SSTF

The last time I bought a game for $40 was in 2014, the last time I paid $60 was in 2011 (and it was a mistake).

While there will always be an endless surge of people willing to pay whatever price game companies demand and those people can’t be convinced to care enough to change, if you’re reading this I hope you’re the kind of person who can look into the effectively infinite backlog of games that already exist and into the indie and AA space for new games at decent prices done with some actual passion.

Oh boy a Star Citizen thread.

I understanding removing the ability for publishing reasons. It is the apparently mandatory apology which I find a bit humorous and pointless. “We’re sorry because of unforeseen player actions which were obviously not an intended part of design.”

Perhaps I’m just so deadened to the hollow “We will do better.” apologies belted out by companies and public personalities, where the apology reads the same regardless of the amount of actual fault.

Sims type games have always had that kind of appeal to be able to go full sociopath in a harmless way. Drowning Sims in pools is a classic of gaming. The devs can do what they want with their game, but (unless this was something they had to do for publishing reasons) it strikes me as strange that they apologized for players being able to hit kids with cars in game, or abusing interactions to kidnap NPCs.

I did a written review of it a while ago, and my conclusion was that a lot of the gameplay was serviceable but not particularly standout, which made it feel a bit bland. There were a number of small things that piled up, with one example being that any time you told a companion to special attack you had to sit through a short cutscene. It had great writing and characters, which makes it the first game I’d reccomend in spite of the so so gameplay, because I thought the character and world stuff was so strong.

While I didn’t have expectations, I think the marketing also greatly mislead other people. The game is structured like a classic BioWare RPG, rather than a modern Fallout game. I also found the marketing connection with Fallout New Vegas to be misleading because there was no connection of actual lead development staff with those games, but instead it was with Fallout 1 and 2. If you know that, and are familiar with the writing and design habits you can feel that difference. Some people may have felt it and been confused or disappointed that it didn’t have the New Vegas vibe.

They replaced map specific factions with one type of each team (SAS vs Phoenix terrorists) globally in CS2. Which is pretty lame but probably makes it easier to theme buyable skins.

CS:GO they’ve been the CT team for the Dust maps.

This game has an all time peak of 20 players. I don’t think it is exactly reaching a major audience. Pretty obvious it’s a quick low quality game capitalizing on shock value and politics over anything else.

I wonder if it is the best use of a counter terrorism taskforce to seek out a game at all, and such a small fry game at that. This smells of doing something just to justify somebody’s job rather than actually doing any public good.

Counter-Strike.

Christmas is canceled.