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Video Games - dragons, lasers and zombies


Lyanna Stark

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How do you guys determine what is an acceptable price range for games?

For myself, I used to buy at release or as soon as I can afford it, but now I will only consider buying at release if multiplayer is an important part of the game and wait for the inevitable discounts. I'm still fairly price insensitive though, my bigger consideration now is whether I have time to play the game.

I don't play that many games though, probably less than a tenth of what the posters active here play.

The going rate for a new PC game in the UK has been £30 for about 25 years, so to be fair it's not surprising that the price is going up. However, the problem was that the price jumped up almost overnight from £30 to £50 for big new games from BioWare, Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft.. Even Activision games are coming in at around £40, which is reasonably acceptable.

What is annoying is that the digital downloads from Origin, UPlay and, increasingly often, Steam are priced at £50 or thereabous, but if you go and buy a physical disk from GAME or Amazon, even if you then just download it using an online code, you can usually get them for about £40. And if you wait as little as 2 months, you can get them for £25-£35 physical, and digitally the price also drops if the game hasn't done massively well.

Just to add to the chaos there's code redemption sites (Green Man Gaming is by the best and most legit) which sometimes allow you to score some pretty hefty savings for a day or so. Shadows of Mordor was briefly £20 on there just a couple of weeks after release, which I'm annoyed I missed.

With the Dragon Age games, I bought the first two for less than £10 each, as I got them a fairly long time after release, and don't consider the money I spent on them wasted. If I'd paid full price for either of them, I wouldn't have considered it value for money. That's why I'm holding fire on DA3.

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DA:I is on the Frostbite Engine which DICE developed for the Battlefield series, and has always looked tremendously better on PC than console (old or new). It's a relief they didn't gimp DA:I to make the consoles look better, as the game clearly looks miles ahead on PC in the comparison videos. And the videos themselves are a bit misleading, as they're only comparing the 1080p versions. Get the game running at a higher resolution and it'll look miles better. Same for Mass Effect 4, hopefully, which is being built on the same engine.




Dragon Age is probably the most overrated franchise of the previous gen (unlike Mass Effect, which is very nearly as great as it rep makes it out to be, a few issues aside). I still like it, but constantly being told it's the greatest fantasy RPG series ever when it's not even fit to brush the boots of Baldur's Gate and is vastly less interesting than the Witcher games (despite their own enormous issues) got old a while ago.



Maybe DA:I is the moment that the series really takes off though. I guess I'll find out when the price drops to something less insane.





DA:I seems to be the point where the series tries something new that alot of people, at least initially, seem to dig. It's basically Bioware meets Skyrim. So far it seems to be a mix people like.



It always strikes me as funny that the series that started as an attempt at a throw-back to old school RPGs has ended up being I think by far the more expertimental of Bioware's work.


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Ron Gilbert and Garry Winnick are Kickstarting a new 1980s/90s-style adventure game called Thimbleweed Park. It's unashamedly a SCUMM-based game heavily influenced by Maniac Mansion (the 'spiritual successor' descriptor crops up). The trailer confirms you can at least try to "Use Balloon Animal On Corpse."



Interesting. This is unabashedly properly old-skool, unlike Broken Age which was tried to give old adventure games a modern slant (not very well, going by the reception to the game). However, after Deathspank and The Cave I'm not sure Gilbert has really got the old magic any more, especially when he's not collaborating with the likes of Schaefer or Grossman.


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How do you guys determine what is an acceptable price range for games?

For myself, I used to buy at release or as soon as I can afford it, but now I will only consider buying at release if multiplayer is an important part of the game and wait for the inevitable discounts. I'm still fairly price insensitive though, my bigger consideration now is whether I have time to play the game.

I don't play that many games though, probably less than a tenth of what the posters active here play.

I only pay full price for games if they meet at least one of the following criteria:

  1. 30+ hours of content from a single playthrough. I won't pay $60 for something that can be completed in an afternoon (I'm looking at you Gears of War).

High quality, judging by reviews, community reaction, gameplay footage, and demos. After Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly on the Gamecube I make sure all of my potential purchases are thoroughly vetted.

The game is the latest entry of a franchise I'm a big fan of, or looks to be the start of a franchise that I want to be a part of.

The game is a fad or phenomenon in the video gaming community, and waiting 1 year or more means the popularity drops. I don't like missing out on discussion, discovering hidden content, or participating in multiplayer, since those things die off permanently the older a game is.

The price is already low, as is the case with indie games.

Sometimes I have to make an exception, like with Nintendo. They don't do price drops if they can get away with it, so these days I just skip entire consoles regardless of quality or content.

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The Australian situation is similar to the UK one. Retail for new XB1/PS4 games is normally $99 - and digital matches that price. For many years EBGames had a virtual monopoly and charged the full retail price. But for several years now we've had JBHifi come in and they'll discount at launch and sell for $89 or $79 (er even $69 sometimes) - and EBGames are forced to lower their prices accordingly (either to match or to come in a little closer). But digital sticks at the retail price (one assumes they have deals in place with the retailers to sell at retail price and not under-cut them). So buying digital always ends up costing more.

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How do you guys determine what is an acceptable price range for games?




$30 is typically an acceptable price range for me these days. I used to buy games at release all of the time, but nowadays, I have such a huge backlog of unplayed/unfinished games that I have no desire to drop $60 and add another one to the pile that I might play.... eventually and by then, the price on it will have probably dropped by an enormous amount.



Exceptions to that are games that I just HAVE TO HAVE but those are so exceedingly rare these days. I think the last game I bought at release for full price was Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Maybe X-Com: Enemy Unknown. Can't remember if I got that one discounted or not.






Anyone looking to buy games right now should remember that Black Friday sales are a little over a week away.




I'm waiting for then to see if the new Civ goes on sale before I buy it. Maybe I'll pick up DA:I too, but I might wait until after Christmas for that one.



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I won't bother anymore with games that are more than 25$/20€ basically. I've got enough games to last me to the next decade - heck, I could probably stretch LOTRO, Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings and Spiderweb's complete catalogue for a year each. That's without taking into account tens of unplayed games.


Since I don't feel the need to buy a newly-released game the day it's released, and I intend to play or have played games 10 years after release, buying AAA at full price is a complete waste of money - and that's without even taking into account their quality.



Having such a large stack of games (on top of a large stack of books), I stick to buying when there's a sale. I've come to the point where I force myself not to buy games on sales - recent examples being Arkham Asylum and some Assassin's Creed - because I would just end up feeling even more frustrated when seeing how slowly I play my way through this huge backlog.



Games I've bought full price - when said price is quite high, not 5/10 $ game - are few: WOW, BC and WOTLK expansions (for obvious reasons, it's a bit tricky not to buy them fast / Sid Meier's Pirates! (PC remake), because the original is one of my 4-5 favourite games ever and I had to have it / Oblivion and Skyrim (haven't played more than 2 hours of Skyrim until now, which is enough to make my point about not buying a newly-released game anymore).


All in all, it's been literally years since I have played a game less than 3-4 months after release.

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Playing through Castlevania LoS 2 right now and do not really understand the bad critics it got. It might be a bit less spectacular than 1 but still a very nice Action Adventure game.



I stopped to create huge backlogs - not because of the Money but because of limited time. 50 hours Job + Family = less time for Videogames.



One game that Looks amazing:


www.kingdomcomerpg.com

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I resent all non 2D Castlevania games for not being 2D Castlevania games.

The Castleroid (or is that Metroivania?) games were the whole reason I bought a GBA back in the day.

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I foolishly started playing Witcher 2 without playing a second of the first installment. I'm on the third chapter of Witcher 2 now, and I love it, but I've been considering the first game after I finish the second.



I'm sure it's worth it, but was just curious if it's a must-play or not. Clearly I've already leapfrogged it, but it appears to me that some characters in the second are introduced in the first, and I'm interested in that.


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I'm sure it's worth it, but was just curious if it's a must-play or not. Clearly I've already leapfrogged it, but it appears to me that some characters in the second are introduced in the first, and I'm interested in that.

Not particularly. W1 is a really good game, but a lot of people could see it as really, really janky these days. Depends on when you started playing videogames I guess. Here's what you need to know:

  • You saved a King's life at the end of Witcher 1 by killing a strange Witcher. You're working for that king in the beginning of W2

Dandelion is a bard and has your back, though he's kind of a ridiculous dumbass sometimes. You can talk him into sleeping with a succubus really, really easily, for instance. He thinks you're the second greatest thing in the world, after himself.

Zoltan is your dwarf bro and is super cool. You know each other well and are basically beer-drinking battle buddies.

Triss is a sorceress you became romantically involved with in (or after, for those who romanced Shani) the events of W1. She's kinda sketchy because while she clearly likes you, Geralt's also an amnesiac in W1 and she lets you think she was the sorceress you were involved with, rather than the person it actually was, namely:

Yennefer. She doesn't pop up much in W2 until later, and when she does, it should be explained pretty well to you.

I think that's all the major characters?

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