you missed the Hopes Others Will Do The Same part.
they’re pulling their game as part of the larger BDS boycott. the point is to put pressure on complicit companies (in this case microsoft) for them to stop working with israel
the IDF won’t care, but if enough devs pull their games, and if enough people stop using xbox products & services, microsoft will care.
I have a lot of issues with the BDS boycotts having no actionable end states but… there are a lot of reasons to not want to give any business to microsoft at all at this point (borderline weekly layoffs at this point) and… their market share sure ain’t what it used to be.
Open ended boycotts don’t work. People MIGHT boycott until they see nothing changing and give up and companies are under no incentive to change anything because it won’t make a difference. It is just a storm to be weathered.
Whereas a boycott with an actionable end state gives the company something to change if they don’t want to try to outlast the outrage, as it were.
Its why the traditional protest call and response is “What do we want?” “X!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”. It immediately makes it clear what will make the angry people go away.
For the BDS boycotts? Microsoft is sort of “Break these major contracts in ways that will make every single potential business partner wary going forward”. The Disney boycott, from what I can gather, is basically “tell gal gadot et all to fuck off”. Which… agreed. But you can also just look at the ongoing lawsuits from the last time they fired a chud for why there will be no public statement and the best we can hope for is to silently stop hiring zionists.
Which is my problem. Most of the BDS boycotts are effectively “burn down your entire company and then we’ll give you money again”. Which… yeah. I still try to support them to some degree (most of what I have settled on is “I’ll grab what I want later so that I don’t contribute to the big numbers on launch”) but there is no end and it is just going to fade away as more and more people decide they want their shiny.
And, for what it is worth, I think at least some of the folk behind these boycotts understands that. The MS boycott discussion was particularly good about stuff like “If you can’t stop using Teams of Office, consider changing to this business plan that is cheaper and turns off copilot”. Which speaks to “We know you aren’t going to drastically change your life but you were probably going to do this so you might as well do it and claim it is related to human rights”
Surely the actionable end state for Microsoft is to cease their AI support in Palestine? Of course they won’t so functionally this doesn’t really matter, but I agree that it makes sense to have a stated goal even if it’s just for the purposes of explaining the boycott to other people.
Earlier this month, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement added Microsoft to its list of priority targets due to the company’s intense entanglement with the Israeli military via Azure cloud and AI services. Specifically, BDS called for supporters to boycott Xbox, including Game Pass, individual games, and future purchases of consoles and peripherals. Now, in a show of solidarity, indie label Ice Water Games has removed one of its projects, open-world tactics RPG Tenderfoot Tactics, from the Xbox store.
Earlier this month, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement added Microsoft to its list of priority targets due to the company’s intense entanglement with the Israeli military via Azure cloud and AI services.
The gameplay is mediocre but the storytelling, soundtrack, and atmosphere are amazingly good. One of the few games I want to finish in quite some time.
In the realm of turn based combat it's pretty good. It has pretty easy to understand skills and mechanics that make it easy to pick up, but then you also get tons of modifiers (pictos and lumina) where the combinations can significantly alter how your character plays. And the timed triggers removes probably the worst aspect of turn based combat, the passivity. You can't just sit there and wait while your character does a thing and then the enemy does a thing. You have to time your attacks but more importantly you have to identify what attack your enemy will do so you'd know if you need to dodge, parry, jump or gradient counter and then also time them correctly. It's far more engaging than your average turn based combat.
The mediocre part of the gameplay are the side activities usually related to gestrals. I'm gonna vent now because my experience popped into my mind and it pissed me off again. Nothing infuriated me more than that stupid beach volley ball. Thank you for putting a fixed camera at an angle where it's really hard to see the middle gestral throw and also your position in relation to where the gestral is going to land. The amount of times I lost the hard volley ball because I couldn't see the middle gestral until it was too late really made me question how this even passed QA. And the reason I couldn't just focus on the middle gestrals was because I had to focus on making sure my attack would actually connect with the gestral. The marker on the ground is just purely decorative as I had multiple occasions where I would attack squarely on the marker only for the gestral to still land and take a point away. AND FOR THE LOVE OF SOPHIE DO NOT THROW OUT GESTRALS FASTER THAN I CAN ATTACK. I almost beat the hardest volley ball match, except I didn't beat it because I literally could not attack fast enough to send back the last gestral. I would just sit there, in perfect position, punching the attack button like a maniac and then watching how the gestral lands on the ground because the attack simply would not happen. Fuck beach volley. End of rant. Actually no, fuck beach volley again stupid fucking minigame. Now it's over.
Im pretty early into the game so my opinion might change but I simply cannot believe how important dodging and parrying is to the outcome of pretty much any battle. I cannot survive any battle without dodging or parrying pretty much every single attack. Id say I get one-shot by like 75% of enemies I face and can survive at most 3 hits from everything else. I literally never have used Gustaves overcharge at full charge because I haven’t had a fight last long enough to fill it up. I either parry and counter attack to win. Or can’t time it right and die instantly. There’s virtually no in between so far.
Again, this might change later and maybe the difficulty is the problem (I’m trying it on expert) but I’m genuinely surprised at how vital it is to dodge and parry so far. Every fight just comes down to whether or not I can dodge every attack. Still liking the game and all but dang, kinda rough gameplay.
It’s fairly one-note at first, but you will get options later that will allow you to soak some hits. Make sure you’re keeping your pictos updated.
That said, yeah, in a game with a fully developed dodge and parry system, you’re going to be expected to at least dodge almost everything when playing on high difficulty.
The main difference in difficulty between the modes is the parry window. If your problem is the parry window, switch to normal mode.
I find in normal mode the game is not very hard for main quests, but extremely punitive with the many optional bosses. So if you still want a challenge, they’re right there.
Lmao I love this take. Must be a skill issue. I don’t have a problem with the parry window or the difficulty parrying. It’s fine. The issue I have is that there is absolutely no strategy in the game so far besides, parry/dodge and counter attack. No skills matter at all, no proccing, no synergy, no need to even think about elemental weaknesses. Everything just comes down to whether or not you can parry/dodge.
Again, this may change as I’m only a few hours in but it is surprising (imo) in a game like this to see none of that matter really at all.
So true. I love the music and atmosphere. It is fantastic. The story looks great. But I do not enjoy the gameplay personally. I want to play it so much, but even 10h in, I’m still not truly enjoying it. Makes me sad, I want to love it so much.
I quit Overwatch after hundreds of hours due to Blizzard’s performative support of the LGBTQ+ community. Limiting the Pride events to countries where it sells while excluding others, some of which are in the EU and don’t even have any laws that would prohibit that, means Blizzard couldn’t care less about the most oppressed.
Funnily, NetEase is better on that front in that its rainbow-colored mountain background in Naraka coinciding with Pride was global. Hopefully Rivals follows suit.
I mean any and all corporate support of a cause (like LGBTQ) is going to be performative. Don’t expect corporations to take a stand unless their existence is predicated on that cause.
You’re basically resorting to the perfect solution fallacy. The reality is that even my Naraka example shows it can be done better, though there are even better examples, like Apex Legends that didn’t mind greeting everyone with the trans flag at one point.
At the end of the day, even if the motives are not genuine, sending a strong and universal message has an impact, as does accurate representation. Many LGBTQ+ people will see it as validating, anybody on the fence will get closer to accepting it as normal, while those who hate will see that their views aren’t embraced. What certainly doesn’t help is showing people that there is a Pride event but not in their country, suggesting their existence is viewed as second-class.
I’d argue you’re the one that’s committed the nirvana fallacy if anyone.
You want them to take a useful stance but you quit supporting them because it wasn’t enough of a useful stance.
I’m just saying, don’t moralize companies … they’ll let you down every time. It’s not about doing what’s right, it’s about fitting in. Companies are like the virtue signalers in high school, they’ll only do it if it’s cool.
Maybe that’s useful to your cause, maybe it isn’t, maybe you support them maybe you don’t, but I wouldn’t expect a company to do things from a place of morals.
It was the opposite of a useful or helpful stance. For the countries that got the events, it was performative. For the countries that didn’t get them, it was contributing to the problem by telling people they aren’t welcome. Even doing nothing is better than that, which is why I’d rather play any other game.
LT: I knew pretty early the scope of the universe, the level, and the script, so I made my dream soundtrack. For example, I would take a level and would want to write three environment tracks, two battle themes, and one boss theme. I do that for the whole game and — one by one — I’d write the track for five years until the end.
This is what’s so nuts to me about this soundtrack. It’s not only quality; it’s quantity too. Those who have played the JRPGs that inspired this game know: for the entire game, you get a few regular battle themes, a few boss themes, and a final boss theme. Some of the consensus top soundtracks in the genre aren’t this big. Yet this single composer did multiples for each level. Only the biggest projects in the genre get this kind of treatment.
I’m glad Broche gave Testard so much run for this game, and gave him the tools to make it sound great, too.
I like that they experiment around a lot, it probably keeps the work from getting dull for them too with how long they’ve been working on this game. This studio might be my favorite, they’re great with their community and any problems I have with the game’s systems or mechanics (pets, arcanes, under-performing frames, operators, etc.) end up getting fixed. It’s always improving and giving me something to come back to that makes the game feel fresh, even after about a decade of on and off playing!
i have mad respect for them. I play similar stuff like Genshin so my F2P time is all eaten up, but I love that Warframe continues to do whatever the f they want.
This article got me to play it, really cool game, I’m impressed by how much it does with quite little. It does feel like there’s some secret I haven’t figured out despite replying it, so haha I really want to get my friends playing it so I can spawn ideas about it!
Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.
Anyway here’s the article:
We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft’s XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die
By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.
The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a “perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat,” according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.
“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.
“Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game,” Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company’s official site. “Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition.”
This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.
The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:
“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”
If anything, this seems targeted to the less avid gaming enthusiasts who would be interested in playing some games, but couldn’t see themselves buying a console.
I used to find XCloud’s portability a nice thing, until they increased the subscription fees. To my knowledge, you can’t even get cloud access unless you get GP Ultimate.
Oh, and let’s not forget these are the people that fired the developers of GOTY Hi-Fi Rush.
Does Japan not have… like… an anti monopoly board. This is an insane merger to even consider. It would make an entity so large it could dominate multiple media industries.
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