Gage Thomas: Is it justifiable for Square Enix to charge the full market price for these three games?
Some of the best PS5 games are exclusives like God of War Ragnarok and Astro Bot, but there are some indie highlights as well.
Discounts on the likes of Dynasty Warriors: Origins, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and more for a limited time.
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "Halfway into the decade and the 2020s has been an interesting one for gaming in both good ways and bad, with the restructuring of the industry, a mix of innovation and the same old, and of course many, many long waits. But there have also been many quality titles, to be sure; the last three years in particular have seen a number of critical darlings. Something the most acclaimed ones have had in common (with the obvious exception of Astro Bot) has been an absolutely massive scope, easily boasting 100+ hours of content.
In my own experience that massive amount of content hasn’t always been a positive; in fact I would go so far as to call their slightly overeager strive for quantity a shared flaw of these games. I’ll be looking at four titles in particular here and going over the different ways in which these otherwise solid experiences became victims of having just a bit too much fluff."
To much unimportant content and bloat is mote likely to cause me to stop playing or never revisit it. Especially when it feels like you're forcing the player to do side quests to pad out your game length just to make it long enough so you won't have the player trade the game in to fast
One recent example for me is Hogwarts I enjoyed the story but despised the level gating there was no real reason to lock missions behind a leveling system it was just forcing the player to fly around doing side quests and puzzles so they could advance to the next chapter
omg hogwarts
i love every second of it but damn, does it feel like a chore to play haha.
Hogwarts Legacy should have stuck to what other games couldn’t do: Let us be a Hogwarts student. The open world aspect was just like any Ubisoft game.
Honestly wish it had more of a Bully feel. It was clear that 90% of the attention went to the school and town and the rest felt like the northern chunk of Just Cause 3's map. Almost like they had to justify the flying mechanic by spreading things out.
Yeah agree the Hogwarts castle and grounds is ripe for exploration. Look at the PS1 Argonaut game i felt like that old game did a better job with relaying what it's like to be a student at Hogwarts than what legacy did.
Legacy was like ok you've done a few classes learnt to ride a broom go spend the next multitude of hours exploring nearby towns and killing hundreds of goblins and spiders I don't think they did enough with the school grounds.
I appreciate them including Hogsmeade but I felt like it didn't need to expand past that point
Why don't we have more 12-15h single player stories for $45 is beyond me.
My guess is I recall around the late 2000s game trades were a big issue which resulted in publishers shifting away from standard single player campaigns that could be beaten in a month and we started to see more expansive open worlds that would take longer to see everything to keep the player invested long enough that they wouldn't trade in the game when it was going to be the most profitable retail window e.g the first month
With the rise of all digital games I can see those games making a comeback as there is no second hand market
Expecting a 12-15h game to be $45 is part of the problem. These games don't sell well at full price anymore and relatively speaking it takes a lot fewer resources to stretch it into a 30-40 hour game that can be sold for full price.
We can complain about padding all we want, but most people simply pay more for padded games.
Eternal Strands $48. 18 hours
Citizen Sleeper 2 $23 10 hours.
AstroBot (got as a gift) 16 hours and they keep adding levels.
Totally agree. I'm tired of the same bloated fluff that games present as 'content.'
Act 3 is massive. I think I finished the game 4 times for the platinum and I know I must have missed at least half the stuff in that city
i feel like Rebirth only really had Costa del sol as a bloat. but its a long game, so i dont blame the author
of course!, this ain't TLOU Remake scam price tag :D
Christ almighty 🤦♂️ Yes is the answer. I swear to god if people even click through to this article imma just go die in the corner. These teams spend years crafting these games, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions, on production and you wanna ask if it’s right to charge consumers the RRP?
Not to mention Remake Part 1 was a full 40-50 experience on the story alone, which only covered a fraction of the original game. Plus more hours if you’re a completionist. This second part may not even follow the exact events according to the original due to how the first part ended so yes, charge the RRP. If this article/video agrees with me then cool but I’m not giving it the time of day 🤣
Why is this a topic now? I see this for The Last of Us Remake quite frequently and now this...
Games, for the most part, have a uniformed MSRP. Value is too subjective because now you're talking about perceived value. What one person thinks is worth the price another could disagree.
What gets me is how did this game get in the cross-fires of this discussion?
Also, I can tell this person has no clue about game design and is obviously a young 'un.
The original FF7 was not $60 when it released. It was $49.99...
Secondly, in order to recreate that entire game and every assets in 3D would take a loooooong time. The original game had pre-rendered backgrounds and images in specific camera angles. Recreating that in an explorable environment takes a lot of work and you're expecting a full 1:1 recreation on top of all enemies, summons, spells, effects, NPCs, vehicles, etc? You have to take into account unique rigging for each enemy as well and summons. Probably a bunch of Mel Scripting involved and blendshapes for facial animations.
Take how long FF7 Remake Part 1 took just for the Midgar portion. Even when you exclude the additional content it's still a lot and took a while. Now stretch that out to an entire game and you're looking at years in development. The way they broke this down to deliver a product makes the most sense. Release the game at a point, recover development costs to reinvest in development of the next part.
If they did it all at once we wouldn't play this game until god knows when.
If it’s anything like the first part, it’ll be a complete game with dozens of hours of playtime, so yes.
Is this even serious? Of course they are. They're totally new games, remade from the ground up and even with new story. Not only are they worth it, to me they're pretty much my most anticipated games of this whole gen.