I’m cautiously optimistic for Light No Fire. The main thing I learned from the NMS initial launch experience (am a day 1 player) is not to allow myself to get too hyped for games (this knowledge was cemented by the launch of CP2077 haha). And, you’d hope that Sean / HG learned also not to overpromise in terms of feature set… would hope they learned a hell of a lot from the long cycle of updating NMS.
Nobody owns ideas, and therefore they cannot be plagiarised. Thus, two companies having similar ideas about how to solve similar problems can never be plagiarism. Do you have proof that actual code has been copied? Or are you just assuming that the use of a similar idea means one must have directly plagiarised the other?
I pirated more in the past than I do now. Big difference is that I can now afford it to pay for games.
Currently I’m more a retro games pirate. Older games are pretty much harmless to pirate.
You pirate with the intention to buy. IMO you’re one of the best possible pirates. A lot of people might never purchase a game unless it’s really necessary for online play or something.
I love supporting good games and awesome studios. What I don’t like it getting screwed because screenshots and trailers look cool and they game turn out to be shit and still cost me $50.
You've got to use reviews and video content. Get really acquainted with a few reviewers and what games they really like, what they don't, and their general mindset. Even if a reviewer doesn't like a game, if you understand their taste and preferences you can even tell when you might like it. Cross reference with general public opinion, or perhaps the development history of the studio and if you've played and enjoyed their previous games.
But basing anything off ONLY screenshots and trailers is a horrible trap and piracy isn't the exclusive way to find that out.
It depends how often you want to buy new games. I regularly consume gaming media for fun, so often I only need to watch a review or two to get a solid idea of if it's worth a purchase, so maybe 10-20 minutes, and often times you can just listen to the review in the background of doing other stuff. And I only need to do that maybe once or twice a month at the absolute most, I'm not super rich or anything.
This is all implying I already have good trusted review sources. I'd recommend ACG Gaming if you don't know any yet, he's a smart writer and goes very in depth in his reviews. He buys all of the games he reviews for integrity purposes.
Of course, if you're being absolutely honest that you always buy a game you like after pirating to try it, I think that's just fine, I have no qualms about using piracy as a tool that way, this is just how I do it.
Retro games are also widely unavailable, and often times when they are available, it's only on a subscription service for a machine that I don't want to play them on. Imagine instead if these companies steered into what their customers actually want. That would sure be nice.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
I’ve noticed that at some point since it came out, Horizon: Forbidden West actually added a thalassophobia relief option into the settings! It brightens everything underwater and allows for infinite breath underwater regardless of if you’ve unlocked it in the story or not
One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
One of my all-time favorite games, Barony, just added an option that replaces spiders with isopods. I’m not an arachnophobe, but I thought it was funny and thoughtful that they did that.
This starts to devolve as an idea kinda fast because someone out there has a phobia for every single thing. I do agree though on spiders specifically. I do not have arachnophobia but its so common and giant spiders are kinda overplayed in fantasy anyways, that I dont think theyd be missed.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
Satisfactory swaps the giant spiders with cat heads and even with my slight arachnophobia, I still prefer the spiders. The cat head floating towards you are somehow even creepier.
With such an attitude, I am looking forward to your next post where you whine about being fired after working so hard for these years and being so professional boo hoo why am I being fiired. Please, union, save my job. Well, that’s because one of your corporation’s projects in another country that you have zero effect on earned a negative amount of money because of your fantasy and due to refund bombing. Instead of at least covering production costs, such losses would bury company after company all around the world until all of the game development switches to hyper-casual games. All because of toxicity you just made up. Think twice. Look further down your nose. That’s even not mentioning your professional mind deformation. You are not average. You should understand this. You see what others don’t and this doesn’t help you feel positive about products. You should be okay to feel bad about every single product, including your own. In every interview, I ask QAs questions like your fantasy to find out whether the person is able to perceive different work aspects from a business perspective, not only a product perspective. This is very important to discover in an interview to filter the red flag attitude like this post of yours. Sorry for the moral speech. It’s just my day-to-day work pain. I wish you the best, OP.
Most bugs aren’t unconditionally experienced by all comers or they would have been fixed. It’s entirely possible there are 17 horrible game breaking experience ruining bugs every single one triggered by a very specific combination of factors in a given work and out of millions of players one person to hit 5 and hate their life and many hit zero.
If you had bothered to read you would note they mention concrete defects that effected their playing not nits they were picking based on depth of experience.
Given extremely misery return policies if your game’s profitability is actually materially harmed let alone destroyed by returns you might have released a broken piece of shit and need to blame yourself rather than customers who believed in you enough to at least initially put their money where their mouth is.
You see what others don’t and this doesn’t help you feel positive about products.
Its a fucking game. If it doesn’t make you forget about it being a “product” and divert your attention from the reality for a few hours its developers have wholly and completely failed.
your professional mind deformation
Did this sound like how humans talk when you said it?
I ask QAs questions like your fantasy to find out whether the person is able to perceive different work aspects from a business perspective
You try to hire people who are literal soulless robots who think about the money that can be made from convincing people to pay you to shovel shit into their brain instead of having fun.
. This is very important to discover in an interview to filter the red flag attitude
Holy shit you might actually eventually hire someone who gives a fuck
I wish you the best, OP.
I just said you were a piece of shit nobody should hire but I totally “wish you the best”. If its a person you ought to avoid hiring its a person who walks into a legit conversation, shits all over it, insults people, and talks like a fucking robot.
Can you possibly keep your negativity to yourself if you have nothing useful to contribute next time?
Most bugs aren’t unconditionally experienced by all comers or they would have been fixed.
This is not always true. I can assure you, that the game can be published with even critical bugs, and the development team has zero effect on this decision because whether to publish a game and when to publish the game - it’s the publishing department to decide, not the development. Because the development department always cares about quality, and always wants more time to polish more. If the development department made the final decision, the games would be published years later than they are and their budgets would skyrocket. This is why it is important to take the business side of game development into account.
If you had bothered to read you would note they mention concrete defects that effected their playing not nits they were picking based on depth of experience.
One can experience a major defect while keeping positivity for the game, but as soon as you start noticing hundreds of even small defects, your positivity breaks. This is the price you pay for being a professional QA.
Given extremely misery return policies if your game’s profitability is actually materially harmed let alone destroyed by returns you might have released a broken piece of shit and need to blame yourself rather than customers who believed in you enough to at least initially put their money where their mouth is.
You are right. As a consumer, you are totally right. And I agree with this when this is about something tangible and monofunctional like pliers, cutting a tree, cleaning debris, or other products and services not affected by subjectivity. When it comes to subjective products and services there’s always more to account for. Something specific to blame for faults. For you it’s a “game” that is bad, for me, you are talking about the team behind the game, and the team is not one unit. Those are people. People fuck up.
Its a fucking game. If it doesn’t make you forget about it being a “product” and divert your attention from the reality for a few hours its developers have wholly and completely failed.
This is a very powerful thought right there. This is what’s great about games. Now tell me, is the attention of those 96% of people who enjoy this game despite noticing bugs being diverted from reality for a few hours? Did the developers actually fail on this one? Or is it just the Head of the Publishing Department at Larian who said “Enough. We are publishing this NOW!”, and a few individuals with a negative attitude toward a great product?
Did this sound like how humans talk when you said it?
If you click on my profile, you will notice that I’m from Kyiv, Ukraine. I’m not a native English speaker, I have almost zero speaking practice. In Ukrainian, this is called “professional deformation”, or “profdeformation” for short. I tried translating this phrase into English. Sorry, I failed.
You try to hire people who are literal soulless robots who think about the money that can be made from convincing people to pay you to shovel shit into their brain instead of having fun.
Sorry, but you didn’t get my idea. You see, the game development teams are very sensitive to the products they make. When publishing comes and says that we are publishing the game now, the development team gets hugely frustrated, as they know not 100% of the bugs are fixed. But each person who is able to perceive this from a business side can understand that this publishing demand can be based on budgeting and made to save the jobs of these developers even with anticipated losses due to negative reviews. By putting this understanding into the heads of my subordinates I save them from frustration and develop their understanding of how business works. This is how I do this, I’m not saying this is the right way.
Can you possibly keep your negativity to yourself if you have nothing useful to contribute next time?
I’m sorry my reply frustrated you. I didn’t want anyone to be insulted. This is just how I express my feelings. I’m a little rough as a person.
Thanks for the information regarding translation that makes it far more clear. I wouldn’t phrase that as “mind deformation” because that sounds like mental illness.
I’d probably love the tedium of being a QA tester. I’d be happy to switch careers and take your job if it probably didn’t imply a pretty hefty pay cut.
It used to exist, but not so much anymore. I miss heavily community based FPS multiplayer games. With custom servers and so on. I played Counter-Strike: Source last night, what a breath of fresh air!
Same, I played some Day Of Defeat: Source also a while back. I got onto a server, people were talking about random things and seemed to know each other, there was a sense of community, it felt like a local bar.
It’s 3am and I’m chilling and talking with strangers while surfing on CS:S. God, I miss this.
I miss that in newer games. It’s all matchmaking, all competitive and in many ways, modern games like this feels “no fun allowed”.
Pretty much. It’s always competitive. Always on the grind. You can’t just play for fun, no. You have to be at your best every time, because now, there is this skill-based matchmaking algorithm watching your every move in game and so on.
I feel like I’m starting to get old when I say this, but every time I go back to play one of those old games, I get reinforced in this idea… so many games feel like jobs nowadays. It’s just like the real world, it’s all so competitive. No fun allowed. You can’t ever be goofing around, you have your rank to worry about… every shooter now keeps on getting updated, the meta keeps on changing, and you have to keep up with it constantly otherwise you’ll get left behind.
I can’t put it into words exactly, so excuse me if what I’m going to say sounds odd… But I feel like most of the modern entertainment available to me is really stressful and I can’t explain it. To be honest, it’s the first time I’m voicing this feeling, but I find it really distressing…
I think that I fully understand how you feel. It’s pretty much why I stopped playing online games. I want to be able to not think about being good or absolutly winning every single game. Most of the time, I would rather prefer trying out “dumb” stuff in the game or simply having random conversations while having fun.
Can I go with a game from the 90s? Because the adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the best games I ever played. Ellison himself voices the “evil” computer, AM and instead of trying to win, you have to make the correct moral choices so your character can finally be allowed to die. You play multiple characters (not concurrently), so you have to do this multiple times. It’s brutal but so good. I know very few people who even know it existed.
Games of any time period are valid. The two reasons I made the post were:
I was watching Nocllip’s documentary on the production of Prey & for a game that has possibly the best first 15 minutes of any game it got middling reviews & it really disappointing the devs that they work was overlooked. So I figured that perhaps some people here might enjoy it who had overlooked it or simply never heard of it.
I thought it’d be a great spring board for everyone who has that one game they love that they can’t ever talk about.
I actually heard about that game for the first time the other day in a YouTube video on philosophical questions in video games that I had playing in the background while doing other things.
I start ‘solving’ the game’s puzzles in my dreams, or random mechanics from the game show up in my dreams somehow. When that happens I know a game has its hooks deep into me.
Get a 2tb HDD and download all the freeleech torrents and then seed forever. Most private trackers have a bonus system which you get for long-term seeding. Eventually you use bonus points for upload.
Work your way up on the rankings until you are high enough to get into the invite forums. Repeat the process until you get into all the top tier trackers (who never have open signups)
Weren’t they floating codename Deckard a while back? If they can make a handheld that plays modern titles reliably, a standalone headset on par with the Quest seems about the right speed as far as next steps goes.
I literally bought No Man’s Sky while waiting for Starfield. I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky for two weeks now and I just can’t put it down because it’s so good.
Now I’m planning to wait to buy Starfield for at least 6+ months until the developers iron out the bugs.
Trying to get to the center of the universe in Perma Death mode was one of the best gaming experiences I can remember. It took so much dedication and patience to finally get to the end (hit, play the main quests).
This reads the same as “hi, my friend saw my {dating app} date’s photo up at the post office with the note that they were wanted for the murder of 16 different {my demographic}. Should I still go on a date with them to that remote cabin in the woods?”
Yeah. It’s a lot safer to go on a date with someone who was wanted for the murder of just 1 or 2 different persons to that remote cabin in the woods, isn’t it? :D
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