![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There was a very brief window of time in the nebulous past where I, having never played a Monster Hunter game before, was vaguely, kinda sorta interested in maybe getting Monster Hunter World (purely for singleplayer/solo play) when I started seeing it on halfway decent sales, but I just never bothered to bite on that particular hook. Now, I'm glad I never touched it, and I will probably never touch it or any other Monster Hunter game, because I fucking loathe shit like what Pat's talking about here. Unfinished games, time-locked quests. I don't even care that Monster Hunter World is ostensibly "complete" now with everything unlocked. This video just turned me the fuck off of the entire series altogether.
More generally, see also: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Balatro, Mass Effect 3 (which I still, to this day, have not touched, even though I got it for dirt cheap on Origin [back when it was still called Origin] some years ago), Elden Ring, Deus Ex, modern Street Fighter, every modern Persona/Shin Megami Tensi/similar ATLUS game, any fucking MMO like Final Fantasy XIV, and every other game/series they mentioned in this video.
Pat: "Even for the best... even for good games, release date is not done. Like, not done at all, anymore. Even for games that are, like, excellent. It used to be bad games came out unfinished, but now good games come out good, and get better, like significantly better."
Woolie: "Not just multiplayer, singleplayer, everything. Everything. It's like get it out the door, ship it, we can fix it later, we will fix it later. You know, there will be these patches. But, like, if you're getting in early... it's gonna be early access, even when it's not early access. 1.0 is still, you know, not so secretly early access."
Basically, the take away from this video: Never buy video games at initial release (or in Early Access) anymore. Which, I mean, I haven't bought a game on day one since Skyrim (11/11/11), and I've long since stopped buying Early Access games (or backing crowd-funded games, which is a whole other thing), and I don't foresee any of that changing in the future.
It's all simply yet another facet of the bullshit-encrusted
And yet, even having said all of the above, I'm still playing No Man's Sky even now (I started yet another new game a few weeks ago, shortly after that "Worlds II" update came out. [Finally, actually deep oceans... and the gas giants are neat, too, I guess]), which also has all of that shit, i.e. it's not finished even now, because they keep adding to it (and new "RELICS" update released only just yesterday and, hell, Steam is downloading another 14GB patch for it right the fuck now as I type this), and it has time-locked "Expeditions" that are only available for a limited time and then, apparently, never again (unless you do save editing shenanigans on PC, with consoles just being SOL forever, I guess, outside of the rare occasions when Hello Games deigns to rerun an Expedition).
See also: Vampire Survivors. I still have that shit installed, too, just waiting for the already announced next update to come out, blaze through it a day or three, then go back to not playing it at all, until the next next thing comes out.
Hell, the case could be made for Terraria, too. I don't have that one installed currently, but will probably play it again whenever the next already announced update comes out, whenever.
And of course, Minecraft, which was one of the first (if not the first) game to operate under this "'release,' but still update constantly, forever" model. Haven't played it in well over a decade by this point, but used to play it near constantly, even though it was still constantly updating (sometimes for the worse). But then Notch sold out, Microsoft took over, and I just noped the fuck out entirely.
