I agree. Pokemon once was my favorite video game series, but it has been technically and to some extent creatively stagnant for quite some years now. And whenever people point that out online, there is always a vocal horde of fans coming to Gamefreak’s defense, saying things like “Pokemon never looked good”. Which wouldn’t be a good argument, but it’s not even true. Pokemon games were never technically advanced, but they had a simple, clean look in the 2D/2.5D era. S/V has some really appallingly low-res textures in places that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the N64. It just looks muddy and inconsistent to a point where it’s distracting from the game itself. At the same time it runs at sub-30 FPS quite often.
Probably the only good looking Pokemon games we got this generation were the “Let’s Go” ones. Those had simple but consistently good-looking graphics just like the older titles.
Yeah, Pokemon had some nice 2D sprites. I yearn for a pokemon game that doesn't hold your hand and is challenging with nice sprite work. It'll never happen unless Game Freak lets the fans do something like Sonic Mania.
To be fair, it’s almost infinitely cheaper to hire a bunch of people to post in threads muddying the waters of any discussion than it is to fix any given issue. If any public criticism devolves into bickering, it’s hard for outside observers to make enough sense of it to heavily impact sales.
Look how well it worked for the election. With a proof of concept that dramatic lying around, what money-grubbing executive wouldn’t want to follow the example?
"the company had appointed advisors to review and pursue various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders".
Companies should focus on extracting the best value for consumers not stakeholders... when it was created the stoke market was supposed to be disconnected from real economy to prevent that situation where companies tries to give priority to the stakeholders (who don't produce anything and don't increase GDP) over consumers. When that rule started being ignored in the beginning of the XX century and provocked the 1929 krack they should have take it at a warning and stop doing that instead of continuing that heresy.
The private equity that would control it after it goes private, in all likelihood, would be the same family who controls it today and always has controlled it. They’re not interested in stripping it for parts, but they’re also not interested in scaling their operations down and learning some hard lessons to make a sustainable video game company.
While he comes off as a jerk, and possibly is one, I can understand the sentiment, having spent a few years of my life among ethnically Chinese people in Asia. There is this drive and aspiration to be recognized by leading brands in the West as equals, perhaps even betters. Due to a history of subservience and shame and a strong nationalistic current seeking to undo that.
This game is one of the most ambitious and accomplished to come out of China and they’re hungering for that kind of recognition. So it is likely that fans of the game feel it was ‘stolen’ from them and he seems to be responding to that sentiment. To us it looks petty, but to some of the game’s most ardent Chinese fans this may have been an appropriate response. Not sure how this was received in China though, just speculating.
The last three weeks or so of Chinese video game reporting has basically been:
“They’ll never shortlist us for GotY. They’ll never choose a Chinese game for GotY. It’s all a Western ploy to denigrate and deny Chinese achievement because They are jealous that the first Chinese AAA game is so good.”
It’s been tiring.
Edit: just opened up my Chinese feeds, and I’m glad to report that the first one I found was criticising netizens for review bombing BG3 and defending the Larian speech, and giving it a more detailed translation.
THAT actually probably was a translation error (unlike “oh, he is not a disgusting misogynistic piece of shit. You are just racist and so is google translate”).
Swen’s speech was (paraphrasing) about how an oracle told him that the future GOTYs will all be games made because they are games the studios wanted to make and were allowed to make without fear of layoffs (which is why it was ironic that a studio that came out of Sony gutting Team Japan won…).
But a lot of chuds and CCP mouthpieces keyed in on the “An oracle told me” narrative framing as an indication that it was all rigged. In large part because they are fucking morons who don’t realize they were voting on a different category when they rushed that vote harder than a gamefaqs poll with Aeris in it.
And Swen is head (?) of Larian who made Baldurs Gate 3.
Also: BG3 is, in scientific terms, gay as all fuck. So the chuds who were already focusing on BMWukong because “it understand that women should be sexy” and whatever other “anti-DEI” bullshit they are radicalizing people with, saw an opportunity to pick a fight now that the mass support of BG3 is somewhat waning.
Not going to lie, despite loving the stories about the monkey king, I skipped it entirely because of the notes they sent to content creators. Which would also be why I skip movies and games that take the US’ DoD money. I’m glad it got passed over.
I like the concept of the playdate. I even like the little gimmicky crank. I don’t like the non-backlit screen. And the price is a deal breaking barrier to entry for me.
Make this thing $60, and put a decent color screen on it, and I’m sold.
“Since the beginning, the number one question from Playdate owners has been: ‘When will there be another Season?’” says Greg Maletic, Playdate project lead.
I’m pretty sure it was ‘why is it so damn expensive’.
Because it has a library of interesting and innovative exclusives, making use of an unusual control input. Whether that makes it worth it or not is personal preference, but you can’t disagree that it offers something unique.
Because they are different devices serving different purposes. The r36s is a portable emulator that'll run games from different consoles; the playdate is a portable console that runs games made specifically for the playdate.
The original designer of Dead Cells, Sébastien Benard, formed a new studio and has a new roguelike game on the way called Tenjutsu in which players take the role of a renegade yakuza.
Earlier this year, Benard called the decision to end Dead Cells development “the worst imaginable asshole move”.
I’m curious about how others feel about this. I think Dead Cells is an incredible game, but the amount of continued DLC releases has actually turned me off of the game somewhat. I’m actually glad development has ended in a way, so that I can rebuy the “complete” game and have everything.
The game already had tons of content, I don’t think it needs perpetual new content additions.
I am becoming the same way. Maybe I am just old, but I miss the days of buying something and having a finished product. Instead, we have games like this and Stardew Valley that release in an incomplete state and are still receiving major content updates almost a decade later.
Stardew doesn’t bother me because the updates are free. As soon as there’s more content for the game, I have it. If I feel like playing Stardew again, the new content is a reason to jump back in to playing it again.
However with Dead Cells, whenever I think about going back and playing it I think about all the new content that I haven’t bought for it. It feels like my options are spend money for the current complete game, play an incomplete version, or just don’t play it right now. I’ve been deciding on “don’t play it right now” for years now.
My issue with Stardew Valley content updates is that they change how the game works. It is not just adding extra postgame missions or something. The content updates tend to fundamentally change how some things work. Your possible/preferred routes to reach endgame today are much different than they were in 2016. It makes it feel like perpetual Early Access.
Dead Cells released in a state that felt pretty complete to me, so I just appreciate all the extra content, especially the free updates. It's a game that's so good I'm glad it got such loving support, because the core is so fantastic that I really did just want some more levels and items to increase replayability.
I think it's okay for it to end now. I'd also think it was okay if the devs kept going, but it's in a place where it's got enough content that it can end here and I'm okay with that.
Reading the full statement, it sounds to me like there was more to it than just the game’s development coming to an end. It sounds like it might have been a very sudden decision by the publisher, with possible negative consequences for the development team.
In principle I agree though, there is no issue with a game just being finished at some point, especially a single player one. But I also don’t mind continued updates and/or DLC.
We’ll see how Seekers of the Storm will be on the 27th, but honestly it likely won’t be bad. Bringing back the character Chef from ROR1 is something we’ve been wanting and so unless SotS changes a bunch of things for the worse, I’m not sure this update will really have any reason to show the future of ROR2.
I imagine we’ll get this and it’ll be done for a while as sales determine whether they want to do another one or not.
I feel this with Terraria. Yeah the updates are free and they try many ways to freshen the game up. But, I'm almost begging for the game to land itself in a comfortable level of finishing itself and just polish it off. It is a radically different game when I try it than when I first did back in 2015.
Good. I hope that sleaze Pitchford loses a mountainload of money on this. I absolutely hate the guy, he’s a liar and a thief. And arguably, depending how you look at it, a pedophile.
As a short reminder: Borderlands was originally meant to look like this. Then, at the MTV Asia Awards 2006, an artist by the name of Ben Hibon premiered a neat-looking animated short by the name of Codehunters. You can see it here. Witchford saw this and wanted to use the artstlye for his new game. He and Ben had a back-and-forth for a while and then, radio silence.
2009 comes around and Pitchfork’s new game Borderlands is released. And to say that it looked familiar to Codehunters would be an understatement. Kitschford, being an upstanding and virtuous citizen that he is, straight-up aped Codehunter’s style. No discussions or agreements were made with Ben and as such, despite Borderlands becoming hugely profitable, Ben didn’t see a cent. And that is why I will always hope for the Borderlands IP to crash and burn. Or, at the very least, for someone to actually pay Ben Hibon for (unknowingly) creating the game’s artstyle. Anyway, rant over, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I agree that Pitchford is a dick, but I sincerely disagree about the art style comments: I don’t think it’s morally correct to “copyright” (or, reworded: claim exclusivity of) art styles, especially in this context.
I think the two works are completely independent, and Gearbox being inspired by the short film is completely appropriate.
Anything else would be no different (in my opinion) than cases like Roger Dean (the cover artist for Yes’ early albums) suing James Cameron for the floating islands in Avatar.
I remember just a couple months ago before that game Mouse (the one that’s all black and white, rubberhose animation style, where you play as a detective mouse) was supposed to come out, and everyone and their mother was freaking out over the use of the rubberhose style, as if Disney had a copyright on the entire art style itself.
I just thought people were fucking stupid for voicing those thoughts in the first place.
Nah, I didn’t forget. It’s just that Pitchford’s list of screw-ups is so extensive that if I wanted to list of each and every one, we’d be here all day.
I was speaking of the gaming industry as a whole. I know very little about this developer. Perhaps they’re one of the good ones swept up in unfortunate-ness.
Game Publishers: Release unfinished game that gets horrid backlash until they work overtime to patch it to a slightly more playable hell, get caught in an update loop, game inadvertantly becomes live service.
Was it really that good? I heard it was overwatch from wish when it launched but then got better. I never tried it, because i didn't wanna learn something new.
It was a hero shooter MOBA but with some verticality, so that’s about as far as the Overwatch comparison goes. I had a great time with it. I like traditional MOBAs but don’t have the skill/patience/time for them, so hero shooter MOBAs are the perfect way for me to be able to play them more casually. In my opinion, of the few I’ve tried, Paragon was the best implementation of a hero shooter MOBA; the core gameplay just felt really tight to me.
Yeah, that really brings me back. I had like 4 tokens on Steam to give the game away when they were trying to get more people to play. There was some other hero shooter MOBA a little after that too, by Epic or something. Didn’t last very long and wasn’t all that great, but I still played the shit out of the falcon character that could “fly”. Man, I need to jump into another one of these games.
There is probably even more comming in the current version for you. Stardew valley is the type of game where you watch a random YT video where someone shows off something you never knew was in the game, after you got 1000h clocked.
Unsurprising. They already split remake up to milk more money out of long time fans, and now they’re doubling down on the mobile market. I remember long wishing for a remake and now I want my wish back. DAMN YOU MONKEY’S PAW!!!
An initial solution looked to have been found from an old Fallout 4 VR thread on Steam, where the same problem could be fixed by using a console command to change the player’s sex.
In Starfield, the same command works, but all you need to do to fix the bug is enter the character customisation screen. Using console commands, this can be done by entering ‘showlooksmenu player 2’. If you’re playing Starfield on console, you can visit an Enhance Clinic for 500 credits to get into the character customisation. You don’t actually have to change your appearance, as players have reported that simply entering and exiting customer customisation makes weapons work as intended once again.
This was already true, but is even more so now - Bethesda should make console commands available on Xbox immediately. Besides the fact that there was no reason to restrict them to PC players in the first place, they’re almost certain to be necessary for all sorts of weird troubleshooting that’s likely to come up in any game this big.
Yeah, I didn‘t finish Fallout NV because a bug stopped me from starting a quest and I didn‘t want to start all over. There were all kinds of solutions via console commands on PC but none on Xbox ofc. I hope something like this won‘t happen in Starfield
I’m playing the game pass version and in the early game I softlocked myself by jumping behind something that I shouldn’t have and I wasn’t able to fast travel to my ship because they were enemies nearby. I downloaded the PC version, accessed the console commands, got myself out, saved, then loaded it on my Xbox and the issue was fixed. But I really wish I could have just plugged a keyboard into my Xbox and fixed it in a few seconds rather than waiting on 140GB to download and praying it would work on my 2 year old laptop.
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