My wife, a player since the early betas, was shocked that in the first 10 hours of playing after release I had already banged laezel despite my lack of interest in the romance aspect of the game.
It all depends on where you work and what lines you personally draw in the sand. Some novice game developers will not draw a line in the sand near release and management will work them to death. Stress causality is the term for when people don’t quit, don’t say anything, and just stop showing up for work. If you work at a studio where crunch is normalized then usually there is a stress causality normalization too.
Thanks for sharing ! Looks like the usual “small white male feeling powerful because he’s the boss” bullshit more than a problem specific to the gaming industry.
Anyway, unionizing should protect them better from these kind of abuse, which is good :)
I wonder if this is just a Hail Mary to try to stop the fear that the merger will make Microsoft the most dominant face in streaming.
Even if it’s agreed upon, it just means in two generations once internet speeds reach where they need to be for streaming to be feasible, Microsoft will get those rights back. Streaming means next to nothing today, but the fear is in a couple generations, that’s going to be the future of gaming, especially seeing how much publishers want to stop gamers from owning anything.
I keep GOG backlog and rom archive as a just in case everyone shits the bed.
Oh but Steam is great has DRM free blah blah
Sure and steam is great because it’s a proprietorship with Gabe as owner. What happens when he dies hmmm? Will his successor keep the company private or will he immediately sell to the highest bidder?
Internet speeds are already fast enough. The problem is latency and it's impossible to fix. You can't beat the speed of light. You just can't have a 200ms delay between your controller and something happening in the screen.
"can't beat the speed of light", according to Terry Pratchett the speed of dark does so quite handily.
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
You can beat the speed of flight, by moving the data centers closer to people. Edge routing did this for content delivery networks and likely if this is ever to work it’ll need to happen for streaming. But that means data centers that can stream in every built up area in a market which is pretty tricky.
What is likely not going to be fixed is users home networking. Home networking in 99% of users homes is going to be using consumer routers, and those consumer routers are all just terrible and lead to endless problems around anything real-time.
Don’t kid yourself: data centers are easier to have closer to many locations, but ones with hardware that works for cloud gaming, less so. And even in a best case scenario, it’s still too big a delay to comfortably play anything apart from casual games.
Even streaming a game from your PC to living room box, such as Nvidia Shield, even wired, makes it nigh impossible to play racing games well, or anything that requires aiming. It’s not far, almost playable when streaming in LAN, but any WAN in the mix and it’s just not feasible.
Networking has a long way to go before streamed reactive games are even close.
I was playing Hollow Knight on Gamepass streaming the other day. It’s a game that would be just awful to play with any real latency, and it was absolutely fine. There was no perceivable latency.
My hope is that the more pro-consumer storefronts like Steam and GOG will help stave that off. At least to the extent of ensuring both approaches remain as options (especially now that one of them makes handhelds). Time will tell, though.
Exciting stuff. I’ve long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I’ll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We’ll see in a couple weeks’ time I s’pose
Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.
No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it's in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.
The shader compilation time varied greatly between users. Mine were 40 minutes tops and later I think around 20 minutes. But you'd have to redo them on every update, just to try and see whether the latest patch fixed any of the issues you had. For me it basically became worse before it got better. It's particularly sad because the game itself is great. I watched countless of let's plays of both Part 1 and 2. So it's a real shame that their entry onto the PC market started with such a terrible port. It left such a sour taste that I still haven't played through it.
It's certainly not the only one though. Horizon Zero Dawn had similar long shader compilation times for me. Social media is unfortunately useless, because there's just too many fanboys that will tell you everything is great, burying any sort of valid criticism (Cyberpunk 1.5 for example).
There are also Steam reviews, reddit forums, etc. One person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying it isn't. I've got Mortal Kombat 1 pre-ordered, and that series has a history of shaky PC ports, with enough cause for me to believe it could happen again. If all's well, I'll know before I finish work for the day from reviews, forums, etc., and I'll get Shang Tsung for no additional cost. If not, I get my money back, and they can earn my money from me some other time.
What do you think I was referencing there in my previous comment? /r/Diablo for example literally permabanned me for speaking out against the predatory FOMO tactics in D4, after I was attacked & insulted for it by several users that also downvoted me into oblivion. And now they can eat their own sock, now that post release the hivemind opinion swapped. Everyone on Reddit and the reviews also said how great of a game CP2077 now was after those updates. Well shit, it isn't, it just got rid of a whole bunch of launch issues, while the core issues were still the same and the game still had a massive performance bug until the next major patch. You simply cannot trust those communities anymore because everyone identifies so much with their product that they see any sort of critique as a personal insult.
But that's why I said one person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying that it isn't. There are more resources beyond those. Quick looks, Digital Foundry, SkillUp, Let's Plays...and as you said, games can still have these issues beyond day 1, so at that point not pre-ordering wouldn't have saved you from it either. But two hours is certainly usually enough to find the obvious deal-breakers if the other resources fail you. Cyberpunk 2077 worked pretty damn well for me even right at launch; I didn't pre-order it, but even if I did, I probably would have been able to tell in two hours if it was horrifically broken like all of the video evidence from other players showed it was, in general. I also really enjoyed it, so that's just a difference in taste between you and I.
You seem to ignore what I am saying / the point I'm trying to make. People who say it is still a problem aren't getting heard by those who should read it, because the people who say the opposite will do everything they can to bury them. This results in you looking for opinions and just getting positive ones / yay sayers. Content creators suffer from similar issues. For starters, most of them are just clickbait bullshit deliverers and blocked immediately anyway. A lot of them tend to also fall in line with the devs though, because they often are in some sort of sponsored partner program or don't want to risk losing benefits from those game companies by being "too critical". And with how YT algorithms work, most smaller channels don't even have a chance to appear on your search.
So if those people aren't seeing the information they need, they should not pre-order. I'm confident that if you know these other avenues to find out this information, it's easy to avoid getting burned.
The only “pre-order” I’ve ever done was Elden Ring, and that was only the day before release because there was a small discount on it. I was definitely going to play it anyway, so I would have been spending the money regrardless. I’m usually pretty patient in terms of gaming.
I might if I didn't just get BG3. I'll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I've seen about the scale and what the game is is what I've been waiting for for a while.
I know Bethesda isn't perfect and I didn't love FO4, but it's in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda's world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it's just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can't exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don't care.
I get the don't preorder principle, but it's on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it's extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.
I’m personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I’m more worried that it’ll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn’t discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I’m cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.
FUD means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.” I’m not following how you think that’s what’s happening here? I mean, I think you’re accusing the Kodokawa execs of bullshitting, but what they’re expressing is the opposite of FUD.
Thank you so much for your concern and apologies in advance. Im well aware I need to work on dumbing down my writing to be accessible to everyone. Sorry for my ableism, I promise to work on myself to be more inclusive. Again, apologies if I made your head hurt, that was not at all my intention. I hope you have a splendid weekend.
Thank you, appreciate your compliment, It’s a pleasure to be a source of entertainment. I used to train chimps, perhaps that’s where my talent to amuse primates derives from. Always nice to feel appreciated, thanks stranger.
Np man. You might want to also consider joining the chimps. I’m sure you would be fed well and someone might actually be able to train you to make hand signals and shit. I think you could really benefit.
Well, this is disappointing, is this the best you can muster? A “no u”? I guess you’re part of the Eurogamer readership after all. Don’t forget to take your meds. Have a great weekend, Bobo.
Oh man, people really just repeat phrases without actually understanding what they mean. It’s very fucking annoying. I’ve also seen people refer to literally anything they don’t think is funny as boomer humor, even if it’s like a Gen Z meme.
Oh, yeah, it’s use in the crypto space is absolutely part of cult conditioning. Any reality check, any sensible question, any appeal to reason, it’s all FUD. Only blind unquestioning faith in the rapture… I mean TO THE MOON… is acceptable.
–BTW this article looks like an ad for Jason Schreier’s new book about this topic, that releases soon and is mentioned as the last sentence in the article with a single link that spans across 4 lines.–
Nothing much. Microsoft put out one of the worst Call of Duty games in history (Modern Warfare 3 in 2023) and couldn’t save Overwatch 2 from being totally ruined. Console sales and Game Pass didn’t grow as expected I guess. And then the layoffs… Funny enough the releases on PC and Playstation (by Xbox) doing well. At the moment its a total disaster and we question if Xbox will survive until next gen (off course it will, there is Microsoft behind it). Once again Xbox players are told to wait until next year; basically since the launch of the recent console.
(Note, I don’t hate Xbox and even own the Series S as a backup console if my PC explodes or a game I want to play doesn’t work on Linux. I hate Playstation probably even more for what Sony is doing. Just mentioning this as a context, because I’m so negative in this post towards Xbox, but more specifically Microsoft.)
Idk if I’d really consider it an ad for the book tbh. If anything it’s an ad for another Eurogamer article, which is an interview they did with Jason. It’s pretty common for sites like this to link to articles that have similar topics to keep you reading
–BTW this article looks like an ad for Jason Schreier’s new book about this topic, that releases soon and is mentioned as the last sentence in the article with a single link that spans across 4 lines.–
He’s had a few other articles written, but given the detail and research, I think he can be forgiven. It’s not like he’s trying to sell something that doesn’t live up to what the book is about.
The shift from “we’re making a fun and relatively casual arena shooter with a neat gimmick and extremely rewarding fundamentals” to “we’re making a generic e sport shooter” was swift and, frankly, uncalled for.
My friends and I all LOVED the pick-up nature of SG1. We’re all adults with busy lives, so hopping into a ~5 minute casual match was just so easy. And the casual nature made it feel like we could have success without “grinding” the game. I guess that is explicitly not the intent of SG2.
Nope it’s not… Another live service with a never ending treadmill of rinse repeat and spend on micro transactions…oh and be sure to play as long as possible for engagement metrics.
Their trailer with esports people had me going who even are these people and why would I believe anything coming out of their mouths when they are the equivalent of infomercial sales people with them being paid to be in it. Is it really the best way to market a game?
I don’t mean the banner ads for cookies, I’m referring to sites restricting viewable content based on your selection. Which seems to be illegal in the EU.
Who are these “they” that has admitted it’s a bad law?
It’s one of the best recent pieces of privacy legeslation. It’s not the EU’s fault that websites are scumbags insisting on making life difficult for people.
Yes it is. They completely failed to specify what would constitute compliance. They were warned repeatedly about this when the law first came out.
It has good intentions behind it but the law itself doesn’t work. They haven’t reduced privacy violations at all because everyone just clicks yes because it’s so frustrating, And it isn’t against the law to implement these dark patterns so what’s the point?
The Newscast is not the images. It’s an annoying video they embed in all articles and then floats when you scroll. I actually have set an adblock rule to block that shit.
As for the images, for now hotlinking to Twitter images is possible, so:
Legitimately one of my favorite games. Incredible story, characters, and side quests. It’s also the only time I’ve actually felt like I was in a city when playing a game, they absolutely nail the environment and setting. It feels like a true city, not a video game city.
eurogamer.net
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