I find the switch to hosting communities on proprietary closed platforms kind of bad in terms of access to the vast knowledge and archiving it for future generations. When discord will go full enshittified, it will just charge a subscription fee to access the “servers”. Also they will sure as hell comply with anything if it threatens the bottom line.
It’s god awful for any development discussion too. Used to be you could at least find someone taking about something on Stack Overflow even if it wasn’t solved, now it’s buried in Discord and you have no way of even searching it out to see if anyone has even had that problem before.
I can actually see Horizon working really well as an MMO. It’s already open world, fetch quest-centered with city quest hubs and such. Yeah, you won’t be that one main character, but you could be out there killing robot dinosaurs with friends.
At least two major MMOs have the player being the “main” character, FF14 and WoW both treat the player character (and their friends) as the “hero” (and their party). I’m sure others do the same, but honestly I never get far enough into them to find out.
You’d almost certainly not be Aloy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not the main protagonist of the story in the game.
Another runner played a Mario game on switch using motion controls strapped to his head and feel and then played the in game music on a keyboard at the same time. GDQ was wild this year.
I suppose they wrote battlefield in the headline since it’s an EA franchise, but I totally see where you’re coming from. At least they mention halo directly after.
I partially agree, but I assume these people get a decent amount of donations. There’s a reason they keep coming back for each game. That said, Bethesda should be the ones paying them.
The game came out in 2021. There are far older games from other publishers still up and getting updates. Stop giving these pump-and-dump games your money.
When did it become the expected norm to receive endless updates for a one time purchase? How is that a “pump-and-dump”? Unless the game is a buggy, broken mess (and maybe it is, I’m not familiar with FC6), once the purchase is made, any additional content or service should be considered a bonus, not a mandate.
If the game requires online features by design, then the company does have the responsibility to keep that online.
If you don’t want to support a game for 5-10 years with online services, don’t make a game that relies on online services. It ilreally is that simple.
Don’t put always online DRM (if hitman servers go down, nobody can play the fully single-player game. Absolutely 0 reason to connect to the internet).
Don’t put online DLC verification. Use a damn code/binary file that steam can distribute theough the store.
if you have a multiplayer game, put an option for self-hosted game servers and LAN. Battefront 2 original is literally still going for 18 years because they were not dumbasses and made a good game with good features and custom server capability
It really is extremely simple to not be a corrupt, money-grubbing piece of shit corpo.
Except this isn’t about DRM, or even online game servers. They literally said all of that will continue. They’re just not making DLC anymore and people are calling it a “pump-and-dump”.
Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.
They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.
I don’t care that Cyberpunk’s NPCs are programmed to walk to a specific place, stand in a specific way and say a specific thing at a specific time.
Cyberpunk’s main quest claims you have a few weeks to live just when the game really opens up to you, so thematically you are discouraged from pursuing side content, but it doesn’t really matter since except for a few quests most are very generic and most of their “story” is delivered through a call anyway. Great storytelling right there.
The NPCs in Cyberpunk are braindead, and when the game came out the set pieces didn’t work half the time.
I really rather Bethesda spend their time improving the parts of the games people who like their games want them to improve, instead of focusing on stuff their competitors are doing.
It’s too bad you didn’t like the narrative structure with the calls in CP2077. That one ending uses them (or I guess you could call them voicemails, considering) to devastating effect. One of the most harrowing sequences I’ve seen in a game. It might have even saved a couple of lives.
I really don’t understand your reasoning. They use mocap and actors and spend so much time recording these scenes, then you don’t play them and then say you prefer Bethesda npcs? Mocap scenes and npc AI is so wildly different things. Ai That doesn’t even react when you shoot them? That can’t stealth? That clip into environment while looking at you like you are a ghost? I really try hard to understand your take here
You know what, I’ll bite. For this to work though, let’s agree on two things. First, the game they’re selling shouldn’t be a hot pile of garbage on day one. Second, I don’t want to even catch a whiff of microtransactions or subscription based models. If we can nail those down, I would be fine with a price increase. As it stands, the sticker price is just the cost of entry in the vast majority of games. They are still bringing in cash well after the initial purchase.
It’s days like this that remind me I’m not a typical gamer.
When Sims 4 came out, I put Sims 3 away thinking it was time for something bigger and better even though I’d had wishlisted DLC unpurchased. When Sims 4 clearly had basic content locked behind future DLC, I quit and didn’t go back to anything because playing the old version when the new version is out “didn’t make sense”. Went from being a Sims player to not a Sims player, not in protest but because their business model “failed to monetize” me. Obviously, if I were the base case, EA would have backpedaled.
Reminds me of the “mini-outrigger and story collection” thing with fantasy literature. I’ve gone from being a diehard fan to no longer even reading simply because I didn’t have the bandwidth and research hours to take it all in (Dresden and Iron Druid, lookin at you).
With the namedrops in the main stories on things I didn’t recognize and my not being able to keep up with side stories, my interest waned and I moved on. I still haven’t read anything after Peace Talks, and I don’t recall what’s going on in Iron Druid anymore.
I am cautiously hopeful for Life By You. My favorite thing in the Sims was to set up crazy soap opera dramas and see what happens, but Sims 4 sims are so docile and boring, it feels a lot more like just playing with dolls and decorating the house. I'm not judging if that's the part you like, but it's just not for me.
Ah. Yet another reason for game studios to turn away from commercial dev tools and turn to FOSS software like Blender and Godot.
And since game devs are, you know, developers, they can even contribute to these tools with heir dev time, improving them and accelerating the industry shift away from this commercial bullshit even more.
But drama almost never kills FOSS software. It just causes it to fork. FOSS software can become like an olympic flame that just keeps getting passed from dev to dev. Once there are people actively using something, those same people are motivated to fix any issues they have with it, or add any features they are missing. That then drives improvement of the software, which in turn drives adoption, which drives more improvement…
There was huge drama around Emby going closed source, but FOSS Emby simply got forked, becoming Jellyfin.
There’s an example just within lemmy, the lemmur app apparently stopped development due to some drama, but it got forked and Liftoff picked up right where it left off.
Yes. There can be drama around FOSS projects, and there often is. Loosely organized groups of volunteers putting together serious software don’t work as efficiently as a paid team of devs led by a visionary with final say. But FOSS projects are capable of becoming self-perpetuating in a way proprietary software can never do. Once they reach a high enough level of adoption, they are very hard to kill.
The only “drama” I recall is that one guy, who ran an unofficial forum, went on a weird rant about how Godot is a scam because he thought development was too slow or something. He then shut down his unofficial forum. That’s a long shot from “being destroyed”.
But maybe I missed something?
(Edit: I had misspelled “forum” as “form”. Sorry if that confused anybody)
The ending to 3 was a bit of a cop out and generally out of line with the narrative of the game up to that point. Everything proceeding that was fantastic though. Still an 8/10 in my book
They canned the writers from 1 and 2 and promoted this goober who said that “Twilight was good writing” to finish the 3rd game.
Which is why we go from having Shepard being such a badass the Reapers tried to make a reaper version of humans, to all of a sudden being all PTSD about shit.
Lead writer left after 2 and his replacement was kind of known for not getting along well with his predecessor. So its still not clear if he intentionally made changes to the plan that had been put in place or if he just never actually read the design doc that had been left for consistency.
Honestly only room for improvement here. The OG writer for ME wrote ME1 & 2 with ME3 being a guy who supposedly squabbled with him over details and abruptly changed course and retcons, and some even trying to put some of the worst ideas of Andromeda as stuff he passed on for them to use (note: this last one is mostly speculation without real proof to best of my knowledge)
Recent, last 10 years or so, Bioware games have not had the quality of writing they were known for in the 90s and 00s, with some charitable takes on TORs overall writing as being very shotgun approach and seeing what sticks and the fans react well to rather than a very clear end point in mind from the start.
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