One thing all these games share: not being made by one of the big companies like EA, Activision-Blizzard-King, or Ubisoft.
Hell, one of these was made by one dude, and another was made by the guys who made Magicka and was expected to have a player population of around 10k.
Yeah. A few companies made good games. Doesn’t mean most companies aren’t making dogshit games that everyone keeps gobbling up and shelling money for
This is the way it’s been since the beginning. Way more people are going to try making something good than people are going to succeed at it. Whether it’s greed, incompetence, laziness, they ran out of time, whatever.
You don’t have to give a bad product any attention at all just because it’s “big”. The box says “Suicide Squad” not “guaranteed to be good” 😅
The issue this is touching on isn’t that the big companies try to make something good, it’s that they try to make something profitable. It’s designed by the suits, not the designers. There’s no passion in them. However, they have the budget to market them and control what most casual gamers hear about. It’s rare that a team without the marketing budget the size of EA can break into the mainstream, even if they’re great.
In the same time period, we’ve gotten Skull And Bones, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and Diablo IV skins that cost more than the base game.
It can simultaneously be true that the big companies are churning out cash grabs while other companies are making awesome games.
Didn’t Helldivers 2 ship with a kernel level spyware? I wouldn’t put it on this list.
Did it? Most games with kernel-level systems won’t run on linux, but Helldivers 2 is running fine for me via proton.
That’s because the anti cheat is running in a fake kernel with Proton. Developers have ways of detecting when the kernel isn’t real… Sometimes… But the Helldivers devs don’t seem to mind for now.
Lately I’ve been running more and more into situations where am so thankful GDPR is a thing. Law is pretty good on its own but with EU being extremely willing to use it makes it all that much more powerful. They don’t shy away from punishing the biggest and the richest and fines from GDPR violation hit percentages of income which makes it such that it can hurt everyone.
Also riddled with microtransactions and yeah it’s not the worst in that regard but there’s still a lot of game design decisions that are worse off because of it.
What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been playing it since it came out and I would totally understand if someone never even found the menu for spending real money. All the weapons all the Armor All the strategends are all in game currency that you can’t even buy. You can pretty much only get Cosmetics with the super credits and a couple hilariously enough pretty bad weapons that are so cheap that you’ll be able to buy them off the super credits you can simply find laying around in maps if you really want them
I feel like neither of you have played it with your description.
For those that havent played -
The game has 4 types of currency, Medals, Requisition Slips, Samples and Super Credits. Medals, Requisition and Samples are only rewarded through playing the game(Either for completeing missions, or found in missions).
Super Credits can be bought with real money, but can also be found in mission.
You unlock Strategems with Requisition Slips and upgrade them(Ship Upgrades) with the Samples.
You then have “War Bonds” which are where you unlock the rest of the gear(Weapons, Armour, Boosts and more). This is where you use Medals. The War bonds are most equivilant to a Battlepass, but they are not timed and do not disappear so even if you come to the game a year later you will be able to buy and unlock everything on the very first one. The game shipped with the basic war bond that everyone had, and the first premium war bond, this is 1000 Super Credits to unlock, then you use Medals to unlock items with in it.
As for other micro transactions, there is a “Super Store” that has 4 items in it that rotate ever few days(I cant remember the time it is 2 or 3 days), that has surprisingly cheap items especially compared to what other companies are doing. They are not just purely cosmetic though, but they do not really offer anything you can not already unlock through the warbonds. Armour has different classes(Light Medium Heavy), and they have a different bonus(More Stims, More Grenades, throw grenades further) and so you might find a combination that you can not get on a warbond that you want(Light Armour with more range on grenades for example). I don’t know if I would class it as P2W, no bonus is overpowered or game changing, but it is definitely not just cosmetic.
The main issues I have with it are the grinding rpg style gameplay loop, and forcing players to return to the ship as often as possible.
Maybe I’m being too cynical but I assume its to try to get people to play as long as possible and look at the storefront as often as possible.
You can unlock a lot of things for free including some premium currency, but that’s just to increase player familiarity with the premium store and to make the player think about the cosmetic upgrades as often as possible.
Another issue is with the difficulty scaling: it doesn’t scale with the number of players or add AI players to the game if someone drops out. On its surface this can be explained by not wanting to spend the man hours to develop smart friendly AI or put more work into difficulty balancing, but the financial incentives also work against this as without it people are encouraged to invite friends to play with them, thus generating free advertising for the in game store.
That’s just a couple of examples, but every game design decision gets influenced to some extent by the way players interact and think about microtransactions. This isn’t really the case with baulders gate 3, which is in a completely different league in terms of quality(and dev budget tbf) to hell divers: it feels a bit like comparing McDonald’s with a michelin star restaurant 😂 (I haven’t played lethal company so can’t comment on that one)
I agree, except I’m hesitant to include hell divers because of the kernel level anticheat. I don’t need to give a video game of all things access to my kernel. But the general idea is right, I am playing so many fire video games all made by indie devs right now.
Do you have a rundown of what that means? First time I’m hearing about this
the game’s anti cheat has access to literally everything in your computer. every file, every memory address, every input, every network packet, etc. How that info is stored and used is entirely up to them
Oh wow. Are there any plans to have this removed? Isn’t this quite a major privacy concern?
Are you certain it has kernelt level anti cheat? Because it’s working on Linux which it absolutely would not be doing if it had kernel anti cheat
That’s because the anti cheat is running in a fake kernel with Proton. Developers have ways of detecting when the kernel isn’t real… Sometimes… But the Helldivers devs don’t seem to mind for now.
I don’t know where the hell you got that information but that’s not how proton works. There is no “fake kernel” it’s not a virtual machine or an emulator it’s just a translation layer that translates Windows syscalls into linux syscalls
