I still have a soft spot for Freelancer, despite all the years that have gone by (and aside from some minor UI issues, plays perfectly on a modern PC), and it still looks remarkably nice for its age, too. The story is pretty linear, and the characters not hugely memorable (despite some voice acting from George Takei, John Rhys-Davies, and Jennifer Hale), but it’s just fun to play. It can be challenging if you want to venture into areas less travelled, but because progress through the game is largely dependent on the money you earn (in-game), if you just want a chill evening, you can just trade goods.
And like… this is a game I’ve been playing on and off for 20 years, and occasionally I still find something new. I played it a couple of months ago, committing to docking with every planet and station… and discovered a new trade route that was both shorter and more profitable than the one I had been using. It probably only cut 10 minutes off my three stage trade run around the entire map, but it was still kind of exciting to go “oooh, I never realised this was an option!” All because I visited a station I don’t usually visit.
Yeah, Freelancer is very special. I really think it’s completely unappreciated for how open the world really is, because it’s very easy just to follow the storyline and never just sod off and explore the world. I recently was replaying it with a bunch of mods, and I went exploring the ice asteroid fields in the south end of New York system, and it’s so atmospheric and cool.
I’ve definitely thought about modding Freelancer, but haven’t quite found the right ones yet. I tried Discovery (I think it was), and felt that the changes to the enemy AI and equipment (such as constantly using shield batteries and nanobots) just made gameplay more frustrating than enjoyable, because it made every single battle challenging - no more just chilling out while hauling random stuff through trade lanes. I’d really love a mod that adds new systems, planets, locations, ships, etc without dramatically changing the gameplay to be exclusively about the combat.
One thing that I think that they did right in Freelancer was to cheap out on the not-in-ship content.
X4 put a lot of work into building up an out-of-the-ship environment that lets you walk around space stations, and I just don’t feel that it added a lot of the environment. There are a lot of things that I’d rather have had done relative to X3.
Agreed! I think a lot of games benefit from trying to do one thing really well, rather than multiple things badly, and Freelancer is unapologetic about focusing on doing the in-ship stuff well. Games that try to do both the in-ship and not-in-ship elements end up either with both being done badly, or one just feeling like it serves little purpose in the game.
I’m a Freelancer fan as well. I was looking for a game like that since then. And now it seems there is kind of a successor to the Freelancer. store.steampowered.com/app/1111930/Underspace/
I literally responded to that link with an out loud “oooooooooh!”, my standard “yes I want it” sound. Spiritual successor to Freelancer with Lovecraftian elements? Ticks all the right boxes.
The linked page isn’t actually proving your statement being true. It just explains in theory. Which was my point, if there are benchmarks that prove this undeniably being true. Especially in context to gaming. If a game is not fully utilizing multithreading technology, then it wouldn’t much benefit from the better ThreadDirector. Maybe this game doesn’t benefit from it much.
Intel Thread Director has been backported to Windows 10, and it wouldn’t affect AMD CPUs anyway. Windows 10 has shown slightly better performance in games compared to Windows 11 in many tests.
Double triple check everything and let a friend try to dig around… Befor posting your Infos make a post and chose a random comment or so. This way you can verify it’s not a bot
Enderal, a total conversion mod for Skyrim. Free, just requires ownership of the skyrim base game or special edition (there’s a version for either).
Has a whole new map, reworked classes, changes to combat, banger OST (here’s my favorite, hits incredibly hard when you’re listening to it in-game at a tavern) and the story is just incredible. I still think about it, and the choices I made, years later. Dozens of hours long, moreso if you are a completionist.
Good luck my friend. Hollow Knight is a special one, but those bosses can be punishing. A few of them took me separate sessions over a few days, which is a frustrating way to play games for me, but it’s such a rewarding experience otherwise. I recently rewatched my recording of beating one of the bosses and I was fumbling so bad, I could see my own desperation in the way I was playing.
Apparently there’s a secret phase for the final boss that I was more than happy to experience via YouTube. I was perfectly satisfied with just rolling the credits.
Hollow Knight is the greatest game of all time for me. I replayed it recently and it was such a different experience for me to move through confidently and quickly when I had a grasp of combat from the beginning. It took me months to finish it the first time because of getting lost and not knowing where to go next.
Some generic (no spoiler) tips:
go in another direction and come back to the boss later if that’s possible. If a boss is way too difficult then there may be an upgrade you haven’t gotten yet.
take your time. It is more important to save your health rather than rushing to get a hit in. Sometimes it’s worth going to a boss and not hitting him at all and just focus on learning movement, patterns and figuring out where the openings are.
play around with your charms and get the best setup you need to help with the boss fight.
try to avoid attacks by running into the gap in projectiles rather than relying on dashes all the time.
if you’re coming to thinking of quitting the game based on difficulty, then there’s no shame in watching a boss guide video on YouTube. Or space it out with a secondary game so you can play something else and come back later.
Possibly. The very early part of the game is linear. Very quickly in this game you’ll find it impossible to look up a guide because it is so non-linear, and it is really difficult to judge where you are in the game because you might have done things in a completely different order. Generally, early bosses just take a bit of practice and pattern recognition, and tend not to be reliant on upgrades.
Demon’s Souls isn’t available on PC, but it is the original Soulslike game. Your best bet is to start with Dark Souls 1. They’re not necessarily easy, but it is the origin to an entire genre, so I feel like those may be a better intro to Soulslike. Also, Elden Ring is too demanding - unless you have a good rig, in that case, you can pick that first. For a gothic vibe, you can go with Bloodbourne.
From the posts out there, it looks like the game runs somewhere in the 30-40fps range, so the game is playable, but definitely not in the 60fps range. You may or may not like the frame-rate inconsistency, and it requires some sort of tweaking here and there.
You could try dark souls 3 for the closest to eldenring experience while being 60fps. Then go onto eldenring or dark souls remastered. Dark souls 2 is a black sheep that plays and feels different to the rest and has all around wild design choices.
Oh hi! I played XI from release until recently (with some breaks). IMHO the original story (basically up to Rank 6 where you defeat the Shadow Lord) is fine, but it’s really more of a prelude and setting up the stakes. If you stop there it’s not really worth your time.
Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia (+ optionally Apocalypse Nigh) are pretty good from a story perspective. These can be completed solo. This is what I’d recommend playing through to anyone interested in the real story.
From there it’s somewhat diminishing returns. Treasures and Wings add some interesting bits to the lore. Rhapsody is actually great but will take a lot of time and effort and is probably only worth it to a die hard fan.
I’m not sure what your definition of AA is so this might not be helpful to you, but here’s what I’d consider so:
Supergiant games, most Lego games, Telltale games, Klei games, most of the open world survival craft genre, Chorus, Alan Wake, Darkest Dungeon 1/2, Doom and other boomer shooters, most platformers (a hat in time, Celeste, ori, mirror’s edge etc.), risk of rain 2, disco elysium, most metroidvanias (hallow knight, hyper light drifter), older titles in some AAA game series / older AAA games in general…
What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower salaries.
That sounds like what I see people comment on Lemmy. Those opinions or impressions are not necessarily true though, or seeing the full picture.
People are laid off, which makes the news. But many others remain employed, those don’t make the news. Many others founded or found new companies, which don’t make the news.
Creating your own company, with all its investment, management, and risk involved is much scarier, higher investment and risk, personally and professionally, than being employed. Some people are willing to take that leap, others not.
I imagine profitably in creating games is very hard. You need to grow a user base or publicity. The market is flooded with games, publishers, and developers. Only the big ones have marketing budgets big enough that the marketing makes a bigger impact on profitability than the quality and discoverability of the product. (Like CoD investing a similar amount into marketing as the product development cost. And marketing is effective - more than a good game or product.)
Either way, I don’t feel I have an overview of the whole market situation, or statistics on the broader market and development people movement. But I’m sure “why don’t people start their own companies” is a wrong premise. They do. Some do. We just don’t see it.
The hiring back is unlikely to be the same people too. It’s new people. At the cost of experience, and possibly gain on lower salaries. I’d be skeptical it’s generally good long-term management though. Short-term management is popular. Lay off, you reduced costs, get more people, you increased productivity - and the cycle continues. Managers gotta manage. (/s)
The tabletop system is intended to be modular, with subsystems that can easily be added, removed, or tuned for different genres. The initial playtest I did was in a zombie survival setting, currently we’re doing a campaign that’s got a bit more of a Shadowrunny type feel, mixing technological dystopia and magic. The idea is to put out a core book in those settings as well as a fantasy setting and a space opera setting, so people can mix and match subsystems and do whatever they like with it.
I applied programming concepts to the design of the mechanics themselves in a way that I hope makes them more intuitive and tries to maintain a steady flow of tension and release without a bunch of pausing to check stuff once you know the system.
I don’t want to give too much of the details away, but I do plan to release a system resource document along with the actual books. And it’ll be released under an anti-corporate license, so other small creators can make modules for it, but big companies will have to shell out if they want to play ball.
Once that’s ready to go I have a couple of video games planned using the same system. One of them ties heavily into themes of abuse and autonomy, the other is about time travel. I have some of the early stages of the art and some shaders and stuff done for these, and have set up a few mechanics, but they’re still kind of on the back burner. I’ve been teaching myself music theory and composition so the soundtrack doesn’t become an afterthought, and I feel like there’s still something conceptual I’m missing at the core of the visual design. I’ll get there, though.
That sounds cool. Are you using any particular tools to organize your ideas/systems? That was one of the reasons I was curious--turning ideas into something real seems daunting.
I use Trello a bit, but not consistently. I’ll use it at the beginning of a project to kind of map things out, then come back a few times to kind of check in with where I’m at and see if there’s anything I’m not thinking of. I also have a ton of note files just laying all over my computer, my discord, and my notesnook account. I used to use Google Docs, but I don’t really want them scraping my stuff for their AI before I even get to finish it.
Honestly I just kind of operate like a blob. I expand in a bunch of different directions on a project a little bit at a time until it starts to come together. Stuff percolates and another piece will fall into place and I’ll get a burst of momentum. Eventually I’ll notice I’m banging my head against something that doesn’t work and I’ll realize I’m looking in the wrong place or I don’t have the right thing yet and I’ll work on some other component.
A lot of stuff just kind of comes to me at random times and I try to get it out before I forget it. But it also involves a lot of like sort of flow state thinking keeping track of how different pieces of a thing connect with one another.
But also like, I feel like you kind of have to be comfortable just having a bunch of files full of concepts that don’t necessarily go anywhere immediately? Like, you need to be ready to just throw some shit out there, see how it works, chop massive pieces off of it or throw it away entirely. The moment you let yourself be self-conscious about your work or worry if you’re “really going in the right direction” you’re fucked. I mean, you can have that moment I guess as long as you don’t stay in it, but it’s the drive and the confidence that gets the actual thing finished whether anybody sees it or not.
You have to do something. You can always do something else later.
Once it’s done I feel like that’s its own other game entirely. Like, I have some guerilla marketing ideas and some former contacts I can try to get on the radar of, but that’s another phase of things. I can’t worry too much about that while I’m over here in playtesting, tweaking, and adding play-informed mechanics land.
Like right now we’re just basically playing a game and I’ll stop suddenly in the middle of it and be like oh I need to add something, and I take some notes and then we keep going. A lot of the time at the end of the session I know pretty much what I need to do; whether a mechanic is too complicated or fiddly or not robust enough or needs something else to compensate for it or whatever, it becomes evident when you watch it play out.
I’m not really sure how I’d ever get anything done if I was too focused on the organization of it, to be honest. I give myself enough hats without trying to also be a hat rack.
My gaming groups (both tabletop and video) are leaning into experimental phase of trying new stuff. Count me in if I ever come across your release in the wild.
On the music and visual side. If at all possible I highly recommend finding or hiring someone to at least review what you have and advise, if not doing all the work. There's so much to both that it takes ages to get right but they can have such a huge impact as you seem to know.
I’m going for very specific look of stylized visuals that’ll play well into my animation experience with Flash. I’ve got the shader for it pretty much nailed, I’m just working on my actual like body concept stuff and I’m not fully sold on the actual perspective angle I’ve been playing with. I definitely have a lot of artist and animator friends who have seen it and I’ve gotten good feedback.
But yeah, on the music side of things, I honestly think I want to try to find some folks to play with some time soon. I’m still shoring up my performance end of things, but playing some bass and/or keyboard and/or guitar with a band would probably help my ear a lot and also give me some folks that I could have a musical understanding with who could help me with the soundtrack.
I’d honestly love to release a sort of grungy album. Most of what I’ve been composing seems to lean into experimental guitar stuff, but it’s all still pretty raw.
I still love the aesthetic a lot of PS2 games have, with smooth, bright textures instead of a lot of detail that gets stretched and blurry at low resolutions. The way metal surfaces look in MGS2 and Zone of the Enders is really nice.
But then there are games like Silent Hill 2 & 3 that use a lot of detail in the low resolution textures to create a grimy or rusted look. Those games really benefited from working within the limitations of the system, like the fog to reduce draw distance.
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