The Malgorian Blog

According to the article on kotaku, Helldivers 2 is currently being review bombed due to the devs/publisher reinstating a PSN login requirement for the game on PC.

Boss says sorry.

And that's the extent of it.

Apparently it originally had a login requirement at first until it became quite popular at the start of release - so they removed it due to the network issues it was causing them. So a lot of the players on steam are seeing it for the first time now.

Personally, I'd be pissed as well, and that's even with me having a PSN login.

If I want to log in to PSN to play a game, I will BUY THE GAME ON PSN TO BEGIN WITH.

*pauses to mark both Arrowhead Studios and Sony PC LLC on ignore - ignores are permanent for me so they'll never get another dollar out of me on Steam.*

I will of course continue to buy games on PSN, potentially. Although depends on the type of game when a PSN login is being required. An online game, sure, PSN login not a problem, for a PSN game. If the game was an offline game or had an offline mode that's locked behind a PSN login, then that would just probably solidify the fact that I'm not buying Playstation consoles anymore. (Still haven't bought a PS5 to this day, but it's only because there's nothing on the console I absolutely want to play. Certainly nothing worth the cost of the console. Microsoft can stop laughing since I stopped buying their stuff after the 360 ;)

Case in point. I already had Helldivers 2 ignored. Just the game. I'm not entirely sure why it was ignored anymore although I don't think it was the login thing. (I auto-ignore anything that comes up in my discovery queue that has a 3rd party login requirement.) Because Arrowhead and/or Sony decided to pull a fast one here with switching around the requirement, everything they touch got tossed under the ignore along with it. Do I expect Sony or Arrowhead to feel the weight of my ban? Hell no. :D But my wallet will feel a little heavier until I put that money they might have gotten to my other hobbies and that's more than good enough for me.

I suppose I can sum up my feelings on the topic pretty simply. There's no way a billion dollar company merging/swallowing another "smaller" billion dollar company will have no negative impact on the industry as a whole.

The more concessions you're willing to accept, and especially the ones you offer yourself to get the merger to happen, shows the more likelihood you're fully aware of the damage you're going to be doing to the rest of the industry (ie: your competition). And of course it's very safe to say that the ultimate payoff will always exceed in spades whatever cost you'll suffer from the limited time concessions.

Take into account just one concession Microsoft has offered. They promise, if the merger goes through, that they will make sure Call of Duty is available on the Playstation for the next 10 years (or was it for the lifetime of sony's current machine, the PS5?) What does that really amount to? A handful of games over the next 10 years. After that, once the merger has been cemented and there's no longer any way to rationally separate the two again, ALL of the negative effects of the merger can happen in full force. The promise is basically another way of saying "Heeeey, no problem. Let us have this really big thing and we won't deliberately try to bankrupt the competition for a good 5-10 years... but after that shit gonna be real."

Really, any concession that's time based should immediately be thrown out as no concession at all. It's just kicking the concerns further down the road until it's impossible to fix the damage.

In short, mergers of billion dollar companies really shouldn't be happening imo.

Finally happened. Microsoft decided to force me to migrate.

And the migration failed spectacularly.

The key problem is that I registered originally with my lycos email account. Lycos deleted all free email accounts back on June 1st, 2018.

I also never upgraded to an Mojang account. I still had a Minecraft account. They were prepared for people being like that, however it all comes to naught because the very first thing they do, and they generally should in most cases, is try to verify who you are by sending an email to the account you have associated with the account.

Oops. Can't do that now can I. I sent a support ticket although it asked for a hell of a lot of information that I honestly don't have memory of or access to. Like, do you remember the month and year you signed up for minecraft? Are you sure? Do you still have that transactional ID? What if you were gifted a fucking code and wouldn't have that information?

So yeah. I really don't expect anything to be done other than "I'm afraid you'll have to rebuy the game you bought."

To which the odds are very likely I'll not be doing. I can't even run the latest version of java minecraft on my computer because of their new "security features". And when I was able to plya 1.16 after they upgraded the launcher for that, I found it did a lot of fucked up shit with the save files I had.

In short, if I started the launcher with a modded jar, it would only let me see new worlds. IE: NONE. Except the new one I started, aptly called "I hate Mojang". But if I started the launcher with an unmodded jar, it would show me all my old worlds. Worlds I couldn't play very well because I fucking well need to use optifine to make Minecraft run on this comp.

Yeah, whatever. I'll rethink about what I want to do with Minecraft when I get a new computer, which might not be until the fall at the earliest. Regarding the rest of Microsoft, I'm just putting the entire thing on a boycott. I may still use Windows as the OS, although it'll be the free version you typically get with a new computer. For pretty much everything else from hardware to software though, I'll probably choose an alternative whenever possible.

That's how much I ain't enjoying them fucking this shit up. Kinda expected this day to come ever since Notch sold out, but whatever. Next time I post about Minecraft will either be when I finally rebuy it with the new computer (There are a variety of conditions associated with that so it's far from a definite thing) or when I see a news report saying Mojang is being discontinued with Microsoft absorbing Minecraft into it's internal studios. "To better serve the players" of course. Like this whole forced account migration. If anything actually happens with the support ticket I'll probably just update this post.

(Update)

Support updated my email tagged to my minecraft account for me. I guess my predicting the proper account and supplying proof about lycos discontinuing their free accounts etc was sufficient. It's possible they also tried emailing those accounts as a test, and when their emails bounced they'd know the accounts were indeed no longer valid.

Even with that it took me about 40 minutes to actually migrate my account. I'll blame myself in that since I surf with noscript on, and that does cause problems when a website is set up in such a way to hide scripts until they're actually used. So I'd allow all the scripts noscript was stopping, then try to continue - only to have it fail. Then when looking at the scripts again I'd see another 3-4 fucking scripts in the list.

Apparently I already have a microsoft account. All xbox live accounts were turned into microsoft accounts I guess (or were from the start). The hell if I could find my password for that so had to reset it. Which took a couple tries because of the above mentioned noscript BS.

And it took another 10 minutes to figure out how to sign in to the launcher again after that. Kept using the mojang button by accident.

So I get to keep using Minecraft for now.

This has quickly become the second type of requirement that earns a Steam game an auto-ignore from me these days. I'm not signing up to a website to play a game on a platform I already had to sign up for. It's really the exact same reason why I have a zero tolerance for additional DRM on Steam - I already signed up and installed Steam, which is a form of DRM.

Reason I'm bringing this up now is because the last few game queues I flipped through had a bunch of these types of games. All of which are now ignored. You'd think Steam would try to keep track of things like this. "Hm. Every time we show this guy a game with third party DRM he quickly ignores it and moves on... PERHAPS WE SHOULDN'T KEEP SHOWING HIM THESE THINGS."

An article over on Kotaku talks about a push to bring TV styled commercials in console games.

The tech would basically be licensed out to game devs to use. Instead of being something to show players in the middle of a game, it'll be something that players would choose to view to get a "reward".

So expect essentially more microtransactions which will get shittier and shittier. Eventually they'll get down to a point where you'll get a tiny bit of in-game currency to buy (eventually after 1000 ads) some cosmetic item. I give them 5 years to get to that point.

Either way they'll add more and more of them and do more and more to force players to watch them.

I can just see an RPG where all the treasure chests are locked - and keys are only given when you watch X ads. I could further see them turning the keys given randomized. Will you get a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum key? They'll match the chests so hopefully you watch enough ads!

It's likely going to be at least 2-3 years before I bother looking at buying a PS5, so we'll see how bad it gets by then. It'll probably make my decision easy.

Wow. Middle of May without a single post since January. Obviously haven't tried that hard did I.

With the whole pandemic thing going on I guess I haven't really been feeling like writing up anything in particular. Haven't played too much for video games either with the exception of Minecraft and Romance of the Three Kingdoms III. Yes. III. Genesis version. Beyond Rot3K6, I haven't had much fun with any of the other games in the series I've tried - admittedly I've only played II, VII, and VIII. Wonder if I even know how to play VI anymore.

The places around here are beginning to open up again - our numbers are actually pretty good, being down to just 1 known active case. Like most of the cases we've had, it's travel related so there's no evidence of community spread. We would have seen a spike in numbers by now if there was anyway.

That being said I doubt I'll be going to the stores very much anyway. Ebgames will be opening up soon (Big surprise 9_9) on Tuesday but I suspect they'll be getting VERY little attention from me due to the whole stunt gamestop went on with refusing to shut down and calling themselves "Essential Services". For those who don't know, Ebgames and Gamestop are essentially the same company and have been for a very very long time. Case in point, I remember seeing a copy of the covid response letter gamestops in the US had put up detailing what they were doing to keep customers and staff safe - I saw pretty much the exact same letter on the front of the ebgames here in town. I doubt they were any more truthful up here than they were down there given all the things that came out afterwards. Just my gut instinct on that of course, and while it may be unfair to say it, that's the kind of vibe I get from the ebgames up here no matter what store I seem to go to.

Regardless of that - I was planning on doing less business with ebgames for a long time so we'll just let this be that tipping point. There's just one game that I'd like to buy there that comes out in June (or was..) and then I doubt I'll step foot inside the store much at all. I won't call it a hard boycott, like say the hard boycott I have on Sony Music (Haven't bought a CD from that label since their whole rootkit bullshit, and I don't feel like anything of value was lost.) but it does mean I won't be going in there most days on my way to work just to see what they have and potentially let myself buy something. Will I buy games from them after that? I won't say 'no', but I'll have to know in advance of a game I want, when it releases, etc. At which point I'll at least make an effort to pick up a copy. If they don't have a copy on launch, I'll just amazon it. Yeah, I just verbed it.

The only other store I'm actually hoping to go to again is Chapters. You know, that place with ground up dead trees and ink. I finally started buying from their online store indigo since the backlog of things I was waiting on was piling up. finally got "the first shipment" on Friday. And noticed I accidentally bought 2 copies of one of the books. X_X Returning shit like that, usually, is easy. I just have to take the book and the indigo invoice form... to a Chapters store! So hopefully they'll actually reopen the stores soon as it has to be done within 30 days. I might be able to get some leeway on that given the stores are closed. If not, oh well, I'll have to shut up and pay the "stupid tax".

This weekend I'll try to finalize the second order. Things are delayed these days due to the Christmas level volumes at the post office, but I'll probably still get the next package in the first week of June or earlier.

I should also take another look at Bloodstained. Never did get back to that after the apparent new character play through dropped a week ago.

Wow. Haven't had the motivation to do one of these lately have I. To be fair I haven't had much to play that I've really been into that's recent. I may post something about an old Genesis game I'm always playing later this week. That one's more of a "Game Year/Decade" kinda thing, but I'll still just post it as a game night.

( RIGHT! ZAN! Moving on to the actual review which is much longer than anticipated. )

Ok according to this post over on Nintendo Life NIS is seriously running dry on funds. Apparently the blame is being placed entirely on their Disgaea RPG game - a mobile game service. And yeah I'm sure that thing would be a micro-transaction infected cancer. Supposedly it was launched in March but due to various issues nobody's been able to download it yet. Which I'm sure causes problems with the business plan.

I don't know if this includes NIS America or if it's ultimately just the Japanese company that's in trouble. I'd assume they're kinda joined at the hip though.

I say this as someone who use to be a fairly huge NIS fan from the PS2 days. Good riddance!

Sorry I can't be any more supportive of them than that but they lost me as a fan when they became massive DLC whores in the PS3 era and onward with anywhere from 50-150 dollars of DLC per game. ALL of it being in the "Bad DLC" categories I explained previously. Stat boosts, Level boosts, good boosts, free item packs, purchased item packs, new classes (things you would unlock in previous disgaea games), bonus stages (ditto), etc. All that cut out of the game design formula to be DLC that effectively doubled to tripled the cost of the game if you wanted the "Full Game Experience".

They never learned their lesson and ultimately they got put on the boycott list for me several times. It seemed every time I lowered the boycott to give them a chance they showed as a company that there was no reason for me to have done so. Naturally half of this ire belongs to NIS America which I doubt the Japanese branch had any say in - or any care about, but like a franchised business, the shame of one international branch falls on all international branches as far as I'm concerned.

Did a quick check on the PSN store for Disgaea games and I guess they got a -little- better with their DLC whoring. Most of the games that popped up there had no DLC because they were streaming-only games from earlier systems. Can't count those really, but let's look at Disgaea 4. It had a bunch of DLC that would have totaled probably about 40-50 bucks (20 things listed not including the season pass, a couple of those are free etc, but the costs of them are between 1.99 to 3.99 or something. So we'll assume about 40 bucks.

The Season pass is 24.99. All the DLC listed falls into the Bad Categories. Ripped out jobs/classes, special characters, and episodes. Disgaea games tend to flow like an episodic game although traditionally you at least get all the episodes as part of the purchase on the disc.

Oh, and to help encourage season passes, one of the special characters which I guess they feel is desirable by the fans more than others, is only available if you buy the season pass.

Their Disgaea Complete games seem to have no Bad DLC although they certainly have a hell of a lot of $0.99 avatar pics to buy. Some only as a batch. I wouldn't bother counting that against them, but you'd have to remember that they have the DLC bundled in here. I assume. They do mention in the desc about what DLCs are added to the Complete edition but I'd have to look at a physical edition of the game to find out if that DLC is actually on the disc or given via a one-use DLC coupon. I can't even say for sure that "Well it's not listed separately as DLC on PSN so obviously it's baked into the game itself!" because I've seen instances where a free DLC coupon for a game wasn't otherwise listed in the store. You either had a coupon for it or you did without.

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, NIS sucks. Sad to see devs lose their jobs but if they're good at their job they'll be able to find work easily elsewhere or even start up their own new group. If NIS actually focused on developing complete games all this time instead of almost leading the charge on nickel and diming the masses they'd probably have more than enough fans left to buy up their new releases each time to keep the money flowing. Lord knows I was eager to buy up anything with NIS on it in the PS2 era, and I was -just- starting to order directly from their online shop for collectors editions of just about everything when the DLC shitstorm hit.

So I was tempted to buy Death End re:quest when I saw it at ebgames/gamestop the other day. I held off, mainly because I had little choice - couldn't afford it that day. But also because they didn't appear to have any non-gutted copies out on display, it was a full priced title, and where it was primarily a niche jrpg - I've seen way too many cases of DLC whoring in that genre since the day they started launching on a console that could easily do digital downloads.

The main game seems to play similarly to games like .hack and probably SAO - games where you're in another game. This one apparently tries to have you go through multiple game genres and the "real world". So I thought that was interesting enough to at least consider. But not until I saw what kinds of things they ripped out of the game to offer separately.

It's important to note I've been playing jrpg titles since the NES. And while the NES and SNES flavor hold little similarity to what these games do, the best way to determine if they're lacking "basic features" is to compare them to PS2 jrpgs. (As seriously I see very little innovation overall past that era - graphics look nicer, sound is generally still ok, but I'll be honest there's a lot of repetition and stagnation. If you like how jrpgs were back then, then this isn't a negative in and of itself. And I don't particularly mind how they were back then - so long as the story is at least trying to be somewhat unique on it's own somehow and the battle system isn't a colossal screwup (I'm looking at you Ar Tonelico 3!) then I can play through it and feel like I've gotten my money's worth. Usually.

When it comes to looking at the DLC for new JRPGs I look at what types of things were commonly available as bonuses or extras. I also look at if they do the common "item set/stat set/etc" DLC. You know - the one time limited set of consumable items you'll be given at the start of the game. This is harder to judge with new series starting on the DLC-able systems but are so blatantly obvious when you're dealing with a series that started on the PS2 or earlier. (I'm looking at you Disgaea!)

This game is pretty much new, so I just end up assuming if the DLC is of the type of shit that use to be common additives in old games but are now routinely cut out at launch (or offered as preorder bonuses) that it's been cut out of this as well. As otherwise it just means the game was inferior to start with.

So here's the type of DLC shown in this game that was -accidentally- released by the developers during a promo stream of the game. Basically when starting the game Compile Heart games tend to reveal what DLC was added. Oops! So much for "announcing it later". More on this after the breakdown.

1. Character Costumes - There's apparently 12 of these in the DLC for the main character(s). I can't even tell you how expensive they are offhand because the 4-5 of them that are currently listed on PSN are showing it as "unavailable".

2. Bonus areas - There are two of these. I consider this gutted content entirely since it would usually be akin to extra stages unlocked in a games epilogue. (Consider Lunar 2 and the various stages in Disgaea 1.)

3. Item Sets. 6 different item sets. one or two of them are free, the others are being sold for a buck or two each depending on your country of origin. These tell me two things. 1. The game is badly balanced so that you need the starting crutch of items, or the game was deliberately balanced to make these item sets desirable if not needed. 2. The game has probably had it's item drop rates, or shop prices/xp/gold-drops adjusted to make them desirable. (kinda goes with the second half of #1 really but from a different angle.) Devs of course will say "Oh no! we never did anything like that!" but can you really trust them at their word? You'd really have to play through the game twice from scratch and ask yourself how much more of a grind was it to go without the item drops.

4. There's an xp boost item. This immediately sets off a red flag for me, making me think they deliberately set the XP gains too low. Even if you could get the game for free by playing the game, and getting it only near the end of the game. Meaning you had to deal with the xp nerf the entire game.

5. 1 hidden boss. Yeah, no. It's not "hidden", it's "removed". So I count these things as optional bosses and as removed content. Hell consider the original Final Fantasy's "Warmech". A randomly encountered boss you could meet in the final bridge leading to Tiamat. Power-wise Warmech was probably on par with Tiamat if not stronger. This boss is one of two DLC quests. IE: they cut quests out.

6. A bunch of weapons/equipment. Basically these are treated the same as item sets, just not consumable/temporary. I consider all items to be removed rather than bonus content.

7. One extra playable character. Also removed content. Consider all the extra characters you would unlock in old games - especially Disgaea as an easy example. (Of which those bonus characters in Disgaea are all now DLC characters.)


So yeah, a whole lot of content I personally classify as "removed content".

Now for the more offensive take away I had from the devs/pubs promo stream. When asked about DLC they kept saying "We'll announce that at a later date!" ie: we're not telling you before the game is launched so go buy it without knowing!

The devs however accidentally gave away the full list of DLC because as I mention above the game popped up notices of all the DLC being added when they launched the game. Which is not what they wanted based on their refusal to actually talk about DLC prior.

What this tells me is that, whether intentionally or not, they were passing off a fully DLC loaded game as the base game you would get with your 60-80 dollar purchase. IE: intentionally or not, they were attempting to engage in false advertising. If Compile Heart's basic game design didn't throw all those pop-ups on the screen, who would have known all those extra costumes were DLC? That the items you started the game off with weren't what you would REALLY start the game off with? That those extra quests would not ever become available? That those items, XP-boosting item, cool extra weapons and equipment, would never be found as you played? (Or found only after doing the most insane of requirements, etc) and the list would go on.

So. For the DLC state of the game alone, I'm passing on this game permanently. I have WAY too much to play already purchased. I'm never going to miss it, and I think my 80+ bucks can be better spent on other things. But for their attempt at avoiding the DLC issue in their promo stream only to be ratted out by the game itself and their potential attempt to show the game as something more than what you will get if you pay the full price tag, I'm boycotting Compile Heart and Idea Factory games in general for at least a year or so. Again. 9_9

For those who don't care about that and buy and play and enjoy the game anyway - go for it. Just don't whine about the missing content or level/gold grind if you refuse to buy the DLC. And if you buy the DLC, don't whine about the cost.

Something recently came to light in the gaming world on reddit - and naturally since I typically avoid the place, I didn't hear about it til it hit slashdot today.

Seems games are now starting to come, in addition to excessive drm and/or online connections, with their own spyware in the form of Red Shell. Like the various DRM options, this is code created by a third party and sold to the game companies to include.

Basically the program collects user data from new installs, along with whatever data it can find on your computer like font information, etc.

It actually got a bit of a stir out of some people for once and it seems some game companies are promising to remove it. I don't know the full list of games infected with this shit, but at the very least none of the games I own appear in the list compiled so far. Yay for only playing old and niche games~ (I suppose that's a "Yay for having a shitty computer." but whatever.)

I hope enough people also swarm Valve with complaints about it. Bad enough we have companies that try to hide the fact that they have third party DRM on their games until people catch them with it - at which point they finally put up the "missing" notice on the steam store page. Now we have to wonder what other third party bullshit they're installing that isn't really a part of the shit the customer wants to buy. Personally I'm hoping Valve requires publishers to disclose if they're using tracking software. (As this can really get those companies in some seriously hot water with the new european privacy laws.)

I think the program that surprised people the most on this list was Kerbal Space Program.