TF2 is almost 20 fucking years old and has been F2P for 13 of those years, why should Valve care to do anything about it? Frankly, the official servers even still being online at all is more than most other games(besides subscription based games like WoW) of that era can say.
Like, what were you guys expecting? For Valve to support the game the rest of your lives?
TF2 is no longer making a lot money for valve. Veteran players have all theirs special hats/cosmetics and no new player wants to invest time and money in a game so riddled with cheating bots. They could easily handle the situation. Detecting obvious cheating bots isn’t hard but valve doesn’t even try. Yes, there are community servers, like Uncle Danes, that are good at handling bots, but it’s also a big burden for them to constantly ban/remove cheating bots.
Valve is testing server side AI cheat detection in CS2. Let’s hope that they will bring that to TF2 valve servers. Maybe don’t VAC ban players being detected (AI is buggy), just remove them when detected and maybe disallow them from joining valve servers for a week.
Compared to other companies, Valve let the community use alternative community servers. Even if Valve does not care about the game anymore (sigh, one of may all time favorites), it’s possible to maintain community servers. This is something any other game wish to had, without hacking the system; it’s just part of the game. And people can even use modded communities and there exist some really cool stuff (admittedly I never tried them, I would play the game if it didn’t have the bot problem).
I still don’t understand what job “game journalist” entails.
Say a politician takes bribes. A journalist can investigate public record documents and paper trails, and visit state houses, to interview workers to uncover what’s going on there.
Game studio is working on a new sequel, but hasn’t announced it. But this is a private company that’s not required to report to anyone. They’re not consuming taxpayer money. What, legally, should a game journalist be doing to reveal this info?
They’re basically just there to echo press releases and provide scheduled interviews, all of which must be basically at the publisher’s approval, since there are far more journalists than interesting studios.
It’s also possible that he did say all of those things and they’re only changing the story due to the negative reception. It’s a Sony site/interview after all.
Technically it’s possible, but the article includes the transcript that Druckmann himself posted, so that would mean he is faking a transcript to call out Sony’s edits to what he said.
It’s an unpopular opinion in most forums, but I love most gaming journalists. I prefer their podcasts and their articles and their opinions way more than any YouTuber/streamer. I just get more insightful and less bias information from them.
People should just stop thinking about gaming journalism as a monolith, and start thinking of it as any other job. Some people are capable of doing it and they show it, others are completely incapable of writing a decent article without resorting to snarky comments or biased opinions.
A local website in my language employs a YTuber as a reviewer for reviews on games that he is a sponsor of on his channel, and those articles are laughable to say the least (I’m not going to name the games nor the person). But I’ve also read good articles on the same website, written by people who actually care about their job and have the skills to do it well.
But for some reason, gamers keep parroting this awful opinion of gaming journalists being incapable of playing games or having opinions on things. No, it’s just that certain journalists are better than others. (And for god’s sake, people should stop using the Cuphead video as a talking point. It was not a true review, it was a joke video, ffs)
There’s a reason for the early rise in popularity of independent gaming reviewers and it isn’t the hard-hitting, honest quality of mainstream entertainment journalism at the time. With the advent of influencers though, it feels like everyone is just regurgitating the same pre-approved, publisher-friendly nonsense. I’m sure there are exceptions, but it feels more difficult today to find an honest review when every random internet personality is signing sponsorship contracts that require them to praise the game every 20 minutes.
Without journalism (or just a third-party in general) providing perspectives and communication in some way, you are relying primarily on the information coming directly from the companies themselves.
In this case we see that Sony was willing to fabricate quotes about an interview.
People watch star trek and listen to fortunate son and miss the message in both of those pieces of art so I’m pretty sure someone would miss the political message in just about anything.
Does anyone really listen to RATM anymore? Tom Morello is a multimillionaire who hordes money instead of giving charity. Hes a hypocrite and a sell-out.
Music and film don’t demand that you engage with them in the same way as video games. There are some games where you literally cannot play them without engaging with their narrative and message. Spec Ops: The Line is a good example of this. It actively pushes back against the player’s natural inclination to play it like a modern military shooter and not absorb the message.
It’s actually very possible to miss the message of Bioshock. Andrew Ryan built the perfect city and Atlas ruined it. Andrew Ryan cast him out, but Atlas brought the player character as his final ultimate weapon. You eventually rebel, saving the capitalist Utopia.
I have seen people who abided by this interpretation. Any art with any level of subtlety can be misinterpreted. It’s inherently subjective and depends on the viewer’s personal biases.
Are you unfamiliar with capitalism as a theory? Or Ayn Rand? Yes, capitalist utopia. That’s the entire libertarian ethos. Libertarianism is a political framework, pure capitalism is its economic policy.
Don’t get me wrong, the only Libertarianism I’ve ever known is intertwined with Capitalism. But they aren’t the same thing, and I always read BioShock as being a take on Libertarianism specifically.
I dunno how you could miss it in Spec Ops, that game is extremely blatant with messaging. I recently patient gamered it and was rather unimpressed. Bioshock still holds up though.
IMO it was a mistake to patient gamer Spec Ops. The whole point was that it was a pushback against the rhetoric of the US military and simultaneously a critique of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (and knockoffs thereof), which had just exploded in popularity. By not playing it when the things it was critiquing were in the zeitgeist, you don’t really get the same experience. Plus, the marketing for the game deliberately hid the fact that it was intended as a critique; it was marketed as yet another modern military shooter.
I think you can patient gamer it but it only works if you’re heavily familiar with that time.
I was really into COD4 and grew up during the Bush administration so I knew exactly what Spec Ops was critiquing. If you don’t have that experience though I agree it does not land.
What I didn’t like was the blunt messaging. I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got. As a game, the clunky movement/cover system, simple enemy AI, and guns that just didn’t feel great hampered the experience. It’s very linear and there are forced choices (eg white phosphorus) that give you control but no choice but to be evil. The graphics are lackluster compared to its contemporaries, but I did enjoy the soundtrack at times. I really got into it with a few of those songs. Unfortunately that only happened a few times during the weekend I beat it in. It was okay, but I was expecting a lot more based on what people said about it.
Appropriately for the thread, the WP scene had a choice: walk away. It kept telling Walker to walk away. The player could have shut the game off.
That’s the pivot point: if you’re just playing a game about Walker, then having a choice doesn’t matter, you’re just being told a story about a lunatic. But, if Walker is a stand-in for you, and you’re playing the game “because you wanted to be something you’re not - a hero”, then not only is playing on a choice, choosing to play war porn in the first place is a choice.
I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got.
That’s the problem when these things gain reputations. The reputation builds it up to be more than the piece of art can deliver.
Now imagine playing it when it was new and you weren’t “expecting” anything but a military shooter. It would still be just as blunt, but it landed back then far more effectively than when you go in knowing the reputation the game has built in the many years that followed.
IMO a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game. The vibrant tree that you pass that burns up when you look back, etc.
As far as gameplay goes it is very linear. The only “choice” is to stop playing. If I remember correctly the development behind Spec Ops was very rushed so they didn’t have time to so any of those branching paths.
I appreciate it like I would a visual novel more than I do an interactive game.
a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game
One of the things I did appreciate about the game was seeing how grimy and worn down everyone got as the game progressed. That was an excellent small detail.
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Aktywne