I’m so glad steam hired this guy cause if he was doing this sh*t to cover slack for Bethesda and the huge publishers all for just a personal side project I would lose any hope I had for humanity.
Is there a name for the phenomenon when a company or group has access to all of the metrics for a product or good then makes foolish decisions using that information?
Right now Arrowhead can deflect all criticism of their actions by saying “we made this decision based on the numbers” while ignoring the fact that metrics aren’t magic numbers blindly meant to be followed, you are supposed to use them to discover underlying reasons for why those numbers exist in the first place.
This patch is a big L for me and a bad omen for what is to come of this game if the devs are making their decisions like this.
For the railgun specifically, it was about the only actually effective way to deal with the multiple chargers the game likes to throw at you constantly. Now you’re pretty much fucked.
Should have brought other options up. Shifted the curve right rather then left.
Yeah I just made a similar comment. At the higher levels, you have more tank enemies than are practical to deal with using orbitals and airstrikes alone. The railgun was the only thing feasible to deal with wave after wave of tanks. Taking that away without giving alternatives is a major blow to level 7 and above.
The railgun is still effective, you just have to use the overcharge mode and be precise, they specifically left the overcharge mode at the same damage potential.
They also buffed other weapons, including the flamethrower and the laser Cannon's wieldiness and armor penetration. This is also the very first balance patch, it's not gonna be perfect, it already wasn't perfect, try out some other options and strategies and see how they seesaw the balance. I think if they keep it up they'll get it right.
It’s not the same potential, though. It takes about 4 unsafe shots to strip chargers leg armor for example. Before it was 2 safe shots. That’s over twice as long and twice as much ammo.
They specify that to retain the damage output you have to target headshots and "other specific weakpoint shots to maintain maximum damage efficiency". That's a bit vague, but it's not quite a full range damage debuff
That’s what they mean though. Weakspots multiply the damage received. Their only lever without redesigning the way weakspots function is to drop base damage.
The Arc Thrower for example ignores armor but does relatively low damage, however sometimes it will oneshot a beefier enemy when the arc hits a weakspot. Even with the flamethrower it is better to hit the charger’s armored leg because that is a weakspot on that enemy.
Their butt is the true unarmored weak spot, I usually main autocannon and circle around and just blast the butt, once it explodes they start bleeding out and change to a slower animation set
Hard agree. Played a 7 today and it felt really bad. Without balancing other weapons to make them viable, they just nerfed the only gun that can do shit.
I love the autocannon gun, but it’s useless against bugs and only good against automatons.
I’ll be sitting this patch out. It just wasn’t fun to play with these changes.
I don’t know if there’s a term for that, but imo Rocket League had the same thing going for years. The game used to always queue a team based on the MMR of the highest ranked team member. People complained they couldn’t play the game with their super low level friends in competitive play, so they changed it so it would average the rank between team members.
The reason I always hated this change was because an average bronze player can barely compete with an average silver player, and etc through the ranks. If you play in 2v2, then you can have a bronze and gold player against two silvers and the game thinks it’s a fair fight. In reality, the gold player is likely going to run circles around both of the silvers while the bronze player barely needs to do anything except try and interfere with the silver team’s defence for it to be no competition at all. I can only imagine the problem would have been even worse in 3v3 matches.
At least before when everyone queued by the highest ranked member’s MMR, then you had to be selective about who you brought with to make sure they can carry their weight. After the change, they streamlined the smurfing and boosting problems the game already has.
Tried bringing it up in community discussions but the whole community (especially at the time) wanted to do nothing but circle jerk Psyonix’s dicks with that same argument: “well Psyonix has the data and you don’t, so how do you know this is a problem? They have the data and they made the change so clearly it must not be a problem”
In Japan PCs always had this weird association with porn, and Japan wouldn’t be Japan without all the antiquated traditionalism, so PCs fell out of favor for a while. Now that they’ve noticed PC as a gaming platform prints money in ludicrous amounts they’ve started changing their minds… So it’s a matter of time until the boomer execs get a stroke or something and younger people take their jobs, really.
Weird, considering how low quality Japanese porn games usually are, and how big the porn industry in Japan generally is. But hey, even Sony saw the light, and overall actually does a half decent job with most of their ports.
Though, we've heard the whole mantra of the death of the gaming PC for decades in the West too. And if anything, consoles got closer and closer to PCs, so arguably it seems kinda the other way around.
virtually anyone can watch an adult video without context. not everyone can play a japanese game with no context. the latter also takes more time to develop.
thr console pc paragdim imo started to switch around when consoles are no longer bleeding edge tech. although price/performamce optimized, they are no longer considered visually the best experience, and everything outside of switch carts needs a digital connection to update. on the PS3/360 launch, their performance was considered high end. Nowadays consoles release with middle of the pack performance to minimize cost. Consoles are slowly losing their plug and play status and resorting to other methods of monetization.
Weird, considering how low quality Japanese porn games usually are, and how big the porn industry in Japan generally is.
This is precisely the reason why though, in Japan porn games have existed since the introduction of the home computer and they flourished because of the lack product standards in the platform. With the release of the Famicon, consoles started getting really popular to the point where many devs and consumers stopped buying PCs for gaming, and since Nintendo (among others) enforced strict standards porn games obviously weren’t allowed on their platforms. After a while, because of this shift most games available on PC were Visual Novels, many of them having porn in it in some form or another, so the platform got increasingly associated with pornography and a stigma was created.
I’m VERY tempted to buy Fallout 4: Game of the Year edition due to my hype for Fallout: London (which releases in April of this year), but I’m worried of getting burned if it turns out to be a bad/disappointing mod. :/
As someone who couldn’t tolerate F3/NV because they paled in comparison to 1/2, I actually really enjoyed 4. It lost a lot of the engine jank and felt like a decent FPS with light RPG mechanics, wearing the aesthetics of Fallout.
Imo, FO4 did everything better than FO3, except the plot. But FO3’s plot was already kinda bland to begin with. I mean, back then… It was incredible. But not by today’s standards.
It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.
The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.
Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.
As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.
It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.
As someone who loves the first two Max Paynes, and enjoys the third; the series should be left alone. With the way Max Payne 3 ended, there’s no good way to revive that franchise.
Look at the games Remedy have been making since splitting from Rockstar.
I really enjoyed Control and the Alan Wakes for the plot and narrative decisions. That’s who Remedy have become, story focused with emphasis on world building. MoCap actors, FMV segments, parallel world building via audio logs and journals, etc while keeping the lessons learned from the Max Payne series for the gameplay combat loops.
All the Max Payne games are mechanics centric; tight gunplay and bullet-time combat. They also have decent-to-solid plots, but I didn’t replay MP2 dozens of times because I wanted the Mona-Max arc’s dopamine hit, nor pathfinding through NYC apartment mazes. Nimble combat against formidable and fair AI is the core part of that series.
It wouldn’t be what you want it to be, and that’s okay that it’s in the past. Remedy have worked an EU and are leaning into that instead, and have done well consistently.
I play Max Payne (2 is my favorite) for the story, characters and game play. They’re all great. I think I disagree with just about everything you’ve said.
I wonder what folks’ reaction will be. Will they pull a GTA Definitive Edition and fuck it up with a bad AI uprez? Will gamers still feel entertained by a one-note gameplay mechanic? I love MP, but I recently replayed 1 + 2 and they feel quaint by today’s standards. The bullet time thing would be a nifty little tech demo in 2024.
It’s the same trash engine they’ve used for 20 years. To be perfectly honest, they should put it in the ground and build a new one from scratch instead of pushing their Frankenstein engine along.
Yeah you always have. They’ve been screwing modern graphics features to the old dog for years and hoping it’ll continue to work. There’s some serious limitations in it that another engine would be able to work through for a game like this. Seamless planet travel for one, and less abrupt loading.
People really have no idea about anything in game development. I agree it should have seemless planet travel, but it is not something that an engine “can just do.” It takes so many complicated systems to make that function. There’s no engine that does it out of the box.
Basically any engine can do it, but it requires it to be built. The land must be deterministic at all points, it must be able to create chunks accurately for all points (which gets really weird at the poles, but any latitude above 0 because your chunks shouldn’t be square anymore), and they must be able to be streamed in to their correct position seemlessly.
It is quite complicated, and there’s no reason the engine developed for an arena shooter (Unreal) would be able to handle it any better than any other engine. It just has to be built.
There’s a reason Hello Games wrote their own engine for NMS. We all know that it was pretty bad gameplay-wise at launch, but under the hood NMS was (and still is) something of a technical marvel. No loading screens except for a disguised one when jumping between systems is quite impressive.
Also, IIRC, NMS doesn’t have different gravities, right? Been a year or two since I properly played, but I don’t remember ever really jumping higher or being forced to the ground. That’s one of the sacrifices for seamless landing.
I don't buy this. Plenty of games allow you to adjust gravity on the fly using console commands. All they would have to do if you enter a new planet's atmosphere, is adjust the gravity value.
Source engine has allowed this forever, changing gravity on the fly. No reason it can't be implemented in other engines.
I guess though I mean it is expected at this stage of game development for this genre to have something like seamless planet travel for a space game. Like it didn’t have to be NMS or Elite Dangerous, they could’ve copied something like how Jedi Fallen Order did it, where basically your ship takes off from the planet, jumps to hyperspace and loads the next one during hyperspace and lets you know when you’re ‘arriving’ (aka when the destination is loaded) and you then take an action and land on the loaded planet. It ends up being the same thing as what Starfield basically does but handles it much more deftly.
Idk, just saying there’s better ways they could’ve handled it even if the engine couldn’t handle seamless planet travel in a traditional sense.
I have no game dev experience but I have a math and software background. I’m just curious about what “it gets weird at the poles” means. If I wanted to (abstractly) generate tiny square chunks of a large sphere, I would generate them as (proper) squares and then pass them through an explicit diffeomorphism to the associated region of the sphere, relying on the relative smallness to guarantee that the diffeomorphism doesn’t change things too much. From a game dev perspective, what approach do you take that causes issues at the poles?
Imagine trying to find the intersections of a line or region as it crosses multiple cells of a non-euclidian “grid” near the poles where an entire axis can flip from one cell to the next.
Are you suggesting using a stereographic projection? That seems like a bad idea. You wouldn’t want your projection to depend on the coordinate system. Am I missing a reason why you wouldn’t use proper, nonsingular spherical coordinates?
Games, support libraries, and engines don’t really support spherical coordinate systems. If you don’t want to write everything from scratch, you gotta go Cartesian.
Sure, I guess, but constantly mapping between them gets complicated and adds overhead. Plus, now you are dealing with curves instead of lines when checking for intersections, and that gets far more expensive to compute when you are trying to do thousands if not millions of checks per frame when trying to run at 60 or 120 frames per second.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible, just that games haven’t traditionally been written that way, so you can’t build on what they have already figured out. That makes it harder to find people who have game dev experience in that kind of math.
Unreal is older than their engine no? And everyone uses that…so what does this even mean?
The difference is that Epic barely makes games. They have their Fortnite which they can put in some minor effort to keep the money flowing and otherwise they can focus on the engine. Maybe with MS now being behind Bethesda they can also put in more work into their engine…maybe. We’ll see.
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist about stupid shit like this, but I can’t not believe that Sonic Boom being directly above TLOU is a ploy to generate engagement from people that will inevitably disagree. There’s no engagement like disagreement, right? (I have fallen for the trap)
Probably a case of TLOU having less impact for those who already played the game compared to Sonic Boom which is those characters in situations that are new compared to the games.
Yeah, if they were concerned about people spamming those and nothing else, then I wish they’d balance the rewards / mission effort, rather than just extending the mission time.
Who gives a shit about people spamming then? They only drop common samples so at best all anyone can get from spamming them is xp, credits, warbonds, and the first tier of ship module upgrades if they grind them.
There’s no value in XP after 20, no value in credits past your first ~50k when you have all the strategems you’re interested in, warbonds are nice but mostly useless except for the boosters and breaker (which just got nerfed), and the first tier ship modules are just quality of life improvements which everyone should be able to get easily anyways after 20 hrs of play.
Because people spamming those missions aren’t completing operations, which means they don’t contribute to major orders at all, and lower the medal output rate.
On one hand, I love the aesthetic and have been saying we need more games with cartoon vibes and physics.
On the other, I can’t say I’m digging the monochrome color scheme. The first full color cartoon came only 2 years after Steamboat Willie. Most classic Disney cartoons other than that first one were in color.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around this “viral” marketing campaign(?). Like why is everyone jumping into this bandwagon when Cuphead had literally the same art style (except in color) and came out years ago?
Edit: holy shit I just realized: this is an entire game based on GMod Nextbots. You’re just shooting at animated PNGs that shoot back. Holy fuck.
Avoiding the reddit like pessimism and cynicism of the other comment…
This is an fpga recreation of the turbo duo. It’s capable of playing original pc engine, turbografix16 games, as well as cd games and the six (Six!) Super graphics games.
Why does fpga matter? It means the games run as close to as they were at launch, including the as close to zero lag as possible for a modern display (and actually zero ms lag when it has dac support).
If you don’t have any original tg/pce games, then this likely isn’t something you will care about. If you do, this is likely going to be the best way to play your game collection for the foreseeable.
is it spring? i have completely lost track of the flow of seasons at this point. Its like the game of thrones weather but every other day instead of every ten to twenty years
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