My least favorite aspect of TA is the tantrums that people throw when things get discontinued, like this and the Sea of Thieves thing. It’s disappointing and it would be great if every achievement stayed unlockable forever, but not every opportunity is permanent. That’s just a fact of life.
I do get some amusement out of checking people’s cards though, it’s not uncommon that the people throwing the biggest freakout over having unobtainables on their cards have like 50% completion or something. Like dude, you were never getting anywhere near 100% in this lifetime anyway, so chill out.
I actually go through “stages” when I hear about these things. At first I’m angry/annoyed, then I think about it rationally and I just say “oh well”. I’m also the guy that is sitting at 50% completion in those games.
The Arena Mode is being discontinued, the achievements associated with it will become permanently unobtainable. Rare is opting not to change the requirements out of respect for players who already unlocked them, which is whatever, if it were me I would change them and I don’t think players would even mind. They’ve already done that before for Sea of Thieves even!
But the comments are full of “I’LL NEVER PLAY A RARE GAME AGAIN” and people lamenting that they’ll have an incomplete game on their card, and then you look at the poster’s tag and their completion percentage is like 40% or something.
I just found out about the Wii U/3DS shops closing today, I didn’t see that news yesterday. Like on the one hand, as someone who loves BC and routinely plays old games, this kind of thing is really sad and I totally get the preservation impulse and why people rush to buy up a bunch of games when this stuff happens, or get upset about old games becoming unavailable, servers going down etc. Totally get it.
But at the same time, all these people rushing to buy up 3DS games just because they’ll be gone soon… 10 years from now, 20 years from now, will you still be chipping away at that backlog? Our LIVES are finite. I think at some point you have to accept that you are not going to experience everything there is, and that’s okay. The furor over unobtainable completions is the same thing. Some experiences are not permanent and that’s not the end of the world. Maybe I’m just getting old.
I’m big into preservation, not just for videogames but for everything culture related. It’s not just for old dudes like us to be able to retroactively buy and enjoy older content, but for younger generations who didn’t grow up playing the Atari 2600 and NES to be able to someday delve into the origins of the industry and the hobby they enjoy.
What frustrates me about all this is that it’s entirely possibly to keep these stores open indefinitely and/or to migrate them over to new stores via emulation. If Nintendo can sell people cardboard, they can continue to sell people games. Obviously I don’t know how much it costs to keep those services running (nor do I know if there are other circumstances or costs involved to keep games on the store), but I also look at how much money they continue to make on an overpriced under-powered tablet and I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for them.
At the end of the day, it is what it is, but if these companies don’t want to sell me their games, I’ll just continue to use emulators. It’s ultimately their loss, not mine.
Microsoft is showing the way forward here, migrating old games to new storefronts, carrying forward save files, and generally making it easy and fun to keep purchasing and playing old games-- to the extent possible.
1000/1000 The Forgotten City. What an amazing, masterful game. 10/10 easily, HIGHLY recommend.
Combined the 3 hour speedrun achievement with the 0% item achievement for Cyber Shadow, wasn’t that bad although I did want to throw my controller at the screen at times. I’d rate it a 7/10 but I do love me some metriodvania games.
About halfway through with Nobody Saves The World. Absolutely love this game and all the variety between the different forms and builds. 8.5/10 game for me.
60 hours into Octopath Traveler; by my calculations it should be leaving GP at the end of March. Long completion and you literally need to have a Google Docs file open to track treasure chests/enemy weaknesses/etc, but if you’re into old school-like JRPGs this isn’t anything new. Finishing everyone’s chapter 3’s currently with a party level of 50~ and all secondary jobs maxed. Still a long ways to go, haha.
Gonna finish up the x360 GTAs soon, as well. Literally have two achievements left in GTA4 which is from the TBoGT DLC and I haven’t played it since 2009/2010, lol:
I’m working on Diablo III Reaper of Souls right now. Been playing the game on and off (mostly off) since 2013, no idea what randomly possessed me to complete it now after all this time, but there you go.
