I did clans a bit. Some message boards were similar. I was a mod of a small guitar-oriented message board and we knew each other's real names, there were occasional real-life meet-ups where people drove from other states, etc... I miss that.
My biggest, biggest pet peeve of the PS4/PS5 era, is this. I’m in my 40s, I’m a senior management level professional, I’m on some boards, I’ve got very young kids. The amount of times I get to sit down and just go ahhhhh and fire up the PlayStation, number in the very low single digits each quarter. This means my PlayStation has to update what feels like two hundred thousand things, and I just want to play a god damn game. Nope, I have to update the new system software, have to update the games update, something for the sound, it literally feels like it never ends. So my three free hours turns into me throwing the controller and just moving on to something else more often than not, only for the cycle to repeat. It’s infuriating.
I think that one issue is that – at least with Steam, and I think on consoles, though I haven’t checked the current gen – if there’s an outstanding update for a game, one is required to wait until an update is applied before playing the game.
That often really doesn’t need to happen. One could have a console just let one play what’s already download, and when an update can be done, do it.
This doesn’t solve things for multiplayer games – or, more-generally, games with some level of online functionality. There, updates may require everyone to be running the latest version, or Twitter support may be broken on an older version (come to think of it, I bet that all that Twitter removal of third-party API access probably broke a bunch of games with social media integration).
And sometimes, like with actively-exploited security holes, a developer may really, really not want people to use existing versions.
Maybe let the developer flag an update as “mandatory” and only force updates if the “mandatory” flag is set.
One other thing that might solve your problem – I haven’t looked at current-gen consoles, but at least the last time I looked at an XBox, I believe that there was an option for it to turn itself on nightly, check for updates, and for installed games, download and install any updates. That might address your “I turn on my console about once a year and then it has a huge backlog” issue, if your console has that and you toggle on that nightly update setting.
They’ve had that standby mode for a few years for sure (I mostly use PS, but Xbox will have the same). I don’t know why though, for whatever reason after a while it just stops working. Might be the routers cycling or whatever, but it’ll stay on standby forever, but when you login there’s still a sea of updates and most stuff is unable to be played. I hear you on the multiplayer requirements and whatever too, personally I’m never a multiplayer. I’d accept the risks of a game being out of date if it just allowed me to skip updating.
I was in a bf2 clan that was pretty tight knit. I have good memories of that. I was also in another clan when I was 14 and one of the older guys tried to groom me. No DoT, I don’t want to masturbate with you
Story mode / Infinite lives / invincibility modes.
Difficulty should not be a barrier for entry. I like how Insomniac games like Ratchet and Clank, and to a lesser extent Spiderman, offer a really easy mode for those who just want to blast away or swing around New York.
One of the worst arguments I had online was me saying that’s great in single player but not unilaterally in multiplayer, and people got mad. I still think about it sometimes.
But generally yeah, agreed. Caves of Qud added a roleplay mode so dying sends you back to town instead of forcing a new game, and it’s real nice even if it’s not the traditional rogue like.
I think that part of the problem in the case of Caves of Qud is that traditionally, the roguelike genre was aimed at having relatively-quick runs. So losing a run isn’t such a big deal. Your current character is expendable. But many roguelike games – like Caves of Qud – have, as they’ve gotten ever-bigger and gotten ever-more-extensive late games, had much, much longer runs. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead can have a character easily last for weeks or even months of real time. If you sink that much time into a character, having them die becomes, I think, less-palatable to most players. So there’s an incentive to shift towards the RPG model of “death is not permanent; it just throws you back to the last save”.
Just as some roguelikes have had longer runs, some games in the genre have intentionally headed in the direction of shorter runs – the “coffee break roguelike”. The problem there is that roguelikes have also historically had a lot of interacting game mechanics in building out a character, and if you put a ten-minute cap or so on a run, that sharply limits the degree of complexity that can come up over any given run for a character.
I bought FFXVI on launch day and decided to go the story difficulty. Best decision ever, and such an interesting way to do it. You basically get these special rings that make aspects of the game easier, like dodging and attack timing. You can always unequip them if you want to try the game with harder mechanics. The rings also take accessory slots, which you only have 3 of, so you have have to consider things like “Do I want this agility boost? Or my time-stop dodges?” Interesting to trade out game nerfs for stats or other effects.
But yeah. Story modes are great. I played Horizon on easy. Had a blast and didn’t get frustrated.
I would be nice if the game detects that it’s been quite some time since I last played, and give a quick refresher of the keybinds as well as brief rundown of recent missions completed / story-so-far.
Dragon Quest XI also! I love this feature. Final Fantasy XII-2 also did it in a nice cinematic way, like you’re watching a show, with snippets of cutscenes after a voice says “Final Fantasy XIII-2, the story so far…”
Pasting my comment from elsewhere in these comments here: The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.
I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.
This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.
The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.
I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.
This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.
Yeah, my thought is that this is a game they'll be supporting for 8-9 years so what the fuck does it matter if it runs like dogshit on day one? Don't fucking buy it until the performance increases and the problems you mentioned are ironed out.
It really is that simple.
Anyone that expected this game to be perfect on launch was clearly not around whenever Cities: Skylines launched. The performance was godawful to the point that I refunded it. A couple of months and a couple of patches later shit was cleared up and I repurchased it. Didn't have an issue after that.
So yeah, the whole "Why doesn't this brand new game not have the same performance and features as a nine year old game with numerous DLCs and mods?" thing is getting fucking tiresome.
I don’t think it’s crazy to expect games to have playable performance levels when they release. Not to mention it’s a sequel so you’d think they would learn some things after fixing the first one.
Yeah the fucks up with all the Paradox apologia in this thread? I also remember Cities: Skylines on release It ran fine and my rig was shitty back then. It was a perfectly functional little city builder. People loved it and it was called the new Sim City! “Just wait two years and put down another $50 on dlc bro. Ur dumb for expecting it to be good now.” Nah this shits unacceptable. If a game needs to be supported for years before its considered good then an honest developer would call it an early access game. Ya know, those games that get years of support, updates, and features for free.
Yeah but it’s Paradox as the publisher who is the one setting the parameters of them having to build a game that is designed to support 10 years of DLC like all of their other products because that’s their monetization strategy.
Publishers still have a lot of power in a games development. They can set deadlines and dictate the direction they want a games development to take. Seeing as this is a recurring problem with games Paradox both develops and publishes, its easy to see who is to blame here.
DLC part pisses me off also. I know this game isn’t developed by Paradox but it seems to be a trend in Paradox games where you need to spend the base price + an absurd amount of extra money to get the developer’s “true vision” or whatever. It’s really annoying.
To get most of the base game features that are currently present in Crusader Kings III, you would’ve had to spend a sizeable chunk of cash on DLC for Crusader Kings II.
I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.
I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.
And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.
The base game of 2077 is pretty good now that 2.0 is out. My biggest issie with it at launch was the lack of cyberspace for hacker player characters. Felt like the game was funneling me towards standard FPS gameplay, even if there are a lot of options within that realm
Exactly this. No man’s Sky is apparently decent nowadays too.
Part of the issue is that publishers make studies sign contracts with fixed release dates, with heavy penalties for delays (even though basically any software project ends up going over time).
But yeah, just go through the backlog of older games, this way you also don’t need the latest PC either to play on max settings.
Preorders. It used to be that you had to preorder the LOTR special edition on DVD with figurines to make sure the shop had existences… then Kickstarter bastardized it into “pay to maybe get something”… and Steam jumped onto the bandvagon of “pay hoping it might work some day”.
Not sure how the point about Kickstarter is relevant but it’s not Steams fault devs are releasing unfinished games.
And I wouldn’t say it went straight to bad digital preorders. I feel like that is a more recent phenomenon and digital preorders were better years ago.
I’d much rather play the game in its current state than waiting 3 or 4 months, i have a pretty beefy system and i dont mind low framerates in a strategy game. If you don’t feel the same then don’t pick it up, wait the 3 or 4 months and enjoy it then.
The problem is that they don’t communicate this and still ask for the full price.
Imagine I’m a gamer who wants to buy and play a working game today, not in half a year. Nothing on their store page indicates that the game isn’t in a playable state yet, so I’d pay full price for a game I can’t actually play. That’s misleading at best, and a downright fraud at worst.
They could easily fix this by delaying the game or launching it as early access for people who don’t mind playtesting a half-finished game, but they didn’t.
It’s kind of baffling how we accept this as pretty much the standard for major releases these days. Why would we be okay buying anything else like this? If I bought a pair of shoes and they had issues that made them unwearable until I got them repaired I would be irritated as fuck, and obviously this would be unacceptable for a store to sell them like that.
I doubt the average player looks up whether the devs came out to warn players their game runs like shit before buying it, I think they just buy it. Similar to how people probably don’t check to see if a movie director has mentioned how bad the sound mixing and lighting is in a movie before going to watch it. Might be a crazy take but imo the onus isn’t on the person buying the game to make sure the game is finished, let alone looking up articles on the game to make sure the devs didn’t admit that it runs like ass and isn’t finished. Though with how often it happens and how often there’s people that excuse it maybe that’s where we’re at now, you reap what you sow and whatnot lol
Anyone buying a full price title without looking it up with a quick Google search or reading reviews on Steam is far gone from my compassion.
You can even refund it so easy it’s not even worth the outcry and i don’t even pretend to care about anyone pre-ordering digital downloads.
It’s shitty that these devs have to put the games out too early, but it would save everybody’s money and nerves if you just start to see releases today as early access because that’s what they all are. There are many companies out there which don’t say a peep and i won’t wreck anyone who at least tries to give a heads-up !pre! which anyone who cares could get easily for free.
This is not what I’m talking about, because the vast majority of people buying the game won’t have seen this. It’s not enough that the info is somewhere on the internet, it needs to be front and center when buying the game.
We didn’t have god damn tunnels in CS1 when it was released and people were raging about the city being limited to 9 tiles.
If company admitted performance issues before release is the hill that these people are willing to die on, well go ahead then. Back then the alternative was either cities platinum series or the abomination sim city became and neither of those was any good. At least now you have something more modern than sim city 4 to fall back on if CS2 disappoints.
The problem is, this sets a precedence in the gaming industry (and in the consumer’s minds too) that it’s fine to consume 16 GB of RAM, not on a late game megacity but on a new save.
Games like this are also pretty palatable at low framerates imo, certainly much better than an fps or something. If the gameplay is solid I’ll definitely pick it up. I like to have it as a second monitor game.
When StarCraft was still relatively new the Blizzard games had a Chat function that spanned all of their games. If they belonged to another game you would see that Chatter’s game as an icon to the right of their name. You could speak to someone playing Diablo at any time. The social setup drove high engagement between players who regularly used to seek playing at a time when the gameplay was typically hosted on a player’s computer rather than on a server.
Clans didn’t have a ready in-game functionality, but fortunately Blizzard had allowed Chatters not only the freedom to change their username quite easily, but to also create Chat Rooms with custom names. By holding the Chat room, you could maintain Administrator rights over the channel.
Early Guilds had to have their users change their names to include the tags in their names, which meant virtually anyone could edit their name to include the tag they wanted. The expanded tag would be used as the name for the Chat Room, which allowed both members and non-members to find it easily enough.
The advent of bots using a Battle.Net login to hold the Chat Rooms and provide admin rights regularly to specific users spiked a new age as Clans became more stable. The bot would be used to blacklist trolls, recognize officers in the Clans, and create rosters to stop people from masquerading.
It created a boom, and in these early days clans rose and fell like the sun. Smaller clans were quicker to join other larger clans and conglomerate into new structures that would require testing and vetting of player skills. Friendships between real players, who formed clans only to incorporate better players from absorbing other clans, were sorely tested as some friends found their skills did not allow them to play regularly any more.
I was in one of these early guilds at the time, a group called the Silver Arrows. I had recently proved that while I lacked strategy for unit construction (as we were playing StarCraft) and combat, I was methodically organized in base construction and could start generating Protoss Scouts while Zerg players were still searching for others to conduct Zergling raids. I was still new to the game at that time and was flounderIng my way through the Campaign. As part of the Clan I found myself playing more often and seeking out games if only to spend time with my clanmates.
I was a member of the -[SA]- clan for about a month when the Silent Assassins {SA} entered into talks with our clan. Different clans with the same initials claimed different forms of their tags. We folded into their ranks and with the additional experience under my belt I found myself joining their first line. I played for a while, but as the boom/bust cycle continued it wasn’t long before I found myself playing relatively alone. Without a support group I gravitated towards Diablo and ultimately Diablo 2, only playing StarCraft socially with my real life friends.
I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan “tags”. I might be imagining it, but wasn’t there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something…) That might have honestly been my first experience with “bots” for things adjacent to games.
In Ultima Online I was part of a really big guild on Napa Valley. We had pretty much all the land north east of the Britannia swamp. We were one of the first, if not the first, guild to defeat the Harrower.
Afaik, yeah. I haven’t played on the official servers for years though. If I ever have a hankering to play it, I find emulated shards that duplicate the experience as it was in 1997.
Edit: I just had to look and see; not only is it still up and running, they recently had some kind of event on the 18th.
On days like this I ask myself if the reason games are released that broken is because there are no real software engineers in the game industry. Like a carmack with doom. Someone who understands the technical site of things.
Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).
Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you’ve coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.
But there’s always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don’t obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.
Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it’s easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it’ll take.
The best time I had in Warcraft was forming a new guild that had splintered off of an existing one (leadership was unpleasant). It was pretty scary at first, not knowing how it was going to turn out, but we had enough of the guild come with us that we managed top 50 raid progression on the realm the following year. It was super validating to have that kind of success in a casual raiding guild after all the turmoil.
I stayed in contact with our GM, and she and I still play on and off (we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately).
A game like this is not going to release without bugs. It’s just not going to happen. Expect Colossal to patch it fairly rapidly and over the course of a few years release all of the DLC that will make it feel like a rich city building experience. For now, I’ll stick to C:S1. No need for the pitchforks and torches.
I dunno – I’m sympathetic to the DLC argument, but bad performance isn’t something I can forgive on launch day. I’m sure they’ll patch it in time, but if I buy a full-priced game, I expect it to run decently well. Anything less makes for a poor user experience. If a publisher truly cares about user experience then they won’t release a game in that state, or if they do, they’ll make it 100% clear on the storefront that the game has performance issues.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne