What happened to content?

PizzaW0lf

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Well look what I found here! There's plenty of content in games nowadays, as long as you WAIT for content through UPDATES........

Oh, what's that? Have crap internet and don't want to update games? Do you want everything on a cartridge/disk? WHAT ARE YOU A CAVEMAN? Get out of here with those silly notions! You WILL love being a slave to companies and you WILL enjoy it!

1669850591414.png


Does Sonic team think this is cute? Imagine waiting a few months JUST TO PLAY MUSIC AND TAKE PHOTOS....

:RedWojak: :binTot:

Sorry just had a heated gaming moment.
 
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Sketch Relics

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Well look what I found here! There's plenty of content in games nowadays, as long as you WAIT for content through UPDATES........

Oh, what's that? Have crap internet and don't want to update games? Do you want everything on a cartridge/disk? WHAT ARE YOU A CAVEMAN? Get out of here with those silly notions! You WILL love being a slave to companies and you WILL enjoy it!

View attachment 45240

Does Sonic team think this is cute? Imagine waiting a few months JUST TO PLAY MUSIC AND TAKE PHOTOS....

:RedWojak: :binTot:

Sorry just had a heated gaming moment.
Judging from the content order and content itself, I don't think this was preplanned, rather it seems to be in response to the games success. Things that would take less time to implement are in first while the larger updates are towards the back rather than consitent large content updates.

Now if only they could find that DAMN 4rth chao garden.

Sega on their way to deliver new Sonic content
 
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Dolfin

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Devil's avocado here: sometimes games benefit from a narrower focus.
I still play Kirby Air Ride semi-regularly, and I can say with confidence that City Trial is the only mode worth playing. The base game is too simple and not compelling as a racer, and mapping nearly everything except steering (brake, use power, drift, release to boost) to the A button is clunky. Vehicles perform very differently from one another and are unbalanced. That's the Air Ride mode: just a straightforward, simplistic kart racer. Top Ride is a top-down racer where everyone has the same generic vehicle and races with the same stick-and-A scheme, which just feels tacked-on.
Somehow, though, throwing all of these vehicles into an arena, letting racers collect power-ups to fix their vehicles' flaws or make them ridiculously good at one thing, and pitting them in a random challenge where their build is anywhere from perfect to laughably useless just works. I'd love to play the Kirby Air Ride where they made City Trial the main event - more challenges, more arenas, more machines, sideline Air Ride - or focused on making the control scheme better within their design goal of keeping it simple.
I've replayed some of Sonic Adventure 2 recently. It kinda sucks, and I understand why preteen Dolfin got so salty over it: it controls like hot garbage and somehow looks and sounds worse than the first SA (at least, the Director's Cut on the GameCube, dunno about Dreamcast). The Chao Garden is arguably the most fun part of the whole game, and I wish they'd spent more time polishing that and the base game without feeling the need to tack on multiplayer.
I'll cap this off by saying this is a very different situation than, say, EA coming out with an empty-feeling The Sims 4 just to sell endless expansions of things that should've been there to begin with. If I order a pizza, I'm not asking for a mediocre-to-bad pizza with wings and breadsticks and a salad and ice cream, and I'm definitely not asking for half of a pizza with an option to buy additional slices as extras. I just want a goddamn pizza.
It's not even just video games but technology and software in general. Modern Windows has practically nothing like Clippy or space pinball. The closest would be Cortana I guess but Cortana is awful anyways and just doesn't match up.
Just to address Windows specifically: operating systems shouldn't come preloaded with "content." I liked 3D Pinball: Space Cadet too, but while that's nice for a home user who likes games, it'll sit unused on everyone else's (read: most corporate installations') computers. There's a thin line between nice-to-haves and bloat, and I now prefer my OS to come lean with plenty of a la carte options because Microsoft and seemingly every major PC manufacturer have forgotten what useful preloaded software looks like.
 
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manpaint

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I think what you guys are describing is what I call the "proving period effect".

When something is new, compagny want to make sure people buy their stuff. As a result, they stuff their products full of details and quality to attract potential customers.

Then after a certain period of time, the compagny get money and putting the effort to attract customers is no longer needed.

Some example I witnessed:

Nintendo:

During the Wii U era Nintendo was very good. While the 3ds was doing fine, the Wii U did not have a lot of sad. As a result, Nintendo tried ther best to attract customers. Thry made thing like Miiverse, more Vitual Console, handed out free games, pumped out quality titles. The second they saw the Switch's sucess, they did a complete 180 and became very anti-consumer as they no longer needed to try.

RuneScape:

In the early year of RuneScape, the game was filled to the brim with content. Until the 2012, they pumped out quality update en-masse but in 2012, they realized they had a stable playerbase and no longer needed to try. As a result, they introduced microtransaction which was not very popular. A controversial update broke the camel's back and most player left. As a result, 2013-2017 saw a lot of quality update but then when the playerbase got stable again and they stopped trying. As a result the quality of content dropped. After many years, they tried again when the player count was low which led to another golden age in 2020-2021, but then the player base got stable again and as a result, the quality of update are very variable.


So yeah, it's all cycles dep down. As a result, I conclude that we might see a golden age of content in the future (although some might argue that it has already started).
 

PizzaW0lf

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I'll bring some positivity to this thread. Shoutouts to the THPS 1+2 remake. I'm genuinely shocked that Activision released something this awesome.

The THPS remake has a lot of things you can unlock and grab without ANY microtransactions! I think there's some cosmetic DLC but it's apparently for a charity and it's around 2 items. You have many clothing items, you can get stuff for the custom map creator, and it combines all the stages from the games. Simply put, you have a lot of things to unlock but the only downside is that none of it is really "secret" but I take what I can.
 
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Drifloon

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There's games out there like Minecraft and HOI4 that are basically held up by mods. I want to know if devs know themselves that modders will add far more content than them.
I've wanted to want to play Pokémon for so long now.
Ever thought of trying a romhack or fangame?
 
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LostintheCycle

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There's games out there like Minecraft and HOI4 that are basically held up by mods. I want to know if devs know themselves that modders will add far more content than them.
Are you kidding? Hell yeah they do. I call it the Bethesda business model.
That's why it kinda sucks to be a modder. In a way, you end up duped into doing a companies dirty work by making mods to fix a broken game.
 
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Dolfin

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There's games out there like Minecraft and HOI4 that are basically held up by mods. I want to know if devs know themselves that modders will add far more content than them.
They all know. The difference is how they react to it. Some examples:
  • Paradox makes its living by releasing an empty, half-busted base game and supporting it with a drip feed of DLC and free patches for the next several years, which I'm sure frustrates modders to no end because every big update breaks their shit. Modders do make a ton of content, and I'm sure they've made things that "inspired" Paradox to make DLC with similar improvements/changes, but I never find myself wanting these mods.
  • Bethesda makes big open worlds that could have so much more in them (mile-wide, inch-deep), and generally, they only release a few expansions. Modders make stuff to fill the void and overhaul the gameplay. I'm spoiled on Skyrim mods and can't play it without them anymore; it's the poster child for "it's great with mods." (Personally, I don't think Bethesda is stealing that much credit from the modding community, if only because they've infamously bungled modder relations multiple times.)
  • Starbound is Chucklefish's red-headed stepchild and is only relevant today because it's furry Terraria modders are still developing mods for it. They're probably the only reason CF still acknowledges this game exists and sometimes pushes out an update. And yes, the mods are essential and overhaul/add to the gameplay in substantial ways.
 
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