If the Switch 2’s OS is anything like the Switch’s current revision of Horizon, it’s an extremely hardened OS. They’ve done a surprisingly good job plugging software holes.
3DS advertised AR from the get-go, even coming with a set of cards and built-in games to show it off. Never ended up being anything more than a neat tech demo that people forgot about almost immediately. Haven’t really seen anything to make me think people are more interested in it now, over a decade later.
VR headsets and the research behind them have made it possible to accurately track the position of the device with very little processing cost from a single camera. Additional cameras are simply for occlusion and field of view at this point. A coupled depth sensor handles any needed resolution of positional conflicts between real world objects and digital objects.
That tech wasn’t there for 3DS, even with 2 cameras it wasn’t stable or accurate, and it was pretty low res and low angle, and it couldn’t tell if the digital content should be occluded by real world objects at it’s perceived depth. Plus there are actual AR games now already established, and the framework and proof of concept to easily on-board new ones. Also, by the time the Switch 2 is released, the mainstream AR headsets and content will be even more established. Currently the best AR content is either on expensive headsets or in limited form on iPhones. But in less than a month the Quest 3 is out, an accessible mixed reality headset. It will have been out for a while by the time the switch 2 would come out.
This is very much one of the directions gaming is going. It doesn’t have to replace all gaming, and never will. But it will be a pretty big part of gaming. Especially once there is enough public trust behind it for people to play augmented reality games outdoors. Us nerds already do so, we know we won’t walk out into traffic even if the headset malfunctions. But the hypothetical “everyman” is apparently worried that they might? That’s just not how anything would work… but whatever. It’s safer than playing a phone game and wearing headphones, since letting the real world in and paying attention to both is the whole point, sight and sound.
You’re absolutely right about VR. But I don’t think AR is ever going to be that big. There just isn’t as much of a point in mixing the real world with artificial elements. The only reason to do so is to get information that can’t be emulated as well for VR. As VR gets better, AR gets more redundant. AR of the style we see on phones (like pokemon go) is even more pointless. AR will stick around for virtual desktops and smart glasses and the like, but for gaming it will always be a gimmick.
The fact that I had to open an app on my phone for voice chat meant that I never ever used voice chat.
I don’t really care if the next Nintendo console has a camera. But I extremely do not want to be forced to use some app on my phone to play the game on my Switch.
Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.
In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.
Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.
Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?
300 different pokemon shiny or 300 shinies including dupes? While getting a shiny during an event is easy actually being committed and grind out every shiny event is crazy dedication. I can’t bother with the game because the core gameplay loop is just so incredibly boring, and as you say is nothing like Pokemon should be. I’m slowly transferring everything to Pokemon Home and in that regard it has been pretty nice in terms of getting legendaries and mythicals that are really tough in the main series games to get. I’ve never catched the original 151 before and when I combine Let’s Go Pikachu with Pokemon Go into Pokemon Home I’ll actually tick that childhood goal off, which feels nice.
Definitely including dupes, I got rid of tons of dupes from events but the spawn pool was so limited you were bound go get more. I was dedicated enough to grind out wild shinies, but if it was locked behind incubators or raids, forget about it.
Well, no. Rates are higher at different times of day, near bodies of water, in different weather, closer to high-foot-traffic zones, in forests, from eggs and from raids.
Not to mention continents.
Personally I just find it to be a location data collecting app with a light video game skin over top of it. I love Pokemon and wore out of the game when I realized player fun isn’t niantic’s priority in the slightest, it’s how to squeeze more and more data to sell out of the player. If it wasn’t for the blue chip IP they landed the company would be gone already. Literally every other game they’ve launched has been a flop
I tried it for the first time a few months ago. It was bad. The in-game tutorial does not cover half of it and the game play that I could figure out was super shallow. I could probably look up third party getting started guides, but I did not think it was worth the bother.
I’ve been playing since launch, although admittedly not much the past few weeks, and I think it’s fun depending on what you find fun.
I’ve never been big on the Battling (PvP or Raiding) but I’ve enjoyed the “Catch 'em All”.
I do however agree that even the “catch” part of the game is poorly put together. For example while the game may contain 800+ Pokemon, realistically you can only ever catch ~30 different species at a given time. If you started a new account today and did ALL the activities available, really grinding for a month, you’d probably only have ~200 or so Pokemon. If you played for a year, maybe double that.
For this reason why isn’t Pokemon HOME considered the game with the most Pokemon?
I lost a bunch of legendaries when my Pokébank subscription lapsed.
I’ve been collecting legendaries in Go for ages to rebuild my stable, and I’ve only just realized that Go legendaries don’t count until you’ve had one in the destination game. Which means that Go legendaries are totally without value in terms of collecting a first of anything.
Seems like a coin toss on whether or not your mons got wiped when your subscription ended.
If you can dig up a 3DS with Pokébank and whatever the intermediary app was, you might still be able to pull them all out, now that Bank (the service) is now free.
Well now it’s free forever, you just need to sideload the application itself.
Some stuff got wiped. It was never clear why it happened to some people and not others.
I lost interest in catching them all when I got to the point where the main pokemon I don’t have are behind ridiculously low egg rates. Add in the few pokemon where I’d ether have to buy plane tickets to Alaska and Greece or violate the TOS by spoofing my GPS signal and I just decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.
I understand that Beth delayed the review codes, but I don’t quite understand why. The subtext of this article seems to suggest that they expect higher reviews from other outlets. Is that the case?
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
I don’t really think it’s a problem at all. It’s on the level of game mechanics being taken too seriously like “why does a sword in my backpack weigh enough to slow me down but not a sword in my belt?” or “how come these vegetable merchants are willing to buy random crap I found in a cave?”
Fallout 1 has a hard timer you have to obey before it is too late to do your main objective and you lose the game. That shit stressed me out so much I just didn’t continue playing.
For me it becomes an issue when I try to make decisions from my character’s perspective. If I try to lean into the RP part of RPG then I often feel like I have to leave a load of content behind because it just wouldn’t be a high priority.
I agree with the FO1 timer though. I ended up beelining to the necropolis and got trapped in an endgame bunker because I didn’t want that timer hanging over me.
i was honestly bummed when Hyrule Historia came out and codified the timeline, because half of the fun of the series for me was trying to imagine where all these games that didn't quite fit together fit together. that, and the third branch essentially being a what-if and relegating the original games to it felt like a dismissive cop-out. i appreciate how BotW was full of enough contradictory evidence to not be placed in any one timeline and then TotK doubled down by contradicting the original Imprisoning War, and now Nintendo has given up on placing them anywhere. we are so back
I know, but its better than messing up everything into one soup that does not fit anymore. Zelda is a long running series and many more will come. So I at least appreciate that they do respect the history and not ruin everything by putting it into one noodle soup. The new Breath of the Wild era games have barely anything to do with the old games and stand on their own.
The people who actually make these games have said that the timeline in Hyrule Historia is little no more than elevated fanfiction, because they don’t follow it when making their games. It’s all retcon and forced connections.
People who want them to have some shared continuity as if they’re a real history might as well make a timeline for Mario too. It’s silly, and misses the point
I get the sentiment. But to me personally, “redundancy” is pretty clear and doesn’t mask the pain that comes with being let go. There’s also generally a difference between being “fired” and being “made redundant”. Redundancy suggests that their job doesn’t need to be done anymore b/c of a restructure, bankruptcy, merger, and the company needs to meet certain obligations for that redundancy not to be considered an “unfair dismissal”.
It’s not the same thing so I’m not sure why you’re taking umbrage with commonly use and understood vocabulary. Being fired means there was a fault on the employees’ part, which isn’t true.
I feel like we’re maybe getting confused about terminology here? “Redundancy” is a specific term for a specific form of dismissal. It’s not a euphemism for “firing” because firing someone is a different kind of dismissal. Terms like rightsizing, reset, re-allocating resources, trimming the fat – these are certainly euphemisms for redundancy that should be called out.
That distinction means jack shit to the people that are “made redundant” and everything to the people that have an interest in marketing this as anything other than someone losing their job.
The article states the layoffs will affect the UK division and EU division, I am assuming you are basing your statement on US laws. www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/notice-periods states that you will get paid for X number of weeks depending on how long you have been in your job.
Redundancy is very different to being fired though. When you’re fired you just lose your job and that’s it. If you get made redundant, you lose your job but get paid X amount of months worth of wages to make up for the fact you may be jobless for a while, while you look for a new one. X being different depending on both the countries laws and the company’s policies. But usually it increases the longer you’ve been with the company.
They can't raise the price too much, or people quickly find out that it's cheaper to just buy the games outright. Their sweet spot seems to have stuck right at 1/4th the price of a new AAA game per month. Believe me, I was surprised to find out from all kinds of failed products and services over the past few years that people can actually do math.
If you ask me, I'd say that's exactly why they won't rise further, or much further. They're measuring all of this before and after they take action, and if the price increase sees a trend line go in the wrong direction, it'll be a while before they bump it again. I wasn't angry at Netflix for raising their prices such that you could call it a backlash; it just became too expensive to justify having it around when there isn't anything I know I want to watch on it.
Netflix also made a killing by creating the ad-supported tier, because the ads more than cover the cost of lowering the subscription. My folks pay for Netflix with ads but you can block them with a DNS sink like AdGuard or a Pi-Hole.
I think it’s a scam honestly. Netflix’s library has shrunk with all the other streaming services coming into the market. It was convenient when it was the only game in town but now it’s just one of a dozen services feeling more like cable than streaming.
I just saw an article where Apple TV+ was going to bundle with Paramount+ for a lower rate.
It makes 3 Billy a year according to them. Sounds like a tidy profit but you’re probably right that hikes will continue, especially if they start getting some better games out at a better cadence.
Probably just less experienced writers that can be paid less and pushed around more. Thus leading to the continual quality reduction of all modern media.
Not only is that headline’s grammar exceptional(ly bad), for a moment I thought the developer of Control was named Alan Wake. Like, how did they manage to butcher that so badly?
News headlines aren’t limited by space on physical paper anymore. If your headline is confusing because of traditions based on outdated limitations it’s not a good headline imo.
It kind of is, now that I’m thinking about it. It has vehicle sections, tight quarters on-foot sections, big weapons, snipers… It has a sampling of just about everything.
This is such a weird take because Cyberpunk's storytelling was a series of Grand Theft Auto phone calls occasionally interspersed with "UR DYING V, I'M KEANU REEVES AND IM GONNA TAKE UR BODY LOL". There wasn't anything interesting about Cyberpunk's storytelling. I believe a Bethesda game could be more boring than that, but it doesn't retroactively make Cyberpunk great as a result.
It blows my mind that people praise cyberpunk. They skipped straight past the character building and introduction to the city and its characters with a fucking 30 second cutscene, and then you just start getting calls from people you’ve never met like they know you. It didn’t interest me at all.
Ah so they didn’t just blow past the city and character introductions with a cutscene and then you start getting calls from fixers you don’t know, who talk to you like you have an existing relationship?
Tell me more about the incredible storyline that introduced you to the city and its inhabitants at the start
Mine was “car chase for a lizard” then the guy I just met dies, who was apparently my best friend because we played 2 missions together
V, someone in their twenties, maybe early thirties, had no life, friends, or business acquaintances or knowledge of the city before the player comes into the story.
I suppose the game should have been 25 hours longer so you could have a sit down meeting with each fixer, get to know them, maybe have some tea with them. Maybe a walking tour of Night City so that everything is spelled out for you would help?
People spent 8 years making Cyberpunk their entire personality. Of course they are going to make it seem like the best thing since stuffed crust pizza.
Ah not liking something makes me the bad guy because apparently it’s my whole personality.
Nope. Just talking about something in the thread where there’s a discussion about it. Happens to be I agree with many others that it was an overhead disappointment propped up by marketing money.
Felt the same way about it. The plot device of the character potentially becoming Keanu really broke all motivation for me. Why would I complete the main plot if each mission made the infestation worse? I made this character, why would I be interested in watching them become someone else’s Gary Stue? I wanted to be my Gary, not theirs.
The story would have been much improved by dropping Johnny Mnemonic Silverhands and instead having the partner, whose name escapes me because I only got to know him through 2 missions and a 30 second montage of us getting to know each other, as the ride along personality. Instead of him taking you over, he’s fading away and you have to save him.
Throw in a heroic sacrifice from your semi AI partner at the end or a plot twist him into a villain Tyler Durdening your ass while you sleep and it could have been something magical.
The theme of cyberpunk is that you have a literal anti corp terrorist in your head, and how that is affecting V’s psyche. Like there are points in the game where you choose some dialogue options and the game is like “is that V’s opinion or Johnny’s”.
I think they should have not played up the “if left unchecked, he’s going to kill you” sense of urgency bit though. But basically every open world game has the same problem with how do you reconcile having an open world, but also have a plot that needs moved forward. Like they can’t just outright game over you if you just do side quests for a in-game week or so.
That’s where starfield actually gets it right. You aren’t the “chosen one”, you are just a guy. The main plot of the game has no sense of urgency, because it’s fully driven by how much you dig into the artifact mystery. Any one in constellation could be doing the same things you are doing, and getting the powers and finding more artifacts, they all have seen the same visions you have when they first touched one. Again, you aren’t special.
When you work on something for longer than 5 years, the tech and expectations from competing games will run ahead of you.
And you can’t just rewrite the story and engine and map and characters every time you get delayed.
So you should just shoot every AAA project that lags more than 5 years on the spot. It’s way too late for it at that time. And start from market analysis, not just rewriting everything in the ‘current engine and style’.
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