Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?
Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and we’ll be rich.
Gamers: Who asked for this? I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want to play this shit. I’ve got better shit that I can play for free.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
Those aren’t re-skins though, they just used the battle royals game type as their main game type.
I can’t really think of a similar game to fortnite before it in regards to the combination of building and competitive shooter, although I’m sure someone can point out an early example, and Apex is smashing together counterstrike and maybe overwatch or something similar for the gameplay.
Personally I don’t think apex would have worked if it just looked like a re-skin but its got a lot of great artwork and the level designs are interesting at least to me.
Also fortnite has become the everything game, they have Lego and rocket racing and a guitar hero minigame, its sort of gone wild IMO.
You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment
Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality
There have been a number of voxel shooter that have shipped lowkey since Minecraft that attempted to add block placement to the team v team ticket shooter, e.g. Ace of Spades.
I think we should just forget the game exists. One day they will announce it, but until them, let’s just assume there is no Silksong, and Team Cherry is just taking a long long vacation.
My hype train was put away for a couple years, but it came back out this year. If there’s not a definitive release date by the end of the year, then I will go back to pretending it doesn’t exist.
Just remember how plasticky and stiff the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition looked because of the mandate to use the Frostbite 3 engine for ~everything, no matter how unsuited it was to a high fantasy world.
The unfortunate fact is, the conceit of most action games relies on some pretty dumb ideas.
Every opponent is committed to ending your life, even to the point of fighting on when 80% of their unit is dead.
Your hero is skilled enough at combat to win hundreds of fights without any permanent injuries
The “light, casual” quests you’re put on like retrieving a child’s missing doll are important enough to for enemies to relentlessly guard with their life.
People have pointed this out for everyone from Mario to Nathan Drake, etc. Some games even try to base a “moment of introspection” around it, and it sort of falls flat.
uncharted is the worst for this because the fights add basically nothing. the games are great humourous adventure serials occasionally broken up by obligatory murderous rampages. after my first playthrough of uncharted 2 it showed that i had done over 200 headshots alone. friend of mine had something like 1500.
i think so. i don’t really have a problem with that. as the narrator says in the stanley parable, what kind of story has the main character die halfway through
Basically the idea is that only the last shot matters. Nathan isn’t actually getting shot by a full magazine from a FAL. He is getting grazed and shitting himself. And when you finally die? THAT is the bullet that hit. Which actually makes a lot more sense since the damage indicators (aside from Nate face tanking a 50 BMG…) tend to line up more with how video games portray suppression and the like. And it is why a single pistol shot to the leg in a cutscene leads to 20 minutes of slow walking and a time skip.
the game would have been better if they took the combat out entirely, save for some one-on-one fights. it’s a shame that they’re done with the series, it was finally approaching “playable indy film” territory.
the achievement means they knew, and put the monster closet shit in anyway.
I think it’s pretty cool this issue is actually addressed in the witcher (action rpg). At the very end you get confronted by Death (personified). He blames you for all the pain and suffering you caused and that he has to follow your footsteps wherever you go and asks you to give up as the world would be a better place without you. You can decide to give in or to fight him, if I remember correctly. It’s really one of my favourite moments in video games history and really worth considering the good you as the witcher have done vs the pain you caused. If you think it’s moral to measure life vs life you can definitely share Deaths opinion.
The witcher still holds up today and I think is worth playing if you haven’t yet.
if you're not really there for it then sure, but i got a ps5 for ff7 remake, kh3 and ff16 and i personally think I got my money's worth. loved every goddamn second.
it helped that I got p5r and expedition 33 as well, what a beaut of a bonus they were
Them being told they’re timed exclusives isn’t really the problem being discussed though. Seems weird to invalidate a console having a game just because it’s available elsewhere. If you don’t already have a PC, a PS5 for it’s performance is way cheaper than getting the PC equivalent.
I’m just adding historical context that those games were exclusives. If them being exclusive meant “the ps5 has games” then timed exclusivity didnt really help in this case.
this isn't really totally relevant anymore because I'm late in replying (as usual) but they were games that I was excited to play as soon as they came out because I knew that I would enjoy them and I knew I didn't want them to be spoiled for me by the internet, which it's become very good at doing
...so for me, at the time, they were exclusives, even though they aren't anymore
I take this as a comparison sometimes. Also the PS2 got five GTAs, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories were released on PS2 too. The PS3 and Xbox 360 got two GTAs, and everything after got remasters. PS5 will probably get GTA 6, so GTA skipped the PS4/Xbox One generation.
There have been some great games with development times that long. But for crying out loud, if you’re not making a surefire success, make a smaller game so it’s less risky.
I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II right now, and it’s excellent. Baldur’s Gate 3 took 6 years, though they attribute a good portion of that to an Eastern European war and a pandemic. Given other side projects, it’s a bit nebulous exactly how long Indiana Jones and Great Circle took that team to make, but it was somewhere between 5 and 7 years, and I loved it. I’m not exactly a fan of Nintendo lately, but people sure do love Donkey Kong Bananza, and that team had been working on that game more or less since Mario Odyssey’s release in 2017.
Ahh, that’s a bummer. Hopefully she’s not too onerous about it. Some people don’t understand games as a hobby or down time activity but then are fine with tv/movies/books.
Nah. She’s right lol. Last month my PlayStation stats said I played 12 titles for 39 hours. So plenty of gaming to be had. The issue is that I’m addicted to humble bundles and have over 100 games there I’ve never played…
They just ported all the PS4 games and slap PS5 on them. I bought a PS5 and not single game I have on it you can’t also buy a 4 version. Except for Dead Island 2, and it was meh. I have not used my PS5 in over a year it just collects dust. With PC games I get all I need and more. But I have looked at new games for it and not impressed with the lineup.
It really does feel like this. And most of the new “ps5” games they also make for 4! Off the top of my head I can think of demons souls, ff16, ff7r part 2, and death stranding 2 were ps5 only and 3 of those are only timed exclusives
I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though. It’s not like I’d be bothered if someone with a GPU 5 years older than mine is able to play the same game on PC.
This is what consoles just should be. No longer locking games to specific generations, letting newer hardware run older titles better, and letting developers continue developing for lower hardware targets to include more people.
It’s because half the player base still only has the PS4, like myself. I just could never justify spending that much money on a console that can only hold like 8 games Anyways without paying a crazy amount for extra storage, when I can still play the same games on the console I already have. I was more than happy to spend twice the money building a decent desktop where I can play just about anything I want with way more freedom.
I bought mine for my girlfriend to play Hogwarts Legacy. I myself have played FF7, FF16, AstroBot and Expedition33. That’s twice as much games as I have played on the Switch2. And AstroBot is the only one of them you can’t play on a PC
I am. I grew up with the PS1 and I really liked the simplicity, ease of use, affordability and reliability of older gens, but the newer ones seem to have all the cons of consoles and none of the benefits.
I grew up with cartridges, so this is hilarious to me. With PS1, you had to put in a disc, close the lid, press the power button, wait for the logo startup sequence, then your game would start (assuming there’s not some kind of problem that kicks you back to the disc/memory card screen). Don’t even get me started on disc damage 😂
Now I’m a PC gamer with a humongous digital collection. Nothing gets damaged, and I get to keep all my games.
Same here, although even earlier. As a family of five Sony's horribly bad game sharing within the family if you have more than one PS5 (we do) has sealed the deal for us. I've just built up two Bazzite-based Steamboxes and that's going to be our couchgaming from now on.
Part of the “problem” is that the current gen launched basically at the height of COVID. People were distracted when it came out and studios took a huge productivity hit at a time when they would be pushing to get those games out.
But it is coming up on 5 years and console generations tend to be 6-8 years if memory serves. Considering how much work goes into prepping the hardware, it makes sense to see “leaks” now for what will likely hit shelves in the fall of 2027 or 2028.
But I think the bigger issue is that we kind of all know these are “just” computers and most games are multiplatform. Combine that with backwards compatibility and there really aren’t that many distinguishing games of a generation. Which is why it is a common refrain that this is probably the last “console generation” with the future being closer to PCs where you just have new hardware every few years and upgrade when a game you want needs it or you get bored.
It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered
The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.
Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development
Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.
There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where its marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product
Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented
Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That’s just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product
The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit, user gamepad mapping repository, I’ve used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they’re a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you
I’d be happy with a suitable competitor. It’s just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive
Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there’s so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren’t such a great point anymore. There’s not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package
I find EGS launcher to be incredibly slow, so I don’t even bother claiming their free games using it. I use the browser instead. The annoying part is EGS launcher will prompt my 2FA if I don’t open it at least monthly, which is also too much of a bother.
I’m pretty sure Steam has been able to do that since launch, though I do remember the legendary loading bar that would progress then regress then progress and regress all with the same text message there so it wasn’t perfect in 2003. Roller coaster early on but by like 2007 it was pretty solid
I’m pretty sure EA Origin was able to do that day one or within a year of release. Origin was OK from what I remember just that it took stayed stagnant and I’m guessing onboarding games to the platform being a terrible process considering how sparse releases were on there
Steam is a mature platform. It doesn’t roll out new user facing features often. Yet somehow I think the gap has widened since 2018 vs EGS
And Epic has had a lot more financial resources available when they launched their store. Estimated valuation of $15 billion in 2018, Valve’s was half that in 2022.
I don’t really see an excuse for Epic to have ever had missing features, they entered the market with plenty of templates for what does and doesn’t work
I just went through this yesterday! I did a big upgrade on my wife’s computer, fresh install of Windows on a 2TB NVMe drive replacing the aging 120GB SSD that somehow didn’t completely fill up, etc. Etc. really loved pointing epic at the installs on the secondary drive and it just ignoring them and instead spending 3 hours downloading Fortnite after we just spent 1 hour applying the last update yesterday (and another hour on a different update the day before too!) on the drive that’s RIGHT THERE IN THE COMPUTER!
DRG is a fantastic place to start with moving from a controller to mouse/keyboard.
I would personally T-up some classics like portal and Half-life 2 for solo “history lessons” after that. Only then would I make some harder recomendations like long RPGs, MOBAs, 4X, and would shy away from MMOs unless you have an organized group to introduce them to.
I encourage you to explore the wonderful world of indie games, and free yourself from the shackles and shitty anti-cheat implementations of the AAA/AAAA gaming industry
I can cite way more than 5 excellent games from this decade from the top of my head, We’re almost in 2025, so I’ll limit to games released in or after 2015:
Factorio
RimWorld
Stellaris
Fallout 4
Overcooked 2 (and all you can eat)
Life is Strange
Cyberpunk 2077
Before your eyes
Dead Cells
Shadow Tactics
Cities Skylines
The outer worlds
Two point hospital
I can keep going, but this is just from the top of my head, there are always good games getting released, and very rarely they’re AAA.
Microsoft is a fucking ghoulish, evil company. The only reason they bought Bethesda was to own their IP. They have Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Doom Because of ID games. That alone is going to bring them so much money, if they ever want to sell any of those franchises in the future, they can sell them for a fortune. That’s probably the reason why they acquired Bethesda to begin with. Laying off Hi-Fi Rush after they delivered an excellent product was just pure evil.
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