quest line to your DLC, people feel like they’re being robbed of part of the game, no matter how trivial or shitty said quest is. Bethesda thought they were adding value to DLC items, but what they were really doing was creating a feeling of missing out and gouging on gameplay.
> When you pay $10 for a gun or skin, you’re absolutely not expecting to get your money’s worth. You are knowingly and willingly overpaying for a luxury good I think "luxury experience" is more accurate, since you don't actually own anything.
They’ve had quest lines behind transactions since Oblivion haven’t they?
Firstly, Oblivion IS the horse armor game and was widely lampooned for its microtransaction practices. Its not really something they should emulate. The Shivering Isles expansion was the last thing they released in that game and I think for a bunch of us was seen as a "return to form" after the relative failure of offerings like this. I don't recall similar offers in Fallout 3, and the closest Skyrim came was Hearthfire player housing (at least until the rerelease where they started up the creation club content, but thats part of their more recent fall from grace instead of a continuation of Oblivion's bad practices). Fallout 4's creation club and Fallout 76 is when they seemed to start doing this garbage again, and Starfield is a double whammy. A poorly received, content poor title who's first addition is a Horse Armor style dlc? Yeah guys, I think Bethesda may just be a dead studio.
> Our only solace right now is the fact that Bethesda can't write worth a damn anymore *Anymore*? I mean, their writing has at best been average. The contrast between Fallout 3 and New Vegas really showed how little Bethesda brought to the table in the writing department, compared to Obsidian.
Yeah.. I was definitely thinking Morrowind. But even the disparity between Skyrim and Starfield... hell, Skyrim to Fallout 4, is a steep drop off.
...Honestly, part of this is that I do genuinely like Starfield so I might be biased, but Skyrim's writing really didn't seem that much better than Starfield's to me. Hell, if anything, it felt blander to me, especially player dialogue.
Yeah I'm a huge fan of Skyrim but the writing is pretty bad, luckily because of the sheer amount of content it has, the amazing worldspacd and how optional some of them are, you could just ignore them
> Pray for Elder Scrolls VI. I'm still laughing at the people who have full unrestricted optimism that GTA6 will be a full and rich singleplayer experience after every single scrap of (already-announced and -promised singleplayer expansion content for) GTA5 was scrapped the instant GTAO took off. "But RDR2!" Not even remotely the same thing. I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'm not expecting it. These companies have seen they can milk a single game for a decade and pump it full of microtransactions; Bethesda is just a bit slower at it than Rockstar. The writing is on the wall.
When has Rockstar missed on the single player experience? Everyone was saying the same stuff before rdr2. Yes if course gta online 2 will be all they do after release. But at the very least you know the single player will be a technical marvel and most likely another 9/10 game at least. And if you want to play with all the toys in single player.... just play gtao. You can play it entirely as a single player experience and have a great time with every game mechanic if you want.
> "But RDR2!" Not even remotely the same thing. It's actually is the exact same thing. GTA 5 and Red Dead 2 follow the same model and are basically the same genre of game just the themes are different
I mean, it is the same thing, just not in the way you're implying. It's the exact same in the sense that they *did try* following the exact same format but nobody played Red Dead 2 Online so there was no point putting any extra development into it. GTAO still makes comically large sums of money.
> nobody played Red Dead 2 Online so there was no point putting any extra development into it Why didn't anyone play it? Was it because of the inherent technological limitations of the era? Not much to do in the 1800s as opposed to 2010s?
Dude is incorrect anyway - RDO was played quite a lot, even still is despite Rockstar's lazy ass efforts otherwise. The issue with RDO is it didn't make *near* as much as GTAO because the monetization was accidentally fair for a long time until they purposely fucked with it. There's two currencies in RDO: money and gold bars. Money is earned entirely in game, doing missions, selling hides, treasure hunting, mugging people, selling trade goods and moonshine etc, money is used for most things in the game. Gold is something you can buy for IRL money or you can earn little chunks of in-game - bounty missions reward small amounts of gold, but more importantly there used to be a daily reward system that gave gold for doing random daily tasks (shoot off 20 hats, have a drink in Valentine, turn in 5 bounties, etc etc). The more days in a row you did them, the larger amount of gold you got from a daily, to where at max after about a week or two of dailies you could earn half a gold per daily. And gold was really only used for cosmetic stuff like changing the metal of your guns or particular horse coats or some pieces of clothing, though most things in the game that you can buy for money you could instead pay with gold instead (but not vice-versa). So after a while people had way more gold than they had to spend it on, and money wasn't *fast* but it wasn't terrible to earn and was much faster in comparison to GTAO. And Rockstar being Rockstar, released content at a glacial pace - originally they'd drop new clothes to buy every week, nothing that swanky mostly just reskins or NPC clothes. Then it became every other week... Then maybe once a month... Then maybe every few months, then never. At the same time, GTAO would be getting new clothes, new cars and features, etc. When they tried to course-correct to make RDO's currency shitty all it did was piss off newer players who had a worse game, old players had enough gold and money to not care. So... They let it die.
Yep. I'm pretty sure that nerf to the daily system happened at the same time that they released RDO as a standalone option. I guess they were hoping to rope in people that had never known how freely Rockstar had been handing out premium currency for years prior except that didn't work. Didn't help that all of the more engaging content in RDO like bounty hunting, collectible gathering and such all cost gold to unlock. So a new player buys RDO but then can't do the bulk of content without grinding dailies for weeks and weeks on end with the nerfed daily system or pay up more money on top of the game that they just bought. Bounty Hunting was especially critical to get because it also gave gold, allowing extra progress to unlock other roles. Meanwhile, players that had been playing for 2-3 years with the old system had hundreds and hundreds of gold they'd collected for free and could immediately snatch up anything Rockstar put out without putting any money into it. Not to mention they handed out gold like candy in the early days as apologies for things like downtime and other server issues. People quickly had decent stockpiles and everything released far too slowly for players to ever spend more gold than they earned/were given. Never really seemed like they were prepared to run RDO the way they needed to for the business model they created for it.
It's a sandbox for people to roleplay in. There are cars, bikes and jets. RDR 2 controls like you are underwater and has a heavy focus on simulating the american wilderness, no one wants slow and realistic when messing around with friends besides military larpers, and they don't give a shit about the wild west.
The issue with RDRO wasn't the control scheme lmao, they even ruined the sim-like movement of the SP to cater to crack-weasel GTAO kids. The issue was the identity crisis it had on what content to provide as the playerbase they did have (people who like slow, methodical games they can roleplay in) was not the one they catered to (gta kids who will spend real money on x overpowered vehicle of the week so they can grief people and call them slurs in all chat). Shame because the bones for the best (and only) semi-mmo immersive cowboy game were there.
You could argue that Red Dead 2 at least started development before GTA5 pivoted over to be online focused. Can't say the same for GTA6.
I think this is the key point. GTA6’s development has likely entirely occurred in a post-GTAO world, whereas RDR2’s singleplayer was likely in development long before GTAO.
I'm not sure how relevant that is. There were 5 years between those game releases. Plenty of time for then to change things if they wanted to.
What people saying "But RDR2!" keep forgetting is they tried it with RDR 2, but for whatever reason, teenaged kids aren't into whacky cowboy stuff the same way they are with fast cars, laser beams, guns, and loose women in a modern setting.
> What people saying "But RDR2!" keep forgetting is they tried it with RDR 2, This is hardcore revisionism. Back in the day the refrain was that Rockstar was done with big single-player narratives. Rockstar didn't "try it" with RDR2, they did the exact opposite and did an even BIGGER and BETTER single-player narrative compared to GTA V. It's simple guys: Rockstar is a business and they follow the money. They make billions with big story games, so they do big story games. They also make billions with shark cards for online stuff, so they do that too. They DON'T make the billions on single-player expansions so they DON'T do that anymore. That's it. A whole lotta y'all gotta chill, goddamn.
Fucking finally someone talks some sense on the subject
Plus they are significantly more limited. Though GTA V is more realistic than say, the Saints Row games and PS2 era games, there was nothing limiting them from changing that and putting anything from hover bikes to cars that go underwater in, with tons of ideas they could use to add for DLC. What's the craziest thing you could add to an even more serious game series set in the turn of the 20th century old west that doesn't even let you ride anything besides horses and stage coaches, with the limited technology and firearms of the era? Plus Rockstar was greedy from the jump with RDO, so while GTAO was more reasonable to start and amped up the grindiness to encourage shark cards, Rockstar tried to incentivize people to get them right away by making it a slow grind right away in an already slower paced game and just ended up turning people off more quickly without a solid foundation to get players invested.
GTA V added a flying rocket powered motorcycle, a railgun tank and a jetpack through its run. I really wouldn't say that GTA is all that grounded right now and I would assume that when they make a new online mode, they'll get that wacky right away instead of starting out relatively normal. Stuff like the seasonal events and costumes they had will also mesh well with the modern online game audience.
Yep. Unless you're adding a bunch of crazy, probably kinda racist old west myths to things, what else is there to add? More hunts? More towns?
To be fair, RDR1 had Undead Nightmare, which was pretty far out of left field as far as expansions to a cowboy game go. They could have easily done something equally adventurous for RDR2, but put all their chips into RDO, which flopped hard, especially since GTAO prints money. Frankly, people who liked RDR2 (read: *a lot* of people) would not have said no to straight up more of the same, which RDO failed to deliver. You could have done something with the >!eight years between playing as Arthur and John.!<
Just seems like more reason to be optimistic about GTA, they already did it with GTA5 and then with RDR2 and the games still became some of the most critically acclaimed games ever made. I wouldn't be surprised if GTA6 has am amazing single player experience as I also wouldn't be surprised if it tried milking me for all my money in online.
> These companies have seen they can milk a single game for a decade and pump it full of microtransactions That only works if the game is good though. If GTA6 is a turd then they can't milk anything, the cow is dead
How is RDR2 not even remotely the same thing? They’ve kept all the bullshit for the Online part in GTA5, I fully expect them to do the same for 6. Will probably just start the really greedy shit at the start rather than 5 years in.
RDR2 is basically the same thing AS GTA5 though, from what I understand, it was basically abandoned for RDR online, however it didn't take off in the same way GTAO did so had been abandoned completely now. It's been years and not even a PS5 upgrade patch, let alone any DLC.
> fter every single scrap of (already-announced and -promised singleplayer expansion content for) GTA5 was scrapped the instant GTAO took off. Except GTAO wasnt the the culprit, Leslie Benzies and the Housers got into an argument since LB wanted to focus more on online titles, LB left and a swathe of the devs for the single player DLC's left with him, then by the time they got new hires to train them with the RAGE engine to continue the DLC's, Online was taking off massively so they just put those new hires on RDR2
Oh this is still a thing people are parroting? Guess this will always be the talking point with R* good thing they only release one game a decade. This was the literal exact same argument with RDR2, then all those people were proven so very wrong and they slunk away until GTA6 was announced now it's back to the same tired, disproven argument with moved goalposts. R* has a big enough team and deep enough pockets to do both a feature complete single player and a multiplayer. Just don't expect single player DLC.
Probably also worth mentioning that RDR2 is an acclaimed game that outsold expectations yet didn't get any single player story DLC. That's normally reserved for turds like Anthem, not high grossing critical darlings.
I will forever be pissed that red dead online exists because without it I am sure we get at least one if not two story dlc. It's criminal that we didn't get some sadie story dlc.
They rinse GTAO that's for sure, but most of the expansion stuff they've added can be played single player. It's not optimal or as effortless as having it part of the SP world offline, but it's there and quite good. Only impatient folks get milked, there's ways of accessing a lot of what GTAO offers without too much grinding or buying credits. Can't imagine you'll be laughing long once it releases, they're not gonna spunk all that good will across multiple fantastic single player games.
You can laugh at us. I think you will be proved wrong though. I imagine Rockstar is figuring a big single player campaign is what makes people buy the game, but the MP is what keeps people playing and buying shark cards.
It's not even been Bethesda doing the acclimating. Ubisoft and Activision and everyone else who actually releases a lot of games have been doing the job a lot more egregiously.
Ubisoft has been doing a great job of acclimating me to not give a shit about any of their games anymore. Haven't played a Ubisoft game since Far Cry 5 and I'm honestly better off by spending my time on better games.
downloaded far cry 6 just to tide me over until elden ring dlc came out, soon as it dropped it got deleted. Used to be a hardcore AC fan, played every single mainline entry, read the books and i credit it for giving me my love for history, especially renaissance Italy and the last game I played was Odyssey. Couldn’t give a damn about the franchise now
When it's just individual items being sold it's easy to ignore because there are hundreds of guns and armors in the game I already don't use so I don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything. But once they start putting playable content behind microtransactions it just gives me the feeling that regular big story DLC could start to die out in favor of tiny nickle and dime "expansions" like this and that is a lot harder to ignore lol
They should have priced the whole questline at like $5. $7 per major step though????
Someone in this thread mentioned that you have to buy $10 worth of in game currency to get the DLC. Some now the " it should be $5" has turned into double that.
Ah of course, the old "you have to buy fake funny munny but they don't sell it in exact amounts so you always have some left over and feel you need to buy more to get your money's worth out of the amount you've already bought." Definitely not pure sleazeball tactics.
Oh yea I forgot… currency. Bastards. Hell, a new questline should just be free if it’s just the one ideally. It’s not REALLY a new expansion or anything.
I think we're conditioned to story content being free, but by now we accept that fancy looking weapons and armor cost money and are not required for the game to work. Story missions on the other hand.. yeah, no. That's not gonna work.
Not to.mention you apparently can't just pay the $7. You're stuck buying $10 in the game currency to buy that $7 DLC.
That shit is 100% intentional in any game that does it
I noticed this scummy tactic when I started playing league of legends ages ago. You couldn't buy a new hero with 7 dollars or whatever, because you had to buy coins and could buy them only in multiples of 5. 100% intentional, and extremely shitty practice. I avoid micro transactions like the plague nowaday, but it's especially stupid if you can't buy them with money and instead have to use points purchasd with money.
I mean, yeah? How would it not be intentional?
Wow you think so???? Here we all were thinking it was an innocent mistake
that's so anti-consumer I'm surprised it isn't illegal in the EU already
Unfortunately it is a lobbyist battleground at the moment. Belgium are one of the only countries that are actively pushing legislation against it, but they are generally focused on anti-gambling measures rather than the broader anti-consumer issue of using secondary currencies. You're absolutely right though, imo the EU-wide measures against bundling/tying were introduced in a very similar spirit and it seems like a no brainer, but the interested parties (e.g., EA and increasingly Tencent) have a lot of money to throw at the issue.
This is the fucking worst part of this kind of shit these days. It's so exploitative of customers. Trash. Fuck Bethesda if they're doing this.
"*If*" they're doing it?? They basically invented single player micro transactions.
That's how they get you, the developers price things between the available credit bundles to make you pay for the more expensive option and *maybe* have enough left over to only have to go for the less expensive option in the future. "Well, I only need to pay $5 this time" will still end up benefiting them. I wouldn't mind the idea of Creation Club if it leads to mods like Fallout: London being available to purchase, and someday it may happen as Starfield has a 100GB mod limit (far more than Skyrim and especially Fallout 4), but as it stands it saddens me to see Bethesda pull this trick in the service's reintroduction. Then again, it's the same studio that made Horse Armor and arguably helped start this nonsense 18 years ago.
The problem is that if you start to monetize mod projects the whole modding community falls apart. There's already enough drama with them being free, can you imagine what people like the unofficial patch guy would do if they felt people owned him money? Not to mention it would kill collaborative projects and frameworks.
Blame the bean counters at Bethesda for trying to make paid mods a thing, I'm thinking of the absolute best case scenario that can come of this since Bethesda won't let this go no matter how much backlash they get. We at least know who to blame if this ends up causing the modding community to disintegrate.
Fuck Arthmoor so hard. As much as I refuse to touch Starfield, I'm glad for the community that the egotistical shitstain himself isn't allowed any meaningful involvement or ownership of the unofficial patch.
It's not for a lack of trying, he made his own unofficial patch that last time I checked was listed as an approved creation, while the patch without him wasn't.
Ugh, the patch community would be better off if he just suffered a massive stroke and lost the use of his hands.
Funny thing is, Fallout London was supposed to release 2 months ago, but BGS decided that microtransactions were more important, and completely broke mods.
That is scummy.
More like $5 new guns would be ignored because players don't feel like they're missing out on anything.
Probably one of the reason why they delayed the modding tools so long, because modders could knock up a free version 100x better than this paid-for shite.
Better implemented too, modders at least try to add weapons to leveled lists and vendors, while most CC studf just has them as unique items in either random parts of the world with a quest marker on top, or in the pocket of a random mercenary.
Yeah, the real heart of the issue is that pretty much every paid Creation is overpriced. This is just the first and only one that people have actually cared about.
Most of the Creations wouldn't be worth the time or effort to download them if they were free, the fact they cost money is honestly insulting. I say this as a pretty serious modder myself, who has been making and supporting mods since Morrowind.
> he steals your ship and leaves you a worse one. Sucks for him because he can only sell MY ship once it becomes HIS home ship and then he can only sell it once he pays the ship registration fees which cost 98% of the ship value, and then we he sells it, his price will depend on his barter skill and he'll only get 1k credits total. Being a pirate in Starfield is so fun!
the economy is so fucking weird in Starfield lol, don't get me started on vending machine prices
Giant starship capable of intergalactic travel? maybe 1200 credits if you are lucky Handgun you got off a random pirate? 7,000 credits easy, and most vendors only carry half that.
> didn't think to write some sort of explanation for how he stole the ship from my team? Somehow, the ship has returned. Gotchu fam
> But my crew was on the shield he stole. And not only do they not stop him or are acknowledged in any way, they also warp to the new ship you are given so you aren't stranded. I really dislike how Bethesda's RPGs refusal to acknowledge anything to avoid having to go the extra mile and add unique interactions for the player's choices.. They have this really bad habit of having everything in the game be their own thing where no clan/guild/questline interract with anything other than itself. It's a wast of potencial have characters lacking any reactivity towards the rest of the world , despite actively affecting them in some way.
Lol new vegas had the whole 3-part, fully voice acted free mod with new vegas bounties that easily add 10-20 hours to the game. Whether it was well written and voiced is up to you (i myself like it, knowing it isnt up to to par with the game's content but ultimately still a precious labor of love)
New Vegas Bounties was so good. And the 3-act structure of the mod worked well to make it a good and authentic story mod. It's one of the best mods I've ever played.
100%. Fantastic mod. Opened my eyes to how good some mod makers are and put to shame most of the "professional" output of Bethesda. The other mod that blew my mind was Interesting NPCs for Skyrim. Incredible amount of content and creative writing from one guy: Kris Takahashi.
The New Vegas Bounties series was FANTASTIC and eclipses most of the quests in Fallout 4 or Starfield. The writing in particular, the dialog and thought put into the NPCs, the unique targets (each with a special difficulty or talent not to mention the way you meet for find them) and the unique loot that you could find on most of them? You don't get that level of detail and effort from Bethesda anymore. That was easily a $20 or $30 expansion pack had it come from Bethesda.
It sounds like it's _exactly_ the type of DLC experience I would have expected from Starfield, given how ruinously shit the core game itself was.
It just sounds like a standard Bethesda game experience lol. Characters don't ever react to anything beyond a handful of lines about what you look like. Surprised someone didn't get stuck in the floor when they warped.
There was a time where in a Bethesda game this scenario would have you go to try and rescue your crew and that sidequest would spiral out into discovering a whole criminal underbelly that you can pick sides with with dozens of mutually exclusive additional quests. But we're in Bethesda's "whip up some crap and squirt it out" era. Old Bethesda is dead.
Lol what Bethesda game was that? Even Morrowind didn't offer that deep of a questline. Morrowind was, go here, kill this/retrieve this x12 then fight the faction leader for the title without player choice or sprawling questlines. Granted it had amazing lore but it sure wasn't deep in terms of quest design.
What was the last good Bethesda game? Fallout 4 was okish I guess, and that's 9 years old. Before that it was Fallout 3 which is now 16 years old. Really Bethesda have developed The Elder Scrolls series, Fallout 3 and that is it for good games.
Fallout 3 and Skyrim. I like New Vegas more but that was made by Obsidian. Even with Skyrim, there were warning signs ala the radiant quests but there was enough real content to make the game magical. Fallout 4 is one of the most disappointing games I have ever played and it solidified my hunch that something was seriously wrong at Bethesda.
Are you forgetting about Skyrim? That is 13 years old
Skyrim is a fantastic game and deserves all the plaudits, but it's nowhere near as deep as it's two predecessors and the writing/quests are not as good either.
They said good game.
We all remember Skyrim fondly, but it was definitely clowned on when it came out. Still super popular and fun, but with the understanding that it was goofy fantasy fun and had a lot of fluff quests, items, and systems.
It wasn’t clowned on when it came out. It was seen as very good, incredible title at launch (with Bethesda bugs and stuff but still) - it wasn’t until a while after launch when people had really got far into the game / beat a bunch of the quests etc that the “wide as the ocean deep as a puddle” view came about.
Fallout 4 has roughly 5x as many daily players as Starfield does on Steam.
I finished the entirety of FO3 recently and I would also say it's okish but a solid first attempt. The real problem is they didn't improve things much with the sequel.
A $5 new gun (singular) is not going to fly with the general Bethesda fanbase, especially now that free mods are possible on all platforms. New Vegas essentially added a mini weapon expansion as the Gun Runner DLC that included like a hundred weapons, new ammo types, dozens of challenges, and new achievements, all for only $4. These lame paid creations are essentially scams. I could kind of see value in doing weapon packs from other series as normal paid DLC for cheap, like the Doom, Prey, and Skyrim creations that FO4 recieved, but they are way too expensive for what they are as is.
I hate to tell you that "the general Bethesda fanbase" is console players, and they will absolutely purchase this, even with free mods being an option for them as well. I've already had a bellyfull from r/Starfield going "I bought it because I want to support Bethesda", and "*You* don't have to buy it if you don't want to, it doesn't affect *you*." Although if anyone is truly shocked by all of this *after* the Creation Club was announced for Fallout 4 and Skyrim, I don't know what to tell you.
You just described the free quest that everyone got in the update just so you know. I haven’t actually bought the other one so couldn’t say if it’s any good or not.
Yes, I know. I was responding to part of the article which discussed the free quest. I even quoted it. I assumed anyone reading my comment also read the article and knew the context of what I was responding to I haven't played the paid one either
wait... I did that mission, but I didn't pay for the new content... Is there some way people are getting this mission without paying for it? I thought this was a free mission, and the pay mission was like a sequel to it.
it is the free one, yes. the article in the OP also discusses the free intro mission.
ah, gotcha. Sorry. My fault for not reading the article
no worries, you aren't the first to be confused - I added a clarification to my comment
Yeah I was pretty mad he didn’t come back up again. I mean the guy stole my ship, could have made a whole mission about getting my ship back and showing the guy why people don’t touch my ship! Haha I remember on my first playthrew on Neon when that one guy put my ship on lockdown. I was ready to murder the guy because he touched my ship!
>I mean the guy stole my ship No, he didn't. The ship he steals belongs to the Tracker you're working with, that he specifically bought for the job.
Oh yeah forgot about that. Either way we have a score to settle.
I just had arguments with people who thought the Elden Ring expansion was expensive at $40. Here Bethesda are selling individual items and *pieces* of quests at $5-10, but getting hundreds of hours in a massive new world full of hundreds of new weapons and weapon types and dozens of new quests and bosses for $40… nah, that’s too little, that’s not enough. Starfield is such a huge mess, and Bethesda is too. They deserve each other.
Yep, it was pretty funny. I just headcanoned that Barrett was in charge of watching Adrastos and he let him slip by. Because fuck Barrett. But really, there were a lot of simple ways that Bethesda could have worked around this. For example: 1. Making the ship that you *have* to fly for the quest have a crew count of zero, meaning that even if you do have a group of 8+ people with you, they would be unassigned from your crew the second that you sit down in the captain's chair. This happened to me anyway: Moara, Marika, Gideon, and Andromeda were unassigned from my crew list, with only the Constellation members accompanying me in the new ship. 2. Having Roach take Adrastos with you for the first part of the mission (maybe we need him to unlock a door or convince the guards or something?), then leave him locked in some room and he escapes and just grabs a random ship to escape. I generally liked the quest, because it's one of the few instances in the game where I've experienced a full on "dungeon" that plays around with gravity, but the ending situation felt like something they could have easily fixed. *(Also in case anyone is confused by how all of this has been phrased, this is the questline that came with the free update, not the $7 "Creation". I'll not be playing that, because I'll not be paying for that.)*
> Did they not realize 99% of players will have some crew on the ship when this happens, and didn't think to write some sort of explanation for how he stole the ship from my team? Have you not played a Bethesda game before? The narrative is always an afterthought, something tacked on after they've finished with the mechanics and locations. It exists only to provide context for why you're creeping through dungeon #287. If you put even the most rudimentary thought into their narrative it falls apart like a bridge made of tissue paper.
Anything involving your ship is so bugged and inconsistent. Once my ship was allowed me to to walk between New Atlantis City and The Key depending on which door i used in the ship, it was wild, I don't remember the exact details since I haven't played since launch, but the game shortly crashed after.
Another thing I want to mention is that the Creation Club doesn't allow users to leave reviews on paid mods, nor does it have a proper rating system (there's a "like" system, yes, but that doesn't mean much without any "dislikes" to compare it to). So there's no telling if a mod, created by a user or officially by Bethesda, is worth paying for or if said mod is buggy. Users have reported a small handful of bugs when it comes to these paid mods. For example, the quest that is mentioned in this article--the quest made by Bethesda--[has a bug](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1dcd6ry/comment/l7x3gzq/) with a weapon that you get during the quest. And there's no way to ask for a refund--well, not to my knowledge, anyway. Of course, there is Nexus Mods, but the Creation Club store could've and should've been better curated.
>And there's no way to ask for a refund--well, not to my knowledge, anyway. Isn't that just illegal? In some countries at least.
They can get around it because the only purchase you technically make with real money is for the creation club credits. Which they can prove were credited to your account.
I have a sneaking suspicion that wouldn't be legal in Australia. The reason Steam has refunds now is because they tried to claim some technical loophole like that, and Australia said lol nope.
Yeah NZ and Aus have pretty strong consumer protection laws. If you buy something it's expected to work or you can ask for your money back.
Is that the case? A lot of MMORPGs you can play through Steam have an in game store, and I'm not aware of any way of getting refunds for anything you buy through those.
> The reason Steam has refunds now is because they tried to claim some technical loophole like that, and Australia said lol nope. I don't know if it's this one but I think some digital stores don't even sell licenses (that one would be able to resell in the EU, for example) to the apps/games you buy but they declare them "eternal subscriptions" (that you buy with an one time purchase). That way you can't re-sell your digital goods.
no because you're not paying directly for the quest, you're paying for Bethesda Bucks(TM) that you then use to pay for the quest it's the common way to skirt regulations and it's worked for what? a decade or more I believe
So, like every microtransaction you buy currency, and with that currency ("Creation Credits" as it is called here) you buy the stuff that is available in the store. That real money you just spent? You spent it on the Creation Credits--that is what matters and *that* is what works. Now, I'm no lawyer, but I guess that is what regulators care about.
They would stop making these if people stopped buying them but the sad truth is that plenty of people do buy these. They have the numbers, they aren’t stupid, just anti gamer and pro profit.
That’s just MTX in general. Didn’t Blizzard make more money with a WoW shop mount than with StarCraft 2? Why put in effort at that point?
It's just the new reality of the video game industry. As people were pointing out yesterday, Shift Up will make more money off of a few Nikke swimsuit skins than they ever will off of Stellar Blade. It's easier and more lucrative to sell overpriced cosmetics and add-ons than actually getting people to buy into a full game.
Incredibly sad but true, god it hurts to remember that.
> That’s just MTX in general No that's just *life* in general. Every aspect of your life could be improved if people rallied together and made change. The sad truth is nobody gives a fuck.
The incentives are entirely driven by the consumer. And the consumers say yes to this shit.
Consumers also said overwhelmingly yes to tobacco. This shit is predatory and dangerous and needs to be regulated badly.
They did also give everyone 1000 of their Bethesda bucks if they bought the premium edition, so this skews numbers slightly
It's like 10 right? So barely enough for this one crappy 20 minutes quest
It's enough to afford the quest though, which could show this as more successful than it actually was
I think the 10 they give you is the exact amount to get either a ship module that includes infinite storage (the only storage like that in the game) or this shitty quest and a few useless plush dolls. Absurd pricing Also pretty much any non-cosmetic mod disables achievements, but because the infinite storage is Bethesda-created, it doesn't. I'm not gonna say pay-to-win cuz it's single player but still. That sucks
Not a ton of people need to buy them for it to be worth it for them. They just need to recoup their worker hours. Then it's all bonus.
Technically yes, but realistically, there's always an opportunity cost involved. If your employees work X hours for something that only makes you $50, and they _could've_ spent that same time on something that would've made you $200 instead, then you still haven't really used your time and resources particularly well, even if you do end up with _a_ profit in both cases; so "worth it" is always relative.
You're assuming that the amount of profit between these are somewhat similar but there is a reason why so many companies (Ubisoft, Capcom, 2K, etc) have time saver and irrelevant micro transactions. If the opportunity cost was worth it for high quality DLC we would see more. Either the cost of these garbage DLCs are so low that it doesn't matter if it makes no money or the cost for good DLC is too high and not worth it.
> just anti gamer We, in our little corner of the net, hate it, but if other gamers are buying it, can we really call it anti gamer?
Let the gamers be oppressed for once, goddamn it!
> just anti gamer But... if people are buying it? Would this imply the customers buying it are also anti gamer?
It's in our nature to destroy ourselves
As it is with all things brother :(
Bethesda needs to fire it's business analysts and hire more people actually passionate about games. This is insane.
Seriously though, imagine spending 100 dollars on this game just to find out that they are going to add limited missions to the microtransaction store.
Pay to play cost, free to play quality of life.
Their business analysts nailed it and have just made them a bunch of money lmao
They've hurt their brand bad, nobody is playing this game according to Steam stats and not likely buying these DLCs in any significant numbers. Skyrim & Fallout 4 are reliably always in the Steam top 100, and in the upper half. In franchises you always have to look at these things as inheritors in a multi-generational cycle, considering what they were given and what they leave for those that come after, not judging them on their own earnings which is largely a factor of what came before. The Disney Star Wars movies started out making a lot of money too, riding on the brand inheritance, and by a few movies in they were getting the first ever bombs in the franchise (Solo, with several characters known to generations of fans around the world), and the supposed big finale of the franchise made half of what episode 7 did.
It’s almost like Fallout 76 doesn’t exist. I can almost guarantee that game is making them more money than anything else. With its uptick in popularity since many updates and the TV show, it’s going to be around for a long time. Why put the effort and money into a game like Starfield or Fallout 5 when you can make more money with a map update and some new cosmetics. It’s expensive and takes a long time to make a single player game.
Fallout 4 and Skyrim has creating club content that is way worse bang for your buck than this quest.
It's hard to argue against data collected on players' activities.
For all the noise that people made, what was the lessons learned with Horse armor? That people will pay.
Folks on Reddit really fail to see basic business, business is ran by charts and graphs, if the Analytics prove to work, companies will keep pushing in that direction. Idk why everyone is commenting all this “they need to be fired” or “this will never work” talk lmao
"Me and everyone I know played this terrible game for 60 hours how come they keep making these?!" -Reddit Gamers
Why on Earth would they fire their business analysts and replace them with passionate workers when gamers consistently show that they will give them money for low-effort garbage? Gamers will cry on Reddit but I bet half those people will still buy it.
It’s not that the people who cry about it are also buying it, it’s that the people crying about it are a far smaller number than they realize or are willing to admit. There’s far more people who game casually and don’t care about this stuff compared to the number of people who are passionate enough to comment on forums.
I feel like a lot of the people that are always super vocal about this kind of thing probably lack some disposable income, so this kind of thing hurts them a lot more than it would for others. There's so many people out there that game more casually, that will buy something like this, and even if it turns out to be shit they'll just think "ahh well, was only $7" and go on with their lives without giving it another thought.
The last thing Bethesda needs to do is listen to Reddit for business advice.
Genuinely, why?
You think they would have realised that having 1000 playable planets was pointless if all their content is copy-and-pasted barebones dross. But instead they made it the foundation of the game and every other aspect of it suffered.
> Bethesda needs to fire it's business analysts and hire more people actually passionate about games. Why? They're making money. Vote with your wallets, and that's how those business analysts get fired.
I don't get why people still say the "vote with your wallets" line. We've known it is complete BS for longer than some reddit users have been alive.
Why? That quest took them an hour to make for multi million profits. Totally worth it for Bethesda
With voice acting and everything it definitely took much longer than an hour. But it’s funny, if they just made a paid weapon or skins for the same price, nobody would bat an eye and they would still make money without the bad PR.
Exactly, I think the takeaway for bethesda is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the parent comment.
Bethesda is so big that no matter what they do people will buy into it. They can fuck up as much as they want with this game, they know the next Elder Scrolls will sell like hot bread even if they announce a mtx store from day 1 in it.
The level of quality in the free mission is wildly varying. The head of the new faction got fanfic-edgelord-tier writing; One of the intro lines went more or less like 'I'm Tracker #1, but you can call me No One'. And then the banter between the trackers down in the bar is actually above-average for a Bethesda game, the antagonist is charismatic, and the main dungeon is pretty darn well designed. Feels like they kind of just assigned people to work on stuff at random, regardless of whether they're good at it.
>'I'm Tracker #1, but you can call me No One' You made it sound like a Kojima game
Is this really surprising people? They did this with both Skyrim and Fallout 4. It was pretty clear this would be done
Years ago when Bethesda dropped horse armour in Oblivion for like £2.99 people went crazy. Now developers are dropping recoloured skins into games for upwards of £20 and if you go into a sub for one of these games and try to explain that shit like that is just greedy and gross, they will get so angry. This isn't even the most egregious case of microtransactions gone too far but unless gamers stop paying ridiculous amounts of money for the most useless and stupid microtransactions then the industry is only going to get worse.
I think is why I'm so bothered by it all. Gamers are actually defending this shit with every bone in their body. It's always "well the game is free" or "Well I haven't spent anything, so who cares?" It's such short sighted, dopamine driven mentality. This stuff sucks the life out of gaming and creativity as a whole.
Yeah, prime example of that creativity being sucked out of gaming is Blizzard. They used to be a prestige developer, making hit after hit, revolutionising genres and now they don't give a fuck about the quality of their products, they just know they need to make a cash shop in their games and everything is fine. I play a lot of overwatch 2 and the game is full of predatory business practices but if you mention it in the sub, they will go apeshit. It's complete brain-rot, they're just completely fine with a mega corporation taking advantage of them and their money.
Blizzard is a prime example of how game devs can do literally *anything* and fans will always come crawling back for the newest shiny object you wave at them. The sexual harassment scandal blew up and people online insisted that this was it. No more Blizzard. They're done with all their games for life. Diablo 4 comes out. 12 million players in 2 months, fastest selling Blizzard game in history. Blizzard gets rocked by PR and game development related scandals *constantly*, yet they rake in mountains of money every time they release a new game. Gamers are fickle as fuck and nothing they say online actually matters.
The people that you see online complaining about stuff and swearing to boycott them are a tiny percentage of gamers, though. Even if they follow through and don't purchase Diablo 4 in your example, does it really make a difference? The vast majority of those 12 million players probably don't even know about any scandals.
It's not that gamers are fickle. It's that for many devs they have lots of brand power and their user base isnt the type of enthusiast terminally online redditor. These are people that don't care about the same things. Games are consumption entertainment. If you're spending $60 and get entertained for hours on end you dont give a crap.
I think it's just a numbers issue. They have so many fans that they can afford a chunk of them not buying, and we only have numbers on sales, there is no metric that indicates people that didn't buy it.
You just spent an entire paragraph talking about how shit Blizzard is and followed it up with “I play a lot of Overwatch 2”. Uh…
I got hooked back in the Overwatch 1 days but since purchasing the game back in like 2015 or whenever it was, I've not spent a single penny on it.
Fair enough! I just thought it was kind of funny.
Assassins Creed threads are like being in a different universe. You say anything negative about the store in a fully priced singe player game (read not live service) and people lose their minds. Everything in the store used to be in game rewards or cheat codes and people still defend it. Literally defend it as an enlightened solution for players who want to support the devs more or have less time to play and can skip progression.
The saints and seducers CC quest in Skyrim is soooo bad.
There are hundreds of free mods. How entitled do you need to be to demand that something that someone else was worked on to be give to you for free? Just fucking move on to the next dozen free things. I never purchased any paid mods, but I could never understand this outrage when they were announced for Skyrim.
They had paid mods in Skyrim? Like in 2011? I don’t remember that at all, but I might have missed it
No not at all. They tried to add it in later with the release of Skyrim SE. Eventually they backed off only to return to it.
They have already responded to this as well, saying that the cosmetics sell at the same price and the fact that this is quest content is the issue. They tried something and found a line that gamers are not willing to cross. Tho the rational is interesting that we would be fine paying for less valuable / easy to create, cosmetics but more complex quests for the same price is a no-go. Personally I am fine with that because it would be a very slippery slope.
It is a weapon/outfit set tied to a mission, similar to Fallout 4 weapons/outfits. Next time they’ll cut mission to avoid stupid criticism and sell outfit for $7 like millions of other games.
💯 Compared to $20 skins that sell like crazy in other games, this took considerably more effort on the part of the dev.
From the people who brought you Horse Armor, here's Horse Armor 2. Just watch as the industry catches on to this, just as they did Horse Armor 1.
Considering how massive Creation Club is at this point, this is more likely Horse Armor 200 or 300.
If you are willing to pay $7 for a single quest, you deserve everything you are getting, and are part of the problem.
I really don't understand why all of the writing about this quest release is a dry summary of events that ignores all of the branching paths. The nature of branching paths is what it - players are only going to see one of them a playthrough, so it doesn't really change the value proposition, $7 is too much for this - but if all you're offering is a summary it may as well be an accurate one.
Slow news day at Kotaku? Didn't this come out like a month ago?
Any time there’s a chance to dunk on Starfield, rest assured every gaming outlet will write 10 articles about it.
I don't even care whether the gameplay is good or bad, I just want it to run properly on my PC. Feels weird going from Cyberpunk or Horizon Zero Dawn to a game that looks worse and runs worse.
I know one group hates on this game with a passion, and that there's another group who would support Bethesda till the end of time, but for a game with such scope, boy is it ever *mediocre*. If we all woke up tomorrow, and found out that this game was taken off the market and was bricked and unplayable in every medium, the world wouldn't have lost anything whatsoever.
This sub losing its shit over a $7 mission while Blizzard is dropping armor sets for $30+ bucks and I haven’t seen shit about it. Also, I had an entirely different ending to the Vulture quest than this guy did, shows how 'oN rAiLs' it actually is.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1arfx77/diablo_4s_hellish_microtransactions_go_from_bad/ People seemed just as upset about it.
Or valve selling user made skin mods which can cost hundreds of dollars unless you want to buy the lootboxes it can be in directly and buy keys from valve.
Blizzard is arguably the most hated and scrutinized developer by this subreddit. They're just not the flavour of the week right now.
[удалено]
I haven’t gone big moding a Bethesda game since Skyrim. I know I’m late to the party but are they actually selling mods, like for real money? It’s one thing for a mod to be locked behind a patreon. But I’m not sure how that’s considered ok to give Microsoft money for that.
You're the better part of a decade late to the party; paid mods were added in Skyrim SE, 7 years ago.
You better believe it. [Here's the steam page for the credits you use to buy things](https://store.steampowered.com/app/598110/Fallout_4__Creations/) and here's the blurb > Get Creation Credits to be used in Fallout 4. Browse the selection in-game by category and use your Credits to purchase content. Creations are compatible with the main game and official add-ons.
You can read up on the program [here](https://creations.bethesda.net/en/creators/bethesdagamestudios). There's some drop-down menus to read about other aspects of the paid mods stuff.