Ex game dev here who jumped ship and is now doing VR training stuff for a big medical company.
I don’t regret it one bit. You definitely lose some of the spirit and excitement of working with people who are super excited to make the fun games they grew up playing, but on the flip side, if you’ve been in the industry long enough to have 18 years under your belt, you’ve probably had enough of that excitement to see the bad sides of it.
By far the nicest thing about being in an industry that isn’t entertainment is that the success of the “product” you’re making is so much easier to define than “is this fun” or “will this help playing retention”. I can’t describe how nice it is to have actual users instead of players, and UX’ers who to come tell me what people want. Sure, it might not be as fun as games, but to be honest, I’m OK with that. I get vastly better pay, better work life balance, and most importantly, a complete lack of any kind of game director whose vision I must try to make real.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like TotK and BG3 and just replayed Outer Worlds (Fallout in spaaaace) and love me some “mainstream” games. But I think people unfairly exclude many genres when making these sorts of lists. E.g.: The Sims, Civ5, Minecraft, Pokemon, and many others that sold like hotcakes and have been extremely good games.
Personally, I’m always biased towards 4X, RTS, and similar, and find it strange they’re always overlooked. Europa Universalis 4 is ten years old and still getting DLC and updates – how many people must have played that game over ten years for the studio to justify that continued investment?
Strategy games are never featured outside maybe a grudging nod to StarCraft or Warcraft 3. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list that mentions a 4X, a sim, or a non-Blizzard RTS. The closest you’ll usually see is someone listing Black & White.
Game journalists have to bounce between games as a job, so it sort of makes sense that the majority of them go for linear, shorter RPGs, and thus over-fixate on them.
I think the actual reason is that they only have a limited presence on consoles, which is what the majority of the English-speaking discourse on games is focused on. The genre also fizzled out in the early 2000s, which doesn’t help.
Steam also releases pretty cool stuff, and continues to support them way after release… My steam link got an update about three weeks ago, despite being discontinued back in 2018
Also, the steam link can run custom apps (like Moonlight for those who would want to use it for generic low latency streaming without a Steam account) and has the ability to enable a SSH server and root access. There are some limits though on what things you can modify, particularly relating to the boot sequence and the included kernel, as it has a hardware secure boot implementation. The OS is on GitHub anyway.
I will happily give my money to companies like this that actually provide value to their users, even years after the fact. Doubly so if they are domestic or western - it is so rare nowadays to find a western company that isn’t blatantly and purely leeching their users
Yes. And Miles Morales is essentially an expansion dlc that ended up as it’s own title. It is really good, but it’s not as long as 1 and 2. So play 1, then the actual expansions for 1, then MM, then 2.
It's a pretty fun rougelike rougelite city builder in a world where it always rains and every few decades a malevolent eldritch storm destroys most of the civilization.
It's a bit pedantic, but I'd call it a rougelite since it has meta-progression. Still they found a way to make a no combat rougelite city builder an amazing game!
This is a great game, especially if you’re the type who thinks the beginning hours of a civ game (before you get bogged down in micromanagement and unit orders) are the best hours. It basically gives you that kind of early-game experience over and over, with plenty of variation. It’s so much better paced than most comparable games as a result. I’m surprised it doesn’t get more buzz.
About the city-builder early game experience - you pretty much nailed my feelings about the game.
I think the weakness of the game is that one needs to experience other strategy games (I played very little of city builders, but a lot of grand strategies and 4X) and have some level of self reflection or meta thinking to be immediately attracted to this concept (without trying out the game first).
Most people who didn't notice that micromanaging already won late game is the bad, tedious part, would be reluctant to accept the inevitable destruction of their cities.
I think that there's an untapped potential in increased complexity of the central City. What I mean is that if there was some metagame city building it would attract a bit more players.
And with the trackpad and back buttons and customizable controls it’s genuinely a treat to play. I don’t miss the keyboard/mouse. I even tracked down an old steam controller when I’m playing at home on the big screen.
Yep. Admittedly I couldn’t imagine an advanced player using the basic Xbox controller setup although I hear from the Switch players that it’s adequate. I could only play with the Steam Controller. It’s already verging on hard work playing it on a customizable multi button trackpad enabled controller that having limited controls would just break me.
Some friends and I once went to visit one of their families for spring break back in college. We made the mistake of starting a server.
The spring break ended. We left the room maybe twice a day to eat food, around 7pm and 4am. The factory grew. I think there was a family there, I can’t remember though.
You acknowledged yourself that the idea is older than whatever Minecraft did, so how exactly did Star Citizen steal anything?
Did Minecraft steal the idea from EVE Online which only had “one” server since the beginning?
Besides, distributed computing is nothing new.
Or are you going to accuse Star Citizen of plagiarizing the idea of using Internet to connect to their servers since someone else also did that before?
There’s plenty of real issues to complain about regarding Start Citizen, you don’t need to invent made up ones. :/
I’m complaining that Star Citizen sells this technology as new and innovative even though it has been around for quite a while. Minecraft is just how I came into contact with this technology. I edited my post to reflect this.
I think the (re)advent of demos has been an amazing boon for the industry that it forgot. Whether simplified full games or up-to-a-point full releases, it’s great to give things a try before you buy. Demos were huge in the 90s, and then capitalism thought it knew better.
I, for one, have bought more games this year in part due to the demos, whereas I used to demure to frugality and concern over refund policies.
I mean … Valve has an extremely reliable 2 hours or 2 weeks policy which is good enough for most games IMO. I’ve rarely needed more than that in terms of a demo to gauge whether I want to keep something or not
And that’s great for you, but I have a family, and sometimes I have to pause a game, and that means those two hours can go up quick. Demos are inclusive to people like me.
I guess that’s fair, but a lot of games also have “save anywhere” kind of saves where you can just close the game. Or they’re “there is no pause button” games.
No, not at all. Games used to have demos and trial versions, like basically all games, but game studios used to have to actually finish making a game before they shipped it. Trying before you bought was the business model of the whole industry. Now so many games are shipped in such bad condition they wouldn’t dare let you try it first. Trying before you buy is just prudent, as long as you actually buy the ones you like enough to play through.
This is actually related to real marksmanship technique – you don’t literally want to pull the trigger with your trigger finger, you actually want to squeeze your whole hand, which indirectly results in pulling the trigger but with your hand applying tension in all directions instead of just backwards, reducing overall movement of the weapon during your shot
That is an interesting take, which (also) makes sense – each millimeter matters when you are using a weapon that demands the most precision in order to hit your targets. And multitasking with your “aiming hand” can mean the difference between being able to hit your target or not. Even so while burst firing.
I think what the game’s like right now won’t matter as much as what it’ll become. I don’t think CO need to do a ton to make it as good if not better than the first game. Really excited for it, personally!
Yeah agreed. I’ve been following along with a lot of the influencer videos over the last few weeks and whilst the performance seems choppy, the base game looks like a really solid improvement over CS1
I’ve been encouraged by the acknowledgment of the poor performance by the devs and letting the embargo lift relatively early. If people want to wait for a few performance patches before buying I think that’s really fair- but personally I’m looking forward to messing around with it on release.
It’s pretty much par for the course for Paradox games to have a sequel that isn’t as fleshed out but has a bright future. I’d still wait a few years to pick it up with DLCs.
Time to pay off my debt to a raccoon and fish all day.
Definitely not a bad way to live. Talk to your animal villagers, the debt doesn’t have any interest and you could just never pay it and I’d get to just chill in nature
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