Castle Magus

I started playing Grim Dawn recently, after buying it as part of a Humble Bundle. It's pretty good. If you've played any recent isometric ARPG, you should know what to expect. I'm playing as an Occultist+Shaman=Conjurer and am putting all of my points into the summoned creatures, which has been pretty cool so far.

I'll definitely say this much for Grim Dawn: it is objectively better than both Path of Exile and Diablo III, if only because it does not require always online bullshit.

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This is the game I'm talking about. It's free to play (with a microtransaction store that I had absolutely zero intention of ever using), so if you want to give it a shot, you'll lose nothing except time (82 minutes in my case). Like I said above, the game was shaping up to be an amazing experience... but then I got randomly disconnected from the server for no apparent reason and was booted out to the main menu, and when I logged back in I was in the town hub. This utterly annihilated any and all interest I have in ever trying this game again.

Seriously, FUCK this online-only horseshit to hell and back and then to hell again, where it should forever remain, since that's where it came from to start with. This is why I never bought and will never buy Diablo III. But I thought I'd at least give Path of Exile a chance, given that it was free and I'd heard good things about it. If it had an offline option, I actually might be willing to pay money for it, given that what I did play of it was pretty great. But if I can only play online, with the ever looming threat of being randomly disconnected and booted out of the game for no good reason, then Path of Exile can fuck off and die for all I care.

Shit like this is why I almost completely avoid multiplayer games, in particular, and modern video games as a whole, in general.

And Ubisoft is seeking to punish players who exploit these glitches? Well, hey Ubisoft, how about you don't have glitches like this in your shitty fucking game to begin with? Then maybe players wouldn't be able to "exploit" them. I think perhaps that consumers should punish Ubisoft by not buying these broken turds that they have the gall to call video games. Will such a thing ever actually happen, though? No, because most players have their lips too firmly secured to the sewer pipe to pull away now.

Also, bugs or not, these big online multiplayer games are all too often seen way too much as "serious fucking business," both by the creators of the game and by the playerbase of the game, to be even remotely fun, at least for me. And, so, that's why I avoid them like the plague.

Note: His actual Angry Rant only goes until around twelve or so minutes in, so it's not nearly as long as that 29:35 length might indicate. I stopped watching when it cut to him and Other Joe just fucking around or whatever.

He basically says the game is good, as far as the bare bones basics of the gameplay is concerned, but is lacking content. He says it should have been labelled "Early Access." In short, he's saying some, but not all, of what a lot of other people who are complaining about this game are saying about it. He didn't give the game nearly as much shit or get nearly as angry about it as I was hoping he would, though.

Because Angry Joe is a reviewer (perhaps even, dare I say it, a professional one [not to be overly insulting to him to call him such]), I no longer hold it against him that he still buys this shit (though why he needed to buy the Collector's Edition to review [or... not review, as is apparently the case, and I have no idea what he's talking about when he says he's working on a Street Fighter game, maybe it's in a video of his I haven't watched], I don't know), even though he should know by now how the modern video game industry rolls. He is, I suppose, performing a service by letting people know about this shit.

The problem, of course, is do people actually listen to what he says? I'm not sure, given that lots of people in the comments are being fanboy apologists and/or reputation management drones about the whole thing and are shilling the fuck out of the game, even despite all the bullshit surrounding it.

In semi-related news, I couldn't even finish watching the SBFP Friday Night Fisticuffs video for SFV. (Which, in my not so humble opinion, should have been a Saturday Morning Scrublords video. ¬_¬ But then, they only use that label for games that they, themselves, actually find to be bad or stupid or whatever, and apparently, at least from what I watched of it, they think SFV is great.) I got as far as Pat saying "This game is so good. It lived up to everything that I always wanted it to be." Then I just had to sigh and close the tab. For what little it's worth, they were using a pre-release copy provided to them by Capcom, as they say at the beginning, but still...

If, and only if, I could get SFV in another Humble Bundle with a bunch of other games for $15 or less at some nebulous point in the future, then maybe I would buy such a bundle (but even then, I wouldn't be buying such a bundle for SFV). Otherwise, what I have seen of this game is incredibly underwhelming, enough so that I wouldn't even pay $5 on Steam for it, by itself. I am apathetic at best about Street Fighter V, and actively antipathetic at worst. And this will likely be the last post I make about it, unless something else comes up concerning it that happens to catch my attention.

Here's a list:
10. Assassin's Creed: Syndicate
9. Need for Speed 2015
8. Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide
7. Heroes of Might and Magic VII
6. Batman: Arkham Knight (PC)
5. Halo 5: Guardians
4. Rainbow Six: Siege
3. Mad Max
2. Infinite Crisis
1. Star Wars: Battlefront

It's pretty bad when there were so many shitty games released that he had to do two separate top 10 lists just to cover them all. And several of the ones on this list are games that he said could have and probably should have been in the "worst" list as well, but he just didn't include them there for whatever reasons.

Also, more of the games on this list were on there due to DLC microtransactions and other such modern video game industry bullshit, instead of simply because they were terrible games in their own right, so if anything, this list for me is probably the more relevant of the two lists.

Since I've already said most of what I feel the need to say about this over there in owsf2000's post on the subject, I'll just link to that and be done with it.

Right here is a very good example of why Fable III was the last game in the Fable series that I cared about (and even it was a fairly big letdown from the far superior Fable II).

"The free-to-play model will follow a system similar to that of League of Legends." Ugh... just... just... fucking ugh. Seriously, Lionhead? Seriously? *facepalm+headdesk* If I'd actually had even a little bit of interest in this new Fable game up to this point, this news would have been almost as disappointing to me as the news that the new Legacy of Kain game was a "free-to-play PVP multiplayer game" or that the new Shenmue game was a "social game" or whatever the fuck. Fortunately for me, I didn't, so... yeah. *shrug*

Anyway, requiescat in pace, Fable series. Like many other once-decent series, your time has passed. Your first three games are still pretty good, though, I guess.

*weary sigh*

I guess this is just the age we live in now, where releasing unfinished, broken games is the norm, rather than the exception. Glad I was already determined not to buy this game anyway, thanks to the online only bullshit.

"We're still going to look at how to do [an offline mode]. You know, It's not off the table. We just can't promise it, and that's caused a lot of people to get very angry. I am always upset when people are [angry]—especially when they've backed us—but we had a vision and we're trying to stick as closely to that vision as possible, which is to do something new."

If they can't promise it, then why the hell did they, you know, promise it? That's a rhetorical question, by the way, because I already know full well why they promised it: they wouldn't have gotten enough funding and the Kickstarter would have failed otherwise.

(Disclaimer: I did not watch that 20 minute interview at all.)

As they fucking well should. Of course, the way Braben is talking, he makes it seem more like he's magnanimously extending a bothersome and unnecessary boon to the peasants rallying at his castle gates with torches and pitchforks, rather than admitting that it was a thing they should have been doing in the goddamn first place. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose.

(EDIT)

On an semi-related note, and speaking more in general than about Elite: Dangerous in particular, I've never understood this relatively recent concern that game devs have with "splitting the fanbase" of their game. This was something that came up with Diablo 3 as well. All these game devs lately are claiming that the game is online-only because they don't want to "split the community." (It's a bullshit reason, of course, since the real reason it is online-only is for DRM reasons, but let's ignore that for the moment.) Here are my questions about this. Let's say you have 100 people who want to buy your game. Out of that 100, 25 want offline singleplayer, and 25 want online multiplayer and 50 want both (the actual split may be different in one direction or another in reality, obviously, but let's go with this for now, just to simplify things). Tell me how, exactly, alienating the 25-75 that want offline singleplayer by removing offline singleplayer altogether is somehow "uniting the community," huh? Tell me how, exactly, including an offline option is somehow "splitting the community." The ones that wanted offline only would have never been a part of the multiplayer "community" anyway. Or are you truly saying that you're fine with 25-75 customers total, when you would have had 100 customers had you included an offline option? More money is better than less money, right?

But, okay, now back to reality. First of all, many of those who wanted offline only are likely going to buckle under and still cravenly buy the damn game anyway, even without it, no matter how much they might complain about it, so there's that bit out of the way. Second of all, what these game devs are really saying is that they don't care that they're fucking over the people that wanted offline singleplayer, just so long as they stick it to those damn, dirty apes who pirate their game or, worse, sell their game in a used game store. I guess the real question is do they think that the money they'll lose by people not buying their game because it doesn't have an offline option (such as myself) is less than the money they'll lose by people pirating their game (assuming that the pirates don't find a way to hack around the DRM anyway, which is not inconceivable) or selling their game used? Looks like the answer so far is that these game devs really don't care that they're angering and alienating legit potential customers by removing features just to inconvenience pirates and used game buyers/sellers (who, in the eyes of these devs, are probably indistinguishable, anyway).

(/EDIT)