I worry about it because I like to play K/M 
. That’s just a personal taste kind of thing and PoE2 showed how it shouldn’t be and ppl praise it while it makes WASD superior to M/K. To me that’s a shame.
1 Like
Like I said, i wouldn’t Just because such implementation looks out of scope of their capabilities in the next 1 or 2 years at least.
I didn’t mean to target you specifically, but I have seen other supporters of WASD claim it as mandatory. Regardless, Mike has said they’re working on it, so it’s only a matter of polish vs release date now, and I still prefer a good system over a quickly delivered system.
Because it’s quantity vs quality. Money-making studios only care about making a game good enough for you to buy the deluxe expansions and MTX. Pay-to-win games are all designed to fleece you out of your money, not to make a good game.
I’m pretty sure if EHG made WASD movement a $10 DLC, a lot of people would buy it. People would probably pay for the key tab as well. Heck, there’s recent requests for a paid campaign skip on these forums. But they don’t do that. Because when you have this option to let players buy QoL, it’s very easy to not invest in the ‘free’ version of the game anymore, after all, you want that $10 to be worth the purchase, so the bigger the difference the DLC makes, the better, right? And then you’re effectively no longer supporting base game to make money, because every development decision is now (also) about how much money it generates.
Look at PoE 1: You start with 3 stash tabs as a new player, iirc. I invite you to try and play the endgame with only that. Or, you know, you could just buy 10 item-specific near-bottomless tabs for a total of $59, which is effectively the real price of PoE. It’s really hard to be GGG and design a league mechanic without a new currency, because they know a lot of their players will buy the tab for it. So the money is going to impact design decisions. And that’s without even getting to the egregious cases like WoW / Diablo
To put it in a game theory perspective: A game developer that makes money is maximizing the amount of time players are willing to spend on their games. A money developer that makes games is maximizing the amount of money players are willing to spend on their games.
Plus, a game studio like Larian can achieve their goal (break even on the game + budget for next project) and use surplus to make the game better (e.g. Patch 8) for no cost to players, while a money studio like ActiBlizz will never have “enough” money. Making a game better for free is always counter to their goal.
There is nothing wrong with making as much money as possible, except when the decision to make as much money as possible makes you change the game identity in pursuit of that goal.
It’s all about priorities. Do you want to make a game that makes the most money possible (Blizzard and D3/D4)? Or do you want to make a game that fits your vision and that you’re proud of (GGG with PoE and EHG with LE)?
The first one makes decisions simply based on the number of players it can get to buy the product, even if they don’t stick around for long. All that matters is buying the box and buying some MTX.
The second one makes decisions based on the state of the game and might make unpopular decisions to part of the playerbase or, more often, to a portion of the players that aren’t the real target of it.
Otherwise, all games would end up being the same, following the same strategies for money maximization.
That is because you’re “poor”. Most of the (significant) shareholders in the big gaming companies are already filthy rich. Getting 10k a month from a game means nothing to them. So they push for high return, meaning millions.
Sure, but since they’re already filthy rich, having a few fail isn’t a big problem for them. And the return from a few highly successful ones are enough for it.
These are people that only play in the millions of billions range. They’re not happy with small steady returns over a long period. They want a big juicy return right now.
I actually don’t agree with this. I don’t like WASD either. It forces me to either have a bunch more keys in the keyboard to use or buy a mouse with lots of buttons, both of which I don’t want to do. And it negates one of the things I like the most which are lazy builds I can play with mouse only.
However, the way PoE2 did this was extremely well made, in my opinion, because they made mouse movement work in a way that feels like playing with WASD. You click on the edge of the screen to walk and click on the opposite edge to shoot and your character keeps moving. This is actually huge.
Yes, there is still some penalty to using mouse vs WASD for movement, but the way it was done in PoE2 means that the difference between both is actually very small and I don’t feel like I have to use WASD or lose DPS.
1 Like
Well, one way or the other, it’s high time for them to focus on a specific group of players which they want their game to cater towards majorly. Sure, some things are not mutually excluse… but others are.
Do you want your bosses and overall content to provide some form of challenge? Well, then the campaign is garbage.
If you want mindless ‘turn brain off’ blasting through content it’s fine… but then the thought processes expected from the design of the monolith are in the way.
Either/or, you can’t combine both, one alienates the others. So either people find the style of monoliths crap or the campaign crap… but never enjoy both. That’s a bad state since you spend a substantial amount of time in the campaign for your first character at least… or you have people stopping fairly quickly in monoliths.
No, I disagree with that entirely.
If you have the funds and there’s a job which needs to be done in your company that would make it suceed better then you hire a person. That job is by design a safe one then as long as the company doesn’t get screwed up.
And even if not you have the decency to inform people with a good amount of time so they can re-situate themselves (several months, I would argue at least 6), give them the time to apply for other jobs as well and best-case help directly to get a good worker a new position if there’s nothing relevant for them available anymore in your company.
That’s basic human decency at first and secondly gives your company a reputation which can’t be beaten by competition, making the smart and reliable people apply rather then those which don’t give a shit.
The same goes for a small-scale project the moment you include a second person. There is no difference outside of complexity… the base aspects always stay the same, it just gets left on the roadside most of the time, and the bigger a company becomes the more things get left behind.
That part isn’t true anymore, they’ve removed including more specialized tabs and now give out the basic storage for free… but overflow needs to nonetheless be handled in the overall tabs.
But yeah, the base game price for PoE is a supporter pack if you wanna play it long-term, 100% true.
Yes, and we see the outcome… loads of bancrupty.
Higher theoretical payouts does also mean higher risk. A good portfolio has a proper spread between low-, mid- and high-risk investments. The high-risk ones always expected to be a insignificant portion of it or you’re prone to fail. No matter the size. Be it 1€ or 10 billion €, the fundamental workings are the exact same.
I’ll once more guide with all my applicable appendages towards Ubisoft as an example. That should say enough.
Except that difference isn’t actually real.
Diablo 1 wasn’t made in someone’s garage in their spare time, it went through both an investment and an outside purchase by CUC (turning Condor Games into Blizzard North) before the game was released.
Warcraft’s Blizzard Entertainment was that original investor, after being invested in themselves by Davidson & Associates. (Back when they were called “Silicon & Synapse”)
So EHG is not much different than those guys. They even show the same enthusiasm in making a great game as their top priority.
2 Likes
Obviously. But guess who doesn’t go bankrupt in those situations? The shareholders (the filthy rich ones). They might lose some money on those projects, but they make up for it with the ones that are successful. So they push for these projects because they don’t care if a bunch of companies go bankrupt, as long as one hits the jackpot.
Because they already have low and mid risk investments in other stuff.
2 Likes
This is the big issue for me because clicking to the right to move and shooting to the left works for 1-3 seconds depending on your MS and maybe your vision range. I have no Idea if this feels better on a wide screen or not. So you actualy rotate arround with the mouse like a maniac to mimic a button press and a mouse click and this is extremely well made for you? To each their own I guss but I disagree completely with this take.
It is definitely miles better than the current mouse movement situation where you click on the left edge of the screen to evade and on the right edge to shoot and your character immediately stops. Forcing you to constantly go between left and right clicks at the highest pace you can achieve.
Currently, games with WASD work with the “normal” mouse movement, meaning that not using WASD is effectively a DPS loss. Quite a huge one. As I mentioned before, there’s a video comparing this for Undecember and the difference is very noticeable.
With PoE2, you don’t need to contantly do this windmill of clicks. You click to move away, shoot a few times while still moving away, then you can go click to move away a bit more and go back to shooting. The difference in DPS for WASD vs mouse movement in PoE2, which it still exists, isn’t as noticeable.
We are talking about different devs I referred to PoE 2, with challenging campaign and garbage lategame (in my view, ofc). It just teared apart between two mostly mutually exclusive groups of players, PoE 1 players where majority wants to zoom-zoom and new players where many of them wants original GGG’s vision.
But it’s not like stocks of the company like Blizzard can drastically increase in the price, if it will be pushed to aggressive monetization. It’s just drying reputation of Blizzards without chance to hit jackpot. It’s not making asset risky, just slowly killing it.
Still, there is a huge difference between 3 seconds and let’s say 0.3 seconds. I don’t think that playing with click-to-move can be as comfortable as WASD anyway, but it certainly much smoother this way, than without such feature.
It’s better but far from good or even close to compete with WASD. If I play my Sorc with WASD my clearspeed is much higher then using M/K because positioning is a non issue and I save myself from a lot of movement I have to do playing M/K. Everyone who don’t has a big dmg increase or saved time from using WASD over M/K is doing something very wrong.
Sure but isometric hack and slash games are no twinstickshooters for a reason. That is something that comes with the genre and defined it for decades and now they move away from it to make twinstickshooter fans, or fans of other genres where WASD is implement naturaly, happy. This makes as much sense to me as if people advocate for click to move in CS.
On top of it LE wasn’t built with WASD in mind so if they implement it and make the game even easier I eagerly wait for the memes that make fun of EHG.
But they are now
Maybe nostalgia.
Sadly
When you have millions of shares, even a small shift can bring massive profits.
But a board of shareholders also collects on the company’s profits. These are the ones that push for high profit margins.
You started with statement that they don’t care because they have nothing to lose. With millions of shares, they do.
It can make sense pushing to extremely high volatility if your share is small, but Blizzard can’t have very high volatility, not while they are making mediocre games anyway. So I don’t see who would get profit from making their reputation further bleed. Maybe marketing section who will report about short-term sales. But in the long term, all shareholders will suffer from such strategy, wouldn’t you agree?
They don’t. As Kulze pointed out, these people have their money tied into low, mid and high risk ventures. Gaming is one of the high risk ventures. It can generate a buttload of money. If they lose money on it, it’s offset by the low and mid risk ventures they have in other industries.
He didn’t mean equal shares though, only small part of investments goes into high risk high reward type of assets. It make sense because you have nothing to lose, but can gain A LOT if you are lucky. With putting a lot of money in risky asset, you have something to lose and smart people usually do not do it like this.
1 Like
Yes, that’s what I mean as well. These people have a lot of stuff invested into low and mid risk investments in other industries. The gaming industry, due to its potentially volatile nature (same as the movie and currently the TV industry as well), is where they sink the high risk ones. Which leads to scenarios like Concord.