3. Or, he's crazy smart and was hoping no one would sue him after the kickstarter skyrocketed and he got millions of dollars to spend, with no intention of making a game.
This is pretty harsh.. Sony has such low confidence in the developer that they'll rather get the goodwill from refunds than spend money on the developer to fix the game.. That's just.. wow. Wouldn't want that game on my resume o.O
@cvantu: actually online sales also have distribution costs, just like regular game stores. and developers also get a bigger chunk of the money from online sales. In the end, yes they do get a bit more money from online sales, the difference is only slim.
The 60bucks cost in-stores isn't actually what the developers get either. They sell them to the stores for.. idk 20-40bucks i believe, then tax and markups puts the price at 60.
the minecraft guy, Notch, whined a lot in the beginning of his minecraft run, where he sold minecraft online for 15bucks, but he only got about 6bucks for each sale, because of distribution costs and various other things. He was pissed.
anyway, back on topic. The problem people have with micro-transactions isn't about spending more money on the game they already bought. The problem is the alteration of gameplay that exists because of it. Real gameplay progression takes a big dive in order to incentives the payable shortcut. Like you said, you spend so and so much time at work, and you don't have the time to spend unlocking everything, because it's designed to make you feel exactly that.
It's a win-win for the developers and publishers, because they get extra money from those without the time to spend on their increased grind, while also being able to brag in marketing, stating it takes so and so long to complete the entire thing, if you dont use payable shortcuts.
It's a pretty sinister design. Imo, the only games where I find this design acceptable is within the F2P genre.
@MJ12-Conspiracy: Well, it's two reasons. First, the vast majority doesn't want to "role play". They just want to be entertained. This is why most games feel like you're just the Play button. And it's much easier to allow seamless entertainment if you default to a male/female human.
Second would be that most people don't want to pretend to be an alien. Most want to be themselves in this world, or think of themselves as the hero. This is an important step in building a good hero. If you can't really relate than you won't care for the character. Also a reason why they always default to male humans.
Since the vast majority doesn't want to "role play" and they don't want to imagine themselves as a weird purple freak. We always get Bob, the generic white man hero, in everything.
Which, imo, is pretty sad. But, its easier and less work.
@amar1234 Well they said he got a private room. So that in itself means they probably won't check up on the customer, since he wants to be left alone.
And over a span of 40 hours, the internetcafe must've gone through a few shift of workers, and as long as there's nothing saying how long he's been in there, or someone neglects to mention he's been in there for 20-30hours now.. well it's easy to simply just go about your day.
Like you said though, they should had regulations on a max amount of time you can spend. No one really needs to play for more then 9-12hours. Anything above that just goes into damaging their own bodies and minds.
@deadagent75 Nah dreaming about what you've been doing is very natural. It's just that during a day, or a few day's you'll usually have done a lot of things. Making your brain catalog different things while you sleep. This mixes dreams into strange and weird things.
But if you say, focused immensely on just a single task for a few days. You don't really have anything else to dream about. Your brain is just cataloging your memories of the last few days.
I like Tom, he's great, but imo he's a bit to high-profile in his manner to pull of the whole phone hacker vigilante type.. Of those actors, I would've rather seen Norton. Since he can walk the line between bad-ass and nerdy hacker guy.
Hmm.. maybe.. Would've probably been nice with some sort of Co-op though.
Looking at their Just Cause line, which are all fun games, but they lose their flair early, which would've been remedied with having co-op. Roaming with your buddy would've made them more fun. I sense the same thing with their new title.
@thekazumalord This is also a game that focuses on its story and narrative, more than a gameplay aspect. This means that pacing and flow is more important, than filling hours. 10hours, imo sounds long, if that is the length of gameplay and cutscenes and the entire thing.
Take a look at games like Uncharted, that keep 20ish hour story driven games, they are way to long. After a few hours, you completely stop carring, and you simply just shoot people and get your gameplay thrills, which is fine, but story-wise you don't really care anymore.
This is why CoD games have short stories of 6ish hours, simply because that pace and speed of the story, can't go on for longer without it damaging the content. Look at Crysis 2. a great game imo, but those last few missions that push it into a 8ish hour game, is what breaks the ending imo. At that point you've stopped caring.
Keeping a pace of high and lows works for a few hours, but over a span of 15-20hrs? it gets tougher, simply because at that point the story won't hold you anymore, and so the gameplay needs to stretch that extra mile.
I suppose if you want 15+ hours, and a focused and good narrative? than you'd have to start looking at games, similar to TV shows and episodes. Releasing a very solid and fun gameplay game, with episodic, story heavy missions that would span 15+hrs of gameplay in 1-2hr episodes? that could work.
It could be actual GAMEPLAY for 10hs, and not counting the cinematic cut scenes and such. Looking at games like MGS4, which also don't have a lot of gameplay hours, it still does have cutscenes that are 30-60minutes at a time.
However, it could also mean, 10hs from start to finish.. We'll see. =)
Another thing, about Heavy Rain's 75% completion.. didn't it have "failure" writing in to the narrative? so even if you failed at a task, or got one of the characters killed, the story went on? right?
This means that a lot of people that would never be able to beat a boss, and simply quit, never had that option, so of course you'll get a lot more completions. So it's kinda sneaky selling a completion ration like that, but it's a good game mechanic, for allowing and adapting to failure.
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