There’s always been criticism but until now it’s been low level insiders and nobodies like pirate software. And the reasons the publishers and big names that would be affected did SKGs didn’t say or do anything until now because they didn’t want to give it any oxygen. They were smart enough to ignore it because they knew if they said anything it’d rile up a shift storm. Which is exactly what Pirate Software did so he’s probably got a lot of people on both sides pissed at him for being too narcissistic to shut up and let the movement die.
Now that it has enough signatures to be taken seriously you’re going to see the fire hoses open up and a lot of misinformation spread about how the movement would make the gaming industry unviable for the current model. Now is the point where if you are an EU citizen that you write and call your representatives who would consider this issue and help write the law if it did pass on how important it would be to you personally to not allow game companies to revoke your ability to utilize a game you paid for.
pissed at him for being too narcissistic to shut up and let the movement die.
You’ve got a typo there. What you meant to write was “pissed at him for struggling with managing the symptoms from his narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis too much to shut up and let the movement die.”
Putting the focus on the personal struggle of managing the symptoms is more empathetic, and using the full name of the diagnosis instead of contracted nouns helps avoid using slurs and/or dehumanising the patent.
Your comment has a typo. You meant to write “human beings who developed narcissistic personality disorder due to childhood trauma and now struggle with identity and empathy to the detriment of their own wellbeing as described in the DSM 5 are literally destroying our planet and our way of life”
and using the full name of the diagnosis instead of contracted nouns helps avoid using slurs and/or dehumanising the patent.
You’ve got a typo there. Unless you can prove that said person was indeed diagnosed with such disability by an appropriate medical authority, let’s not use such term that could either be considered defamation, or at least medical disinformation. (/i)
People say what they intend to say, not what you wish them to. If you believe they are incorrect, no need to be pedantic about it. Just argue why, you’d find out people are way more open to arguments when they do not feel like you are condidering them as idiots.
While I am against using illnesses as slurs, I am 99% sure Elon Musk has NPD even if was never officially diagnosed, which he would avoid for obvious reasons. So I wouldnt count this instance as using an illness as a slur.
If he does have NPD, then we’re back to the issue that the general population needs to start referring to mental disorders with respectful and empathetic language, because this creates a culture of tolerance that will be visible to other people with the disorder.
You know that someone can act like something without being that thing right? You can say someone is narcissistic without them being an actual narcissist.
Like me saying that you’re stupid shouldn’t imply that you’ve had a traumatic brain injury or were born without a frontal lobe.
That’s a false equivalence. “Stupid” isn’t the same as any of the words in the diagnosis “mental retardation” (recently updated to intellectual disability). Your example would work better if you did it like this:
Like me saying that you’re retarded shouldn’t imply that you have mental retardation.
There, that’s a much closer analogy. Do you still stand by your point if we use a proper equivalence?
You can’t typically get punitive damages for contract disputes. Also, there is a very real possibility that the contract hasn’t been breached by the new owners’ actions. It sounds like they used their superior bargaining power to put a lot of questionable yet enforceable provisions in the contract.
Ive heard of it once where the defendant litterally wrote a book on how to use overseas buisness to pull off scams like the one he was being accused of
Typically, conduct would have to rise to the level of fraud to justify punitives in a contract based dispute. That’s a very high hurdle in most jurisdictions. Also, at that point the conduct complained of would likely be based in tort, not contract.
I know you’re joking but thanks to the Internet, I can confirm you do get the shotgun in the lost valley stage where dinosaurs are found. Now that I read up on it, the funniest part to me is that this meme might have actually chose a shotgun for that reason, especially since apparently you can totally take on a T-Rex with a shotgun.
yes, but mobile games now are literally casinos, with research going into making them as addictive as possible to maximise in app purchase and advertisement revenue
source: worked in ad tech for several years, specifically in the mobile gaming industry, monetisation/ad optimisation. a job I regret doing and which feels very scummy in retrospect.
Because they all come with microtransaction stores, including several of the ones you’re specifically lauding, ya numpty.
Just because YOU haven’t wasted money on microtransactions does not magically make them unsuccessful in getting many children to blow loads of their parents’ money.
No, they don’t. It’s not hard to find premium, paid mobile games without microtransactions—I’ve already listed examples. And I’ve cited hard data: there are 14,139 such games on iOS alone.
If you can’t find even one of them, the problem isn’t the platform. It’s that you’re not actually looking.
To be fair, the iOS app store will show the top 200 paid games, and that’s it. There are a bunch of categories for games, but ‘paid’ isn’t one of them; there is no other way to see or filter just paid games. It’s always sucked and Apple has never fixed it.
I honestly don’t know how any developer is supposed to be successful on there with a paid game, because if it’s not already in the top 200 list, most people will never be able to see it in the store without specifically searching the name.
Ah, the classic “world hunger is a myth, I have eaten today.”
I’m not saying there are not the rare gems in mobile games (just bought Don’t Starve on Android last month!), but like 99% of games for mobile are just s money making scheme using dark patterns to influence your brain to give them money.
And congrats on not spending on micro transactions! You do realize the world doesn’t revolve around how your perceive things, right? If young people are exposed to micro transactions like that, it alters their brains and not in a good way. And that’s science, there really isn’t much you can argue with.
You do realize that iOS alone has more paid premium games—without microtransactions—than the entire combined library of NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube, right?
Your premise would be true if kids were compelled to spend money. But I watch my kids’ spending habits like a hawk. If what you were saying were true, I’d notice transactions being made.
Which leads me to believe that you’re either exaggerating or deliberately engaging in moral panic because others are having fun in your non-preferred way.
My kid has spent more money on new Switch games than Roblox.
So because you do it correctly, everyone else should get fucked or what? Like, you know how many people have bad parents?
So, congrats, your kids won’t suffer from that (or maybe they will once they have their own money because the path way of “spend a $1, get an in-game item, get an instant rush of feel-good hormones” is forming even with moderation). But other kids may, unless of course you think that it’s somehow their fault they have shitty parents.
So no, I really don’t want this around kids whose lives will be ruined just so your kids can have a fun time (which they can have in other ways, including other games).
I just spent the last two weeks in San Diego and hated it.
I hated the freeways, the strip malls, and the car-centrism. More than that, I hated the complete and utter hostility towards walking.
There were places that were 0.5 miles away. It would take three minutes to drive there yet an hour to walk because the assholes who designed the city couldn’t be bothered to build a pedestrian overpass.
I feel very strongly that cities like this are everything wrong with the USA, and that the reason so much shit happens in the USA are because cities are simply unlivable.
But Americans—specifically American voters—have decided this is what they aspire towards, and being antagonistic towards the average American is ultimately unhelpful.
Now why do I mention this? Because there’s a host of things that suck, and there’s only so much bandwidth to give a damn.
The real problem you’re talking about isn’t games. It’s financial literacy. Schools don’t teach it. Employers are hostile towards it. Governments just want you to spend—they don’t want you to save.
Financial literacy is what saves people from making terrible financial decisions.
Specifically worth pointing out the research and refinement of the skinner boxes in mobile games today is a continuous and ongoing process, with revenue also being continuous and ongoing. Any games and moral panic of 80s to 2000s were about products that didn’t change after release and were one-time only purchases.
Modern mobile games vs. shareware are incomparable in terms of harm they could do, real or perceived.
Moral panic is unrelated to games having addictive elements.
A better comparison would be how retro games would be designed for you to die/lose over and over because they were based on arcade dynamics, where the customer has to keep putting in quarters to continue playing.
Because the games are intentionally made with micro transactions as the main feature.
Like, if you play Witcher or Control or whatever, the focus is on you enjoying the game. If you play Fortnite, the main focus is on getting you pay. The game is probably still fun, but every single thing in the game is meant to make you pay.
It’s absolutely not the same thing. I used to play a lot as a kid (still do) and I have no problem with today’s kids doing the same. But I want them to be able to enjoy games without constantly being manipulated into spending as much money as possible.
And it’s not just about kids either, I think these predatory tactics affect adults too.
It’s not a moral panic, the problem is capitalism.
Yeah. It has rapidly turned an initiative that was already unnecessarily combative toward devs (fuck the publishers though) and associated it with harassment and review bombing games that are actually Doing It Right just because they worked with the wrong third party studio. Not to mention all the “Well, we don’t agree with everything asmongold says, but let’s call a truce so long as he is gonna let us play our video games”
And… honestly? I have disliked thor since LONG before all y’all realized he isn’t the world’s best WoW player or he has an opinion you don’t like because he was considering things from the perspective of the people who would be doing the work to enact these “simple requirements”.
But it feels REAL fucking everyday normal to watch people immediately go from “the harassment campaign that led to the death of Mikayla Raines was horrible” to “Let’s fucking ruin Pirate Software’s life and attack him and everything he has ever associated with because we are morally righteous”
I think Outer Wilds is the most unique and fantastic way to tell a story I’ve ever experienced. Truly open in a way I’ve not seen before or since.
With the banger of a soundtrack too, I just can’t bring myself to rate other games higher than it; even if I enjoy them more, Outer Wilds is probably the best game I’ve ever played.
Slay the Spire probably makes the list as it’s inspired countless tweaks on its incredibly balanced deck building experience
Unpopular Opinion: The last few hardware generations have had diminishing returns while increasing the cost of being a PC gamer drematically. While the DOOM games are generally well-optimized, I just upgraded my whole ass system after 8 years just two years ago and I’m hitting minimum specs to play the new DOOM game at all. Same with Indiana Jones, same with STALKER 2, same with Alan Wake 2.
Of course, we also went from 8gb of video RAM being more than enough to needing fucking like 16-24gb as a standard somehow.
Seriously, the rig I bought to play fucking Bioshock Infinite kept up for about 8 years. I know I didn’t go all-out in building my machine but I didn’t 10 years ago either when I put my old box together. Honestly current machine feels way more high-end than the one 10 years ago did.
Anyway, kind of feels like a rip-off by the industry to me, and this is the same industry that is pushing for GTA 6 to cost $80-100 because they’re not making enough money somehow.
Basically, even if you have a 4090, the stutters and poor fps still exist due to the way the game is designed.
In a way, it’s like being back in the NES days all over again. Sometimes the game itself would just push the hardware too much and it would slow down. This shouldn’t be happening at all in this environment, it’s a joke. It goes well beyond just positive reviews for this kind of stuff.
There needs to be better compression for texture and sound files. That’s pretty much the reason for the giant install sizes and RAM requirements. In theory it’s possible, but it hasn’t really changed in decades.
“AAA” companies don’t want to spend q/a time on code. Indie devs don’t seem to have that problem. So there’s a huge gulf between quality.
Personally I think the day one patch excuse for reviewers is bull. Day one patches have been a thing for at least 25 years, everyone should know they don’t fix bad games. If the companies are not being called out for bad practices then they’ll never bother to fix them before going gold.
Additionally, if a day one patch were actually enough to fix these issues, then just delay the game by a day. That way, the launch day gamers won’t suffer through a (sometimes) unplayable experience and possibly leave bad reviews.
The reason the new Doom and Indiana Jones games require a card with ray tracing is a consequence of the consoles all having ray tracing and an increasing number of PC users do too.
So to support a diminishing number of PC players would require the game to be lit twice, one with RT and one with traditional methods. Obviously this costs more in development and testing and studios are increasingly deciding it’s just not worth it.
It’s got to be the biggest dividing line we’ve seen in years. I suspect things will settle down for a while, now.
“With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.”
Any time a critical character dies (usually because you’re on a killing spree) it says that. But it’s also become a meme when someone famous dies in real life.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It happened when important NPCs died, rendering unfinished or future quests associated with that character impossible to complete or start; iirc essential NPCs didn’t have immunity to damage and death in Morrowind like in later Bethesda titles, so these NPCs were protected only by the player reloading their save after getting this message upon the essential NPCs’ death.
Just a habit, on lots of subreddits now, you get AutoMod deleted or banned from their subreddit if you use curse words. This happened to me on PC gaming subreddit. I got hit with a Perma ban there 3 months ago and they wouldn’t tell me why I kept messaging them over and over again, told it was for excessive profanity. Apparently lots of my comments use the f word so that’s not acceptable.
I started to censor myself too on other platforms because sometimes they have warnings like “Are you sure you want to post this?” and I feel like they’re shadowbanning my comment.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re getting put on a list. They probably have it designed that way, people who use offensive language often or certain words, add them to an internal list and restrict their interactions with the rest of the people heavily.
I’m legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.
I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.
Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post’s intention.
Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games
I don’t know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn’t ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?
To add to your point, Jedi Survivor was a huge improvement over Fallen Survivor. I’m not sure how you could look at that game and say that there hasn’t been any improvement at all.
Honestly I’ve I did jot know how survivor improved upon the first part since the pc version was so overshadowed by it’s technical problems. Tho I’ve heard the patch yesterday improved the performance massively
I did play months after release and I have a pretty beefy PC so it was fine for me. I did only encounter stutters at one specific area halfway through the game but other than that, it was really smooth for me.
Survivor improve Don the first one by expanding on the stances you had in the first game, a much larger world with a larger variety of enemies and tools you can use in combat. There’s a hub area which is kind of cool but I honestly didn’t really get the appeal of that. There’s also quite a bit of cool moments in the story that were really neat but I won’t talk about it because it’s a spoiler. I liked it a lot actually and it’s a shame all of it was overshadowed by the awful performance on launch.
Ubi actually has 2 kinds of open world games… Assassin’s Creed Style and Far Cry Style. I prefer the former, I was disappointed to see the Avatar game was the latter
I just want to say I was really disappointed when Far Cry 3 basically became the template for Far Cry games.
The main thing I hate is the “observe this outpost from a distance then permatag all the enemies so they’re visible through walls, then take them out” mechanic.
It has elements like both, but it doesn’t do exploration towers that unlock areas. It feels more like a third option between the two, which makes most sense because it comes from the devs that did both The Division and Avatar.
I enjoyed Outlaws open world gameplay, even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It was still an enjoyable experience that felt like discovering the worlds on your own, instead of being guided and follow a checklist of stuff to do, despite having a list to get upgrades and do story and missions. It felt a bit more like Rockstar style open-world, where you just go about your business and run into encounters, instead of going from A to B all the time.
I’m right in the middle of this game currently, and I do fully see some of the jank that shows up in this game. And it does have some issues (I couldn’t land my ship on the starting planet until I finished a specific quest, but the game doesn’t tell you this).
However, I’m finding the game pretty fun overall and kinda hope they iterate on this scoundrel idea and make sequel. I’m having fun sneaking in and looting all these places.
I really hope they make a sequel game, or maybe a similar game based on a different character that would allow for a bit of a wider range of gameplay. But I wouldn’t mind if they kept going with Kay, she’s a likeable protagonist to me and I just love Nix.
Have to say I ran into very few bugs and I wrapped up the main story and loads of extras after about 45 hours. Funnily I ran into only one bug after finishing the main story, getting stuck in ingame cutscene-camera that prevented me from doing anything else, including being able to reload the game lol.
There’s definitely been some minor goofy and janky stuff throughout the game, but nothing that ended up gamebreaking. I think the most un-finished part of the game that I wish they’d fixed up before launch is the lipsync issues. It just looks so bad in some scenes and takes away from the otherwise great immersive experience.
Yeah other than this weird thing where the quest made landing the ship weird, I have had anything totally break the game — though it did crash on me once. But the autosave got me maybe ten seconds before that so I loaded right back where I was.
Mostly I’ve just seen little graphical bugs. Like when you fly off world and the “loading clouds” show up. Sometimes there will be a flash of a big, black chunk of the screen that shows up for a split second. Stuff like that.
I wouldn’t mind if Kay got her own little series out this. She’s cool, and Nix is cool. I like them both.
I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don’t trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it’s typically lies or false claims…or they make cinematic trailers which don’t even represent the game at all because… cinematic.
That can even be a guide to many things like tools, if it’s pricy but has good word of mouth and not heavily advertised (sometimes the biggest expense) then it might just be worth the cash
I don’t think this game even lasted long enough for word of mouth to have popularized it. I didn’t hear about it until it was dead. I am wondering how many players Helldivers 2 had at 11 days (not a great example because it was an existing IP with existing fans). Could they have made it if the game had actually been good? I am not sure. Shutting down super fast got them more publicity than anything else they did.
I’m not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that’s a minority of advertising these days
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
Yeah, they definitely didn’t market it very well, at least to the PC crowd. It seems the PlayStation version is doing much better, with advertisements in the PSN store.
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