How does this even make sense? You can’t pay more in taxes than the earnings you’re paying taxes on. If you deliberately cause a 10 million loss reducing your earnings by those 10 million and thereby saving a percentage of those 10 million in taxes, you’re not very good at math, are you?

It looks like an Octopath spin-off. Which is a good thing.

As a direct comparison? Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. But pretty much everything Bioware up to Dragon Age Origins.

the companion back stories are rich, and full of tragedy.

The thing is, they’re mostly exposition dumped at you. All of them already went through the worst of it and tell you about it. To me, Larian fell in the old TTRPG trap of making up those elaborate grandiose backgrounds for your characters and expecting the other players to be impressed instead of writing the story of their adventures during the actual game.

I was there when Jaheira found Khalid’s corpse. I accompanied Nalia when she came back to a ruined home and a dead father. I broke Imoen out of the wizard’s asylum.

Karlach told me how bad the hells used to be and we proceeded to make a few trips to the blacksmith together. Wyll told me of his pact and his crazy adventures, the rest just happened to us at camp. Gale told me he banged a goddess and I got to make a persuasion check at the end. Astarion told me of the torture he suffered, and the resolution was done in 2 fights after we met zero vampires before the last room (BG2’s Bodhi and her lair were so much ahead of this it’s not even funny).

Shadowheart is the only one I felt had a story that I actually experienced with her and wasn’t just politely informed of. Oh, and Minthara, but the evil play through really got the short straw in any other way.

Larian’s writers can’t hold a candle to the Bioware of old.

Article without tracking paywall bullshit.

So, the player frustration this quest is inspiring isn’t a straight-up next entry in the long-running paid mods debate that’s been going on within the Bethesda community with regards to the Creation Club for a while now, but rather folks simply being unhappy with the monetisation practices Bethesda’s employing with regards to its own stuff.

I suppose that will be part of it, but it takes a load of willful ignorance to not see that the reason they distribute it this way is to ease people into the idea of using the infrastructure they ultimately set up to monetize other people’s work (i.e. mods).

With how frequently they get hacked, Sony is the last company you want to trust with any of your data. Might as well post all of it on a public facebook page.

If I were a dev, that wouldn’t be my priority in a first person Game either.

I repeatedly spend time deciding on clothing choices etc for my character only to proceed to never actually see them outside the menu.

Well, yeah, XIV as an MMO is a different thing. But that one also doesn’t have revenue issues afaik.

Maybe it’s because Final Fantasy peaked at VII-X and went downhill from there, fucking up their combat further and further with every installment?

The average movie isnt worth ticket price either

The worth of a thing is determined by what people will pay for it.

length certainly doesn’t equal quality.

For any single product that’s true, statistically it makes the two classes (games and movies) comparable.

I don’t think you’ll earnestly want to argue that 1 hour of movie entertainment is in general worth multiple hours of gaming entertainment. There are good and bad movies and games, but if you compare those of similar quality, the fact stands that the game will give you more for your money. Whether you want more of course depends on you - I gather that gaming doesn’t seem to really entertain you for the most part.

If the game cost $20, they’d have to sell about 120k copies to break even on that Investment,

Far more actually. You have to deduct taxes, steam’s cut etc. from those 20$.

That’s a movie ticket and a snack. Most games offer far more (or at least longer) entertainment than that. Even games I won’t finish.

And people still have to lift heavy shit, crawl around in dangerous spaces and generally harm their health to make a living.

Wait for the kernel level anti cheat to be revealed before you get hyped.

FF16 to me is paper thin in every regard. I would rank it last among all the FF games I’ve played. The combat is especially bad. You can basically button mash your way through all of it. Dodge a lot, that’s it.

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Guess I finally have a reason to upgrade …

BotW was originally developed for the WiiU, which it also released on. It is not a “handheld game”, and tbh I’d take it’s gameplay loop over Nier Automata or Shadow of War any day of the week.

I’m in my 30s. I’m gradually getting calmer. But seriously, if a game doesn’t induce the urge to throw objects around the room from time to time, it probably won’t make my list of favourites.