E3 has had a foot in the grave for the last ten years. The availability of the internet kinda invalidated any need for expensive physical conventions. When they changed their rules to allow the general public to attend, that was a pretty clear death rattle, imo. And the Big 3 all pretty much pulling out entirely and doing their own streamed announcement events didn't help matters. Covid also ended up killing whatever momentum E3 had left. Basically everything was stacked against E3 for a long while now.
Super disappointing, but also super expected, honestly. See you in the next life, giant enemy crabs.
I honestly think it’s all the in-house directs now that really killed it. The sad thing is now they all get to control their narratives and put on a pretty, but tightly produced/curated show and we all lose the little snipes back and forth and comparisons that happen at events like E3. It felt more…gladiatorial, I guess?
The sad thing was that CoD Mobile was the last decent game in the series. Just think about that for a moment: a freaking cell phone game is better than any CoD title to come out on actual gaming systems in practically a decade.
I agree that it’s probably mostly children / teens that play those games, but I’m sure a non-insignificant portion of their player base is the type of person who is A-OK with listening to nothing but pop music.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but they are either afraid of trying something new or they aren’t interested in discovering what they may end up enjoying more than the same derivative time-wasters.
While this headline is true, I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason for the game’s success. Having characters that feel alive is awesome, and part of what elevates BG3 over D:OS 1 and 2 for me. But what makes it great is the amount of control you have over the narrative; how the game responds to your choices. There is nuance. There are permutations. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any rpg Bethesda ever put out (fite me).
A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
Yeah, this is true. I think Bethesda games have just felt really empty and lifeless to me for a long time. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot. Oblivion I played for a while, but never finished the story. Don’t even remember if I ever finished Skyrim, which was obviously massively popular. Same with their Fallout games, it’s just been diminishing returns for me. Different strokes, and all that, obviously, they just don’t have that secret sauce I crave.
I think part of it is that your character doesn’t have any personality; you’re some total cipher of a Chosen One, which makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to them, and by extension to any of the NPC’s. Some of their NPC’s have well-written dialogue, but I sure don’t remember any of them.
Bethesda's "good stories" have always been moreso the player's stories of cobbled together mechanics as a a result of their playstyle/current abilities, gear, and motivation.
Most of the time it might be rote open world questing with some enjoyable grind loop, but there are a lot of particular memories I love, like robbing the Red Diamond jewelry store in Oblivion's Imperial City, "casing" the place by day as a customer and purchasing a necklace, purely to experience the joy of breaking in at 3 AM and robbing it blind.
The joy and hilarity I felt when I came back the day after I'll always remember. Entering the store to see the shopkeep, beaming at his new customer, all of his shelves and cases completely fucking empty, as he vacantly grinned at me, buck naked as id stolen the clothes right out of his sleeping pockets.
I've stolen a lot of shit in that game, but that one was good. It's incredibly rare for me to remember Bethesda's actual character moments that fondly, as they've always come off plastic and rehearsed in some combination of writing, voice acting, and rigid animation. Sometimes they almost reach a good story, like some popular side quest chains, or Paladin Danse's personal quests.
So, I think these two games tell their best culminational "stories" in different fundamental ways, and I think it's neat how each one's best potential narrative, whether written or otherwise, is a marriage of the game's possibilities and the player's motivation and intent. But you're probably right, BG3 can tell a lot more, better stories than my idiotic repetitive Bethesda adventures, but I do like some pulp.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and maybe my waning enjoyment of that style of rpg says as much about my lack of imagination as anything else. I’m just a sucker for a story I can get caught up in, with characters that I can somehow relate to, and I’ve nearly always felt let down by Bethesda games in that regard.
tl;dr Dark Ages doesn’t have anything left that made Doom 2016 fun for me
I had a real sense that The Dark Ages wasn’t going to be my game. Am I the only one tired of games just piling on completely new feature sets and complicated feature sets to remember, level over level?
I enjoyed Doom 2016 because for a large portion of the game, the mechanics were simple enough that you could get into flow state even at the higher difficulties. I couldn’t make it halfway through Eternal before I was annoyed at having to switch strategy every 5 seconds.
Dark Ages looks more like an Action RPG than Doom. Not to mention the constant tutorial interruptions. Can we go back to ammo, health and maybe grenades for once in a AAA game? It always feels like AAA means complicated game mechanics, rather than letting a simple gameplay loop speak for itself in a AAA environment with all the other benefits that come with it.
Last thing to add, the intro level of Dark Ages looked incredibly bland, like it was a midpoint level of one of the other games. The game just sort of assumes that the other games have been played and that you enjoyed them and starts from there, rather than standing on its own.
I don’t know much about the Dark Ages because I haven’t played it yet. I am somewhat skeptical of the shift in tone and the introduction of melee components like shield. Doom is about blasting demons on Mars. The medival stuff is a bit weird. I actually did like Eternal though, and felt it brought back the faster gameplay that 2016 lacked.
DOOM 2016 captured the essence of the originals with some added systems, but they never felt too invasive. Eternal threw that out the window, seems like this is the same. Just more AAA slop for insane prices.
I got through eternal, and for the most part had fun. (fuck marauders) But the damn skill ceiling in the DLC killed my interest in completing those. 2016 was definitely my favorite of the two and I really liked the back too roots mechanics. The devs have talked about how they want to do something different in each game and how Dark Ages is intended to be more grounded than eternal and hopefully less complicated. Also has tons of difficulty sliders for every little aspect of the game so it should be much more tailorable than previous games.
Doom Eternal is one of my favorite games precisely because you switch weapons so often and are a slaughter machine. I beat the dlcs and had a blast. I enjoyed the difficulty honestly, it forced me to get better and actually feel like I ‘deserved’ to have the power of the doomslayer. The Marauder has to be my favorite enemy in all of gaming. He was SO hard the first time but once you learn how to counter him you can FUCK HIM UPP. It’s so satisfying to completely 180 him and turn him to a pile of gibs. The 2 at once fight in the first DLC was my favorite encounter of the whole game.
Tutorial hints were super annoying though, however you can just turn them off in settings.
2016 was boring for me tbh. Super excited for dark ages.
Eternal is so intense, 2016 feels slow and boring and simple in comparison. I prefer depth over simplicity. IDK about Dark Ages though, it looks slower with less mobility/verticality
I agree, I like both, but Eternal does force you to use most of your weapons and other systems continuously, like having to use demons as piñatas. The DLC is brutal, I remember having to stop for a breather after a particular spot because it was too hectic, I was bouncing around the level trying to kill everything but also basically always being at the brink of death, pure adrenaline . 2016 is not bad either, is just a good game overall, it captures the same feeling as the original games, it’s slower, but it’s still damn enjoyable, and that’s also ok.
I just started The Dark ages yesterday and it DOES feel more bland vs eternal IMO (at least the first level), and the shield homing attack seems dumb to me IMO, but it’s still simple fun being an unstoppable demon slayer
Yeah I guess they wanted to take each new Doom game in a new direction. Which is a shame, because they don’t really feel like Doom, they feel like other games with a Doom theme. Even Doom 3, which was more horror than action, still felt like Doom. Because of that, I liked it, even if a lot of people didn’t.
This sucks hard. They likely knew they could not overcome Nintendo’s infinite money for legal proceedings, and if they lost they could have been on the hook for far more than this settlement amount.
The upside is this has no legal impact, but the downside is they were the best-positioned group to take this to trial.
Now Nintendo is going to start going after the smaller guys, who definitely can’t afford to fight.
Now Nintendo is going to start going after the smaller guys, who definitely can’t afford to fight.
The plus side is Ryujinx is Free Open Source Software so a million forks can begun being made right now. Yuzu had closed source aspects, which was its downfall in replication from this point forward. Ryujinx will likely have thousands of clone repositories made after today alone.
People need to make sure they pull the code off of github and put it up on other sites, preferably private repos. Github has already dealt with other ‘banned’ projects by going through all forks and even re-uploads of them and cleaning house.
They did not make that claim. The article is just wrong. The devs said they’re removing in-game monitization and only having DLC on the store page. It’s functionally identical I assume, but there’s less pressure on players playing the game.
But… Like… Did we ask for that? If you cant afford to keep developing a game after shipping it… Dont?
Just make the game, wrap it up finished, and let me buy it. It doesnt need to be a subscription, I dont need to play it for 6 years, you can move on with your life and design a different game.
Ill pay cash, just give me the whole game for crying out loud
Most of the gaming community did, yes. Players want servers that last forever and updates that never stop, and they’ll throw a hissy fit if it costs them a cent more up front than it did 30 years ago. I’m not a fan of it either, but it’s where the industry is right now.
More importantly people don’t want to buy into closed game environments. They promise of ongoing development attracts players that want that type of scale, and also allows devs to continue to eat. It’s a win/win.
This is the right choice by devs. I haven’t played it and honestly I probably never will, but I respect the decision.
Do you not remember when a title would get released and stay in a buggy state forever rendering the game useless?
Have you never enjoyed a game so much that you wanted more content for it
I don’t want a product that’s going to go stale the second I buy it, I want a game I can play for 10 years with new content being added to keep it fresh.
Let me guess, you think movies should just be perma running live streams?
Calling a game “stale” for not having an unending stream of spectacle creep is a wild opinion. Its a game, not a lifestyle. Not ending is why so many games are shit now. Because they dont stop when theyre good, they stop when its become too bad to play, and everyone leaves.
Enjoying a game so much you want more content was, and still is, filled just fine from dlc and sequels. The best part? They dont require permanently altering what you thought was good, so if theyre trash you still have the original.
Well games used to not have Servers and be peer to peer they did not have season where New content got Put in or if they got New content they Split the Player Base Because they Sold the New maps, classes etc. So selling cosmetics and giving away the New classes maps etc is actually great. So that way the person not spending much gets New content and the person that love the game can Support them more. At the Same time Yes time is spend on Those skins etc and not New stuff but What would you like. A game being shut down and not being play able like battleborn? Or a game that gets New stuff but also New cosmetics?
Yeah, the headline is just awful. The Inkbound Dev notes that they’re removing all in-game microtransactions. The goal is to move away from pressuring you to spend money on microtransactions as you play, and keep them where they belong: on the store page.
The devs are doing exactly what they said. The headline is either click-bait, or a result of awful reading comprehension.
Fair enough. Still, games used to be vastly cheaper in my country and the asking price for the basic version of Starfield is 80 USD. There is no way any game is worth this much of my income.
Like I said. The price tag on Donkey Kong from 1994 says 799sek which in today’s market is worth 66 usd. I can’t be arsed to follow index and calculate how much that was in -94 but it’s a lot more than Starfield.
My only point here is that games haven’t really increased in price ever. Anyone claiming it has, is wrong. We can discuss the other parameters all day with (un)finished products, mtx, bugs, paid dlc etc. The fact still stands that games in 2023 haven’t vastly increased in price at all. And we have a lot of free options now as well that didn’t exist back in the ninetees.
In 1994 you were buying a physical, manufactured product which you owned.
Now you are temporarily licensing access to something that doesn’t exist, can’t be transferred or resold or backed up or modified, has unlimited reproduction potential for no cost, and sells at scales unimaginable in 1994 dwarfing all other consumer markets in total revenue.
The expense was probably quite considerable. Not only do you have to have the game ROM on a chip, you would also need Nintendo's lockout chip too. If your game had a battery save system (DKC did) you would also need to buy a RAM chip and watch battery too. That's ignoring any enhancement chips as DKC didn't use any (but many other late generation games did).
And all that before you get to the fact that the only who could officially make these boards was Nintendo. Meaning there isn't exactly much competition driving prices down. Sure, Nintendo couldn't quite take the piss the way they could in the NES days, as Sega was all too eager to try and attract new games for its console, but unless you wanted to completely remake your game, you're dealing with the big N's bullshit.
The boards could probably have been made much cheaper today than in the 90s, as ROM memory was expensive AF, even the couple-of-MB ones used in the consoles of the day.
There's a reason PS1 and Saturn games were massively cheaper to buy than N64 games.
If you buy a game today, does it come with a free SSD to install it in? Does it have a paper manual and a nice box? Is it even finished? Games aren’t cheaper, you’re just getting scammed.
Isn't this insider trading? If I owned a company and sold all my stock and then tanked my company with stupid news, that'd be illegal.
Though I'm surprised they sold it before the news. This kind of fund-raising tactics piss off customers but investors usually love it, the short-sighted creatures they are.
The guy who owns the company knows what it means for the long term stock price: a plummet. He knows that’ll come eventually if these changes go through.
Investors may react positively to the news, but when they see the damage it actually does, they’ll pull out too.
The guy running the company has shares that are valued way higher than when he earned them, he is sitting so high right now it’s far worth selling here instead of gambling on the response to the news. It’s just simple “quit while you’re ahead”.
No it’s not. If he unloaded a huge bunch out of nowhere just before the announcement then sure, it probably is, but that’s not what happened - he has been consistently selling stock the whole year, buying none.
What likely happens is he is paid partly, or was at some stage, in stock. To convert it to cash you need to sell it.
Stock traders who do not have any information about nintendo’s plans beyond the rumors in the press have sold shares in response to rumors in the press about the switch 2.
well we dont really know anything about it outside of the leaks, as far as I’m aware. the most I know is that the game will run on the original engine but have graphics handled by unreal engine running on top, or something to that effect
I’m sure the remake will release with the same level of QA and polish that the original Oblivion shipped with. That renowned Bethesda standard of quality.
The remake is being handled by a third party, and it’s unclear so far what they’ve been allowed to do besides replace the graphics rendering with Unreal Engine 5. It’s all reportedly still Creation Engine under the hood.
Considering that Bethesda refused to roll in the community bug fixes with their rereleases of Skyrim, it’s likely that it will have all the bugs of the original.
I totally agree. Morrowind gets a lot of hate for it’s combat (some deserved), but most of the time it’s people not understanding what it’s trying to do. You don’t complain in BG3 when an attack fails, and that’s the same thing Morrowind was doing. It cared about character skills, not player skill.
Yeah, if you create a scrawny character who has never held a blade, grab a dagger, run into a dungeon until you’re exhausted, then try to fight then you should miss. The later games, especially Skyrim, not caring about the character makes every playthrough feel the same and no one has a unique experience.
Morrowind needed animations to convey what was happening, but the foundation is very solid. It’s just the technology at the time limited it and it didn’t communicate what it was doing well.
It’s also from the era when people were expected to read the manual while the game installed, so the game never has tutorials for certain things, most prominent being fatigue. New players tend to run everywhere, drain their fatigue meter, and struggle to hit anything or cast a spell. Just reading the manual, as the devs originally expected, solves a lot.
The problem with combat in Morrowind is that it simultaneously measures player skill and character skill. Chance-to-hit works when the character does the aiming and gap-closing for you. When you have to handle that with poor depth perception and you have chance-to-hit on top of that, it’s always going to feel like garbage.
I disagree. It’s been done well before. Where Morrowind fails is only in that it doesn’t display success or failure well. If your character did an animation where they fumbled their attack, or the enemy dodged or blocked, then it would be fine. Instead you just spam attacks that all look the same but only some make your targets health bar go down.
Feedback is always critical. Instead of implementing proper feedback, Bethesda instead simplified it so they don’t have to and all attacks succeed. It still looks and feels bad, but it made it so it doesn’t need to show failures.
As long as spellcasting is still good and spellcrafting is still in. Magic was a complete joke in Skyrim and not just because it was terrible DPS compared to swords and bows. The spells were all so boring.
Considering that Bethesda refused to roll in the community bug fixes with their rereleases of Skyrim
IIRC Bethesda lets mod creators own the rights to their mods so Bethesda can’t just roll in the bug fixes into the actual game without the mod creator’s permission. I know the Skyrim unofficial patch is ran by a team (Arthmoor) obsessed with DMCA’ing other people as well as just being dicks in general. Some of the “fixes” aren’t really fixes and just what the team personally thought how the game should be.
Gosh I hope but Bethesda’s Radiant AI in Oblivion made for some real weird and unique NPC interactions. It gave that game its charm, IMO. Skyrims is different and just porting the game to Skyrim’s Creation Engine might lose some of that weird charm.
eurogamer.net
Ważne