More of the same news , just from RPS.
It’s pretty amazing how quickly WB became a reviled publisher in the PC gaming space.
Has any publisher successfully grafted a dedicated micropayment system onto an existing single player franchise? I’m trying to think of an example.
I guess even multiplayer game Evolve got killed by this. Just curious if this is a marketing failure or if every game like this gets trashed. I don’t recall.
Ubisoft? The Assassin’s Creed games since Unity have offered optional in-game cash purchases.
I don’t know how successful they’ve been in terms of actual revenue to Ubisoft, however.
Yeah, I meant without gamer rage. Maybe there was some for AC, or maybe it just got lost in the noise.
AC was piddly things like maps and such, nothing like this.
Who would want to buy a map in an AC game anyway?
Yeah, the thing with AC was that there really is an upper limit to how much you could spend because there’s only so much content to buy. Once you buy all the maps and gear, there’s really no reason to buy anything else other than ammo (throwing knives, smoke grenades, etc) and you get that stuff all the time from looting and the normal trickle of in-game cash.
Random loot crates are another beast entirely. There’s no upper limit, so you can spend and spend and spend. It’s potentially infinite.
Yeah, I’m out. I was quite looking forward to this, too.
A lot of the early Xbox One games this gen had micros grafted on. Forza V was supposedly a prime offender.
remember when Diablo 2 was the best game ever, and the Diablo 3 came out with the real money auction house? Then lessons were learned, and Diablo 3 became awesome.
Here’s hoping that they learn that lesson.
Yeah, I’m out on this game because of the microtransactions. They could charge 3x the price for a game and I wouldn’t care, but I despise microtransactions because getting solicited for cash while playing a game is just the worst. Dislike it enough that I’ll just pass unless they change that.
Yep. Went from day-1 purchase to “eventual Steam sale pick” for me, too.
I not sure what to think at this point. I thought the Nemesis system was pretty cool, and the expanded ideas of the sequel look very interesting. However loot boxes are the new FtP styled profit booster that seems to compromise or threaten all game design now.
Plus, I’m very disappointed in Shelob. This is not a social justice thing either. I would be equally miffed if Shelob was a fat, drooling old woman. Tolkien, especially Peter Jackson Tolkien, is so low fantasy anyway with a universe full of bipedal humanoids varying mostly in skin tone, gait, and armor style. Why did they need take one of the more interesting non-humans and humanize her? I suppose in the next game Smaug will be a dude just to save animation and story boarding work. Good job WB.
I have engaged my #patientgamer mindset, I’ll grab it and enjoy this game at a discount when the GOTY edition comes out next year. WB games seem to always drop in price FAST.
Monolith’s creative vice president Michael de Plater tries to explain why they turned Shelob into a sexy lady.
Firstly, it’s important to understand that de Plater’s approach to Shelob comes from an interpretation that she and Gollum are, in fact, the unsung heroes of The Lord of the Rings. Put simply, it’s his take that Frodo fails to cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom at the crucial moment - instead Gollum succeeds where he cannot (albeit tumbling into the fire himself along the way). According to de Plater, that weakness in Frodo was something Shelob sensed, making a pact with Gollum and hastening him on his way to Mount Doom and the final confrontation that saw the ring destroyed. It also goes some way to explaining why Shelob tried to eat Frodo in The Two Towers.
"So you’ve got Shelob representing darkness and then you’ve got Galadriel representing light, so you’ve got a duality between these two powerful women basically opposing each other in the same way that there’s a lot of duality in our game. So we thought those two in opposition are really interesting, and the way Galadriel basically manipulated and sent people off on these different quests [testing the Fellowship with the mirror in Lothlórien] but ultimately left to themselves that quest [to destroy the ring] would have failed. Then you think of Shelob as almost the dark mirror to her, who actually had this minion [Gollum] that… if you think about it in a way, ultimately succeeded.
“We were also thinking really in a lot of ways that, not intentionally, but it felt like Gandalf and Galadriel kind of lied to them [the Fellowship] a little bit about their chances and what differentiates Shelob is that she’s completely honest… So she’s evil, or perceived as evil, but she has this honesty to her, and so as we started thinking through that and thinking of her as this dark mirror to Galadriel and filling that role in our story of that narrator and what that would look like.”
“Why would you take the form of a spider?” he asked. “Because they’re terrifying. It really is to provoke fear, there’s a psychological dimension to that, and the other thing with Ungoliant and the spirit of darkness is this line that she hates light but she craves it, and so Celebrimbor and the new ring also represent this new thing that she has a love / hate relationship with.”
As someone who is a huge fan of the original works, including having read The Silmarillion multiple times, what in the actual fuck?
Shelob, daughter of Ungoliant the destroyer of the trees of Valinor, the one who betrayed Melkor to keep them for herself, a hero? One whose sole drive is to take the light and the beautiful and consume them for herself? Shelob literally represents the forces of corruption and destruction, of the destructive nature of unrestrained greed, and she’s the god damn hero?
Nope, no, hell no. Microloot boxes were bad enough. Out. No.
The first game did no great shakes to the lore of LotR either, but I could get past the themes that ran counter to the work. Because I am able to separate it from its inspiration like an adult, and view it on its own merits. This is a bridge too far for me, who is normally very forgiving of translational changes.
I don’t know exactly how this guy would respond to you, but I know it would begin with the Official Videogame Suit Verbal Crutch, the word “so.”