Been playing Melvor Idle, really great one that replicates old school runescape’s Skilling experience as an idle game. I also enjoy Impossible Dungeon quite a bit as well, top down auto dungeon crawler where you earn points to upgrade and customize a party for getting as far down a dungeon as you can and competing with other players in tournaments and dailies.

I think there’s a strong possibility you’re correct, especially with that genre. When it comes to purely competitive games continual new content and adjustments keep the masses coming back, and providing those things long term with no monetization is a business suicidal idea, and I think that strong reasoning like that excuses a lot of the cynicism and bad faith behind MTX in those specific cases provided its still relatively fair.

I give you an A+ for an actual strong argument for MTX (in those and related cases)

Personally, yeah, I find it much less offensive if the extra purchases do not nag you in-game and their presence is not missed or noticed in terms of affecting balance.

For example, Middle Earth Shadow of War infamously let you buy Uruks. Having played the fuck out of that game I can confidently say the game was balanced such that you never needed to do that (apart from the end game grind, but the grind is the gameplay, so if you hit end game and didnt want to grind, you just didn’t wanna keep playing), but having it appear in the menus was jarring and the idea of buying an Uruk with real money juxtaposed next to the mechanical intent of obtaining Uruks through exploration, marking, stalking, and exploiting their weaknesses just stuck out like a cynical sore thumb.

If they put the Uruk purchases outside the game with no in-game ads and I played through Shadow of War and was like “man holy shit, my Uruks cannot keep up with the curve, this is insanely grindy” and I discovered that you could buy them and skip it, I’d say thats dastardly as well.

But the happy medium would be balancing it so it wasn’t necessary, but providing an external purchase to milk that revenue if they really still wanted to. That example is moot now anyway since they eventually removed the MTX Uruks entirely.

I know and understand the whole idea of maximizing artist hours for cosmetic DLC. It’s an understandable reason for it to exist.

However, the big thing about MTX to me is the way it changes my perception of the game and how it feels to interact with it. Playing games without in-game cash shops or MTX allows me to focus on the game itself and feel that what I’ve purchased is one cohesive piece that works in a singular purpose towards a goal of something enjoyable to play and rewarding to explore the content of.

Something like Prey 2016. My entire memory and experience of playing that game is absolutely nothing but the experience of the lore, atmosphere, gameplay, decisions, and the creativity of exploration. At no point was I ever passing over menu options designed to sell me more piecemeal content, I wasn’t wading through a reel of battle pass cosmetics, I wasn’t attempting to ignore little rectangular ads on the main menu asking me to check some skins out.

And again, I totally understand why those things are there and I’m not inherently against their existence, I enjoy many games where those experiences are a part. In the end, I just believe that being free of that stuff absolutely makes a game feel perceptibly better and more pure, more of a game and less of a transparently monetized product.

I also feel like there’s a sort of forbidden knowledge aspect to the whole “maximizing artist labor time for cosmetic MTX”. The best way for cosmetic MTX to happen is to utilize extra possible labor time that couldn’t be used elsewhere. I’d love to believe that any cosmetic MTX took no time or development from any other part of the game. I’d love to believe that no amazing visual design for armor or weapons was held because its more premium appearance would better fit a paid item than a free base game one.

But you’ll never know that for sure. There will always be that inkling of cynical doubt that the cool item got a price tag and the okay one ended up in the base game. That the visual artists are so burnt making constant art for base game and then MTX that their energy couldn’t be focused solely on the core experience. I can assume, I can take the company’s word for it, but I’ll never be able to cleanse my mind of the knowledge that it’s a separate kind of content from the base game.

It’s more of a “are good games with microtransactions good regardless of MTX or in spite of them?”

You can totally have a good game with MTX, but I think it always lowers the quality in some way, and they’re only good in spite. I don’t think OP is suggesting that no MTX guarantees a good game, but that a game should stand on its own merits and sell its whole experience instead of chopping itself up piecemeal

I’m sure there is a small amount of extra port work that would need to be done, the big one I can think of is text box size.

If the Switch version of those EDF games has a unique layout or size of its menus or text boxes compared to previous English localizations, then there would be some amount of new work involved in making sure all lines of text are sized appropriately, or edited if they do not fit correctly.

Past that, it’s hard to see why they haven’t put them out, I would love to play them again!

And to your other comment, I’m on a Kbin instance that has a funny time setting, you’re right. I wish I could just say I’m a cool dude from the future.

Third parties do it for me. Sadly, I wish Nintendo would release official ergonomic joy cons. Instead I must buy something Chinese with questionable QC, to get something fully featured compared to the feature-neutered but high-quality Hori licensed ones.

What’s the the unhelpful hostile attitude? Is it still 1996 where it’s cool to shit on people for not knowing everything about what they’re doing and call them “noobs”?

I mean on the Switch specifically, where Japan has many more options than where I live in America. They just haven’t been localized yet, when they already have localizations from their respective systems, like you say. They’ve already been translated, just lemme play them!

EDF is a perfect portable game to me, so I wish it was available globally on the currently best portable system.

Still waiting on some of the older legit EDFs to make their way to English speaking countries on Switch. At least I can still play the PS Vita ports, but it’s crazy to me that they brought World Brothers here but not any others!

It’s hard to outrun that kind of human interaction anywhere that there are enough users and the anonymity of usernames, I do think it’s not as bad on the Fediverse still, I hope it stays that way

The hilarious thing about My house.wad is that if you go in without knowing anything about it there’s a relatively high chance you just complete the level normally and think “that’s it? weird that had so much hype”

Nothing about Lemmy would suggest people would like Epic anymore than any other place on the internet. Their exclusivity deals have the potential to upset anybody regardless of what website they post on, so while there’s absolutely a degree of hivemind hatred, it’s rooted in understandable reasons.

That being said, it’s disingenuous of that person to imply that Epic never gives any good reasons to use the platform, the biggest being the waves of free games they put on “sale” from time to time, though you could go down another rabbit hole of whether thats really something that would make gamers want to use the platform, or if it’s just a nice bonus people pop in to claim while still spending their money on Steam when it comes to actual purchases.

Traditional game ownership already ended once after the popularization of digital downloads, but you’re right, it could end all over again in an even more dire way if cloud gaming gets popularized as well.

You can include all of the Ace Attorney games in the DS visual novel category, and I can thank them for gatewaying me into visual novels in general. Also throwing in 999 since it wasn’t mentioned yet and is great.

I far prefer visual novels to real books. Visual novels allow for more “showing not telling” of an environment and a character’s mood, allowing you to sort of “skip” all the stage setting description of an environment, though a developer can totally insert more description if they like, so it lets them control the pacing more tightly.

The controlled “dialogue box by dialogue box” progression of a traditional visual novel also allows for tight control of the reveal of information. I’m sure many people can relate to reading a book, and accidentally reading a section far ahead they didn’t intend to while flipping to an incorrect page. This box by box approach allows interesting games like Doki Doki Literature Club to reveal information deliberately and immediately for maximum impact, where a book may reveal a twist if the reader happens to glance further down the page.

I also find having character art/voice acting helps me to remember and separate different characters more easily than just using my own memory and imagination, half a benefit, half a symptom of my smooth brain.

Unless character skin, hair, eye colors etc. are specifically described in a book they tend to just become a homogenized blob of generic person in my head, and I’ve read books where I formed a mental image of a character, only for a line to be dropped later that causes me to have to change what they looked like in my head. The weight of the imagination on the experience of books can in that way be a blessing and a curse.

There are also lots of visual novels with exceptional soundtracks that heavily aid the atmosphere and emotion in a game, such as Ace Attorney, or Danganronpa. This introduction of other media to the format can also be taken further towards games like the ever cult popular Persona series in which RPG turn based gameplay is fused with time management, choice, and heavy visual novel elements, to varying effect. Though the soundtracks are always bangin’.

As much as visual novels can aid the experience, they can also let it down in more ways than books. A book really just needs to deliver on its premise, and a writing style and story that the reader enjoys. A visual novel must satisfy in story, writing style, music, gameplay (if any), visual style, voice acting (if any), etc.

And, due to their higher degree of complexity, visual novels are often more expensive than books to boot.

Was it like that when the game was fresh and you were getting into it in the beginning, or just after youd put the hours into it, and the novelty wore off?

It’s funnily enough part of why I continue to return to it. Competitive games as a service are too much, I dislike having to keep up with an ever inflating hero pool and a constantly changing Meta. I can just enjoy the gameplay polished to a sheen and the natural depth

For me, Fallout 3’s setting and atmosphere is more interesting to me. Plus nostalgia plays a much heavier aspect since it was my first Bethesda Fallout and the premise and mechanics of the world were more novel.

Gameplay wise 4 blows both of the others out of the water for me due to the addicting loop of collecting salvage and modifying equipment, along with the shooting finally becoming enjoyable in its own right.

Playing Heroes of the Storm vs AI, the Hitman WoA trilogy, Left 4 Dead 2, and Diablo 3 Hardcore. I can always chill on this stuff and know it’ll be a good time

Ooh, that’d have to be Monster Hunter for me. For a while it’s fun, then it becomes pain