@Atzenkiller: agreed. I worked for Gamestop during the XB1 and PS4 launch and we had problems with scalpers back then (though not as bad as the current situation). The problem back then for scalpers was that both MS and Sony were regularly pumping more consoles into stores on a weekly basis. I had a guy who managed to get about 10 XB1s and PS4s alone from the two stores in our city, not to mention the ones he got from Walmart and other stores in nearby cities. He sat on his stock on eBay for about a month before he finally had to bring the cost down to MSRP just to keep from losing money on them because MS and Sony kept up with demand and kept consoles in stores.
This hasn't been the case this time around and covid has so much to do with it due to health concerns and decreased staffing. It's why the RTX 3000 series is sold out everywhere - high demand and low supply. It really sucks, but this was the perfect year for scalpers to do their thing because of all the circumstances.
"I think anybody can do a joke about anything and it’s just who’s telling the joke and what’s your intention? Is your intention to humiliate, or is your intention to make people laugh? Our intention is always to make people laugh."
I only partly agree with this statement - your intention doesn't really matter if everyone has an agenda to see your film/career/whatever spiral into negativity. You can have the best intentions in the world but trolls will be trolls. There's this belief that you can't write about POC, LGTBQ, or any other label if you yourself are not what you're writing about, and that is absurd. Just because you don't have the personal experiences doesn't mean that you can't write an accurate portrayal of something. Women do it all the time in our modern culture where everything is getting gender-rebooted, and you've got women writing male characters... and males writing female characters. But again, the point is that you can have the best of intentions but you are only as valid as the trolls allow you to be.
Here's why this is so difficult to adapt: they're creating an "origin story" for the gunslinger...... Why is it so friggin difficult for Hollywood to just stick to the friggin source material? It's the SOURCE that makes a book/comic/etc so popular, not Hollywood's meandering agendas that they try to incorporate into everything they put their hands on.
@jski: Even DLC though is a shadow of its original intention/implementation. It used to be a two or three year old game would get a DLC campaign pack, sometimes even free, just because the devs cared about their fan base. You'd have modders create map packs for games, and sometimes the devs would create free map packs for games simply to support the community. Now you buy a multiplayer game with four or five maps for $60 and every quarter you can expect to pay $15 for a map pack that contains four or five maps instead of including them in the game in the first place - devs are purposefully holding back content for the sake of selling it at a premium later. That's bullshit.
TellTale games are probably the best at this... sell one "episode" for $15 that has an hour or two of content, then sell four or five additional two hour long "episodes" at $15 a piece, and suddenly a complete game you'd of sold for $60 otherwise is turning into $75. It's genius. And really shitty.
@joalopes: I wholeheartedly agree. I don't have quite as many years under my belt as you, but I've been gaming going on 25 years. I remember playing Call of Duty 4 ten years ago where if you wanted to have the best and most prestigious camo for your guns (blue or red tiger), you had to legit earn that shit - 75/150 headshots. My proudest moments were unlocking red tiger for the M40A1 and the 50cal because it took hours and hours and hours of playing, and it was a symbol of that achievement to other players in game. Now you look at Counter Strike and the only distinction you have in other player's weapon camo is the money they put into buying it. EA are absolute atrocious. Their business practices are garbage. They're creating a dangerous and damning culture in the video game industry - one that prioritizes piecemeal game content so that the full experience is hidden behind paywalls and "loot boxes", and in the process they're stifling innovation. EA are ruining franchises and companies through their corporate greed. It's a real friggin shame, seeing how franchises like Dead Space, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Battlefield, Battlefront, etc are being turned into microtransaction pissing contests.
This is the downside of Kickstarter unfortunately. Regular Joe's invest money into a product that they want and it's up to the producer to actually create and deliver the project. I've kickstarted several successful projects and only one has not delivered to this point. This instance here though, this is something completely different - getting funding to develop a specific game and then deciding "meh, we're going to put that on the backburner and work on something different instead".... that is incredibly shitty. That is fraud. That shit wouldn't fly in a legitimate business environment.
The biggest thing Bioware got wrong with this game was their overestimation of how important size was going to be. Mass Effect worked so much better in the first game, and after they started throwing in the scanning missions and other filler content to artificially inflate the game. ME1 didn't need all that unnecessary filler - the story was what kept gamers engaged. Now with Andromeda, they've tried to turn the series into Skyrim or Witcher 3. Not every game can be a clone of those games and not every game is going to function well as a massive open world entity with a metric shit ton of filler content that gamers have to trudge through just to fill like they're getting the whole story. I haven't beaten DA: Inquisition or Andromeda yet because of this - you just get bogged down and lost in the mix of too much content. These games function better as action RPGs and not open world RPGs.
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