DeathscytheX

They probably should cost more, but they can't. If not enough people are willing to pay $100 for a game, then you cant sell it at that price or you don't have a business. That is where the problem lies. That's why EA is getting out of the liner story gaming business and focusing only on games they can monetize post launch. People can be convinced to pay $100-250 for a game if they get DLC and some art books and statues. Its interesting how that works... but most of the time those types of games need to be established series or have insane hype.
I could see myself paying $75 for a base game so long as its not bullshit. That's me though. The higher you go in price, mistakes and bombs are going to hurt more, and cost consumer confidence faster. No one is willing to take that chance yet. The same goes for consoles. They're always going to be limited until people are willing to pay $500. We live in a world where people get triggered over every small thing they perceive as getting taken advantage of over. And that sentiment becomes infectious on Reddit. Sometimes its jusitifed, but when its not, the results are terrible. (I watched my favorite game's expac get ruined over shit like this).
 
The thing I don't want to see is "early access" become the norm. I think that's a bunch of bullshit.

They probably should cost more, but they can't. If not enough people are willing to pay $100 for a game, then you cant sell it at that price or you don't have a business. That is where the problem lies. That's why EA is getting out of the liner story gaming business and focusing only on games they can monetize post launch. People can be convinced to pay $100-250 for a game if they get DLC and some art books and statues. Its interesting how that works... but most of the time those types of games need to be established series or have insane hype.
I could see myself paying $75 for a base game so long as its not bullshit. That's me though. The higher you go in price, mistakes and bombs are going to hurt more, and cost consumer confidence faster. No one is willing to take that chance yet. The same goes for consoles. They're always going to be limited until people are willing to pay $500. We live in a world where people get triggered over every small thing they perceive as getting taken advantage of over. And that sentiment becomes infectious on Reddit. Sometimes its jusitifed, but when its not, the results are terrible. (I watched my favorite game's expac get ruined over shit like this).
 
The thing I don't want to see is "early access" become the norm. I think that's a bunch of bullshit.

I feel like I'm going the be the only one playing devil's advocate but I agree with the EC video, games shouldn't cost $60 anymore (and I wouldn't say they're playing Spin Doctor or that they're to calm, they're taking a rational approach to a subject that get gamers way to fucking angry every time it comes up (and no I don't agree with the inflation argument, I just generally think games should cost more based on what the employees in this industry make and what they have to go through to get said game out (they really need to be paid more but that's another subject for another time))). While I don't look forward to that time when games cost more than this it's a sad fact. Honestly I'm still surprised that they're still $60, I've been expecting a price hike for years. It's inevitable, it will happen once DLC/loot boxes stop paying the bills (and with the recent Battlefront 2 debacle it'll happen sooner than later). While Jim brings up a lot of great points sadly he seems to have no grasp about how things work in the industry.
Sadly I'm not going any further with this argument. Honestly I now enough about the industry to agree with the video (I have a degree in this, I've had to take classes that explain the overhead costs a studio has and how much money they actually get compared to the publisher. I literally had to make a business plan for a final in my Game Management class with a budget, you'd be fucking surprised how much a AAA game actually takes to make (and how much having a person with a degree in Business Management would help most developers out)) and I'll leave it at that.
Please note I'm not defending the industry for what it does I just agree that games should cost more, it's inevitable with everything else we buy so why shouldn't it hold true here.

Counter point: Movie going hit a 22 year low in 2017. It has less to do with the pricing and more with the product though. Reboots, remakes, sequels. 
Games can't go up because of the frequency they need to come out now. Annual titles like COD have bred short attention spans. It's not like a car or a mattress that had a 5-10 year turn around. Plus you gotta pay for the console, and a yearly subscription to play most of the games. There is too much money going everywhere else. If they raised the prices, DLC and lootboxes wouldnt go away at this point so they dug their own grave.

As much as I liked Extra Credits, Extra Credits has a way of defending or promoting AAA Games in a way that I'm uncertain if they're playing Spin Doctor or are just too calm.
I think my main problem with this Extra Credits video is they talk about how inflation hurts the game industry but fail to note that inflation has hurt gamers who live on minimum wage.
 

GW2 HAD horizontal progression. When Heart of Thorns came out it was pretty good IMO. You had to do certain tasks to gain mastery points, and invest those into new abilities. Each category of said ability required more points every tier you leveled it up. It was a pain in some places but overall it was doable solo. GW2's player base on a whole is super casual, HoT required more than just using auto attack to survive encounters. It actually made you use the skill sets they put into the game. It wasn't perfect, but it was refreshing to me. People cried and bitched that they couldn't get everything day one. So when Path of Fire came out, the horizontal progression was a joke, it all revolved around the new mount system, and you basically just had vertical progression for each mount type. On top of that, if you invested the time in HoT, you had enough Hero Points to get your new specializations unlocked day one, because everyone cried about the HP requirement back then, so they lowered it refunding the points for those that did it legit. Within a week I had everything maxed out and my interest in the game died off for the first time in 3 years. It took me a year to get enough mastery points on HoT.
There is absolutely no excuse not to have LFG, both consoles have a virtual keyboard built in to type out a description. Raids don't necessarily need the best rewards, they need unique rewards that aren't utter trash and are indeed among the best gear in the game. They should also have extra stats bonuses for the raid and future raids. This is one request I see a lot of on the Destiny Reddit. The problem I had with Destiny 1's first year was the only way to get any decent gear at all was the raid, even the standard legendary gear that dropped in the raid was better. After seeing what they did by Y3, and some of the awesome strikes they made, that had strike specific loot it baffles me why all this was left out of D2. I guess they thought they could get away with slowly readding it as "new" content and got called out on their BS. I was against random rolls at first because I thought getting legendary weapons were going to be as much as a grueling grind as it was in D1, but thats not the case so rolls would actually have been good for D2. Like Strider pointed out, they went from one extreme to the other instead of just dialing it down a little bit.
Anthem needs to follow The Division's lead on loot... and by that I don't just mean how it drops, but adding loot for free in patch updates. When I came back to the game there was a shit ton of new exotic weapons, and they had added 3-4 more in 1.8. Loot is why people play these games, and when you have everything, or at least everything worth having, thats when it gets stale. Borderlands is a semi-linear game, but I remember spending hours repeating bosses just to sort through the explosion of loot and pick up new guns.
 

GW2 HAD horizontal progression. When Heart of Thorns came out it was pretty good IMO. You had to do certain tasks to gain mastery points, and invest those into new abilities. Each category of said ability required more points every tier you leveled it up. It was a pain in some places but overall it was doable solo. GW2's player base on a whole is super casual, HoT required more than just using auto attack to survive encounters. It actually made you use the skill sets they put into the game. It wasn't perfect, but it was refreshing to me. People cried and bitched that they couldn't get everything day one. So when Path of Fire came out, the horizontal progression was a joke, it all revolved around the new mount system, and you basically just had vertical progression for each mount type. On top of that, if you invested the time in HoT, you had enough Hero Points to get your new specializations unlocked day one, because everyone cried about the HP requirement back then, so they lowered it refunding the points for those that did it legit. Within a week I had everything maxed out and my interest in the game died off for the first time in 3 years. It took me a year to get enough mastery points on HoT.
There is absolutely no excuse not to have LFG, both consoles have a virtual keyboard built in to type out a description. Raids don't necessarily need the best rewards, they need unique rewards that aren't utter trash and are indeed among the best gear in the game. They should also have extra stats bonuses for the raid and future raids. This is one request I see a lot of on the Destiny Reddit. The problem I had with Destiny 1's first year was the only way to get any decent gear at all was the raid, even the standard legendary gear that dropped in the raid was better. After seeing what they did by Y3, and some of the awesome strikes they made, that had strike specific loot it baffles me why all this was left out of D2. I guess they thought they could get away with slowly readding it as "new" content and got called out on their BS. I was against random rolls at first because I thought getting legendary weapons were going to be as much as a grueling grind as it was in D1, but thats not the case so rolls would actually have been good for D2. Like Strider pointed out, they went from one extreme to the other instead of just dialing it down a little bit.
Anthem needs to follow The Division's lead on loot... and by that I don't just mean how it drops, but adding loot for free in patch updates. When I came back to the game there was a shit ton of new exotic weapons, and they had added 3-4 more in 1.8. Loot is why people play these games, and when you have everything, or at least everything worth having, thats when it gets stale. Borderlands is a semi-linear game, but I remember spending hours repeating bosses just to sort through the explosion of loot and pick up new guns.
 

Being a semi-MMO raids are probably going to exist in Anthem but I think BioWare knows how to handle it the right way as opposed to Bungie. They've had 4 years of watching Destiny fail and seeing just how much of a dud Destiny 2 was (especially raid wise). I have a feeling they'll do something similar but restrict just how much it means to the overall progression of your character. What that actually means is a mystery now but BioWare does have one MMO under their belt (TOR) and while it started out very badly they've had years to reflect and adapt to the market through it. Yes I know BioWare Austin is in charge of TOR but the development team has mostly shifted to other projects and you can no doubt most of them shifted to this (I believe the TOR team is only 5-6 members right now and they might not be doing it for much longer if the news that came along with this announcement is to be believed). I'll tell you this much if there is no LFG system in Anthem it will not be received well. Gamers asked for it for 3 years with Destiny and never got it and when D2 had a glimmer of having such a system we can Guided Games which is an atrocity. It's not that hard to program a system into a game to match people together to play, fuck Crucible does it so I can't understand why D1 or D2 never had it (outside of the devs developing it that way). Fuck WoW and FFXIV even have the ability to allow people on different servers to form raid groups and do content so I can't see why games similar to it can't get it done.
Sadly no MMO or semi-MMO has horizontal scaling, it's always vertical (GW2 might be the exception, I lost interest fast in the game and haven't really progressed past where I last was). Without something to work towards nobody will play the game. It's a problem every MMO type game runs into and while it sucks it's just something to get used to. My mentality towards this will always be the same having been a hardcore raider in WoW for a year (before I got burned out), it's part of the package. I don't raid in FFXIV, no real interest as it has other ways to get gear equivalent to raid gear. Is it grindy as fuck? Yes (it takes roughly 6-9 weeks to grind the currency needed to buy the gear, which with the way FFXIV patches its roughly 3 months through a content patch cycle but that gear lasts for 6 months by upgrading it (which is usually when the new raid tier and gear comes out)) but it's something to work towards. Horizontal progression/scaling would stagnate a game for me and, much like you Sledge, I'm the definition of a casual player. I spent the last 5 months getting my character to item level 339 (current max is 340 with raid gear and weapons) and on Tuesday I need to start all over again grind to the next current ilvl cap (it sucks but hey I get new story content and something to work toward again, the last month has been boring with nothing to really do besides gear my Samurai). Sadly not every MMO has a similar line of progression and semi-MMOs probably never will. Catering to much too one side always pisses the other side off and no one is really happy. We've seen it with Destiny 1, we're currently seeing it with Destiny 2, The Division suffered from it in the beginning, and Blizzard learned the hard way with WoW years ago (the game is finally turning into something I could see myself getting back into but I can't afford another MMO subscription). No company has found the perfect balance yet.
The other problem with raid content is that it will always be a time sink. When you first get into a raid it'll take more then 30 minutes to beat due to learning mechanics and gear. Once mechanics are learned and party gear gets better this becomes faster but you have to remember raids are designed to be hard, making them too fast and easy will just make the content boring. The best gear is always locked behind this content because it's your reward for successfully beating the content. Yea, it sucks for people like you and me but that's just how games like this work. I feel D2 dropped the ball there by making gear just cosmetic with little to no meaning for stats (yea they are there but honestly I don't give two shits as its effect on gameplay are minor at best (except for recovery)). I feel the whole raid is cheapened by that and it's no wonder why so many people were disappointed with the rewards considering a Crucible rewarded hand cannon is better then 90% of the weapons you get from the raid (which is supposed to be the hardest content with the best rewards).
Meh, my opinions on Anthem still stand no matter how much info comes out (until I see new gameplay footage highlighting the major features of this game I will reserve my judgement but I'm not allowing another D1 disappointment by pre-ordering). I'm done getting hyped for these big, blockbuster games which always result in disappointment and I'm done pre-ordering unless I know exactly what I'm getting. The only game I'm hyped for is Ace Combat 7 (which I will pre-order) because I know exactly what I'm getting, a mechanically sound air combat simulator that will be fun regardless if the story sucks or not (as long as they don't bring mechanics from Assault Horizon over).

This season has been amazing. Its actually one of the best. I didn't think they'd beable to stay so strong without Ragnar, but they managed to do it. Ivar is a really strong character. Everyone despises him, and they all say he is tearing Rangar's legacy apart, but they don't know Rangar encouraged him to be like this.
Its looking bad for Lagertha. Shes lost Astrid now, and I don't trust Heahmund. I'm starting to think his capture was a calculated risk. The preview for the second half of the season makes it seem that she's going to die, but it may be for shock value because we don't really see her. I can see Rollo still holding that grudge that she never loved him instead of Ragnar. With the mid-season finale roster purge, it looks like there will still be more culling of the cast.
I was sad to see Halfdan die, especially in such a lame way. I really liked his character especially after his journey with Bjorn to the Mediterranean. Astrid's death was sad too. They really screwed her character over. She knew that the kid was probably from when she got gang raped. She rather would have died by Lagertha's blade than Harald's wrath. 
And going back to Heahmund, I really like his character. He brings a lot to this season. He's clearly a corrupt christian that indulges in sin. Only using his religious position to his advantage.
Aethelwulf dying like Macaulay Culkin in My Girl was so lame too. C'mon. Then we get a gratuitous shot of Judith's Mic Foley ear for no reason. They could have not spent the money on the CGI and kept her hair over it like they have. Clearly Athelred despises Alfred for being king at his mothers request. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out because at this point History has pretty much gone from slight deviations from History, to completely throwing it off track. 
Floki's camp is a disaster too. I don't get his character anymore. After he killed Aethelstan he's been incredibly inconsistent. He's always been ultra loyal to the gods, but then gets miffed by the Muslims, and then after he loses everything and almost dies from an hand cut infection, he's all about the gods again and tries to make a camp where this dude is trying to be an ass, and they swap son deaths with the other guy after Floki offers him the position of Lawgiver under the condition of no revenge killings. Then he offer's himself as a sacrifice. I don't think he'll die, but at this point I don't really care about his character anymore. He was one of my favorites, but this whole side story doesn't really interest me. I wish he would have just had that whole family killed and be done with them. 
Ivar, Bjorn, Lagertha, and Heahmund are my favorite characters still around. Ubbe seems important, but I feel they've established Ivar as the dominant brother. Now that Bjorn's love interest is dead, and Ubbe has seduced Torvi. I expect some awkwardness between the two... but also a common interest since Ubbe loves Torvi, he must protect Bjorn's children from crazy ass Margrethe. I hope Torvi puts a hatchet through her head.

This was on HBO GO so I gave it a shot. Fimmel was just Ragnar with more hair. He uses the same accent or at least lets it slip often. The CGI doesn't hold up well on the small screen, it looks like a Triple A game. The RTS style camera angles for some of the battle scenes was a subtle tribute. I'm not a lore nut, so I can't comment on how accurate or inaccurate the story held up to the original game. Overall it was enjoyable, but not enjoyable enough to have paid to see at the theater IMO.

Obviously the game won't be perfect. I fully expect cosmetic microtransations, the potential for Javelin skins are too good to pass up. I could see skins, booster effects, lighting packages, weapon camo, etc. 
They're going to have to have a solid loot pool implemented with good variety, and specific ways to get some. They're also going to need to have way better communication with the playerbase than Bungie has done. Right now D2's community is just a wave of rage and Bungie is just adding more to the landslide dropping into the ocean. Its amazing how they can't implement mass deletion of shaders until later this year (even though you can do this with important items), but can delay Faction Rally for a month just to nerf token acquisitions. Basically don't make the classic mistake of prioritizing reward nerfs over serious issues with the game. Especially if the rewards are lackluster in the first place.
From that last video it seems Bioware has been paying attention to Destiny 2 and The Division and taking notes on what and what not do. They have a lot riding on this game. People can give Andromeda a pass since it was a B team studio, but if this gets fucked up, their rep is going to take some irreversible damage. At a time where there aren't many developers left that are still viewed highly by gamers, we definitely don't need that to happen.

YESSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4/20/2018

It really is. I think I only experienced one of those catastrophic bugs. But the game play wasn't the problem IMO. I actually enjoyed the combat a lot... more so than the previous 3 games. The fact they got that working right in such a short time is amazing, and maybe they shouldn't have been dissolved into other studios looking back on it now that I've had time to cool down from the utter disappointment. They were just told to make magic happen after fumbling around on a lost cause for 90% of the allotted time. You'll most likely enjoy the play through now that you know not to expect very much out of the game. It has the potential there, it just never comes to fruition. You never really bond with the characters like you can with Wrex, Tali, and Liara, and you never really hate any of them either. God I despised Kaidan just because hes voiced by Carth Onassi, just add two floppy bangs to his head and its the same character.
Just about every choice you made in the first three games had consequences, even the smallest things. In Andromeda its like all your choices were pretty pointless, and the two major ones were pretty unoriginal and predictable. The Renegade/Paragon system missing also was a mistake. I liked how tilting too far one way, gave you even more dialogue options for that personality if you invested skill points in charisma. Like he said, the dialog is terrible and the story wasn't very good. It was a game that mechanically was great but story was was awful, which made it worse having a predecessor that set the bar really high. Romancing was totally watered down. You really had to talk to an NPC a lot in the first games and pick the right dialogue options to get in their pants, but in Andromeda, you just pick all the dialog options that have a heart icon on them and have a connection as awkward as Padme and Anakin. I guess that was the mystique of BioWare's early games. I remember playing KOTOR through many times, every time I discovered something new by doing a different dialogue sequence. I don't think I ever seduced Bastila until the 3rd or 4th play through and was blown away that I could do that, or when I made Zaalbar kill Mission, or when I got banned from Manaan for the rest of the playthrough. Stuff like that made it worth playing through multiple times.... with Andromeda, you feel like you've seen it all in 1 go.

It is dubbed, but Its def not the best dub I've ever heard. Maybe its just the main character that feels uninspired. Overall its was ok, the last 15 minutes is the best part. Seeing as this is "Part 1" I feel they spent too much time going over the theory of relativity and how much time had past on Earth despite only being gone 20 years. The first hour is spend on humanity bickering about the state of things, the last 30+ minutes is actually doing something about it. The trailer made it seem like this was MONSTER PLANET, but is really just Godzilla and some metal pterodactyls. A lot of tropes and cliche moments, and in the end, I'm ready for Part 2 because it seems like it will be the movie we thought this one was going to be. There is a post credits scene as well.

I beat this tonight. It was enjoyable but felt a bit annoying at parts with David's constant assholeness whenever he was around. My favorite part was the helicopter. After I got past it I chose a dialogue option that made Javier look the the helicopter and say "Fuck that. Fuck this. Fuck you helicopter!" I haven't laughed so hard in a good while. I hate that QTE bullshit. I didn't die the entire game until literally the last 10 minutes when I'm on a vehicle and have to hit the square button repeatedly to kill some zombies. Hit the button 3 times, kill three walkers, do it again on this side... and I die horribly. WTF. When I replayed the scene again the camera moved a bit different the second time through and there was a fourth square button press QTE that was only half on my screen way high and was only visible for a half second before it was completely off screen. That was a setup to make me die on purpose.

Into the Badlands season 3 will start April 22.

The GW2 model wouldn't have worked because they simply didn't make enough content to make it worth it. Plus I don't think people would accept convenience items in this game for already hot issues like inventory space. GW2's micro-transactions are based on that and cosmetics, but are also made desirable through making gold via ultra rare drops.
Overwatch's model might have worked better. The thing I don't like about the Eververse armor sets is that they come with set stats, and I'm not giving up my heavily dependent recovery builds that have medium resilience. Then again, they still haven't made enough desirable content IMO to put stuff people would want. They could have done things like random reroll of stats tokens, but we had static builds... which i was in favor of at first, but now I wish we did have random rolls because of the ease of access to loot and how limited the loot is. The best thing for me to get out of my free bright engrams is a sparrow with insta-summon. As the video pointed out, there isn't enough in game content to justify eververse. Micro-transactions are here to stay, but when you have way more payshop content than in game rewards its a problem... and its a bigger problem when both end game rewards and MT rewards are both underwhelming.
The biggest draw back this game for me right now is complete lack of weapon diversity, and its due to balance in PvP. I finally got my hands on Crimson and Jade Rabbit and they're both pretty trash. Crimson is ok, but it runs out of ammo way too fast and it doesn't do a lot of damage. Pretty much every non power exotic is underwhelming in PvE. I will say the Colony is fucking awesome and a ton of fun to use, especially in PvP. (You can buy it from Xur expac or not right now) After that, Merciless is probably the only other Exotic weapon I'd deem worthy. Better Devils, Nameless Midnight, Uriel's Gift, and The Number are probably the only weapons worth using that feel powerful. The Forward Path is decent if you got it to drop from IB, and some of the trials weapons are ok. One of the new energy scout rifles is decent too, but its not as good as the 450rpm ARs. I was using the new vex autorifle for a while until it just felt underpowered when running a few heroic strikes. I'd really like to use something else to mix it up, but when I try, the either feel off, or weak.
They would have been better off doing procedurally generated weapons like Borderlands of making content was too hard. Of course that would be impossible to balance PvP with, but I think everyone has come to terms that Destiny PvP is more fun when everyone and everything is OP. I remember getting my ass handed to me in D1, when I didn't have any OP stuff, but when I got my hands on Fellwinter's Lie and The Messenger everything changed and it was a blast when I was on the same level as everyone else. With how accessible the game is, it wouldn't be hard for everyone to have some type of god roll weapon.
I still believe every gear tier should be available to everyone in some sort of fashion. For Instance, The Division is having a global event at the end of this month. GE's are the best way to get classified gear sets apparently. Right now I only have 2 mismatch pieces because I mainly only farm the PvE named bosses and West Side Piers. I can't solo my way to wave 10 on Resistance. So I'll be grinding the shit out of the GE to get some gear sets I've been wanting. The Faction Rally could have been used for this rather than the underwhelming rewards they give out now. 

Mayhem needs to be a permanent Crucible mode, I fucking adored it during the Dawning. It's the most fun I've had in D2 since playing through the vanilla story (I say vanilla because of Curse being out now). It's just absolute carnage and I fucking love it.
They made plenty of money with their micro-transactions, just not enough to try and take the high road (I know plenty of people who sunk hundreds of dollars into Eververse just to get specific things, hell I threw in $10 just because I wanted a chance to get the whole Dawning armor set (which I only got the boots)). The only redeeming thing about Eververse is it's all cosmetic shit, at least they didn't lock powerful weapons or armor behind it like Battlefront did it's just sad that none of it was really desirable.
Honestly all this is going to do is make companies rethink their micro-transaction system to try and find other ways they can cheat people out of their money, not entirely kill the system (which will never go away because of mobile gaming). If Bungie would of looked at Blizzard's model with Overwatch or hell even GW2's model I think this issue wouldn't of been so catastrophic for them (hell you can even look FFXIV's model, it's all cosmetic shit from outfits to mounts). Sadly they placed to much fucking faith in this system being accepted that it affected the development of the game. This is why publishers are the fucking bane of game development, they force this shit on developers and it ends up hurting a games development to this point (not that I had any real faith in D2 before it launched due to D1's failure in my eyes).

The problem with D2's transactions is that its full of shit no one even wants. I bet they aren't making hardly any money off of it and decided to save face today by outlining how they are going to put stuff in the game to play for. My clan is pretty much dead and I only play on resets until i get to max. As limited as the first expac was, the best part of it was crafting the 11 weapons. They should have focused more on this type of content, because it gave a reason to do strikes, crucible, and public events. At least 6v6 is coming back like I figured it would. 4v4 is horseshit and so is the overbalance of PvP. Everyone uses the same 3-4 weapons because tbh they are the only good weapons across both modes. When they had Mayhem up for the Dawning it was actually really fun since you got your super 10-15 times a match.
I'm actually glad this happened though, hopefully other developers take notice, especially EA with Anthem. More so after the Battlefront II fiasco.