I loved WarCraft 2, but it came much earlier so it wouldn’t fit the “peak Blizzard” timeline. For all those years to this day I’ve been humming music from that game.
IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.
So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.
Personally I think of StarCraft 2 as Blizzard’s last good game. It was the last time they made something new and didn’t cut it up to sell to you in pieces.
They were the GOAT for SC:BW, D2:LOD, and the first couple years of WoW.
SC2 has done well over the years but I remember being really disappointed when it came out. The original’s campaign was so gritty. Playing each race, you felt like you were in this strange scifi world. It was brilliant.
The SC2 campaign was so bad. Cartoonish, one dimensional characters. They made zerg and protoss more human like and boring. They were already focused on making their games sports, so single player was not their focus at all. I was fine with the esport focus but not at the cost of making it more cartoonish.
I was so excited to play the SC2 campaign when the game came out. Starcraft and Brood War was my life for years.
I was so disappointed by SC2 that, to this day, I haven’t even read the wikipedia summary of the expansion campaigns. Never bought either of them. I stopped playing around the time they introduced paid maps (in 2010 or something). Playing competitive was good, but UMS was botched just as bad as the campaign when the game was new. That was my most anticipated thing after the campaign. Even now people mostly only play the same 3 UMS maps.
The original game still holds up too. We got robbed of a good sequel. And don’t even get me started about diablo 3 lol. RIP blizzard.
Edit: did some googling and it turns out they announced, but did not implement paid maps in 2009. Map micro translation did eventually get implemented though.
I watched SC2 on YouTube on and off over the years. UThermal is worth checking out, he’s a great player and super positive self-conmentator. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched SC2 a lot more than I’ve played it. Which is sort of weird for a game…
I was wondering what “feminist propaganda” was and apparently it’s talking about misogyny.
Another forbidden topic seemed to be targeted at criticism of misogyny at Game Science. The company has come under fire for lewd and sexist comments attributed in media reports to its founders as well as recruiting materials from 2015 replete with sexual innuendos. Those original job postings and comments were deleted, and the company has not commented.nytimes.com/…/chinese-videogame-wukong-censorship…
But this anti feminism attitude is not limited to this 1 gaming company, but government policy under Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule: www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/…/100165360
so, you have gigabytesper second of disk io, and the game relies on the couple of megaBITS of internet bandwidth most people have to stream textures? As opposed to downloading and installing them once as an update…
Man I miss the early days of lan parties. Struggling to figure out how to plug my friends computer into mine via BNC cables (didn’t know we needed terminators) when we got our first ever network cards. Then later the big lan games of blood, duke 3d, quake, even starcraft.
Your comment unlocked repressed memories of having to rewire ethernet cables for direct connection between PCs. And to make my father take me and my desktop+CRT monitor to my friend’s house for a weekend of HL+mods, AoE, and whatever new game one of us had found that month…
Fun times, online matches are great, but the feeling of a Lan party is something that I think it’s mostly lost.
Same. It was a good read though. Getting old sucks for everyone, but I can’t help but feel like we grew up in a particularly magical time where you can remember dial phones all the way through smart phones. It kind of set the wow factor baseline a little high. I don’t know if other people in history have had a similar experience, but I kinda doubt it.
Maybe, or maybe in another 30 years people will just be commenting how nice it was to be alive during the birth of the metaverse and giant corporations.
My first memories of “LAN” parties was playing Doom, OMF2097 and other DOS IPX games over a null-modem cable (which I made myself by hacking up a regular serial cable - was so proud of myself when I got it to work lol). Of course, it was only limited to two PCs, but still fun nonetheless. After the DOS era, my first “proper” LAN party was over 10BASE-T (Cat3) during the Win 9x era, and then we quickly moved into the Cat5/100Mbps world. So somehow I completely skipped over coax LANs, even though I started with MSDOS, RS232 and BBS door games. Or maybe I used them unknowingly at school or something. But it feels really strange to hear others reminisce “fondly” about T-connectors and terminators, when even though I’m from the same era, I never even saw them. Or maybe I’m from an alternate timelime where they didn’t exist at all…
If you’re buying this (or anything other than Nintendo exclusive games) for your switch, it’s because you don’t have any other options and likely only own a switch
If you had a PC or a PS5, you’d buy it on that.
So switch only owners would pay whatever for it, but the rest of us wouldnt
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
Given that the switch version looks terrible even by Switch standard, I think they’re right to complain and refuse to buy it. And not everyone can just “invest in better hardware” the second an upgrade comes along. Let’s not forget that up until the Steam Deck, the switch was the gold standard for handheld gaming - mainly by virtue of being the only real option
Not always true; some games work really well on handheld/portable devices and the Switch is really good for that. The Binding of Isaac springs to mind.
I own a ton of games on my switch that aren’t switch exclusives. I travel a lot and use it like a Gameboy on planes, in hotels etc. Anyone using a switch entirely as a home console experience, ya silly to not buy games on PC etc instead.
I mean, it definitely helps. The production quality is insane. But the fact that the choices (or mistakes) have actual real impacts on the game going forward are as big as far as I'm concerned. I ended up with my hand being forced into combat early that made an encounter with a potential party member immediately hostile. That sucks, especially since I wasn't trying to do what happened in the earlier encounter. But in terms of a world feeling alive, having it actually react to what you do is pretty damn significant (unless "you're small and irrelevant" is intentional).
It's time developers come to grips with the fact that making choices matter is what makes it a successful game. I'm tired of storylines that don't make any sense except to give you a world to kill people in. Sorry folks, lore is important and that takes writers.
It definitely depends on the game, I’m perfectly happy with a game that has a story to tell, and tells it well. Not everything needs to have branching options and 50+ hour playtime. Some of the best stories I’ve played are short and railroady, WaW and BO1 campaing’s are fantastically interesting and you don’t make a single choice in them.
I don’t think the lack of choices is necessarily a bad thing. The original Doom had no story choices (it barely even had a story) and it’s still pretty good even by today’s standards. Half-Life 1 and 2 pretty much had no story choices as well (there was 1 at the end of the first game) and the first one in particular is considered revolutionizing how stories are presented in games.
What I do think is an issue is when the game presents you with a choice that doesn’t matter. Bioshock Infinite is the first that comes to mind as the game puts quite a few options front and center, but really none of them matter (except the very last one) and the game even implies that the choices deliberately don’t matter because “constants and variables”. Thus those choices, at least for me, detracted from the story because there was never no need to make me make a choice.
In that sense I agree that choices should matter, but I think a better wording is that if you’re going to have choices make them matter or don’t have choices in the first place.
Remnant 2 is brilliant at this and bad at this at the same time! The in-world stories that are told along with the environments are absolutely STUNNING! Everything clicks together so well and a slightly different story is told when re-rolling the map!
Main story cutscenes tell the worst story I’ve ever seen executed. (Worse than Monster Hunter World’s Handler story stuff) I’m glad they’re skippable on another run. Because literally everything is is some of the most classic gaming experience one could have.
There was so much promise in their lore!! I liked N'Erud the best but the rest didn't really lead anywhere other than that you visited, you did something notable, and then you left. Nothing really changed.
I would say if it is all about the gameplay, like Serious Sam or Doom, then the story doesn't need to be that important and dexisions don't need to matter. But if the story is front and center, like Baldur's Gate and most similar RPGs, the story and how choices impact the story need to be well done so it doesn't feel on rails and replaying it is enjoyable.
It gets super confusing when you do stuff in the wrong order though. Missing a clue because you didn’t read the right book or something but then randomly finding the end of the quest and everyone is talking like we know all about it.
Usually it recognizes it. Sometimes it doesn’t though. I’d hope those instances get patches eventually. Even worse though is when something triggers for something you didn’t even do. I’ve had a party member get angry at me for something that I did the opposite of. It’s a pretty solid game, but it’s not totally bug free, which is expected with so much complexity. Who knows, it could have just been a cosmic ray that flipped a bit and not even their fault (though I doubt it).
I doubt that they’re referring to Minthara; you have to make an intentional series of decisions to >!murder a bunch of people!< in order to get her in your party. It’s relatively easy to miss several origin companions if you’re not the type that explores the whole map. And one of the origin characters starts with >!a quest to kill one of the others!<.
I played it a couple of years ago, before a lot of the patches, and still thought it was one of the better games I have never finished.
spoilerThere is this quest line where a character is abducted, raped, tortured and kills herself after you rescue her. Afterwards, the main character and another are on a balcony and smoke, still processing the horrors they’ve witnessed. I had been off the smokes for a few months at that point, but still needed to go outside and do the same.
I uninstalled shortly after. Not out of disgust, I actually appreciated the game making me feel something, but it just felt right to stop at that point.
The whole game has an amazing story, that actually hooks the player’s emotions. It’s fantastic. It’s so refreshing after so many games with lazy writing or voice acting. I also played shortly after release, only experiencing 2 major bugs in my playthrough. I know others had it worse, but it was actually refreshing on that front too.
nasty things people do with AI [trigger warning]> “I went on to this stream because somebody gave me a heads up and I went on and heard my own voice reading rape porn. That’s the level of stuff we’ve had to deal with since this game came out and it’s been horrible, honestly.” Amelia Tyler.
I cannot imagine going into a stream of someone playing a game you have poured your heart and soul into for years, and hear you own voice reading stuff like that
I use jerboa and it is working (I used the toolbar to generate it, but had to fix it because my mobile keyboard is a massive PITA for any corrections and I haven’t had time to find something new).
Anyway, looks like sync and boost are not lemmy-markdown-compatible
JFC what kind of terrible human do you have to be to say something like
"Like, you can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,’ right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income.
“For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn’t feel like they were exploited! They felt like, ‘Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.’ So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal.”
is the same argumentation about stars. 1 in 10’000 people get this status (I just threw random numbers, don’t quote me on that) and the other remaining 9’999 are exploited. So he is justifying exploiting 10k people by gifting one person.
Yes indeed. The PMG video they mentioned in the article dives into that aspect. Highly recommend watching if you want details on how fucked up Roblox is. They also did a follow up video that is great
Honestly, at this point, they should really just save whatever for a sequel. It’s been two years. As a reminder (though there are extenuating circumstances here), Dark Souls 2 was 2014, and Dark Souls 3 was 2016.
I guess the new reality is that it takes six years to make a game and three years between expansions. I think I’d just prefer smaller games and smaller dev cycles.
Armored Core is one of their oldest running IPs and a series I have been playing since 2nd installment. AC6 was without a doubt the best one. Highly recommend.
Why? With a DLC they can expand on weaker areas and introduce interesting advanced mechanics, whereas a sequel needs a lot more groundwork and can’t expand on existing story threads as easily without some repetition.
It’s such a good game that I’d prefer more of it to a sequel, at least right now. Make the sequel it’s own thing that’s not burdened by having to finish all the unfinished stories.
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