Larian Studios - Standards Raised for Games

A serious topic, especially regarding GGG.

After the speech about the video game industry, developer respect, etc that Larian Studio gave during/after the Dice Awards; it's made me think now about some games I often play.

That brings me to Path of Exile, and GGG.

Larian Studio is right about the greed, the shareholding, developer disrespect, etc.

To be honest, it all makes me NOT look forward to Path of Exile 2.

The greed that comes from GGG on it's microtransaction shop, is becoming more and more apparent.

$60 for a costume? No, no more. I quit.

I'd now rather spend $60 on an actual outfit to wear, then a virtual one.

My Feedback is this.

Grinding Gear Games, I refuse to play Path of Exile and refuse to play Path of Exile 2; until the greed stops with your unrealistic costs of microtransactions by 75%.

I don't mind buying microtransactions to support a video game studio and it's developers, but I REFUSE to buy them at such extremely high costs that have no reason to be so.

If people desire to snicker and snap at my stance, so be it.

I got other places to be anyway.

"

raysuko wrote:

The greed that comes from GGG on it's microtransaction shop, is becoming more and more apparent.

How high are you?

A costume you don't need at all in the slightest like almost every MTX the game has (past some extra tabs which are regularly discounted)

Everything else is fluff and it's priced where they feel comfortable.

It's not like the game is pretty much dead and getting an update every year+ it's getting multiple per year and a new game in the works, and the staff required to make it.

And the game is free, you don't need to spend jack shit and you are dribbling on about greed?

What even is this thread?

You're seriously gonna complain about the price of cosmetics in a free to play game? JUST DON'T BUY THEM then. Nothing about the game changes if you do or don't own special glowing costumes.

And then you say you're gonna quit playing because costumes exist? Uhhh... what? Aside from the fact that you just admitted you're not gonna give GGG any money so why would they care if you quit, do you even realize that THERE ARE ALSO COSMETIC MTX IN BALDURS GATE 3?

What is HAPPENING in this forum lately?! I swear to Purity that the cognitive dissonance has never been this bad before. It's like watching society fail in fast forward.

How do you think GGG should make money then? Should they beg for donations? What's "acceptable" according to you

You do know that a current corporate contract only states shared profit gains for "Path of Exile" not "Path of Exile 2". They pulled a sneaky and good for them on it.

Larian aren't a greedy company but they're far from flawless. I've worked with their games, code, main devs and other mod devs for 6 years now. They say that BG3 was ruined because of Hasbruh and very likely but I also know Larian to be messy coders and fairly slow.

Larian outsourced all their DOS2 Giftbags. Why? No idea. It was a simple copy + paste.
Having others do this instead of themselves created redundancy code and bugs.

You might have heard about the recent modding incident? BG3 was very much an unfinished product and because they were so invested in actually finishing it. All mod support was abandoned. Mod support is 100% community based and it would break with every update.

Larian claims they've been working on it since the start however. We can tell this only started with the most recent update. Code for a "Mods Button" was found in the game. Larian also stated 7 years ago they would produce an updated version of the DOS2 editor. They failed to deliver on that.

____________________________________________________________________

So yea. Standards come in all flavors. I can agree with applauding against corporate green but unless you want people like me fixing bugs in your games. Don't hold Larian up too high.

I think very little of Larian - their D:OS crash bug cost me a 100+ hour save - and their response on the forums was:

"Buy fewer things from the vendors and you won't corrupt your save."

That's word-for-word from a developer btw.

Larian can crash and burn for all I care.

They never bothered to fix that bug by the way. Ever. If you buy too many things from the vendors in Divinity: Original Sin, you will corrupt your save file. The same bug exists in the sequel - rather than fix it, Larian just quadrupled the allowed save size rather than clear out the RoG vendor tables that accumulate in your saves.

Additionally, I think even less of their writing. The worst of PoE is better than what I saw in D:OS.

In closing, I would not recommend a Larian game to somebody I hated.

But that's just my opinion.

I'm just here waiting until someone notices that the OP is refusing to spend money on PoE and complaining about pricing yet still has 7 supporter titles and probably more (7 is the max you are allowed fully layed out that way)

"

Sabranic_SilverDeth wrote:

I think very little of Larian - their D:OS crash bug cost me a 100+ hour save - and their response on the forums was:

"Buy fewer things from the vendors and you won't corrupt your save."

That's word-for-word from a developer btw.

A perfect example of what I mentioned in my post.

I could have fixed that for you being a 3rd party developer for their games.
We tell them about bugs and exactly how we fix them. They could care less.

"

Xzorn wrote:

A perfect example of what I mentioned in my post.

I could have fixed that for you being a 3rd party developer for their games.
We tell them about bugs and exactly how we fix them. They could care less.

While the devs at GGG sometimes take longer than I'd like - see my map tab thread - they generally do fix the catastrophic bugs pretty quickly.

Larian is horrific for crashes and save corruption, and doing nothing about them beyond saying "don't do that thing." And that "thing" is typically something mundane like stockpiling equipment or buying from merchants.

I've yet to lose a character in PoE - or 100+ hours of gameplay. With GGG, rather than poor coding and neglect, it's seems mostly us as players not agreeing with development decisions.

i have many gripes with GGG and somethings in the game i hate with passion while others i love with great passion too.

but monetization?

greed?

i would say to get yourself at a comfortable place to play poe u need to drop 50-160 USD to get stash tabs.

beyond that its all cosmetics.

its still WAY cheaper than to buy diablo 4 + whatever expansion theyre gonna release later.

and that the "purchase" price of the game

beyond that? MTX are TOTALLY OPTIONAL.

i will not argue that the MTXs are expensive because they definitely cost a lot of money. BUT. this is OPTIONAL.

i wear super expensive MTX i've collected over the years. does it make me stronger? no i get my ass handed to me by a random mob.

please realize you're complaining about the price of something entirely optional. it sounds more of entitlement rather than an actual complaint.