How is the principle different?
You paid for the product. You used the product. You didn’t dislike the product so much that you didn’t finish it. Seems pretty analogous to me.
Things being different doesn’t automatically make them incomparable, this is literally how all analogies work.
I don’t think that’s a good reason for a refund, honestly. If you go to a restaurant or a movie, most places won’t give you your money back if you finished the meal or movie. If you finished it, you should pay for it… if it really is so bad you feel you should get your money back on principle, you know before the end of the meal/film. This just feels like an excuse to be a cheapskate.
I know this is gonna sound like petty old guy complaints, but by God the save file sizes can be ridiculous! I have a smallish system drive that’s just for the OS, mainly, and have games and media installed on a few other chunky ones. I never bothered changing save file locations, because… save files, they don’t take up that much space, I’ve still got ~40GB or so to spare on the system drive, may as well leave it. Flash forward a few months after 3 of us have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m getting errors because there isn’t enough room on the system drive. Take a look on TreeSize for the culprit, and there’s BG3 taking up over 20GB of save files!
I get that it’s ultimately on me for not managing files better, but I honestly never even thought of save files eating up tens of GB of storage.
One thing about it, the game feels so different whether you’re playing the stealthy, slow, hack and snipe type or the balls out melee build or whatever in between. They really got the mechanics dialed in by the end, it’s nice to be able to have such different experiences in actual gameplay.
Full ninja builds are a blast. I went pure swords and throwing knives. Double jump + air dash along with Shinobi sprint and the auto cloaking perk while crouch sprinting + the relic perk that breaks combat when you cloak makes you a ridiculously mobile hit and run machine. Your mitigation by the end when mid air is guaranteed at 90% strength, so you’re taking nearly no damage as you leap into combat. Pop your sandy, slice and dice, Shinobi sprint back out. It almost trivializes a lot of the game, but it’s some of the most fun I’ve had in a combat game in a long time.
Or if you prefer guns, all that mid air mitigation and air dashing + air kerenzikov is deadly.
Generally time slows when you’re targeting something in scan mode. If there’s nothing to target near the reticle, time moves normal.
It can be a little finicky detecting sometimes.
What do you mean by memory stuff? The brain dance investigations?
Don’t sweat it and just use a guide, they aren’t really a major part of the game beyond maybe 3 story missions?
If you mean hacking, just go with a sandevistan no hacking melee build. The game feels very different when you play it as a pure (no) hack n slash.
The perk and cyberware combos that let you have near constant ~90% mitigation strength guaranteed midair is just nuts. Throw in the mid air kerenzikov and you’re practically a little flying angry cyber hornet.
Holy shit, that’s slimy even by their standards. It’s like they’re begging to be pirated lol.
I should’ve guessed, honestly.
Least enjoyment for me was Star Wars Squadrons. I wasn’t interested in the slightest but my friend convinced me to buy it full price on release.
Ouch. I got it at, like, 2 bucks or something like that and at that price, it was… okay when I wanted to fly around in the cockpit of a Star Wars ship. But even at a couple of bucks I feel like it only barely cracked into “decent use of the money” territory… I’d be mad at full price lol. I think I may have a grand total of 5 or 6 hours in it.
Least: The two I bounced hard off of I think was the '24 version of Microsoft flight sim? Loved Century of Flight in the past, but felt like the navigating the UI was oddly arcane and just couldn’t be arsed to learn its eccentricities. Also GTA V. Do not get it, man. I really enjoyed San Andreas and the old Saints Row games, but GTA V was just boring for me.
BG3 was another that I didn’t get a ton out of… Act 1 was great, but it fell off a lot after that imo. Every session felt like a slog (I actually like 5e, but it tends to get more slog-y by itself at higher levels imo). I just watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much in terms of experience. I get where people got into it though, the voice acting really was a treat and I did enjoy Act 1. But I felt like I went way over my usual dollar to fun ratio.
Most: Minecraft is up there, like many, especially for my kiddo. We both really like playing Golf With Your Friends together along with PinballFX. I’m pretty much done for good with it at this point but I put countless hours into New Vegas that I don’t regret one bit. Similar story for Oblivion and Skyrim. Batman Arkham Knight is, maybe controversially, best in the series IMO and the only game I’ve ever 200%'d. Even at the price, RDR2 was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in gaming. American and Euro Truck Simulators, CKII, Civ VI, Subnautica. I really liked Cyberpunk and put a lot of hours in there, but I came in well after the release kerfuffle and had no expectations. My wife plays the shit out of Disney’s Dreamlight Valley.
Wow, that’s really good! You’ve definitely got your money’s worth, I’d guess.
FYI, you can get total spent by going to Help > Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to Your Steam Account > External Funds Used.
Can you not check directly if your account is private? I went through Help > Support > My Account> Data Related to Account > External Funds Used for totals. Does that rely on a public profile?
Yeah, I suspect if Steam shut down, not only would we see a bunch of cracks released for games that now have no way to update to try to kill the cracks, but we’d probably see something like emulation of steam to get around it without even needing individual cracks.
It all depends how old the account is. $1000 in a few years is definitely bananas… over 15, that’s a damn cheap hobby honestly.
Less than I thought! About 1,900, can’t tell if that’s USD or EUR I’ve used both. Saved over 3,000, supposedly. For over 17 years, 112 bucks a year for a hobby shared nearly the entire time between 2 - later 3 people - that’s pretty good I’d say. Not a lot of hobbies come in that cheap.
Perhaps, but one could argue it happens so often that the hammer lends itself to hammering this particular nail, and so often devolves into that. The Balkans are this experiment played out, attempting to carve out ethno states, and we’ve seen how that’s gone. Once you start saying things like “this country should only be (or primarily be) for X people”, you almost necessarily have to engage in some degree of genocide (in the wider sense of removing a people and culture that doesn’t fit the paradigm), or apartheid, otherwise the statement ends up a bit vacuous, no?
Israel is, in my view, a very clear example of this; once you’ve decided “this is a Jewish state”, anyone not Jewish by definition become second class citizens.
If we’re just talking general assimilation, that’s more nuanced… I don’t oppose calls for more assimilation, but I think governments have done a very poor job in using more stick than carrot. They tend to not put any effort in helping people integrate, which is, from experience, very difficult. One could argue it isn’t their responsibility, but I think such framings for state action is silly… either the state has an interest in a thing being done or it doesn’t, and in this case I think they very much do. Most immigrants that form insular communities do so not out of any inherent pull to, but because they’re already being somewhat ostracized. In the US, Chinatowns arose as a direct result of ostracization and discrimination.
I do think there is a danger of assimilation programs overzealously wiping out culture… the Sami have faced multiple attempts in the past at trying to stamp out their culture, the US and Australia religiously forced the elimination of many native cultures in the name of assimilation. It is also a fine line to walk. But there is undoubtedly a state interest (and immigrant interest!) in assimilating into society.
I’d argue the binding culture that should be assimilated shouldn’t be things as fuzzy as ethnicity… the culture that binds should be the values of that nation. Which doesn’t really have anything to do with ethnicity.
If the game itself was enjoyable enough that you kept playing it, that doesn’t reach the threshold of “so bad you feel you should get your money back on principle” imo. Would you really expect your money back from a movie just because you didn’t like the ending? That’s wild to me.
Not to the point of deserving a refund, totally disagree. At what point do you draw a line? Should someone who hated the Game of Thrones ending get a refund for the years of subscription they paid to watch the rest of the show?
I don’t think not liking a piece of media you bought as much as you thought you would deserves a refund when you’ve already consumed all or nearly all of the media. You’ve received a service and used a product at that point, you should pay for it.