Also the character creator, the depth of personal freedom to make or break relationships, even the wide diversity of npc skin color is awesome. You have a ton of DND races but the NPCs feel somewhat unique from each other even when they are the same race due to the diversity of appearances. The dialogue is well written, the choices you can make are abundant, the music gets in your head, the sheer volume of class actions and customizations that highly affect the way the class plays (DND license well used), and the varying levels of difficulty allow people to approach the game from their own experience and work their way up from there.
But you know the industry will learn the wrong lesson from this.
"Wow, people really like Baldur's Gate 3. I know, it must be the dice rolls! Let's have every interaction in Assassin's Creed: Tropical Freeze be determined by RNG!"
yup fuck lootboxes and microtransactions
we just want to buy our games for the promise that everything in it from release is the full experience
expansions in the form of dlc for extra charges can be justified if they add additional content to the game not what was supposed to be in the initial launch(like skimming off the top and selling it back to the consumer👎)
Ignore the part that it’s also a really impressive game with a really long early access to fix issues and continue to add content before doing a public release but okay
Yeah, I think the real message here is that people want stable, full featured games at release. There are a lot of games that still are stuck with a reputation as broken, barely finished messes long after those issues have been resolved. I see people shit talk Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky to this day, even those those games currently sit in a much better state than they did at launch. First impressions matter.
The real lesson developers need to take away from this is that if you put the time in to make sure your game is finished before released, it performs a lot better at launch.
We're obviously in 'what if' territory, but I'd imagine those games would have sold even better if they'd been in a better state at launch. A lot of people requested refunds after purchase, and a lot of those people probably never picked up the game at a later date. I know there's people like me that were going to buy Cyberpunk at launch and held off once the criticisms came in. I picked the game up for maybe 50% off in a steam sale later on, which means CD Projekt Red only got half the money out of me that they were going to get. It also means that once a game gets polished into a better state, you have to restart your marketing campaign to attract those people that you originally chased off.
I think the lesson is “people who are vocal about hating microtransactions sure are vocal, but the majority of mouth breathing garbage eaters don’t care much, and sales data show that very clearly”
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