It sounds like he wants to help people develop games, and really doing that as a publisher would be a lot more sustainable than just giving money away like you suggested.

People mainly play it because it’s fun to get stuff that makes those numbers get bigger.  If at any point Blizzard decides to put some of those numbers behind additional paywalls, that’s going to get some pushback.

What’s weird is that for so many people, the actual gameplay and mechanics aren’t going to decide whether this will be a buy.  The real question is going to be how this ends up getting monetized.  Because if there’s even a hint of gameplay mechanics like gear, upgrades, or skills getting monetized, then this game will…

Money can be made without using loot boxes or putting game mechanics behind battle passes.  Frankly it’s as simple as keeping the battle pass stuff to cosmetic only.

How many of those games you mentioned let you change characters mid-fight? The way Overwatch works, this is much more analogous to being locked out of certain abilities. Imagine playing Street Fighter and not being able to use certain special moves with a character, you’d definitely be at a slight disadvantage versus…

I think the unclearness in general is the biggest issue. When starting a new game and given Easy, Normal, Hard, and something above hard, what are each of those supposed to mean? Is normal something that I’ll only die occasionally, or does it mean only the slightest effort will be expected?

“I don’t like games having difficulty options” are saying they don’t want the choice to be there.

Eh, talking weapons are an old game mechanic and I usually like them. First one I remembered was Lilalcor the talking sword in Baldur’s Gate 2. It was kind of a fun mechanic since you can get the sword early enough that it’s pretty powerful at the time, but eventually you’re weighing the benefits of the sword against…

Very brave take, considering that Monopoly is regularly trashed by the board game community :) .  But obviously play what you like, I’ll try to quit with the board game snobbery.

It’s actually a good rule, as if people use it that means everything gets bought up within a few passes of the board, and the game will usually go much quicker. Also it means people who save money have a chance to buy properties much cheaper if they’re the only person with a decent amount of money come auctioning, and…

Yeah, the beauty of tabletop is that any rules that players end up hating can just be conveniently ignored. They’ll either use an edition that they liked before, or they’ll use some alternative that emerges, or if push comes to shove they’ll just make their own home-brew.

There are a ton of Final Fantasy spells that aren’t any of the basic fire, ice, or thunder spells. I’m talking about Break, Ultima, Meteor, Quake, and Tornado. Out of all of those Ultima is about the only one I ever used. And then of course there are all the status effect spells, which are completely useless since…

Inside are all the spells you have. You can cast it, and it’ll do damage relative to your Magic stat, and the enemy’s Magic Defense as well as element

Ah, the beauty of when games were still coded in languages like C.

It would be cool if PC modders eventually got some kind of multiplayer working.

Seems like a number of romhacks stay out there.  So long as people are able to get it one way or another, the good will of the community will likely remain.

By my logic, if an RPG is released without an ending then it wasn’t fully realized at release.  By your logic, any game is fully realized so long as you say you weren’t talking about any major aspects that were left out.  Hell, you could qualify Star Citizen as being fully realized by the logic you used before.

GenCon is still kind of worrisome since Marion County just shot into the red in the past week.  I’ll probably still be going myself, but I’m going to be on my guard the whole time.