• TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    8-bit DRM-removal patcher program music plays

    3 command prompt windows pop up in the background and quickly disappear.

    “Fuck. What were those?”

  • HurlingDurling@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The fact that the game hasn’t been fully released yet and they are including a DLC if you buy the premium version, is just asking me to pirate it.

      • escapesamsara@discuss.online
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        1 year ago

        Sure, if the DLC isn’t cut content from the game. That’s the problem. If they have already developed the content, then it should be released with the rest of the game, for the price of the game. DLC, should it be developed at all, should be an expansion beyond the original scope of development funded by the excess profit from the game.

        • anonono@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          the worst fucking offender at this has to be Mass Effect, and this is coming from someone who deeply loves Mass Effect.

          I don’t buy DLC on principle, I will buy a proper expansion but not a DLC, so when I started Mass Effect 3 I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. I had to google it because the start of the game ties in with a DLC from the second game, what a crock of shit.

          • landsharkkidd@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            Yep big fan is Mass Effect here and I will FOREVER be mad at the Day one DLC for Javik. I finally got him in Legendary Edition and oh my God, he is so essential to so many stories, especially Thesia mission. Like holy shit!

            I think the start of Mass Effects 3 they change it based off of if you played the DLC of Arrival. Because from my understanding, Shepard is in jail because they work with Cerberus, whereas if you have the DLC it’s because of the Batarians.

        • scubbo@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          If they have already developed the content, then it should be released with the rest of the game, for the price of the game.

          Why? Genuine question. What does it matter to you as a consumer when the content was developed?

          If the point you’re actually trying to make is “if the game is developed as a whole, but then content is carved out such that the base game then feels incomplete without it”, then this is already covered: a game which feels incomplete is inherently flawed, and so doesn’t justify the price of a full game. That’s my original point - most people are actually just pissed at inaccurate or unfair pricing, and DLC can enable that (but doesn’t have to), so they misdirect their anger to all DLC instead.

          • escapesamsara@discuss.online
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            1 year ago

            When a company actually exists that utilizes your view of DLC, then it might be a valid criticism of the phrasing; but zero day one DLC released for any game has been anything but carving up a complete product into an incomplete main product and several DLCs to increase the price without increasing the price. Oblivion was the first example of this. Horse Armor was already developed.

            • scubbo@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              When a company actually exists that utilizes your view of DLC, then it might be a valid criticism of the phrasing

              No, that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make - “every example of X that has existed so far is Y” does not imply “by definition, X is provably and definitively always Y”.

              You can claim that all DLC that has ever existed is predatory and exploitative (I suspect there are counter-examples; but, fine, whatever, not relevant to my point). You can say that, because of past performance, you are disinclined to trust future examples of DLC or give them the benefit of the doubt. That is all reasonable. But you can’t conclude “because all DLC so far has been bad, the concept of DLC as a whole is bad and can never be used well”.

              As a super-simple example - here are some prime numbers: 5, 11, 37. Are all prime numbers odd? I can give you a bunch more examples if you want!

          • TawnyFroggy [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Day 1 DLC, no matter how optional it might be in practicality, is 100% a tactic to make people feel like they need to pay more to get the “complete” version of the game.

            • scubbo@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              “_Every person who has ever done in the past, has done it with and it had _” does not imply “_The only reason anyone could possibly ever do is with to achieve _”. That’s a valid reason to be cautious, but not a reason to make blanket statements about an entire category of thing.

              EDIT: for Day1 DLC in particular, a totally valid and non-exploitative reason for it is “we had a release date that we absolutely had to hit (because of marketing, contracts, etc.), which necessitated calling a production halt well in-advance of the release date for QA and testing - but instead of moving on to the next project, developers worked on more stuff for the same game. If that was too complex or didn’t work out, we could drop it and no-one would complain; but if we’d kept developing it in the base game, and resulted in a slipped release date, there would be hell to pay

        • TheAndrewBrown@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I dont think you’re thinking about this right. Stuff like DLC has never been funded from profits of a specific game, that’s not how company finances work. They may decide to create an expansion or extension of a product they weren’t planning if a product does better than expected, but a lot of time, it’s too late by then and you’ve missed the wave to capitalize on the success. Most things like this are planned pretty early on based on the projected success. The base game and the DLC might even have separate budgets.

          And all that to say, the DLC shouldn’t factor into your evaluation of a game at all. If you would like the amount of content in the game if the DLC never existed, then they added enough. You aren’t owed more content because of when they developed it, that’s absurd thinking. And if it for some reason got coded into law, it wouldn’t make anyone add more content to the base game, they’d just wait until after the game is released to start developing it. Which would make for a worse experience for both the company and consumer.

          I agree with the person you replied to: if a game feels incomplete, then that’s the problem. I’m not going to pay for an incomplete game, regardless if it has DLC or not. But if a game is complete and I enjoy it, I’ll pay for DLC to get more experience from it and it doesn’t matter to me when the DLC is developed.

            • TheAndrewBrown@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Yeah I don’t understand this mindset. It’d be like saying it shouldn’t be allowed for cars to have different versions with more features because they were developed together. DLC is supposed to be an additional feature like lane assist or something. You can get just the base version for cheaper or you can get a version with more features but you pay more. If the product sucks without the extra features than the problem is an incomplete product.

              I get that we want to pay less and get more, but they can’t give away stuff for free.

    • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Right? Looks like their Bethesda purchase was the best investment for new content. Starfield, Hi Fi Rush, the Quake II remaster (we don’t talk about Redfall).

  • Selmafudd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Oh shit this is good news, I looked at it yesterday and it’s $120 here and instantly thought fuck that I’ll wait until it’s cracked

      • Selmafudd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Australia, they love price gouging us here. Just went and checked steam again, the premium version is $170…

        • dan1101@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          How much is a decent middle class income in Australia? I’d say it’s about $45,000 per year in the US.

            • dan1101@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              So higher relative income in Australia.

              How much is 4 liters of milk and 4 liters of petrol in Australia? 4 liters because that about equals a US gallon which is our usual measurement for those things.

              In the US right now a gallon of milk is about $2.65 and a gallon of petrol is about $3.80.

        • landsharkkidd@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Yeah I have Game Pass so I was pretty keen to play the early access but when I found out it was $170, just to play 5 days earlier? No fucking thank you.

          I’m spending that money on an SSD because my partner bought the deluxe version and running it on my computer is arse. My computer isn’t even that bad!

          • rotopenguin@infosec.pub
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            1 year ago

            There’s a lot that goes into an Australian release. Shipping all those bits to the bottom of the world is outrageously expensive. All of the map geometry has to be altered to be right-side up there. The physics math has to be re-coded to deal with -1g gravity. Somebody has to be paid to go through all of the scripts to replace every instance of “jelly” with “marmite”. Asset loading code has to be changed to compensate for the Coriolis effect.

            All of this adds up to expensive Au ports, the new costs often overshadowing the title’s original development costs.

          • Dave@lemmy.nz
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            1 year ago

            This site says $11.95AUD, the equivalent of $7.72USD.

            As for the $170 premium version, that’s $170AUD. Australia has 10% GST (VAT) so 170/110*100 = $154.55AUD excluding tax.

            $154AUD is $99.64USD.

            They aren’t getting gouged, well, at least not worse than US customers.

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
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        1 year ago

        Probably a country where the dollars are worth a different amount.

  • rotopenguin@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    Eh. By the time I have hardware that can actually play Starfield, it’ll be a GoG giveaway.

  • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe I’m just old but $70 base is too much for any game let alone one from a studio with known issues

    • offspec@lemmy.nicknakin.com
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      1 year ago

      Games have been the same price for over thirty years, they’ve not changed with inflation and production costs have skyrocketed. To an extent the increased market has helped keep costs down for the consumer but it’s not unreasonable to see prices shift upwards.

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What about the cost of disc media that’s absolutely disappeared? That was a huge chunk of the overhead. Logistics to get the copies to all the stores, etc.

        Now it’s just electricity and servers to download from.

        Do you ever notice that no one ever talks about all the advancements that saved money? Of course not, cause then they’d never be able to justify continually hiking the prices up.

        • Corroded@leminal.space
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          1 year ago

          Lots of games today force some sort of online element (ex. Cloud saves, workshop content, multiplayer, etc.) I wonder how much that costs them to maintain. I can’t imagine it’s that significant if they are dealing with multiple single player games.

          • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Probably not as much as the money they derive from the live service model.

            Businesses do what makes them the most money.

        • ThunderWhiskers@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I am genuinely not trying to sound like a studio apologist, because there are myriad reasons to be upset with them, but y’all need to think these arguments through a little better. I haven’t pulled up any numbers, but are we really going to pretend that the cost of producing a game in 1990 is even remotely comparable to that of a modern day AAA game? The fact that video game costs have remained relatively steady and even decreased in some cases for decades should be astonishing.

          Pick a different argument.

          • thedrivingcrooner@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Pick a non-strawman argument and then we can have a discussion. They had different methods of creating games yes, but were they easier back then than they are now? I don’t think so, they had people inventing the fucking wheel of what could be possible and we still had a consistent price tag with a FEATURE COMPLETE package. They didn’t have as many workers as they did because all of the programming went to those individual developers to figure out. The amount of work is more intricately spread out in these bigger studios, but the passion and creativeness was more alive back in the early days. None of it was automated with fully polished dev tools and externally hired language teams.

            • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
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              1 year ago

              How are you missing that you are literally comparing a team of 5 programmers and artists to games made by 500+ people?

              I mean seriously you can read, that alone should be enough.

            • Aux@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The only strawman argument here is yours. Most people wouldn’t play a game released today if it looked like Pong and had the same gameplay features. Also, there are a lot more wheels to invent today.

          • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            There’s no way in hell that paying steam is more expensive than buying dics, putting your game on those discs, putting those discs in cases, and then paying to ship those cases all over the world.

            Know how I know? Because businesses do whatever is the most profitable, and clearly digital distro is cheaper since we’ve been pushing for it since it was invented.

      • Maladius@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah my parents were paying $60 for NES games for me… Which is why I had like 3 NES games. The only reason game aren’t $180 now is competition… And reproducibility vs size of market… And physical media is cheap or non-existent. Ok there are a few reasons, but still…

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      Eh, to me I usually just convert it to $ per hour of enjoyment. Will I get 10 hours of enjoyment? 100? 1000?

      If it’s a great game and I think I’ll get 1000 hours out of it, even if it’s $70 that’s like $0.07 per hour.

      Compare that to paying $30 to go see a 1.5 hour movie at the theater and you’re doing pretty darn good I think. Even if you only get 10 hours out of it thats $7 an hour for entertainment vs the $20 an hour for a movie.

    • Khalmoon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I always found it kinda funny how gamers rage about the poor quality of games, but bugs with Bethesda is almost an expectation

      • Corroded@leminal.space
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        1 year ago

        Do you really get that vibe? I feel like a lot of people refer to Bethesda games as a buggy mess. There’s the whole Bugthesda thing.

        I think all the mods designed to improve performance have helped the reputation a bit but I still wouldn’t play Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 due to the bugs.

        • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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          I see both. For some reason there are still a lot of people who like their games despite the bugs and will defend them very vocally. I understand liking what you like (even if I strongly disagree) but it never makes sense to say an obvious issue isn’t an issue

          • Corroded@leminal.space
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            1 year ago

            A lot of the time I think they are overlooking the bugs and focusing on the game as a whole. Kind of with the mentality that once you get past the buggy husk you get the tasty kernels inside.

            Fallout 3 (through Steam) was unplayable without mods for a while because Games For Windows Live was used as DRM and was shutdown years ago but if you checked the Steam reviews a significant amount of people omitted this or were fine with the game (mostly) working once you got over that hurdle.

            Personally I didn’t think this was unacceptable considering the GOG version worked fine but it goes to show the mentality people have.

  • TheBlue22@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I never pre order games

    I never buy games full price

    And I definitely do not buy Bethesda games before playing them and seeing how broken they are and if I enjoy them.

    I never ever bought a Bethesda game before cracking it and playing for at least a few hours. Bethesda just does not deserve it.

    • Corroded@leminal.space
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      1 year ago

      And I definitely do not buy Bethesda games before playing them and seeing how broken they are and if I enjoy them.

      I never ever bought a Bethesda game before cracking it and playing for at least a few hours. Bethesda just does not deserve it.

      I mean if a demo isn’t being offered what else can you do?

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Buy it on Steam, play for 2 hours, full refund if unhappy? Trying out games has never been easier these days.

        That said, I’m in full support of pirating first and buying if you continue playing. I probably have hundreds of hours in Skyrim, but it only shows a few hours on Steam because I did exactly that 😋

        • Someone64@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Besides the other points already brought up regarding this, 2 hours is just too short. Games like this often have long startup times, long intros, etc… and it’s just not enough to get a good impression of the game. At least with demos you get a good vertical slice preview of what you’re getting into.

        • Corroded@leminal.space
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          1 year ago

          Buy it on Steam, play for 2 hours, full refund if unhappy? Trying out games has never been easier these days.

          Weren’t there some issues with people no longer being able to refund games after doing it too many times?

          That said, I’m in full support of pirating first and buying if you continue playing. I probably have hundreds of hours in Skyrim, but it only shows a few hours on Steam because I did exactly that 😋

          That’s what I did with Hotline Miami. Since then I’ve bought it 5 times. No regrets I love that game.

    • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
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      1 year ago

      How much of a toddler do you have to be to not understand that video games were 50-60 dollar for decades? Also, can you give a single example of something that costs $70 but can entertain you for 500 hours? I don’t believe that’s a thing outside a good video game.

      • Tobi@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        All kinds of sports equipment falls in that price range and can entertain you just as long, if not longer

        • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
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          True I guess. I guess I should have added the caveat “takes large teams of people years to design and build”. Given that most sports equipment has changed slowly enough it doesn’t take 500 people 5 years to make, it’s not quite comparable. Another creative work would be, such as movies, which easily are far far more expensive for the number of hours of enjoyment experienced

        • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
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          In my lifetime rent has quadrupled, video games have gone up 40% (only very recently). Yeah you’re right that the likely $10 max of distribution costs going away definitely ought to have made games $5 brand new despite inflation making every thing else insanely way more expensive.

          Only a fucking baby could mistake being completely rational for being a sImP. Fuck every single corporation. They’re all scum. Fuck irrational idiots harder though.

          I haven’t spent over $60 on a game maybe ever so try not to base your entire lifestyle on buying the world’s most expensive videogames as soon as they will take your money, then complain about it because mommy is no longer paying and you have to work for money or whatever

          And totally yeah let’s just ignore how easy it is to find images of NES games going for $90 in 1987 and that then dev teams were 1-7 people while now that number might be hundreds of people.

          The fact that you’re this mad and this unreasonable tells me you’re unhinged for some other reasons as well and you probably need a lot of therapy. Either that or go back to reddit where interactions like this are considered normal.

    • Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
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      1 year ago

      You clearly don’t understand development if you are so worked up over day one DLC.

      Development has always worked in stages.

      Imaging being so tilted over a small DLC meanwhile games like BG3 get “released” after 4 years of development which the largest team seen on any one game and it was still basically unfinished mess.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Lol, without reading the caption I just assumed this was a shit post comparing Johnny Depp’s likeliness to Jack Sparrow, and I laughed pretty hard at that.

  • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    If you don’t want to sail the high seas you can also get it on xbox game pass for like $10 for the month once it’s out for the plebs in like a week.