That has to do with the 90’s having a growing, diverse industry that collapsed into said monopolies as the biggest fish started buying out competitors and popular franchises to profit from them and that games became increasingly expensive to develop, leading to the quick demise of various “clones” of popular titles and a death of conceptual experimentation.
The big names entrenched, settled into a steady, profitable rut and actively encouraged creative sterility for a predictable uniformity in products and profits.
Finished Dishonored, bit short of a game, and was too easy for a stealth playthrough.
Don’t know why I didn’t get the achieves though, never killed anyone, never got spotted… seems to be a common bug
Never needed much magic either, just Blink, really, don’t need the sight, wind, mind control or time stop, and didn’t even bother to buy the swarm.
Also never took damage, so all I needed was Agility, no Vitality, Blood Thirst or have corpses disappear.
All this on Very Hard.
I think I’ll do Dishonored 2 without any magic at all.
Unironically this but with analysis of connecting factors and solutions. There needs to be laws against the worst features inherent to the machine in its perpetual appeal and encouragement of man’s worst impulses to exploit and ruin out of self interest.
I’m glad to see things like kickstarters take off even if they’re just a symptom of the larger problem as it changes the means by which some games are made. Philanthropy isn’t the solution but it creates wiggle room for genres that were destroyed by design to reincarnate such as old timey shooters and isometric grand scale RPGs as the people who want the product can enable it. It is a good step toward demand side economics rather than the bizzare fiction of supply side, if we must still be shackled to capital as a cornerstone.
Anti monopoly crackdowns are healthy for an industry and an economy. It’s not about making laws about what games can be made. It’s likewise healthy to break down incentives to exploit addiction and abuse by outright disallowing things like lootbox gambling.
But one thing leads to another, and we both know how much governments love power, so we’ll have to be careful, lest they find some intentional loophole in the laws they got us to agree with and f*ck sh%t up.
On a deeper, metapolitical level, governments of a certain stripe adore monopolies and would strive for more as a business aristocracy holds power of both capital and politics with participation in the latter demanding an excess of the former. The more thing are decentralised and capital removed from the equation with robust protections against exploitation, the more things become democratised and the consumer enjoys more freedom. Ultimately, capital hierarchy with monopolies to control the structure are antithetical to a democratic society.
They’ll find a way to ruin stuff for us if we let them, we’re handing them power, don’t mistake the direction and intent of this for their idea of what to do with it once we’ve agreed with their laws.
Maybe they’ll make it so that nearly everything is some sort of minor violation, or start taxing companies heavier, and boom, we wanted to ruin it for big companies doing lazy work, now it’s ruined for everyone.
I’m not saying all laws are bad in this industry, again, banning lootboxes is a very good idea from what it looks like, but we need to be careful and the moment something seems amiss, we need to oppose the suspicious laws, ask questions.
Even now, did they ban lootboxes because we oppose them, or is it to force the companies to increase the prices of the games themselves, and thus more tax money from gamer to them?
They are but Soulsborne runs with the same formula generally for each game which is what I was referring to before. Again I like the games but Demon’s Souls is really amazing when it comes to creativity or maybe I’m just talking out my butthole considering I never played the King’s Field games.
Agreed, regarding the expensive situation you mentioned I think one Youtuber put it best when he was referring to the PS4 and Xbox One "These consoles weren’t designed to be powerful but to be cheap. " [which is sensible]
You also essentially mention the reason why Indie games, while having creative ideas they simply don’t have the fiscal power to develop their ideas nor advertise it abundantly.
But there is a way around this, a lot of people regard the Thief trilogy as Indie games but that’s only half true. Looking Glass Studios was Indie but they’re publisher Eidos Interactive was triple A. Thief was very expensive to make they had to build a whole new engine for it to work and LGS didn’t have the fiscal means to do that but Eidos did.
We still see something like this today such as with Demon’s Souls the only problem being from the Soulsborne series Demon’s wasn’t really well received at the time but neither was Thief The Dark Project at the time [or at least now it’s not].
But it’s sequel The Metal Age was very well received but now I’m going to have to talk about design philosophy and I want to go wash my hair plus I’m ranting now so.
They did say they’re done with Dark Souls, I think they just made 2 and 3 purely out of high demand.
That said, I’m glad Sekiro became what it is and not a Tenchu game where you fight the same villain for the I-don’t-know-how-manyeth time.
No idea, haven’t played it, though while it does look to have stealth aspects, it certainly isnt stealth-centric, more flow of combat, wait for attacks, parry them, wait for opening, then strike, bring target out of balance
Naming a human is damn near impossible as every given and surname is someone’s alt somewhere. At least the undead have the common decency of playful corruption for wordplay like Ereek Smellington.
Not just economy but society as well. Monopolistic tendencies tend to gravitate towards autocratic, or at the very least - illiberal and authoritarian societal norms. The people see the big businesses allowed to get away with anything and begin to associate monopolised political and societal control into one body as legitimate.
What to think, what to consume, what to mock, what to salute. How to speak, how not to speak, how to dress, how to gesticulate properly.
Deviation from the corporately controlled big society = ostracism, ridicule and petty harassment at the least. At worst it leads to character assassination, overt threats against a person or a person’s livelihood and even permanent silencing where the Big Brand™ Government (or more likely government contracted businesses in the future) can get away with it.
So yes, anti-monopoly and in general anti-accumulation laws are the best for a society.
![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")