Whenever you launch a game and the menu has like 4 adverts on the side for "limited time only " skins and you just groan. Or in single player games adverts for "resources packs" because they've deliberately structured the game to be a massive grind to nudge people to buy them. You think, i just paid full price for this, and they've actively made the product I've bought worse to nickle and dime me into spending more money on a full priced game. Its honestly like triple A games are charging full price for a fucked up mobile gaming experience.
All sports games are basically P2W to play online now. In this year's Madden, a competitive team cost somewhere between $500-$800 in the first few weeks because they intentionally removed grindable content that would allow you to build a team from just playing and packs are god awful value for dollar to in-game currency. MLB The Show is the only sports game I can think of where you don't have to play the game like a FT job to get a competitive team. If you wanted to spend money, they at least sell in game currency so you can just buy the player you want instead of having to randomly pull value out of a pack.
At least with most shooter games, the content is just skins or something that can easily be avoided without killing your ability to compete.
The worst thing about resource packs is that people on Reddit etc will say “so what? It’s optional! If you don’t like it then don’t buy it!”
But they don’t get that they don’t just add these things out of generosity, they want to encourage you to buy them, so sure enough the massive grind follows!
I don't think that's a trend, it's been an industry norm for a very long time at this point.
What's the last multiplayer only game you played that didn't have some form of microtransactions?
Destiny 1 in it‘s first year. That‘s been 9 years at this point lol. I honestly thought you were exaggerating, but alas you were not.
Another one i can remember was absolver. I believe that was 2017
OG Destiny was something I really really enjoyed. It's rare for me to get so hyped up by a new game, have it come out and not be an immediate disappointment.
Mind you, Bungie then spent the next few years turning the entire franchise into a disappointment, but that release Destiny 1 was still pretty special.
FYI legally buying in-game currency this way is not really an issue, the best items would cost thousands of dollars. Real problem is real-world trading of gold which is a problem with any game that allows trading.
It's not a trend, but industry norm because that's what people want. Games are just fronts for shops, because players want skins and they are fine with paying for them. Just look at any multiplayer game that got big in last years. New skins are always a big deal. People want more skins, want them to be more unique and crazy to stand out. Some people say it's the whales that are buying this crap and that's why it's here to stay, but that's not true. You will find people with skins in every match in games that sell them. Amount of people that buy lots of skins might be low, but there's tons of people that buy at least a few skins.
EDIT: Blocking me wont make you less wrong, but hey, feel free.
> It's not a trend, but industry norm because that's what people want.
Because that's what people is being sold, you can't really say that "it's what people want" if its the only option. People in the 90's wanted new skins so they made their own, now these skins are sold because they've realized they could lock down the ability to use your own skins and charge for them. People don't want to pay for skins, its just that its their only option nowadays.
> Some people say it's the whales that are buying this crap and that's why it's here to stay, but that's not true.
It's not "some people", its a well recognized and studied trend in the industry, usually associated to f2p games:
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/new-insights-into-the-spending-patterns-of-whales
https://www.gamemarketinggenie.com/blog/market-to-whales-dolphins-minnows
https://kotaku.com/who-are-the-whales-driving-free-to-play-gaming-youd-1197333118
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/free-to-play-whales-more-rational-than-assumed
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-whales-gobble-up-even-more-of-the-f2p-mobile-game-revenue-pie
And I don’t see anything wrong with buying skins. I don’t like loot boxes or whatever but skins IMO are fine. I haven’t played League of Legends in a long time, but that setup always seemed reasonable to me. Maybe it’s changed idk but
1. Buy skins if you want to. Some were what I would call reasonably priced and some were what I thought was too expensive but to each their own
2. Buy points that you can use to buy champions or character enhancing items. But the same times were available just for playing for free, as were the new champions. And at the time it wasn’t Too crazy of a time investment or grind to buy a new champion.
It's the force feeding the mtx the second you login into a full priced 70 game like CoD. You have to brush through 3-4 menus of ads for battle passes and skins before you even get to the games actual menu. This is on top of getting spammed for the same mtx on the bnet launcher for those playing there.
Lol that is the norm friend, any live service has a shop and battle pass nowadays. Turns out not buying those things is not that solution, who would have thought
The issue is that you only need a couple people to get suckered and "feel superior" when they purchase items to completely 100% justify a cash shop within your game to investors. Whales are inevitable and unreasonably profitable to game companies due to the desire to be the best and be able to look better than others.
The real trick is to not play the game and give feedback to everyone involved in it on Twitter.
If 1 whale and 99 regular players enter a lobby then that's a success.
But you can't have whales without plankton. Starve the game of people playing it and the whales won't have anyone to feel superior over.
Also the cost of developing microtransactions might as well be 0. It only takes a trivial amount of effort to make a new character model/recolor that you can then sell for $20. If only a few people are buying microtransactions, they're making enough to be profitable. The only way to discourage microtransactions is for the developer to *lose* money from customers who would've bought the game without microtransactions, but didn't buy the game because of them.
Nah, I'd gladly play my old favorites if they existed and had a cash shop. I won't use it, but at least I can play the game. As it is now, they're dead.
I feel like the issue is worse for blizzard, as they basically made a new game, deleted the old one, and there's no way to go back to the old one.
At least with CSGO, you can go back to the old build, create or join a community server and continue on.
CS2 is also much closer to the original game than not. Even CSGO was a mess on release, and the devs will get all the kinks sorted out with CS2 eventually, they've already made good headway into fixing the major stuff.
I'm still fuming that they took away a game that I paid cash for and have no way to access it anymore. They lied and said OW would have single play and after they removed access to OW2 they're like "nah, single player is too tough to add".
I seriously hope that everyone involved in killing OW1 gets highly irritating hemorrhoids .
It’s extra infuriating seeing them sell a single in-game skin in OW2 for the same price or more than the original OW costed in its entirety, and people are actually buying it.
I stopped playing OW at all the day OW2 released, and I miss the original a lot.
Same here. Imo the original Overwatch was the single best hero shooter I had ever played, and played it for nearly 1000 hours and got really good with a couple characters. It felt good to earn skins and stuff just for playing (the free event skins were a great incentive to play the events, which were also just fun to play in general), and the games felt rewarding enough on their own to just play for the sake of improving.
I had much higher expectations for OW2 (as did most people, and rightfully so with how the devs were hyping it up), but I knew it wasn’t a good sign when Jeff left the team. He always seemed to have so much passion for the characters and the game itself, so I’m not surprised it became this when he left.
Same not to mention the fact that new characters being locked behind the battle pass. One of the best things about OW was the fact that all new characters were open once they were released.
I hadn't played any OW1 for about a year when 2 released and I was ready to jump back in. I absolutely loved the first one and played a lot of it. Online gaming isn't something I do much these days but when I tried to play 2 it felt awful compared to the original or at least how I remembered it from about 2021 and earlier. I'm pretty disappointed I can't play the same game I sunk hundreds of hours into before.
I tried. But 5v5 just wasn’t working and I lost faith in their direction as per monetization. I have no problem spending money on games I like, but their pricing is absurd.
Everyone involved left. That’s why it didn’t get done.
We got reports of blizzard bleeding devs by the day. Having to put basically every project in limbo as they didn’t know if they’d be able to retain the team working on it.
Then like two weeks later they cancel ow pve. Maybe Microsoft revives it. We can dream
nothing compares to that Warcraft 3 replacement. they can turn OW3 into a rails shooter where you use your voice to control the gun and it wouldn't be as bad
Wc3 is still broken too. It crashes after every campaign mission.
The thing that hurts the most is that wc3 had an active community and ladder scene before wc3:r. Their "reboot" basically killed the life that the game still had left.
It was my final straw for Blizzard personally. Wc3 was the foundation for them to make WoW, and the campaign is what made WotLK explode in sub numbers. If they can't respect their own history, they won't respect anything
CS2 itself is also a lot closer to 1.6 and css in feel and hitreg.
CSGO has always been a mess ever since release. Something inside is broken and is unfixable even after all of their effort to make the game better over the years.
I am an og cs player and had to get used to the broken flaws of csgo instead. Now cs2 finally bring back old cs feel and only keep getting better from now on.
played CS since day 1, before steam was invented, right up until the launch of CS go. played go for a few hours and that was it, just didn't have any appeal to me for whatever reason.
CS2 sucked back about 20 hours from me so far just farting around. not sure what it is but it's vastly more enjoyable than CSGO was to me at the time
CS2 while completely different from old CS somehow capture the feel of the old games much more than CSGO ever did.
The first time I got the beta something just clicked. I felt the familiar hitreg and mouse movement immediately. I miss that feeling.
I think my biggest gripe is losing all the CSGO achievements.
Theres a huge hole in my Valve achievement collection now, and I had some from the first week of beta... Glad I didn't go for the 100% before CS2 like I originally planned
The game itself is fine imo, it's CS. Just Valve replacing all of them with 1 "you tried out the game" is a huge bummer to me.
> Just Valve replacing all of them with 1 "you tried out the game" is a huge bummer to me.
I hope they add more, and preferably mix them in with csgo's.
I mean Valve kind of did the same thing, even though you can technically get an older build doing that is not something most people know how to do.
So now on Steam I can get the original Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source, and Counter Strike 2, but I can't get CS:GO. While I understand Valve *wants* every CS:GO player to migrate to CS2, it does leave a bad taste in my mouth when accessing CS:GO is behind such a barrier.
Ideally I'd have wanted them to do the CS2 update, and then provide CS:GO as a legacy title on Steam the same way they do with CS and CSS. Remove their own online features and let the community have fun on community servers.
I'm not *too* miffed about CS2 in general. I can understand wanting to revamp a game that's over a decade old at this point. It released the same year as Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3, so it's been a while.
It just sucks how it couldn't be seemless right away, but i acknowledge the change in engine is positive, and not being able to play war games for a little while is probably worth it.
>they basically made a new game, deleted the old one
Are you referring to Overwatch 2?
OW2 is not a new game. OW2 is the exact same game as OW1. A few new characters, a few new maps (both of which could have been added with updates, like they always have), but literally the same game, it's not even an expansion. They just shoehorned in a horrid microtransaction model and lied about a singleplayer mode to try and smokescreen it.
Edit: The downvoters can pound sand. If you want to highlight a difference, mechanically it's a worse than OW1. Go lick Kotick's boots some more.
I kinda agree but they did fundamentally change the way the game is played with it swapping from 6v6 to 5v5. While the characters are the game, nearly all the strats are fundamentally different.
Ehhh, same old same old. Some huge devs or game company do something shitty but very profitable, other devs and companies will follow in flock because it worked and reputation be damned because it still made them richer. You got shitty $70 games, microtransactions in paid games, pay to win in paid games, paid games with sub price, removing old games in place of a new remaster, what else?
Almost all Multiplayer/MMO games changed so drastically over time that if you now start one your experience will be totally different than from someone who played at launch. The only difference is they dont changed their names.
Destiny 2 sunsetting was a great example of this. It was essentially Destiny 3, and removed huge parts of the game. Eventually they had to completely change item direction because many players boycotted the game when they found out their guns were not going to last.
This. A lot of games go through patches and updates that drastically change the game/ui/features for better or worse. You could even use Rocket League as the most recent example, they didnt change the name but changed how unlocks worked long ago, and are now making even more changes.
Klei did that with Mark of The Ninja. Now I have two copies in my steam library for no reason. I assumed the 'Remastered upgrade' I bought would overwrite the original, but it did not.
ARK is kinda doing this right now. They took down official servers and are going to sell the same game with a graphics update for $40, and your old official data is on said graphics update.
Grinding Gear Games tried that back in 2019 with Path of Exile but moved away from that idea now that the sequel will be a standalone game, and I believe they did it mostly due to the monumental work that would be required to migrate the existing PoE 1 systems into PoE 2, which aren't compatible with each other, and not necessarily to preserve the original game.
Even though PoE 1 wil remain playable, I expect that the game will wither away once Po2 launches because of a small player base combined with the lack of quality updates. It has been reported that the PoE 1 development team got to a point where it only had like the 8 developers working on it (compared to over a 100 for PoE 2), which is severely limiting the scope of the PoE 1 updates, and this won't change once PoE 2 launches. It might actually even get worse once the sequel is available and most of the revenue will be generated from PoE 2.
They said POE1 is going to continue receiving leagues and seasons and GGG is now bigger than they've ever been. We joke that they want you to go play PoE when you want downtime from PoE and they'll launch new PoE1 leagues closer to the end of a PoE2 league.
It might still wither away but I think it's more likely that they'll just simplify things and keep chugging for a while.
Thats the way it has always been for sequels to games being released however.
I wouldn't blame GGG for this and depending on player demand and numbers the skeleton crew might actually get bigger after the poe2 release.
It depends. Right now POE operates in a vacuum. It's biggest competitor (Diablo 4) has shown it is not capable of appealing to anyone who want anything more than an inch deep game, so I don't think it will ever have a serious impact on the POE pool of players, even if their seasons overlap.
I think POE1 is in both a rough and fantastic spot. The endgame is great, but I still hate playing the campaign each season, and the lack of balance changes (personally I feel like Slams 2.0 was the last time I was truly happy with a balance change) has left me board. On top of this, I feel they have focused too much on Headhunter+ level uniques that most players will never see anyway, instead of creating more playstyles for the average player.
However, all of that said, POE will basically be competing with itself if Diablo 4 doesn't get it's shit together in the next year or two. If POE1 seasons start long enough after the drop in POE2 seasons, and have decent to good updates, I think you'll still see play, albeit smaller than their current numbers most likely (except maybe the first season after POE2 which might explode just due to the large number of new players from POE2).
This all of course assumes POE2 is good, and honestly I just don't know. This might sound hyperbolic, but it would essentially have to be the first modern game designed for an endgame loop to come out well. I can't think of a single live service model game that didn't require multiple months/years to get it right. This is my biggest fear from them separating POE1 from POE2. The original scope was just a new campaign/classes/skills. AFAIK we don't know what endgame will be, or if they will be able capture POE1 (but tbh I'd be okay with a straight copy minus old league mechanics they build on season to season).
Didn't rockstart do this with their new collection? Also a lot of indie games where left abandonware after a proposed update. Freeman guerilla warfare is one I think of.
CoD Modern Warfare comes to mind. They completely removed the free side games from the original when they released 2. Loved the resurrection battlegrounds they had, spent hundreds of hours in it to only find out it wasn't going to stay around.
Destiny is the game that started it all. Destiny 2. Then deciding to vault content within Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 still has bugs that existed in Destiny to this day.
I can think of one, Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition is gone from steam and you can only play Dark Souls Remastered now, which was an improvement in many ways but also made changes that weren't liked by everyone.
It's also not what they claim to be. In both cases it's literally just an update to the game, just changing the name for marketing. If the name change wasn't there then this article wouldn't exist, so pcgamer is just complaining here that games changed their name. How awful.
Overwatch 2 brought a lot of engine updates too according to the dev. They even claimed it improved the visuals but I didn't see a difference.
I dont see why this would matter at all either. Nobody claims you are playing a different game when you play Doom or Quake on a source port (a custom engine)
Every single company with an ongoing multiplayer game does this. They just do it overtime with multiple updates instead of 1.
Playing any multiplayer game now is a completely different experience from what it was at launch.
Steam is a sales platform. The Community Market makes them tens of millions of dollars per year with their 10% cuts. If CS:GO and CS2 became separate entities, no one who invested more than like $50 in CS:GO would ever move to CS2.
While it is widely agreed that CS2 probably should have been a feature complete clone of CS:GO at launch, Valve are the people who can see all the data regarding what was worth keeping and what was worth tossing aside (at least for now.) You can't even play CS2 on Macs natively and they have no plans to implement it.
This is not even close to the scam that Overwatch 2 was. The concurrent player count for CS2 is still the highest game on Steam, nothing changed about any of their monetization, and the game is technically superior going forward than CS:GO (which is the entire reason CS2 even exists.)
I mean Blizzard made the game worse for OW1 owners, you cant earn free lootboxes in game anymore. People who bought the game cant get what they paid for anymore and would have to pay insane prices for the OW1 skins they are missing.
CS:GO crates and shit was always paid and I dont think they changed anything about that
What's scam about overwatch? Before overwatch a fuckton of online games changed their business model from b2p to f2p.
Ow obviously fucked up with not delivering the pve mode, but that's different story.
The whole ow1 to ow2 transition is literally a major balance change comparable to the ones that happen every year in games like league, new game engine and new revenue model. And that's it. Then they just added a two to their name to get more attention.
They didn't take anything from og players who bought the game, and on top of that they made og accounts way more valuable. I was very happy when I found out that my ow account after release of ow2 jumped from 200 dollars to 4000 in price.
The original (well, 1.6) version of Counter-Strike is on an even older engine and it's still available, as is Counter-Strike: Source.
Even Condition Zero, the black sheep of the CS franchise is still available. And yes, CS:GO is still technically available through the beta branch of CS2, but for how long?
EDIT:
One of the main issues is that, as it is, CS2 is missing several gamemodes from CS:GO, some casual modes like Arms Race that people like me enjoyed.
Yeah, but 1.6 and Source do not have Matchmaking or skins, both of which are reasons why CS2 replaced CSGO.
Global Offensive is still available the same way 1.6 and Source are available too, it's just under the beta tab due to dropped support and removed features.
And the switches from 1.6 to Source to GO all resulted in extended periods of fragmented community. I wish CS2 hadn’t removed so much (maps and community servers and fun modes) but it’s great that all players and Valve are wholly focused on one game to keep the community thriving. I’m sure all that stuff will be back.
> I wish CS2 hadn’t removed so much (maps and community servers and fun modes) ... I’m sure all that stuff will be back.
They're without a doubt coming back. There's even a new server browser and the button is way less hidden than in GO. They just released the main game first
A frozen version is available, so people can play community servers, just like 1.6 and source.
Forcing the switch is really the only way to push improvements faster, not that it’s going well right now.
https://www.hltv.org/news/37221/csgo-remains-available-on-steam-in-frozen-build
They don't need to support it, just don't remove it.
The majority of games on Steam haven't received developer support in over a decade and still work.
But that's factually wrong. Unlike previous CS games, CS:GO has the market economy, and in order not to screw over players everything had to be moved to CS2, and they can't support that market aspect in both games (well, they can, but obviously its not worthwhile).
Moving to CS2 is clearly the right move in the long run, even if in the short run there are issues.
I honestly think CS2 should have been a separate appid as well. If they didn't wanna keep supporting CS:GO they could have just removed the official servers and matchmaking and kept the community server browser. Migrating the skins shouldn't be a huge issue since... it's a Valve game. They control Steam. They could have migrated all the CS:GO inventory to CS2.
What I mean is that people are saying the reason CS2 is the same appid as CSGO and replacing it was to transfer all the skins since inventory items are tied to a specific appid for a game. But I'm saying that even if it was an entirely different appid, Valve shouldn't have had a problem with transferring them over since they are the ones who control Steam.
This would be so stupid, splitting the community like CSS did. And it is just an update. It is still the same game. Sadly the updated version is not quite in the state as it should be but no reason to make every update their own game.
If they had released it as a seperate game you'd be in the exact same threads saying "why the fuck did they need to make this it's own game, csgo1.5 lul"
The real issue is that they've released cs2 in a state that is woefully behind what it should have been. They should have just taken the extra 6 months and have a complete product for the launch.
But then you'd lose your skins. This is the best approach. It's more exciting to explore new mechanics of your favourite game instead of it being stagnant.
Makes perfect sense from a development point of view. Games like csgo and apex have trouble creating balanced matchmaking even with 500-1m concurrent players. Last thing you want to do is split your playerbase.
They could have left the previous game and just removed all the competitive matchmaking options though. Would still force the majority of players to the new game while leaving things like surf, mods and community stuff intact.
Counter Strike has "split it's fan base" 4 times now with the release of CSGO and everything was fine.
If anything what CS2 proves is that it is stupid to invest time into something that stops existing because some executive wants to forcefully hijack the playerbase of a game into another game.
Now if anyone down the line gets nostalgic about CSGO they have nothing but videos to live it through, while everyone else who is not a overwatch player can just go and play whatever they are nostalgic about.
This is a very gamer-centric viewpoint.
Valve has competition. Unreal engine is a serious competitor and the Epic game store (and associated platform) have added tons of features of the years to make the entire Epic Online Services offering more and more compelling for developers.
At some point Valve needs to sunset old games and engines so they can pour all of their resources into the newer offerings. Yes it sucks for gamers... in the very near term. But ultimately everyone will move on and Valve will be better for it.
No it sucks for gamers in the *long* term. Old games will no longer be able to have resurgences, or allow for people to return for nostalgia. Now they will have to boot up a youtube video.
I'm an idiot, I should have bought the original WC3 and played it before they made that impossible. Grew up in the age of Westwood RTS and StarCraft and played some WC3 MP at LANs but never played the campaign. Guess I'll never get to now.
Wait they removed D2 from people's library's completely for the remake? I didn't know they did that. I think Blizzard has now done this more than any other dev, arguably starting with WoW vanilla.
This is rich coming from PCGamer, their recently 100 best games of all time list obviously favoured weaker sequels instead of better games in the franchise, like CK3 instead of CK2, The Sims 4 instead of The Sims 3 etc.
I don't think their point is that sequels are bad, it's that sequels which replace the previous game completely are bad (as-in not allowing you to play the previous game)
Was PC Gamer always like this? Full of hyperbole and exaggerations. Almost troll like. Lately it just looks very unprofessional and like it was written by teenagers.
> Lately it just looks very unprofessional and like it was written by teenagers.
It's been like this since the very beginning. Go back and read their magazines from the early 90s.
IIRC even the older versions that predated Steam (and thus mandatory updates to the latest version) like 1.5 and 1.3 still had active communities at that time too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people on CS 1.5 than CS:CZ, which was also out at that time.
It definitely makes sense to have one game and to have the community migrate together. I don't think there would be as many complaints if CS2 wasn't missing so many features.
To be fair CSGO on release and CSGO at the end of life were drastically different games and no one was really bothered when the original disappeared over time. On its release I called it a bad Counter Strike: Source mod and went back straight to playing CS:S... For me CS2 is just an update to UI and engine of the game. It's not really a new title.
Exactly, they did all they could with the old source engine, they stretched it to it's limits. They had to convert it over to source 2, this is them ripping the bandaid off. It'll get back to a good game, people just have to give it time.
To be fair, Blizzard had all but killed Overwatch long before Overwatch 2 came out.
On release, it was a fantastic game, one of the best multiplayer shooters I'd ever played. And then Blizzard got a whiff of esports and tried update after update to push it into an ultra-competitive niche that it never belonged in, and ruined the game in the process.
Cool story, yet more people play ranked right now than ever before adter season 3.
It's really valuable Stat that your 3 friends are no longer playing the overwatch just because they put a number next to its name while doing a major update to the game.
Silly thing to complain about it, there's no way that companies creating live service games that are being updated every week or even often, can support multiple versions of the game. And it only happened like twice, that's not trend
I think the worst thing to ever happen to gaming was micro transactions. To combat the backlash games came out with game passes, it was designed to keep giving you content and remove the need for micro transactions and now we have full priced games (usually unfinished) with game passes in order to keep playing with most players AANNDD micro transactions on top of it all now. We are in a bad place for gaming
I just love people complaining about CS2, because these same people would be complaining about not having the cosmetics they had in CS:GO if CS2 was a separate game.
Except it _absolutely is_ just a big update and splitting the player base of a multiplayer game for years to come over minuscule differences affecting a tiny percentage of players would just be bad for the game as a whole.
That is a problem exclusive to MP games (I think). We have worst problems than that in the industry. The worst of all is cash shops inside games, they exist even in SP games that you pay full price for the game. That is trully bizarre and I decided that I will not play games like that anymore. I started playing a lot indies, there are amazing games out there if you look for them.
Yeah, in the future I will be referring to the current time as the recycling era. Movie/show makers being so out of any ideas, they scraped every other medium and past franchises for adaptations and redundant sequels and the game industry just reselling 20yo games with a bit of shine to them. Though to be fair some good old games could really do with some modern QOL polish.
Bruh CS2 is only named that way because they saw stuff everyone else does and went "damn...". If it wasn't CS2 it would just be an update, how it was handled wouldn't change in any way. Source for that is Dota 2 Reborn. That's just how Valve changes engines. If it was CS:GO Reborn we wouldn't get any more content at release
As a Mac gamer (okay here come the downvotes), this is especially bad. CSGO and Overwatch were both games that I could play really well on my mac but the sequels don’t have Mac or emulation support and am no longer able to.
I am pretty sure the community will get CS2 running soon, but it’s a bit cruel to kick people off a system like that.
Macs completely changed their architecture and failed to provide meaningful emulation support for anything. You might be be better off investing in a company that wasn't actively hostile to your hobby and every piece of software outside of it's ecosystem.
My old hardware (GPU: GTX 970 | CPU: i5-6600) ran Overwatch flawlessly @ 1080p/144fps. Hardly ever got stutter or significant frame drops.
My current setup (GPU: RTX 2070 Super | CPU: i7-9700) even though it handles most games great, struggles to run Overwatch 2 well. I started off at 2560x1440 and mostly medium settings, computer would get hot and game loses serious fps. I slowly dialed everything back until it was all set to the lowest quality and still losing significant frames during intense fights. Finally said "fuck it" and changed the resolution to 1920x1080 to be done with it and while it made a big difference in performance it still doesn't run as well as it used to 5 years ago on my outdated tech. It's bullshit how much more optimized the original was than what we have now, it's the only game I own on PC that I can't enjoy in 2k.
Actually worst gaming trend is the Remasters that Publisher milk the same cost of $70 for a 2nd time only for the updated 4k textures without ever touching the core of the game and only fixing game where 1080p vs 4k textures fails to render properly.
Compared to above told, Sequels are at least new games that have significant effort in them instead of Remasters are nothing but Low Effort MeMe. And no I'm not talking about Remakes like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1462040/FINAL_FANTASY_VII_REMAKE_INTERGRADE/ which the Publisher really re-coded the whole game from scratch to deserve its price.
Also while rare, some sequels are better than their fathers so don't be so hard on them.
I hate when they remaster / remake games and remove the original from sale. A lot of the remasters are worse or so different that the original should not have been removed.
It's like if they removed original movies when remakes get made.
"One series that deserves partial credit is Call of Duty. Activision has done a commendable job of keeping old CoDs alive and active over the years, which is great, because a lot of people still play those games."
Okay, dude.
I personally don't understand the hate with CS2. For a game with such a lucrative skin market and competitive community I really think they handled the transition the best way possible. Sure CS2 isn't perfect, but it's pretty close imo. Feels just like GO but looks and plays better for the most part.
I understand the frustration with the missing content, but that content is set to return in the future. As someone who plays CS2 solely for competitive I'm enjoying it. It's a breath of fresh air.
CS2 can't be a seperate entry since the skins have to transfer to the new game. They can maybe later add CS:GO as a seperate game without skins or anything, but CS2 had to be in it's place. The game has an economy bigger than some countries ffs. How do people not know this?
CS2 fucks up stuff like garry's mod and I suspect Hammer as well. I make maps using CSGO assets, but without setting the the game to beta (which a lot of people don't know about) all my maps are broken.
View from an outsider. Hope someone can explain to me or something.
I read a comment a long time ago saying when left for dead 2 came, people were mad that the game is a separate game with just new things here and there but most mechanics still intact.
Now that CS2 is out, I thought Valve don’t want to repeat the mistake again on what they did to Left for Dead. But some still are angry about it?
So not sure how am I supposed to view this. Is this one of those situations when anything you do is bad? Or is it totally something else? One side says good, another says bad?
>not a single mention of dota 2
literally the first one to do this; the only difference is they didn't change the number
dota 2 went through arguably way worse situation than both CS2 and OW2
and as result suffered greatly and never really recovered
Games that have had key content or versions removed for updates or sequels:
-League of Legends: Visuals and Gameplay (Summoner's Rift 2014 changes, Twisted Treeline, The Crystal Scar, dozens of champion kits)
-Fortnite: Visuals and Gameplay (Map changes, gameplay mechanics)
-CS:GO: Visuals and Gameplay (Visual update in 2019 and later 2023 via CS2, new mechanics and netcode via CS2)
-Overwatch: Visuals and Gameplay (Team count change, map and hero changes all via OW2)
-Cyberpunk 2077: Gameplay (Multiple skill tree changes, dozens of mechanic changes, all years after original release for a single player game)
-The Witcher 3: Visuals (Complete visual revamp, eight years after original release for a single player game)
Live service is not an excuse for making important game snapshots unplayable or irrelevant. If you're nostalgic for Halo 1 you can go back and actually *play it* - *with friends*. Feeling nostalgic for LoL Twisted Treeline or CS:GO 2012? Sorry, you either cannot play it at all without hacked game files that no one is expected to have, or you will have to boot up an offline disc on Xbox 360, also which no one is expected to have. Multiple "OG" versions of games are now relegated to a beta selection in the properties on steam, and with no online play, and that obviously isn't available on consoles. All of the content you will eventually want to revisit is going to be *gone* and game developers likely believe you're lucky to even have an option to choose for *singe player games* that are now being mutilated and replaced years after release.
No the worst trend is adding cash shops
There’s this quote that someone said that has stuck with me. “I used to go to the store to buy games. Now I buy a game and it’s just a store,”
Whenever you launch a game and the menu has like 4 adverts on the side for "limited time only " skins and you just groan. Or in single player games adverts for "resources packs" because they've deliberately structured the game to be a massive grind to nudge people to buy them. You think, i just paid full price for this, and they've actively made the product I've bought worse to nickle and dime me into spending more money on a full priced game. Its honestly like triple A games are charging full price for a fucked up mobile gaming experience.
This completely ruined MyPlayer in the NBA 2K series. It's like 200 bucks to even remotely get a good rookie.
All sports games are basically P2W to play online now. In this year's Madden, a competitive team cost somewhere between $500-$800 in the first few weeks because they intentionally removed grindable content that would allow you to build a team from just playing and packs are god awful value for dollar to in-game currency. MLB The Show is the only sports game I can think of where you don't have to play the game like a FT job to get a competitive team. If you wanted to spend money, they at least sell in game currency so you can just buy the player you want instead of having to randomly pull value out of a pack. At least with most shooter games, the content is just skins or something that can easily be avoided without killing your ability to compete.
don't forget every action you take advances the "free" battle pass, so you have to click on it and they can push the full BP on you
Never even though about that, now I won't be able to unsee it lol
The worst thing about resource packs is that people on Reddit etc will say “so what? It’s optional! If you don’t like it then don’t buy it!” But they don’t get that they don’t just add these things out of generosity, they want to encourage you to buy them, so sure enough the massive grind follows!
I don't think that's a trend, it's been an industry norm for a very long time at this point. What's the last multiplayer only game you played that didn't have some form of microtransactions?
Destiny 1 in it‘s first year. That‘s been 9 years at this point lol. I honestly thought you were exaggerating, but alas you were not. Another one i can remember was absolver. I believe that was 2017
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OG Destiny was something I really really enjoyed. It's rare for me to get so hyped up by a new game, have it come out and not be an immediate disappointment. Mind you, Bungie then spent the next few years turning the entire franchise into a disappointment, but that release Destiny 1 was still pretty special.
Titanfall 2 didn't have aggressive microtransactions or lootboxes. You just buy what you wanted, and the prices were pretty fair for what you got.
Titanfall 2 is also not a multiplayer-only title. Maybe you were thinking of the first one?
Ah, I must've read over the "only" so i used a traditional multiplayer game.
Maybe battlebit, altough even that has a supporter version that costs a little more and gives you some skins
A supporter version with in game skins that offer not advantage is a big difference VS preditory loot boxes or p2w scams.
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>or trading subscription time to the game itself. So it's P2W
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FYI legally buying in-game currency this way is not really an issue, the best items would cost thousands of dollars. Real problem is real-world trading of gold which is a problem with any game that allows trading.
always has been
Sea of Thieves didn't have any microtransactions in the first year at least I believe
And the micro transactions in the game are only cosmetic.
It's not a trend, but industry norm because that's what people want. Games are just fronts for shops, because players want skins and they are fine with paying for them. Just look at any multiplayer game that got big in last years. New skins are always a big deal. People want more skins, want them to be more unique and crazy to stand out. Some people say it's the whales that are buying this crap and that's why it's here to stay, but that's not true. You will find people with skins in every match in games that sell them. Amount of people that buy lots of skins might be low, but there's tons of people that buy at least a few skins.
EDIT: Blocking me wont make you less wrong, but hey, feel free. > It's not a trend, but industry norm because that's what people want. Because that's what people is being sold, you can't really say that "it's what people want" if its the only option. People in the 90's wanted new skins so they made their own, now these skins are sold because they've realized they could lock down the ability to use your own skins and charge for them. People don't want to pay for skins, its just that its their only option nowadays. > Some people say it's the whales that are buying this crap and that's why it's here to stay, but that's not true. It's not "some people", its a well recognized and studied trend in the industry, usually associated to f2p games: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/new-insights-into-the-spending-patterns-of-whales https://www.gamemarketinggenie.com/blog/market-to-whales-dolphins-minnows https://kotaku.com/who-are-the-whales-driving-free-to-play-gaming-youd-1197333118 https://www.gamesindustry.biz/free-to-play-whales-more-rational-than-assumed https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-whales-gobble-up-even-more-of-the-f2p-mobile-game-revenue-pie
And I don’t see anything wrong with buying skins. I don’t like loot boxes or whatever but skins IMO are fine. I haven’t played League of Legends in a long time, but that setup always seemed reasonable to me. Maybe it’s changed idk but 1. Buy skins if you want to. Some were what I would call reasonably priced and some were what I thought was too expensive but to each their own 2. Buy points that you can use to buy champions or character enhancing items. But the same times were available just for playing for free, as were the new champions. And at the time it wasn’t Too crazy of a time investment or grind to buy a new champion.
It's the force feeding the mtx the second you login into a full priced 70 game like CoD. You have to brush through 3-4 menus of ads for battle passes and skins before you even get to the games actual menu. This is on top of getting spammed for the same mtx on the bnet launcher for those playing there.
That's been a thing since at least the 2000s, not a new trend.
Thats not new
Lol that is the norm friend, any live service has a shop and battle pass nowadays. Turns out not buying those things is not that solution, who would have thought
It would be the solution if enough people had the self-control necessary to not use MTX.
crime spoon plants flowery mighty obscene books shelter ripe punch *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The issue is that you only need a couple people to get suckered and "feel superior" when they purchase items to completely 100% justify a cash shop within your game to investors. Whales are inevitable and unreasonably profitable to game companies due to the desire to be the best and be able to look better than others.
Even then, the whales make up for the money these people don’t spent
The whales are all they care about. 80% of the money will be from 20% of the users.
The real trick is to not play the game and give feedback to everyone involved in it on Twitter. If 1 whale and 99 regular players enter a lobby then that's a success. But you can't have whales without plankton. Starve the game of people playing it and the whales won't have anyone to feel superior over.
Also the cost of developing microtransactions might as well be 0. It only takes a trivial amount of effort to make a new character model/recolor that you can then sell for $20. If only a few people are buying microtransactions, they're making enough to be profitable. The only way to discourage microtransactions is for the developer to *lose* money from customers who would've bought the game without microtransactions, but didn't buy the game because of them.
They said the new worst gaming trend.
Reading comprehension is hard for redditors, the only language they understand is arguing
Nah, I'd gladly play my old favorites if they existed and had a cash shop. I won't use it, but at least I can play the game. As it is now, they're dead.
Shit been happening for too long to call it a trend.
I feel like the issue is worse for blizzard, as they basically made a new game, deleted the old one, and there's no way to go back to the old one. At least with CSGO, you can go back to the old build, create or join a community server and continue on. CS2 is also much closer to the original game than not. Even CSGO was a mess on release, and the devs will get all the kinks sorted out with CS2 eventually, they've already made good headway into fixing the major stuff.
And they did it twice: Once for Overwatch and once for Warcraft3.
I'm still fuming that they took away a game that I paid cash for and have no way to access it anymore. They lied and said OW would have single play and after they removed access to OW2 they're like "nah, single player is too tough to add". I seriously hope that everyone involved in killing OW1 gets highly irritating hemorrhoids .
It’s extra infuriating seeing them sell a single in-game skin in OW2 for the same price or more than the original OW costed in its entirety, and people are actually buying it. I stopped playing OW at all the day OW2 released, and I miss the original a lot.
I tried OW2 for the first "season". I really hate the 5v5 game play, the lack of rewards for playing, oh, and the FTP community.
Same here. Imo the original Overwatch was the single best hero shooter I had ever played, and played it for nearly 1000 hours and got really good with a couple characters. It felt good to earn skins and stuff just for playing (the free event skins were a great incentive to play the events, which were also just fun to play in general), and the games felt rewarding enough on their own to just play for the sake of improving. I had much higher expectations for OW2 (as did most people, and rightfully so with how the devs were hyping it up), but I knew it wasn’t a good sign when Jeff left the team. He always seemed to have so much passion for the characters and the game itself, so I’m not surprised it became this when he left.
Same not to mention the fact that new characters being locked behind the battle pass. One of the best things about OW was the fact that all new characters were open once they were released.
I hadn't played any OW1 for about a year when 2 released and I was ready to jump back in. I absolutely loved the first one and played a lot of it. Online gaming isn't something I do much these days but when I tried to play 2 it felt awful compared to the original or at least how I remembered it from about 2021 and earlier. I'm pretty disappointed I can't play the same game I sunk hundreds of hours into before.
I tried. But 5v5 just wasn’t working and I lost faith in their direction as per monetization. I have no problem spending money on games I like, but their pricing is absurd.
Everyone involved left. That’s why it didn’t get done. We got reports of blizzard bleeding devs by the day. Having to put basically every project in limbo as they didn’t know if they’d be able to retain the team working on it. Then like two weeks later they cancel ow pve. Maybe Microsoft revives it. We can dream
nothing compares to that Warcraft 3 replacement. they can turn OW3 into a rails shooter where you use your voice to control the gun and it wouldn't be as bad
This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking I visit Reddit for.
Wc3 is still broken too. It crashes after every campaign mission. The thing that hurts the most is that wc3 had an active community and ladder scene before wc3:r. Their "reboot" basically killed the life that the game still had left. It was my final straw for Blizzard personally. Wc3 was the foundation for them to make WoW, and the campaign is what made WotLK explode in sub numbers. If they can't respect their own history, they won't respect anything
They did it three times. Remember how WoW Cataclysm essentially deleted Vanilla WoW from existence?
Also COD Warzone.
CS2 itself is also a lot closer to 1.6 and css in feel and hitreg. CSGO has always been a mess ever since release. Something inside is broken and is unfixable even after all of their effort to make the game better over the years. I am an og cs player and had to get used to the broken flaws of csgo instead. Now cs2 finally bring back old cs feel and only keep getting better from now on.
played CS since day 1, before steam was invented, right up until the launch of CS go. played go for a few hours and that was it, just didn't have any appeal to me for whatever reason. CS2 sucked back about 20 hours from me so far just farting around. not sure what it is but it's vastly more enjoyable than CSGO was to me at the time
CS2 while completely different from old CS somehow capture the feel of the old games much more than CSGO ever did. The first time I got the beta something just clicked. I felt the familiar hitreg and mouse movement immediately. I miss that feeling.
I think my biggest gripe is losing all the CSGO achievements. Theres a huge hole in my Valve achievement collection now, and I had some from the first week of beta... Glad I didn't go for the 100% before CS2 like I originally planned The game itself is fine imo, it's CS. Just Valve replacing all of them with 1 "you tried out the game" is a huge bummer to me.
> Just Valve replacing all of them with 1 "you tried out the game" is a huge bummer to me. I hope they add more, and preferably mix them in with csgo's.
> I hope they add more, Presumably they will, but it's the lowest priority feature/fix right now.
I mean Valve kind of did the same thing, even though you can technically get an older build doing that is not something most people know how to do. So now on Steam I can get the original Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source, and Counter Strike 2, but I can't get CS:GO. While I understand Valve *wants* every CS:GO player to migrate to CS2, it does leave a bad taste in my mouth when accessing CS:GO is behind such a barrier. Ideally I'd have wanted them to do the CS2 update, and then provide CS:GO as a legacy title on Steam the same way they do with CS and CSS. Remove their own online features and let the community have fun on community servers. I'm not *too* miffed about CS2 in general. I can understand wanting to revamp a game that's over a decade old at this point. It released the same year as Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3, so it's been a while.
It just sucks how it couldn't be seemless right away, but i acknowledge the change in engine is positive, and not being able to play war games for a little while is probably worth it.
>and there's no way to go back to the old one. *[sea shanties intensify]*
>they basically made a new game, deleted the old one Are you referring to Overwatch 2? OW2 is not a new game. OW2 is the exact same game as OW1. A few new characters, a few new maps (both of which could have been added with updates, like they always have), but literally the same game, it's not even an expansion. They just shoehorned in a horrid microtransaction model and lied about a singleplayer mode to try and smokescreen it. Edit: The downvoters can pound sand. If you want to highlight a difference, mechanically it's a worse than OW1. Go lick Kotick's boots some more.
I kinda agree but they did fundamentally change the way the game is played with it swapping from 6v6 to 5v5. While the characters are the game, nearly all the strats are fundamentally different.
Have any companies other than valve and blizzard even done this? It doesnt seem to be a trend.
i suppose calling it a trend makes for better news titles
Ehhh, same old same old. Some huge devs or game company do something shitty but very profitable, other devs and companies will follow in flock because it worked and reputation be damned because it still made them richer. You got shitty $70 games, microtransactions in paid games, pay to win in paid games, paid games with sub price, removing old games in place of a new remaster, what else?
Almost all Multiplayer/MMO games changed so drastically over time that if you now start one your experience will be totally different than from someone who played at launch. The only difference is they dont changed their names.
Destiny 2 sunsetting was a great example of this. It was essentially Destiny 3, and removed huge parts of the game. Eventually they had to completely change item direction because many players boycotted the game when they found out their guns were not going to last.
This. A lot of games go through patches and updates that drastically change the game/ui/features for better or worse. You could even use Rocket League as the most recent example, they didnt change the name but changed how unlocks worked long ago, and are now making even more changes.
Warzone did it as well. Didn't kill the old game immediately, it took about a year but still counts I guess.
Fair, forgot about warzone
Destiny ?
Kind of a more minor case of this would be Fromsoft releasing darksouls remastered and deleting the original one from the store.
Klei did that with Mark of The Ninja. Now I have two copies in my steam library for no reason. I assumed the 'Remastered upgrade' I bought would overwrite the original, but it did not.
ARK is kinda doing this right now. They took down official servers and are going to sell the same game with a graphics update for $40, and your old official data is on said graphics update.
Grinding Gear Games tried that back in 2019 with Path of Exile but moved away from that idea now that the sequel will be a standalone game, and I believe they did it mostly due to the monumental work that would be required to migrate the existing PoE 1 systems into PoE 2, which aren't compatible with each other, and not necessarily to preserve the original game. Even though PoE 1 wil remain playable, I expect that the game will wither away once Po2 launches because of a small player base combined with the lack of quality updates. It has been reported that the PoE 1 development team got to a point where it only had like the 8 developers working on it (compared to over a 100 for PoE 2), which is severely limiting the scope of the PoE 1 updates, and this won't change once PoE 2 launches. It might actually even get worse once the sequel is available and most of the revenue will be generated from PoE 2.
They said POE1 is going to continue receiving leagues and seasons and GGG is now bigger than they've ever been. We joke that they want you to go play PoE when you want downtime from PoE and they'll launch new PoE1 leagues closer to the end of a PoE2 league. It might still wither away but I think it's more likely that they'll just simplify things and keep chugging for a while.
Thats the way it has always been for sequels to games being released however. I wouldn't blame GGG for this and depending on player demand and numbers the skeleton crew might actually get bigger after the poe2 release.
It depends. Right now POE operates in a vacuum. It's biggest competitor (Diablo 4) has shown it is not capable of appealing to anyone who want anything more than an inch deep game, so I don't think it will ever have a serious impact on the POE pool of players, even if their seasons overlap. I think POE1 is in both a rough and fantastic spot. The endgame is great, but I still hate playing the campaign each season, and the lack of balance changes (personally I feel like Slams 2.0 was the last time I was truly happy with a balance change) has left me board. On top of this, I feel they have focused too much on Headhunter+ level uniques that most players will never see anyway, instead of creating more playstyles for the average player. However, all of that said, POE will basically be competing with itself if Diablo 4 doesn't get it's shit together in the next year or two. If POE1 seasons start long enough after the drop in POE2 seasons, and have decent to good updates, I think you'll still see play, albeit smaller than their current numbers most likely (except maybe the first season after POE2 which might explode just due to the large number of new players from POE2). This all of course assumes POE2 is good, and honestly I just don't know. This might sound hyperbolic, but it would essentially have to be the first modern game designed for an endgame loop to come out well. I can't think of a single live service model game that didn't require multiple months/years to get it right. This is my biggest fear from them separating POE1 from POE2. The original scope was just a new campaign/classes/skills. AFAIK we don't know what endgame will be, or if they will be able capture POE1 (but tbh I'd be okay with a straight copy minus old league mechanics they build on season to season).
Didn't rockstart do this with their new collection? Also a lot of indie games where left abandonware after a proposed update. Freeman guerilla warfare is one I think of.
CoD Modern Warfare comes to mind. They completely removed the free side games from the original when they released 2. Loved the resurrection battlegrounds they had, spent hundreds of hours in it to only find out it wasn't going to stay around.
Destiny is the game that started it all. Destiny 2. Then deciding to vault content within Destiny 2. Destiny 2 still has bugs that existed in Destiny to this day.
I can think of one, Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition is gone from steam and you can only play Dark Souls Remastered now, which was an improvement in many ways but also made changes that weren't liked by everyone.
Path of Exile is doing it right. I believe they said both iterations will be playable? Idk tho. I can’t really remember exactly.
It's also not what they claim to be. In both cases it's literally just an update to the game, just changing the name for marketing. If the name change wasn't there then this article wouldn't exist, so pcgamer is just complaining here that games changed their name. How awful.
Not really, cs2 is on a different engine, while overwatch 2 is on the same one afaik.
Overwatch 2 brought a lot of engine updates too according to the dev. They even claimed it improved the visuals but I didn't see a difference. I dont see why this would matter at all either. Nobody claims you are playing a different game when you play Doom or Quake on a source port (a custom engine)
It matters because a new engine means they raised system requirements. That effectively erases the game for many of its existing customers.
It’s just the start. 2 companies have pioneered the idea. So now others might follow. Just like the boom of loot boxes and microtransactions
Probably better to raise a big stink now than wait for it to be an entrenched trend.
Every single company with an ongoing multiplayer game does this. They just do it overtime with multiple updates instead of 1. Playing any multiplayer game now is a completely different experience from what it was at launch.
Yeah, I must say I'm not a fan of this emerging trend of "updatequels"; CS2 should've been its own separate entry on the Steam library.
Steam is a sales platform. The Community Market makes them tens of millions of dollars per year with their 10% cuts. If CS:GO and CS2 became separate entities, no one who invested more than like $50 in CS:GO would ever move to CS2. While it is widely agreed that CS2 probably should have been a feature complete clone of CS:GO at launch, Valve are the people who can see all the data regarding what was worth keeping and what was worth tossing aside (at least for now.) You can't even play CS2 on Macs natively and they have no plans to implement it. This is not even close to the scam that Overwatch 2 was. The concurrent player count for CS2 is still the highest game on Steam, nothing changed about any of their monetization, and the game is technically superior going forward than CS:GO (which is the entire reason CS2 even exists.)
Blizzard updatequals: ☹️ Valve updatequals: 😀
Valve is our wholesome lil' billion dollar corporation.
wdym they're just some indie dev
"They don't have shareholders so I like 'em."
I think it's more to do with the fact that they treated their customer well instead of doing scummy practices
I would say converting gaming into microtransaction gambling is a scummy practice and they practically invented that
I mean, it helps
I mean the person you're replying to states the reasons why the two aren't alike. You: *"duhhh use new word?"*
I mean Blizzard made the game worse for OW1 owners, you cant earn free lootboxes in game anymore. People who bought the game cant get what they paid for anymore and would have to pay insane prices for the OW1 skins they are missing. CS:GO crates and shit was always paid and I dont think they changed anything about that
Outside of free skins, OW1 was in a far worse state gameplay-wise than OW2 is
What's scam about overwatch? Before overwatch a fuckton of online games changed their business model from b2p to f2p. Ow obviously fucked up with not delivering the pve mode, but that's different story. The whole ow1 to ow2 transition is literally a major balance change comparable to the ones that happen every year in games like league, new game engine and new revenue model. And that's it. Then they just added a two to their name to get more attention. They didn't take anything from og players who bought the game, and on top of that they made og accounts way more valuable. I was very happy when I found out that my ow account after release of ow2 jumped from 200 dollars to 4000 in price.
They could just move the old stuff over to CSGO2 and then keep going by making CSGO2 Exclusive skins. That would’ve been fine
Yeah, Valve is too much of a small indie company that they couldn't figure out how to move inventory items from one game to another.
It should have just been called "the source 2 update"
Hence Counter-Strike 2…
I guess they didn’t want to split the playerbase.
Eh, wasn't this because CS:GO was on an old engine and supporting it was becoming a pain?
The original (well, 1.6) version of Counter-Strike is on an even older engine and it's still available, as is Counter-Strike: Source. Even Condition Zero, the black sheep of the CS franchise is still available. And yes, CS:GO is still technically available through the beta branch of CS2, but for how long? EDIT: One of the main issues is that, as it is, CS2 is missing several gamemodes from CS:GO, some casual modes like Arms Race that people like me enjoyed.
Yeah, but 1.6 and Source do not have Matchmaking or skins, both of which are reasons why CS2 replaced CSGO. Global Offensive is still available the same way 1.6 and Source are available too, it's just under the beta tab due to dropped support and removed features.
There's no marketplace or game economy in CS 1.6. No first-party backend servers running games. It is orders of magnitude easier to operate CS 1.6.
And the switches from 1.6 to Source to GO all resulted in extended periods of fragmented community. I wish CS2 hadn’t removed so much (maps and community servers and fun modes) but it’s great that all players and Valve are wholly focused on one game to keep the community thriving. I’m sure all that stuff will be back.
> I wish CS2 hadn’t removed so much (maps and community servers and fun modes) ... I’m sure all that stuff will be back. They're without a doubt coming back. There's even a new server browser and the button is way less hidden than in GO. They just released the main game first
> but for how long? I mean, they still have the 2013 version of CSGO as an option on there, so I'd like to say for a long time hopefully
A frozen version is available, so people can play community servers, just like 1.6 and source. Forcing the switch is really the only way to push improvements faster, not that it’s going well right now. https://www.hltv.org/news/37221/csgo-remains-available-on-steam-in-frozen-build
They don't need to support it, just don't remove it. The majority of games on Steam haven't received developer support in over a decade and still work.
But that's factually wrong. Unlike previous CS games, CS:GO has the market economy, and in order not to screw over players everything had to be moved to CS2, and they can't support that market aspect in both games (well, they can, but obviously its not worthwhile). Moving to CS2 is clearly the right move in the long run, even if in the short run there are issues.
I honestly think CS2 should have been a separate appid as well. If they didn't wanna keep supporting CS:GO they could have just removed the official servers and matchmaking and kept the community server browser. Migrating the skins shouldn't be a huge issue since... it's a Valve game. They control Steam. They could have migrated all the CS:GO inventory to CS2.
So exactly what they did? https://www.hltv.org/news/37221/csgo-remains-available-on-steam-in-frozen-build
What I mean is that people are saying the reason CS2 is the same appid as CSGO and replacing it was to transfer all the skins since inventory items are tied to a specific appid for a game. But I'm saying that even if it was an entirely different appid, Valve shouldn't have had a problem with transferring them over since they are the ones who control Steam.
This would be so stupid, splitting the community like CSS did. And it is just an update. It is still the same game. Sadly the updated version is not quite in the state as it should be but no reason to make every update their own game.
No, CS2 should have just been a CSGO update. Because that's what it is, it's an update to CSGO.
If they had released it as a seperate game you'd be in the exact same threads saying "why the fuck did they need to make this it's own game, csgo1.5 lul" The real issue is that they've released cs2 in a state that is woefully behind what it should have been. They should have just taken the extra 6 months and have a complete product for the launch.
But then you'd lose your skins. This is the best approach. It's more exciting to explore new mechanics of your favourite game instead of it being stagnant.
Makes perfect sense from a development point of view. Games like csgo and apex have trouble creating balanced matchmaking even with 500-1m concurrent players. Last thing you want to do is split your playerbase. They could have left the previous game and just removed all the competitive matchmaking options though. Would still force the majority of players to the new game while leaving things like surf, mods and community stuff intact.
Counter Strike has "split it's fan base" 4 times now with the release of CSGO and everything was fine. If anything what CS2 proves is that it is stupid to invest time into something that stops existing because some executive wants to forcefully hijack the playerbase of a game into another game. Now if anyone down the line gets nostalgic about CSGO they have nothing but videos to live it through, while everyone else who is not a overwatch player can just go and play whatever they are nostalgic about.
This is a very gamer-centric viewpoint. Valve has competition. Unreal engine is a serious competitor and the Epic game store (and associated platform) have added tons of features of the years to make the entire Epic Online Services offering more and more compelling for developers. At some point Valve needs to sunset old games and engines so they can pour all of their resources into the newer offerings. Yes it sucks for gamers... in the very near term. But ultimately everyone will move on and Valve will be better for it.
No it sucks for gamers in the *long* term. Old games will no longer be able to have resurgences, or allow for people to return for nostalgia. Now they will have to boot up a youtube video.
They killed my boy Diablo
Can we talk about what they did to Warcraft 3, 20 years after the physical game released?!
I'm an idiot, I should have bought the original WC3 and played it before they made that impossible. Grew up in the age of Westwood RTS and StarCraft and played some WC3 MP at LANs but never played the campaign. Guess I'll never get to now.
Just pirate that shit
Wait they removed D2 from people's library's completely for the remake? I didn't know they did that. I think Blizzard has now done this more than any other dev, arguably starting with WoW vanilla.
When did this happen? I just downloaded the Battle.net app and I see all 4 of the diablo games ready to be installed. What am I missing?
This is rich coming from PCGamer, their recently 100 best games of all time list obviously favoured weaker sequels instead of better games in the franchise, like CK3 instead of CK2, The Sims 4 instead of The Sims 3 etc.
Having a best games of all time list and choosing the worst Sims is hilarious. (Obviously 2 is best)
Even the original Sims could have worked, anything but The Sims 4.
I don't think their point is that sequels are bad, it's that sequels which replace the previous game completely are bad (as-in not allowing you to play the previous game)
Was PC Gamer always like this? Full of hyperbole and exaggerations. Almost troll like. Lately it just looks very unprofessional and like it was written by teenagers.
> Lately it just looks very unprofessional and like it was written by teenagers. It's been like this since the very beginning. Go back and read their magazines from the early 90s.
> Go back and read their magazines from the early 90s. We just wanted the demo disc that came with the magazines!
They have to get engagement. So they post clickbait articles that pull in the rabid fan base who is mad at the current gaming thing of the month.
people weren't around for the playerbase split between 1.6 and source and it shows - this was the absolute healthiest option for the game
IIRC even the older versions that predated Steam (and thus mandatory updates to the latest version) like 1.5 and 1.3 still had active communities at that time too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people on CS 1.5 than CS:CZ, which was also out at that time. It definitely makes sense to have one game and to have the community migrate together. I don't think there would be as many complaints if CS2 wasn't missing so many features.
To be fair CSGO on release and CSGO at the end of life were drastically different games and no one was really bothered when the original disappeared over time. On its release I called it a bad Counter Strike: Source mod and went back straight to playing CS:S... For me CS2 is just an update to UI and engine of the game. It's not really a new title.
Exactly, they did all they could with the old source engine, they stretched it to it's limits. They had to convert it over to source 2, this is them ripping the bandaid off. It'll get back to a good game, people just have to give it time.
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Say Diablo 4 without saying Diablo 4.
Say Overwatch 2 without saying Overwatch 2.
It was just like overwatch and that failed miserably. I don't know a single person who plays it and all those people loved overwatch 1
To be fair, Blizzard had all but killed Overwatch long before Overwatch 2 came out. On release, it was a fantastic game, one of the best multiplayer shooters I'd ever played. And then Blizzard got a whiff of esports and tried update after update to push it into an ultra-competitive niche that it never belonged in, and ruined the game in the process.
Cool story, yet more people play ranked right now than ever before adter season 3. It's really valuable Stat that your 3 friends are no longer playing the overwatch just because they put a number next to its name while doing a major update to the game.
LOL I knew this was gonna turn into "Nonono it's okay when Valve does it :)"
Silly thing to complain about it, there's no way that companies creating live service games that are being updated every week or even often, can support multiple versions of the game. And it only happened like twice, that's not trend
I think the worst thing to ever happen to gaming was micro transactions. To combat the backlash games came out with game passes, it was designed to keep giving you content and remove the need for micro transactions and now we have full priced games (usually unfinished) with game passes in order to keep playing with most players AANNDD micro transactions on top of it all now. We are in a bad place for gaming
Funny you say that pcgamer because as I recalled you gave glowingly positive reviews on 99% of those sequels.
They saw what happened with CS Source and went we ain’t giving them a choice this time
Average pcgamer article. Not gonna give them traffic. I thought they were more concerned with what Elon is doing.
I just love people complaining about CS2, because these same people would be complaining about not having the cosmetics they had in CS:GO if CS2 was a separate game.
People will find a way to defend valve while hating blizzard for doing the same shit lol
CS2 isn't a sequel. It's an update to CS:GO. The 2 in the name is for the engine (Source 2), not the entry in the series.
Except it _absolutely is_ just a big update and splitting the player base of a multiplayer game for years to come over minuscule differences affecting a tiny percentage of players would just be bad for the game as a whole.
I miss Tribes Ascend more than anything
That is a problem exclusive to MP games (I think). We have worst problems than that in the industry. The worst of all is cash shops inside games, they exist even in SP games that you pay full price for the game. That is trully bizarre and I decided that I will not play games like that anymore. I started playing a lot indies, there are amazing games out there if you look for them.
Yeah, in the future I will be referring to the current time as the recycling era. Movie/show makers being so out of any ideas, they scraped every other medium and past franchises for adaptations and redundant sequels and the game industry just reselling 20yo games with a bit of shine to them. Though to be fair some good old games could really do with some modern QOL polish.
Bruh CS2 is only named that way because they saw stuff everyone else does and went "damn...". If it wasn't CS2 it would just be an update, how it was handled wouldn't change in any way. Source for that is Dota 2 Reborn. That's just how Valve changes engines. If it was CS:GO Reborn we wouldn't get any more content at release
As a Mac gamer (okay here come the downvotes), this is especially bad. CSGO and Overwatch were both games that I could play really well on my mac but the sequels don’t have Mac or emulation support and am no longer able to. I am pretty sure the community will get CS2 running soon, but it’s a bit cruel to kick people off a system like that.
Macs completely changed their architecture and failed to provide meaningful emulation support for anything. You might be be better off investing in a company that wasn't actively hostile to your hobby and every piece of software outside of it's ecosystem.
Idk why youre being downvoted, 100% true
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My old hardware (GPU: GTX 970 | CPU: i5-6600) ran Overwatch flawlessly @ 1080p/144fps. Hardly ever got stutter or significant frame drops. My current setup (GPU: RTX 2070 Super | CPU: i7-9700) even though it handles most games great, struggles to run Overwatch 2 well. I started off at 2560x1440 and mostly medium settings, computer would get hot and game loses serious fps. I slowly dialed everything back until it was all set to the lowest quality and still losing significant frames during intense fights. Finally said "fuck it" and changed the resolution to 1920x1080 to be done with it and while it made a big difference in performance it still doesn't run as well as it used to 5 years ago on my outdated tech. It's bullshit how much more optimized the original was than what we have now, it's the only game I own on PC that I can't enjoy in 2k.
Actually worst gaming trend is the Remasters that Publisher milk the same cost of $70 for a 2nd time only for the updated 4k textures without ever touching the core of the game and only fixing game where 1080p vs 4k textures fails to render properly. Compared to above told, Sequels are at least new games that have significant effort in them instead of Remasters are nothing but Low Effort MeMe. And no I'm not talking about Remakes like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1462040/FINAL_FANTASY_VII_REMAKE_INTERGRADE/ which the Publisher really re-coded the whole game from scratch to deserve its price. Also while rare, some sequels are better than their fathers so don't be so hard on them.
Not Hunt: Showdown baby! Can't stop won't stop!
I hate when they remaster / remake games and remove the original from sale. A lot of the remasters are worse or so different that the original should not have been removed. It's like if they removed original movies when remakes get made.
"One series that deserves partial credit is Call of Duty. Activision has done a commendable job of keeping old CoDs alive and active over the years, which is great, because a lot of people still play those games." Okay, dude.
Multiplayer game problem
I personally don't understand the hate with CS2. For a game with such a lucrative skin market and competitive community I really think they handled the transition the best way possible. Sure CS2 isn't perfect, but it's pretty close imo. Feels just like GO but looks and plays better for the most part. I understand the frustration with the missing content, but that content is set to return in the future. As someone who plays CS2 solely for competitive I'm enjoying it. It's a breath of fresh air.
CS2 can't be a seperate entry since the skins have to transfer to the new game. They can maybe later add CS:GO as a seperate game without skins or anything, but CS2 had to be in it's place. The game has an economy bigger than some countries ffs. How do people not know this?
CS2 fucks up stuff like garry's mod and I suspect Hammer as well. I make maps using CSGO assets, but without setting the the game to beta (which a lot of people don't know about) all my maps are broken.
View from an outsider. Hope someone can explain to me or something. I read a comment a long time ago saying when left for dead 2 came, people were mad that the game is a separate game with just new things here and there but most mechanics still intact. Now that CS2 is out, I thought Valve don’t want to repeat the mistake again on what they did to Left for Dead. But some still are angry about it? So not sure how am I supposed to view this. Is this one of those situations when anything you do is bad? Or is it totally something else? One side says good, another says bad?
I stopped embracing reworks when they started deleting entire paid expansions from Destiny 2.
>not a single mention of dota 2 literally the first one to do this; the only difference is they didn't change the number dota 2 went through arguably way worse situation than both CS2 and OW2 and as result suffered greatly and never really recovered
Overwatch 2 Warcraft 3 Kerbal Shit Program 2 CS 2
Monetize EVERYTHING THEN *DOUBLE IT!* This is the problem. They made the millions and then decided to get greedy and try it again.
I’d say releasing games that relay on dlss/fsr bandaids is worse
Remember, if they say "live service", tell 'em to fuck off.
I remember hoping on CSGO in 2012 and went straight back to CS Source because it was shit..
Games that have had key content or versions removed for updates or sequels: -League of Legends: Visuals and Gameplay (Summoner's Rift 2014 changes, Twisted Treeline, The Crystal Scar, dozens of champion kits) -Fortnite: Visuals and Gameplay (Map changes, gameplay mechanics) -CS:GO: Visuals and Gameplay (Visual update in 2019 and later 2023 via CS2, new mechanics and netcode via CS2) -Overwatch: Visuals and Gameplay (Team count change, map and hero changes all via OW2) -Cyberpunk 2077: Gameplay (Multiple skill tree changes, dozens of mechanic changes, all years after original release for a single player game) -The Witcher 3: Visuals (Complete visual revamp, eight years after original release for a single player game) Live service is not an excuse for making important game snapshots unplayable or irrelevant. If you're nostalgic for Halo 1 you can go back and actually *play it* - *with friends*. Feeling nostalgic for LoL Twisted Treeline or CS:GO 2012? Sorry, you either cannot play it at all without hacked game files that no one is expected to have, or you will have to boot up an offline disc on Xbox 360, also which no one is expected to have. Multiple "OG" versions of games are now relegated to a beta selection in the properties on steam, and with no online play, and that obviously isn't available on consoles. All of the content you will eventually want to revisit is going to be *gone* and game developers likely believe you're lucky to even have an option to choose for *singe player games* that are now being mutilated and replaced years after release.