If someone complains about buying a finished game and not getting more of it later, they’re idiots and there’s nothing you can do but ignore them.
Publishers that do ultra-early access/roadmaps/live services with promises of content/bug fixes/trust me we’re making the rest of the game later, are clearly to blame for the mess too. They’re the ones poisoning the well.
But plenty of games release in a final state and that’s okay. They have to be firm about it though.
It’s a tough line to walk. You want to create reasonable hype and you have an idea where you want to go, but as you correctly point out, it’s really easy to over promise and under deliver.
How fast do they think internet connections are? If the higher quality assets were that big compared to the 300 GB install no way they’re going to finish loading or fit in the memory while you’re playing the game
This article speaks right out of my soul, when comparing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0.
The quest qualtiy itself is comparable, but the delivery of Starfield makes it solely my job to create immersion (which I can and will do), while Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 grabs me by my balls and drags me into the world.
Spoiler for a small quest in CyberpunkWhen the barkeeper leans slightly forward, looks carefully right and left to make sure no one is listening and then tells me he suspects his wife sees someone else, I smell his parfume and I notice he relaxes his hurting back by stemming his arms onto the desk, because he is doing a double shift. Having Silverhand commenting on every step of the quest and turning it into a noir detctive story, making fun of me, added more immersion to a “follow person, report back”-mission. That I then can just call the quest giver on the phone, as a normal being would feels life like.
A similar quest in Starfield:
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
They might have fixed it by now but a certain little fortune teller has a very similar issue in an elevator in cyberpunk.
After helping him out I had a certain Ripperdoc showing which arm he operates with by raising it. Only his arm rotated backwards as if his elbow was turned around 180 degrees, arm clipping through his biceps.
But at least in Cyberpunk I’ve got the feeling that a bug like this is an honest oversight, whereas Starfield gives me the feeling that Creation Engine (2.0 these days?) should have have been killed, burned and buried after Skyrim. Each game since (and including) Oblivion I’ve felt like I’m looking at limitations I already noticed in the previous game built with Creation Engine or NetImmerse/GameBryo.
I haven’t played starfield and don’t intend to but I played cyberpunk on launch thanks to a covid scare and even on launch it was a good game to me. Had it’s problems but I got 300 hours out of it before the year ended.
Questgiver: “Hello, I don’t know you stranger, and I don’t trust outsiders. Can I help you? Oh, you want a quest? This evil company in Neon does bad shit and I need you to inject this virus and make sure it doesn’t get back to me. Also, the mayor here is evil AF. Don’t say that out loud, he has ears everywhere. I trust you stranger with my life. Have 8000 creds for picking up my mail, and 2000 creds and a unique purple gun for blowing up half of the city.”
Unity had made their plans clear. Whether they backtrack a bit now or not doesn’t matter. We know what direction they are heading: squeeze more money out of indie devs
That's correct. Even with this backtrack, it's a safe bet that they'll likely re-introduce this same policy with different wording once they believe their consumers have calmed down.
The controlling shares of Unity are held by a trifecta of private equity and venture capital organizations. That’s why this is happening. It’s a classical presentation of the (short-term) profit über alles enshitification cycle.
The insider transaction history for Unity Software Inc shows a clear trend: over the past year, there have been 49 insider sells and no insider buys. This could be a red flag for potential investors, as it suggests that those with the most intimate knowledge of the company's operations and prospects are choosing to sell their shares
Or it just means they see it as compensation and are selling for taxes and expenses, not because they are worried about the long term direction of the company.
Ehh, the top folks at Google were all selling their maximum-permitted amount every window they got for a decade and the stock held up.
You typically don’t need to buy shares as an insider, the company just prints more gambling slips – er, I’m sorry, non-transferrable stock options – and hands them out.
Yes, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “insider trading,” which means using internal-only information to make trading decisions. If they sell these stocks regularly, on a schedule, in the same quantity, it’s not insider trading.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, you can see their trades, and they’re consistent for about the same amount. So they’re not trading because of changes going on internally, they’re trading based on a schedule, probably because they need cash flow for some reason. My guess is taxes for their stock compensation.
I suspect Valve is truly refurbishing these, rather than blindly reselling returned units with a refurb label (as we sometimes see from certain retailers). Good for them!
Portable, Windows-free gaming just got more affordable. I love it.
The only real complaint I have with helldivers is the controls are a little muggy. They put out a polished product with good options that isn’t so paywalled as to be difficult to make progress with but still gives them a revenue stream to keep the live service, which actually adds value beyond “play the game”, running.
It's possible people could interpret the way that the reticle follows the actual barrel position of the gun as "muggy" because it can be quite unwieldy if you're not being careful about it, but it's a very deliberate choice and makes the chaos more chaotic and really accentuates how controlled you need to be even when shit gets wild
I didn’t realize it was happening until I used machine gun where it’s slow. I actually like it but if you didn’t realize I could see it being confusing.
Also the key binds aren’t super. There’s a lot of overlap and weird finger positioning for some stuff. The stratagems especially. I’m running, holding L1 and using my right hand to dial in the d pad like I’m hacking the matrix. It’s kinda fun and stressful but I could see complaints about it.
I play on PC so it's hard to say how that stuff feels comparatively. Can you move and use stratagems at the same time?! For me, WASD is both my movement and the stratagems, so if I press CTRL to pull up the menu I can't walk anymore.
And yeah, different guns have different aim speeds to balance them. That's where you may find the machine gun too unwieldy and want to try the stalwart LMG instead
Edit: by default on PC stratagems are done with WASD like the first game, and I just stuck with that. If I rebind to arrow keys then I can move and input stratagems at the same time, but I'll have to relearn all my Helldivers 1 muscle memory haha
The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.
Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.
Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it’s because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there’s no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn’t want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it’s caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn’t feel good to die that way.
Also not being able to jump over things you think you should be able to jump over because it’s a few pixels too tall. So you just run up against it and stop.
Also the trees are rigid so if you run into a tree it’s like a brick wall it doesn’t brush out of the way or snap like it obviously should when you’re charging at it.
The cross platform friend requests bugs mean I still havent been able to play with the friends who convinced me to buy the game in the first place. But yeah, otherwise quite fun.
Its 100x better of a starship troopers game than the actual starship troopers game that came out last year
It only looks like insider trading if you forget the definition of insider trading and only read a headline curated to ignore the important details that show small, consistent sales across time regardless of company activities.
Well yeah of course I didn’t read the article. I don’t give much of a fuck about it. I took the headline at face value (“sold stock days before announcement”) and fired off my Lemmy content into the ass crack of this butt land. You’re welcome.
Insider trading is the trading of a public company’s stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time. Also, it was 2000 shares, which is peanuts.
The article is focusing on this guy because people know who he is. Instead, they should be focusing on the board members who sold tens of thousands of shares right before the announcement. From Kotaku:
Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, …sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
Also, I actually didn’t know this until yesterday, but CEOs are also permitted to buy shares of their own company, so long as they clear the purchase with the SEC. But that would indicate they’re optimistic about their company…
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