This is some of the most honest feedback about Starfield. It’s not bad. It’s just horribly dated.
It’s a standard Bethesda game, and it’s great for a Bethesda game. But Bethesda hasn’t updated anything in years, over a decade even. Characters are flat, storylines are fun but not engaging, it’s just… fine.
If this had come out in 2014-2016 as a successor to Skyrim it’d be one of the best games, I firmly believe that. But it didn’t, they took their time building it, which is good, but now we have games like the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, RDR2, even ME3 came out after Skyrim. The format for story propelled RPGs has changed, and the bar has been raised.
Again I don’t want to be one of the “Oh bethesda bad boooo” people because honestly, I’m still having a ton of fun in Starfield. It’s just that for a brand new game… it’s really showing it’s age.
Yup, this. I’ve played two runs by myself and on my fourth with some buddies and I’m still finding out meaningful stuff I didn’t do on my solo runs. Starfield is an upgrade in tons of aspects over previous beth titles (big exception is planetside exploration), they fixed tons of issues both Skyrim and F4 had. Skill checks, while not as present as they should be, pop up once in a while. Skill tree isn’t as boring as F4 but build variety suffers, same as in Skyrim. Character background pops up in convos sometimes (but isn’t as deep as it could be).
That’s starfield. It has the makings of a good game, and it is, but it plays it very safe. And because of that, NPCs are boring, as is the story, as is combat, as is pretty much everything else in the game. The only thing that impressed me was that one mission in the main quest but even that one was limp dicked on the finish. And ship costumization, but if I wanted in-depth ship mechanics I’d play KSP.
Like the game was too ambitious and too chicken shit at the same time.
I really like this, honest feedback to them. The game is obviously made by committee. That’s exactly what my wife and I have been saying, that they did a lot of cool ideas - and then dropped them half way through. None of the ideas are fully thought out or finished, it all screams “Some suit said ‘no this is great, move on’”. Some quick examples
Base building, awesome concept, I want to build a base on a foreign planet.
But what do I do there?
Automated crafting. Awesome, I love Satisfactory! I can do this.
Wait, I can’t limit items in transit, so I can really only transport one item over a link? So it can’t really be automated.
Oh sweet, I can build my own spaceship?!
But you are rarely actually in space and really when you are it’s just a mini game between planets.
and you get companions to hang out with you on your ship?
But they don’t interact with each other or do anything like help you fight other ships.
Oh and we get to have a fleet of ships?!
but they aren’t actually a fleet. You never get to assign someone as captain of another ship to help you fight pirates. You just… pick which of your ships you want to fly right now.
And that’s just some. Like so so so many cool awesome fun ideas that were just… “I don’t want to play with this anymore.” The fleet one especially stings. I was really hoping I could assign someone as captain of another ship, and when we jumped/spawned in space there it would be on my left, and it could help me fight pirates. I mean, how hard would it be to program that? They already have the ship, they have AI for dogfighting other AI, it would just follow behind you until you entered combat.
ive heard it gets insanely buggy and forgets previous choices once you reach act 3. havent played any baldurs gate game though, so i have no clue on specifics
If this had come out in 2014-2016 as a successor to Skyrim it’d be one of the best games,
LOL nah, it’d be shat on like FO4 was. Maybe not as heavily, because it didn’t opt for voicing the protagonist, but sure as hell wouldn’t be called “one of the best games”.
Idk I find starfeild could even be a downgrade in some way, no ai habits like shop keepers must be on a meth bindge as they never leave they’re stores, the openish world is gone, in one lengthy mission I’d see 5/6 loading screens, usually when going from planet to planet then into the city then to do the objective then repeat in reverse.
i don’t understand how they could ship the game with more than 1 featureless gray rock planet, the interesting environments is the bread and butter of bethesda games and the one thing you’ve been able to rely on enjoying even if you find everything else to be garbage!
While the subsystem of 5e isn’t my favorite, Baldur’s Gate 3 has an insanely good RPG system and every sidequest feels pretty unique. No radiant quests like 2077 or Bethesda games Sure, the sex scenes could be a bit better, and I’d like more dialog once you become the best of friends with people, but it’s still amazingly deep with great voice acting and tidbits of stories in various places and situations.
I recommend it if you haven’t played it yet! It’s definitely my game of the year.
I’m not against patents in general but looking at the list of specific insanity-induced hallucinations being patented this whole thing is ridiculous. This is on the level of being able to patent giving your restaurant guests cutlery. How is any designer supposed to keep track of which specific micro events are patented like this.
I am against all game design patents in general. You shouldn’t be able to file a patent on game mechanics, like no movie director could have filed a patent on, say, the idea of sequence shot.
Game content (art, characters, etc) is already protected by copyright. Patents have absolutely no business in this.
Wholly agreed. In general the concept that “you can’t patent an idea” or “you can’t patent a general concept” is supposed to be at the heart of patent law. I think some of these game mechanics parents, like this and the Nemesis System, go against that too much.
Sure we all agree but the dumbshits making the rules 1) Have no idea about technology older than color television and 2) Are really only interested in preserving corporate profitability
If you invented a new and novel method of painting, like Jackson Pollock’s, you could potentially patent that. Directionally brushing has imperial buttloads of prior literal art.
If every game had patented everything that they came up with, we probably wouldn’t have reached 1000 total games by now.
Some early game would probably patent “revealing more of the world as you move horizontally/verrically” and we would probably be confined to a single screen for every other game for decade.
Then some other game would patent “using an input source to move a gun’s aim/targetting on the screen” and we would never have had any fps. A “first person view” would probably be patented soon too. Leveling up? What a cool concept that I wish more than one game ever used.
At best, companies would all be paying licenses to each other for all of those mechanics - just like it works on hardware today where Samsung (for example) for a long time made a ton of money out of their main competitor’s sales. And games would probably be so expensive that a lot of them could even have their own dedicated hardware made specifically for them, without affecting the final price that much.
Modern day Nintendo would surely enjoy that. They could make gimmicky hardware for specific games and simply call it a toy. Games like Guitar Hero would probably only be playable on toy guitars (as some other game would’ve already patented translating basic inputs into something rhythm related).
In a way I could see some pretty cool games being invented for a while in this parallel reality, with the patent restrictions forcing people to think of new stuff like the hardware restrictions used to do last century - but we would never had Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Rimworld, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress and 99% of the most beloved games out there.
Yeah well when the copyright courts agreed to Namco’s patent on loading screen minigames it kind of freaked everyone out back then and people patented every dumbshit thing. For a short time Amazon tried to patent the single click purchase
Outside of the very specific cases of Palworld and WB’s notorious Nemesis System, you probably can just ignore the patents and do whatever you want, many of these are filed for self protection rather than to enforce them.
Metroid Zero Mission’s Mother Brain fight is patented, it literally is about shooting the player when they make line of sight with the Brain eye, besides being utterly ridiculous to have something like this patented, you don’t see anyone going to court over this.
I think the big problem is when companies apply for patents but never utilize them. In my ideal world, patents should quickly expire and opened to the public if they aren’t being used. Like, what’s the point of protecting your idea if you have no intention to use it anytime soon?
That could deal with the patent troll problem as well.
Yeah I’m not against patents in general because it’s meant to allow the company or individual a chance to be only one on the market so they can recoup rnd costs instead of someone else coming in and undercutting them immediately.
The issue is they last too long. Especially idea ones like this for software. 5 years is what it should be around about.
What the point is? To cripple your competition. Nintendo is actively discouraging game development. If Nintendo was a human they would be garbage. Since they’re not human, everyone who choose to work for them is garbage.
what really bugs me are fighting games with dlc characters. i know fighting games arent as profitable, but twenty years ago you could unlock every character by actually playing the game. locking content behind paywalls are a slap to poor gamers. that’s on top of a $60 price tag
This has been disproven and was called out at the time of the increase. Games cost less to develop now than ever. Microtransactions and recurrent subscription transaction1s like battlepasses mean a shit game gets to live longer than it would deserve. People have careers in the field and languages common to the industry - this isn’t a “new and groundbreaking” industry - its one of the largest on the planet.
Studios are absolutely not passing any of that $10 to lower level staff. It was to see if the market would bear it, and no other reason - and corporate defenders came out of the woodwork to pretend BILLION dollar corporations need more money. If videogames were too expensive to make, they’d not be spending so much, now would they?
It’s interesting actually. There are both games with insane budgets that cost more that than triple A games in years past and incredible tooling and assets available for very modest amounts of money + incredibly powerful computers very little. It’s possible for some games to be made for less than ever before AND some to be made for more.
Has the distribution gone up though? If the quantity of games being sold has increased the companies are making just as much even though games are “cheaper.”
Imo. That’s the big argument in this debate that doesn’t get discussed. The reach has increased so prices could come down as more units are sold and the company would get the same amount of money.
20 years ago, they sold every Street Fighter three times with more characters in each new iteration. Microtransactions suck, but simple DLC is a less shitty than what used to be normal.
They did milk the fuck out of that, I’ll grant you.
But at the same time you couldn’t take them online and end up playing somebody who’d got the latest one and have to fight new characters you’d have no access to.
Fighting games started in coin operated arcade cabinets that were intentionally designed to be such a pain in the ass to beat that people would dump heaps of money into them just to keep playing. Same deal with games that were released in the days that youd rent them for a week. The difficulty was set so high that it was very unlikely that you could beat the game in that week so you would end up renting them another week or two.
The gaming industry has been filled with greedy fuck policies from the beginning and the only thing that has changed is how they are greedy fucks.
Yeah, I noticed this with mortal Kombat on snes. Every time I played the single player campaign, I’d win one fairly easily, then I’d lose to the next guy. Then I’d use a continue and beat that guy fairly easily and lose to the next one. Repeat until I run out of continues, with the occasional upset of the pattern (extra win or loss).
As the article says, since his comments were run through machine translation, it’s possible they’re meant more in jest rather than seriously. I’ll keep a charitable perspective on this until we learn more.
Since last night, I’ve seen a lot of strong dissatisfaction and frustration in players’ comments - often expressed humorously or ironically, which made me laugh,"
Jest or not, this one statement is irresponsible because this will only serve to encourage bad and toxic behavior and you know that’s how immature gamers will take it, as condoning their behavior.
No the OP did not. I’m literally saying tone does not matter and even if it was a flippant remark, gamers will take that as approval of their bullshit behavior.
Let’s face it, gamers are all too often immature assholes, Westerner, Easterners, wherever.
Then that would be the gamers’ fault, not the producer’s. They’re not responsible for how their comment may not only be taken out of context but also translated in a disadvantageous way.
This is based on a shit article from the shitrag “TheGamer” that calls 500 players downvoting a game a movement. There’s 1,4B people in China, 500 votes don’t even register. TheGamer is a clickbait/ragebait shitrag that weaponises xenophobia/culture wars/ignorace to generate traffic. They are the precise example of the enshitification of the Internet. Veritable parasites.
I got heavily downvoted for pointing out “TheGamer” as a poor source of gaming journalism in a post specifically linking to that article. So I guess that tells me everything I need to know about Lemmy?
Those are usually locked away behind command lines and they don’t test with random chance or such. You trigger the things directly. Realistically what probably happened is some engineer wrote the system slightly wrong and no one caught it. Possibly maybe a designer requested the romance to be more prominent and the solution on engineering side was to tweak a value. It’s be surprised if anyone changes hard coded values for QA. It’s not the 90s anymore where qa is the engineering team.
You can't take it back. What you can do is have a trademark of sorts and sue anyone using it without your permission for damages, which if won, is a lot more than it would have cost them to just pay the sub.
Meh that sucks. There was a mod for ME3 that gave Miranda more of a role and it used the voice files from the game as source material for AI training for dialogue in the mod. Having that be hampered because of some DRM loicense so the Hollywood people can buy more mansions isn’t something I’d like to see.
The actors better start setting that shit up, because in a few short years only voice actors with work will be the ones leasing their voice. But give it 20 and they want even need them either. They have deep fakes that are just as good. Fucking sad we all love the robots taking our jobs, but we meant Fucking hard labor and factory work not the arts.
Let robots that don’t experience emotions or pain take away the dangerous, backbreaking stuff. Not the safe jobs people do because they love them. Whose idea was this in the first place? Why the arts anyways, I thought “starving artist” was a phrase for a reason, is there really that much money to be made here?
Art is incredibly valubable, other than wars most of the stuff we remember about past situations is some kind of art (statues, stories, graffiti) Artists on the other than have no percieved value whatsoever.
That’s my thinking. I can imagine a live service game needing about 10 new lines from a character every few months, and depending on the hassle of recording studios, AI could be great for that - IF it can be set up in such a way that its use is only applied with permission of the actor who created the voice. They’d also have the right to refuse AI voicing for that session, provided they give a reasonable plan for in-person recording.
My friend told me about this earlier and that’s exactly what I thought. They knew this wouldn’t be popular and would drop the value so they sold before the announcement, that’s got to be insider trading
Now the share price will drop and he will buy his share back at a discount. Then they will revert the policy and share prices will rise. Boom! Free monies!
I think the part where they had a trend of selling over the course of a year makes this not insider trading (or harder to prove if they were playing the long game).
They probably have automated sell of dates or automated sell of prices.
This is part of a consistent pattern over the last year.
He probably hasn’t bought any stocks due to receiving stock as part of his employment contract.
It could be insider trading, but considering how companies have been doing pricing structures and rapid shifts from free to subscription based and then seeing sales/profit increase I imagine it’s worth it for them to simply keep the stock long term, but an initial sell off was put in place at a certain price. Sometimes there’s smoke and there’s fire, and sometimes it’s just simply the fumes of capitalism creating a system that’s uniquely imbalanced for everyone else, but isn’t really insider trading.
I feel like a scheduled sell shouldn’t mean insider trading investigation is off the table.
Does it really matter if they decided to sell just before they devalue their company, or they devalued their company right after a sell? They knew about both before hand, and they can have the same intent either way.
I suppose, but that’s a different crime under a different statute Im guessing. (Tanking the company because gou have a scheduled sell, versus selling because you tanked the company.)
They’ve been consistently selling off stock for the last year as noted in the article. Many of these execs get paid in a combination of cash and shares. To get their full wage they sell shares.
No, as the article says they’ve been doing it all year. Many execs and important employees often get paid a big chunk of their wage in stock. To get cash they need to sell stock.
Or the people who care about it already have it. It doesn’t have archaic controls or graphics or whatnot, so the need to buy a new version is way lower than the likes of a Resident Evil remake.
Yep! I would be much more interested in a Braid 2 rather than a remake of a game I already own and enjoy. I actually didn’t realize until writing this comment that Braid Anniversary Edition even had more puzzles than the original.
He should have called it “Braid+” or “Braid 1.5” or something. “Anniversary Edition” makes it sound like I’m just going to pay to replay the same puzzles I already figured out a decade ago but with minor cosmetic changes. Forty new levels is fairly substantial.
I don’t seem how threatening to brick a device is intended to help you sell more of them. Like I was seriously considering buying a Switch 2 even recently, but this is really the nail in the coffin. Why should I pay money for something that could stop working on their whims? Because it’s not like these measures have been 100% accurate in the past.
Because it’s not like these measures have been 100% accurate in the past.
This is the part that really frustrates me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the wording here. Account ban? Sure, against TOS, etc. But affecting the device is a whole other story. Especially when prior account bans have come under dubious circumstances.
They won’t give the first shit about piracy policies or anything like that, but they’ll care that MummyD123s DH bought their DD an electric brick that won’t keep them quiet any more.
Right, children are known for being well behaved and following the rules…
I remember as a child playing 2 player Tetris on the original Gameboy, which required a cable connecting the two devices. I figured out if I watched my opponent’s height indicator on my screen and saw it drop suddenly I could unplug the cable from my device and not get sent the extra lines. It was a cheat and an exploit that I stumbled upon because I was curious what would happen. That “I wonder what would happen” attitude can now apparently cause Nintendo to purposely brick the device.
You haven’t met a pre teen. You’re also ignoring the problem of false positives.
“It doesn’t matter how strict the punishment is, only criminals will be punished” only works if only criminals are punished. There’s plenty of stories of accounts being banned when no rules were broken.
It only takes one, and they’re not going to admit to their mum that they tried taking it apart or installing some dodgy stuff on it. Once word gets out they can be “randomly” bricked they’ll stop selling so well.
There’s also the risk that it’ll actually get randomly triggered.
idk I dont see that issue specifically, I see the issue of them choosing the vulnerable customers (families with pre-teen children) over the conscious ones (gaming etusiasts who are less likely to choose nintendo first and if so then better be a diehard cultist)
but a lil kid who cant even control mario in mario kart without the auto drive assists…? idk how this little guy would install or screw open a console xd
Even with the critical slant of applies to the gameplay of these “games” this article still ultimately neglects to describe the biggest problem with the “play to earn” aspect, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t work.
The article describes the notional highs and lows of these tokens, but overlooks the fact that trading volume is far more important than a hypothetical trade price.
If one person buys one of these utterly useless tokens for 10 cents, that sets the price at 10 cents. But if I then try to cash out a thousand dollars of that same token, I’m probably not going to get a thousand dollars, because that requires there to be someone on the other side of great trade who thinks its actually worth putting a thousand dollars into this otherwise useless token.
To make matters worse, crypto prices are generally set by crypto trades. What I mean by that is that the person who bought one token for ten cents, actually didn’t. They traded fifty BLOB tokens, notionally worth ten cents. What can you do with BLOB tokens? Nothing, they’re worthless, they were made for a game that doesn’t even exist anymore. The guy who owned those fifty BLOB tokens got them by trading a bunch of POOP tokens for them. Those are from a DAO that has since collapsed, they’re worthless too. He bought those POOP tokens with a fraction of a DOGE coin, which he got from selling an airdropped Bad Monkey NFT that he was lucky enough to get one time (and even luckier to sell before the rug pull).
See the problem? It’s all people trading Monopoly dollars for Game of Life dollars and arguing over the exchange rate. At no point did a real US dollar enter this process. So when you try to sell your BLOB tokens for real US dollars, no one is buying. The notion that people in developing nations will make a lining playing these games is a complete fantasy.
At the end of every exchange, someone has to be left “holding the bag”. There’s no end state that doesn’t end up screwing over someone else so you can cash out.
While trading in general is zero sum, if you believe the product you’re trading has intrinsic value, then no one needs to be holding a bag.
If I sell you a car and you get to use the car, you wouldn’t be holding the bag, because you wanted the car. This applies to stocks, and stock derivatives, as well as commodities.
The problem arises when there isn’t an intrinsic value (or the intrinsic value is very small), such as with NFTs or many cryptos in general.
There are cryptos that have some intrinsic value like monero, since they have fungibility and a use case, but most do not.
The big problem is that it trivially easy to make new tokens, and give them the appearance of a market with fake liquidity. I know people think Smart Contracts are a real innovation, but 99.999999% of the time they are just used to make more crappy tokens.
Crypto advocates say it’s security comes from the network effect of all the nodes working on extending the blockchain, but that security is of little value if it enables scams on higher layers.
Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.
An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.
The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.
The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.
I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.
In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.
The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.
Although somewhat unrelated, I thought this excerpt from the article was interesting and sad.
Asked in an interview if he regrets Balatro’s success, he replied: "Honestly, yeah. Don’t get me wrong - this has changed my life in a lot of amazing ways. I’m so grateful. But I do miss that time before. It was just a hobby that recharged my batteries. Sometimes I think, ‘Maybe I would’ve been happier if I had never released this game to the public.’
The guy has all the resources to rekindle that flame by organizing game jams for example. I am sure he‘ll think much more positively about the whole thing a couple years from now when he realized opportunities granted by his success. Either that or he’ll go down the Notch route but I don’t think he’ll be that kind of stupid rich.
Yeah, but his way to relax and get away from stress was to code. Organizing game jams is a whole other world of stress. The different level of stress is like that Mitchell Hedburg joke, “You’re a great chef! Can you farm?”
If you remain fixated on the idea that your way to relax is gone, you’ll never be able to find a new way. Life changes, for good and bad. It’s on us to make the best of it.
Don’t feel sad for them! They have now reached a point in life where they get to ask these kind of what if questions and no longer need to work. I love the game they built, and hopefully if they still feel down they have to time and resources now to seek help (i.e. therapy).
Eh, EA can certainly be a problem, but it’s also an incredibly useful resource for devs operating in good faith, opening up the field for talent that would otherwise be priced out of making a game at all. Personally, I’m ok ignoring money grabs if it means the barrier of entry for resource starved talent is lowered.
Manor Lords is early access. At least one patch is to be expected. And of course the publisher is absolutely right. If my memory serves me well one dev developed the game all on his own so far and the challenge of meeting expectations after being a massive success is huge. Hiring more people to get developments going is likely necessary but expanding takes time. Some players have unrealistic expectations in general but even more so when it comes to small indie productions.
I just had flashbacks to Dead State. It was a AA title written by one of the guys from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines so I was watching it closely during development.
Suddenly, it went from EA to full release. I was surprised, but picked it up without reading many reviews.
I enjoyed the game and put maybe 15 hours into it, but then I had to move and had to pack up my PC for a few weeks. By the time I got settled and booted it up, it had gotten a massive patch which fixed a ton of bugs, filled in missing content like item descriptions and a bunch of other polish that would typically be done during pre-launch.
Meanwhile, one of the devs had gotten into a high profile pissing match with the community over accusations they had rushed it out the door. I normally try to sympathize with devs over a reactive community, but I couldn’t help feel like I got punished for buying the game at launch and experiencing those relatively non-replayable opening hours in a non-optimal (Dead) state.
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