There used to be an unspoken contract with game developers and gamers:
“I’ll release a finished game that you will never need to talk to me again if you don’t want to, and you can play it on any offline computer that meets the minimum specs. You will pay $X one-time for this and expect $0 spent on this game ever again”
“I may release an expansion pack for this game at some point in the future. It will usually cost 10% to 30% of what you paid for the original game. You are NOT required to buy this. If you like the original game the way it is, keep playing it that way. If you are a new player, you will have to buy the base game and then the expansion pack to play expansion pack content”
“I may, in the future, release a stand-alone sequel to the game. This game will have the same themes as the original, but I will increase the quality of the graphics/length of story/sound. You will NOT be required to buy the original game or the expansion packs to play this game. You will pay full price for this finished game”
Somewhere that evolved into shipping unfinished games, subscription based games, battlepasses, endless DLC, loot boxes, and forced online connections for single player games.
The game studios broke the contract. If they want endless money, that comes with endless work.
The contract was broken as soon as devs and publishers started pushing the digital download lies, because if you buy the game digitally they wont have to pay for shipping, boxes, manuals, cds, storage, etc etc etc, so the games will cost less and the devs/pubs will still manage to make more money on it than they ever would have otherwise!
and now we have 70-80 dollar charges for the standard, base version of games, with triple digits for the super mega special elite deluxe ultra edition. And you don’t even get to own the fucking game, cause sony and ubisoft have both shown zero issue with going into your account and removing things you’ve bought.
You highlight another point in the unspoken contract:
“After you buy the game, you can play it for as long as you own it with $0 additional dollars spent. At any point in the future you’re welcome to sell your copy of the game for whatever someone will pay you for it. That new buyer will be able to play the game forever paying $0 additional dollars.”
Which is what digital downloads was actually all about.
Killing the second hand market in the belief and hope that those people buying the used copy for 5 bucks, will come to the dev/pub directly and spend the 60 bucks on it brand new.
That’s why I’m really glad to see Hooded Horse and Greg Styczeń have this mindset, and that they’re actually speaking out against the GaaS mentality. They’re going back to the unspoken contract and saying the current status quo is stupid.
The headline is poorly chosen. They aren’t saying that studios should be earning endless money without work. They’re saying the GaaS model to try and earn endless money is putting devs on a treadmill, and that this shouldn’t be the case.
I hope to see more like this going forward. I don’t think gamers nor developers are a fan of GaaS trying to stay constantly relevant.
Because it is a much safer investment to send out a 50% costed demo to see if you can break into the market then trickle out updates to make up the rest of the cost
If your demo doesn’t land then you’ve saved half the cost of a full project that would fail anyway
While I agree with this for bigger game companies the problem is people apply the attitude of deserving infinite content to smaller games as well even if they don’t participate in all the things you talked about. For example with Manor Lord the only thing from what was listed that might apply is it being unfinished since it’s in early access. And while that does come with an expectation of more content the speed people expect it at is wrong especially since this game is basically being made by one person.
And while that does come with an expectation of more content the speed people expect it at is wrong especially since this game is basically being made by one person.
I appreciate the solo developer, and that they are doing most everything else right, but he opened this can of worms because he sold early access. He could have chosen to wait until the game was finished to release it, but I imagine wanted the money up front from early access to help finance the development.
If you release unfinished, you open yourself up to your customers wanting it finished, and also wanting a say in how it gets developed. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a right to sell via early access, but he brought this on himself.
I genuinely just don’t understand the value proposition of this handheld. It’s remote play only, with no standalone capabilities, that also only works with the PS5. You could use your existing phone, and receive exactly the same product. Or if you’re committed to buying a handheld, you could absolutely get a Steam Deck, still receive the remote functionality, but also have a system that can not only play your PC games, but play like 5 generations of console games from the past
It’s good for a niche market, people who have multiple people living in the house where they have to share a TV, but don’t need to share the PlayStation. In that one niche it makes sense to me
I think that niche might be bigger and more normal than you think it is.
Why a handheld if 99% of people don’t want to use it outside of the house and just want a home-portsble
Edit to just point out how disappointed I am in this community lately. It’s become all the things that made me dislike reddit. The circlejerk here is just as strong, and all the discussions we had initially are gone in favor of updooting my opinion and downdooting everyone else.
Agreed, people on here can’t seem to understand how this product could be successful? Every post about it on here has the same upvoted comments about how people should get a Steam Deck instead. If someone comments about why they like it or are happy with it, it gets downvoted.
Personally I probably won’t ever buy one of these but to act like your opinion about something as unimportant as a this is better than everyone else’s screams of reddit to me. Why not just let people be happy with their purchase?
Yeah it was odd to read that description being presented as an oddity - that sounds like most households I know. If you have a wife, kids, or roommate and don’t enjoy being holed up in your own room the whole time you play (and those sharing your house don’t just want to watch you game all night) then in house streaming is a huge boon.
I PC game, but most of my gaming is done on the couch, streamed onto my phone. I’ve been very tempted to buy a dedicated streaming device lately to avoid draining my phone battery while playing
It’s an oddity because there’s already multiple devices in most homes that can remote play, paying for a device that can ONLY remote play is about the stupidest waste of money I can think of when I have two phones, a PC, a laptop and a tablet that can all do the same thing. Hell if you plug in an ethernet cable the PC and laptop well do it better.
It could have been a cool device if you could use it to stream from PS+/Now, but you can’t. It could be cool if it had like a vita in it or something so you could play vita games, but it didn’t. It’s an idea with potential, but they shoved all that potential in a bin and instead released something that’s completely useless unless it’s connected to your PS5. What a waste.
It’s completely useless, unless you want to play your ps5 in the same kind of way you play a nintendo switch. In which case it works super well.
it turns out a lot of people want that. People could stick a laptop on their lap and get out a controller and play nintendo switch on that too, but that’s a pain. people just want a thing they can pick up. and they are happy to have it. even if you are angry about it.
There’s multiple devices that allow you to play your PS5 like a Switch, and they all do more.
I’m not angry, you can have opinions about things you’re not angry about. I’m disappointed that Sony charged as much as possible for the bare minimum again, just a lack of ambition and abundance of cost.
we all think that it costs too much don’t worry, but also you should understand the value proposition it has. people are paying “too much” because it serves a real function.
no, we don’t want to hogtie a controller to a phone, we want the nice ergonomics of a playstation controller all built together. it’s worth understanding that value.
Edit to just point out how disappointed I am in this community lately. It’s become all the things that made me dislike reddit. The circlejerk here is just as strong, and all the discussions we had initially are gone in favor of updooting my opinion and downdooting everyone else.
This has been Lemmy wide and growing substantially. I’m put off and disappointed as well.
Both of you had too lofty dreams for social media. Reddit itself used to be like that too, by convincing themselves that this sort of idealistic attitude could last, or that “circlejerk”, that is, the influence of majority opinion, was ever not present. This is a place for discussion among regular people, not a philosophical symposium of specialists, as if those environments were truly neutral and universally accepting either.
As platforms grow beyond the most invested niche users, most people will not put more energy into any discussion than a general agree or disagree. The tendency of downvotes is always to become a disagree button, no matter how much one might insist otherwise. In such a semi-anonymous platform, a modicum of politeness is already an achievement.
Really, if you do want to have such a perfectly open and supportive discussion group you might want to select particular people to create a small forum. But by doing that, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you won’t escape some form of circlejerk.
The good people seem to have left, maybe as a result of the reddit people coming in?
Or maybe as a result of poor moderation. The way how other instances defederated from lemmy.world comes to mind. Compared to the other instances I am in, this one seems more belligerent, and that’s not a matter of up or downvotes.
I have to admit I did come from reddit, but if there was a moment of pure, 100% jerk free discussion here, I must have entirely missed it. Then again I was on reddit before people started saying circlejerk took over, and in retrospect that was an entirely idealized memory. If anything, it overrepresented certain viewpoints far more before the “circlejerk took over”
Dunno why you stretched that point across so many words. I’m not speaking on just downvotes. There’s trigger words that will almost universally get you comment bombed along with being downvoted. We filtered everyone of the same mind from Reddit and brought them here. To the point that Reddit could theoretically be better now.
Funny how they pretend to ask a question, then downvote you when you give them an answer they don’t like.
It’s also half the price of the SD with a bigger resolution screen (bUt mUh oLEd). I pick it up, press like 2 buttons, and I’m playing in 20 sec. I was happy to pay for the convenience, have been using it a lot since I got it the day after the release.
Honestly when it drops to $150 or so, I’m in. Mostly for these same reasons. I use the PS5 on the good TV, but if I wanna be in the room with my partner while they watch a trash reality show, and keep working on my game, this is perfect. At $200, I’ll stick with remote play on Android and a Bluetooth controller, but the Portal seems better for this use case. So when the price is low enough… Sure.
Lol, would love to hear why on earth this is downvoted - guess we’re in full on reddit mode and just downvoting everything that isn’t exactly what I think lol
Get some glue and make a holder or something. Bigger screen? Use a tablet, laptop, or PC that you’ve probably already got. £200 for a device that can’t do anything on its own? Stop bending over for them.
Yeah, and convenience used to be putting multiple different functions in one device. Now apparently it’s more convenient to pay £200 for a device that can literally only do one thing instead of using the many other devices you already own to conveniently do the same thing.
No I’m disappointed they didn’t make a worthwhile device. I would’ve loved this if it had some worthwhile additions, but it’s an overpriced screen with a controller attached, useless without your PS5 connected to it wirelessly.
Even just streaming from PS+/Now would’ve done it for me, but “here’s a way to play games you already own that are installed on the console you already own, but it costs £200 and you could do the same thing with many of the devices you already own, some of which may have an ethernet connection, so they’re better at it” just feels like a waste.
Hopefully it’ll get hacked and they’ll get gamepass streaming on it or something.
It’s just a $200 pro controller with a screen. I don’t think it’s gonna have a massive market, but for what it is, it’s not entirely terrible. Not everyone has a phone with a large screen so upgrading to a $1k phone is not a move they can make, but $200 for what’s basically an extra controller with an 8in display is not terrible just very niche.
Edit: If you just want a screen controller combo for streaming, there are a myriad of android based options littered in the space for nearly the same cost and similar screen size.
Don’t get me wrong I’m sure it’ll find a small market, it just could’ve had a bigger one with comparatively little effort and now the device it could’ve been will never exist. I had hopes for this as I’d expected it to stream from Now, but it just doesn’t for no reason beyond “CBA” really.
The thing is they are only targeting that small market for PS5 gamers, they don’t want to compete in the handheld market and possibly loose those customers who would be happy with just a ps5 remote play experience vs a better more expensive device. I get it, they don’t have to have as many competitors and it makes it slightly cheaper versus the non dedicated competitors giving them a niche area to sell to.
Yeah, and convenience used to be putting multiple different functions in one device
Yeah, I always use my Swiss army knife in the kitchen, way more convenient than using my chef’s knife, because it combines so many functions.
Convenience is often a tool that does one thing and does it really well. Combining multiple functions almost always complicates things.
I used to own a combination microwave/oven/steamer/grill that I replaced with a simple microwave, as I rarely if ever used any of those other functions. Guess which one is more convenient to use?
Compare a simple black and white laser printer with an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax combo an tell me which one is more convenient.
I’d say the printer/scanner/fax combo is more convenient the second you either need to scan something or find yourself in the 1980s and need to send a fax.
It’s kinda absurd to think Sony can’t put more than one feature into this £200 device without over complicating it. There’s no reason it couldn’t stream from PS Now, all the hardware it needs is already there. It’s just the bare minimum and much of the potential was squandered.
They do sell like $5 phone clips for controllers now a days as some mobile games are adding more controller support. But if for you an extra inch or two of screen real estate for the display is worth $200 then that’s your position, it just seems like the market share for that will be pretty damn niche. Like the nvidia shield I don’t expect it to be around for to long so if you do want this you better get one while they make em but know once the ps5 is done support for this will die out as well.
My phone is nearly a 7in screen, I could Bluetooth connect a Playstation controller and have the exact same functionality, using the hardware I already have. I get that if you don’t have a phone with a bigger screen then this becomes more of a proposition as getting a newer device with a larger screen is gonna be north of $1k USD, so spending $200 to get a portable display and extra controller in a sense is not that bad value wise. I do see where people are seeing it being wasteful as other devices are capable just not at the same level, the only thing I’m wondering is how big is the market of people who wouldn’t rather get a $5 phone holder for their ps5 controller and just use their phone. I see a couple people in this thread here but if most realized they could get a similar experience for $5 for a plastic phone clip would this really look as enticing?
Correct but that screen real-estate isn’t the biggest issue as you generally have the phone and controller fairly close to your eyes, at an optimal viewing distance. Plus, I can stream up to 4k on my device or 1080p at 120fps if I wanted to stream from my pc. Think monitor vs TV gaming. Viewing distance is much more important than screen size on its own.
Most of my games are on PlayStation. The Steam Deck is clearly the more powerful and capable device, but it is also more expensive and I have no need for any of the extra features. I love the ergonomics of the PS Portal (even though it looks silly), the haptics, the huge screen, and it all comes with a seamless integration into the PlayStation ecosystem. Plus there is no need to take the case off of my phone every time I want to play it unlike the Backbone.
It’s definitely not for everyone but they call it a DadStation for a reason ☺️.
You are right. Even though I’ve had an absolute blast using the PS Portal daily ever since i got it I have made the difficult decision to return it because the internet told me that it’s actually not good.
Prehaps an ayn loki zero might be up your valley as its a full fledged budget steamdeck type pc for the same price as a ps portal this might be perfect for you as you could have playstations desktop streaming app installed and some desktop games that’ll run on the meager loki zeros hardware I hear it does a good job emulating games upto ps2 games
This again is why modern gamers are just fucking impossible to please. Bethesda gives you BOTH options. If you need to get to a planet from one solar system to another, you CAN just press a button and be on that other planet, or in its orbit if you haven’t been on it yet.
But that’s just it, you CAN instead pull up your starmap once that mission is active, see the star you’re at, and all the little dots youll follow to get where you’re going. You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission. Doing this, you’ll often get sidetracked with another mission, the choice is yours. They dumbed down interstellar travel as hard as they could without it no longer resembling what interstellar travel would be like.
I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do, and the fast travel is just for people who want to level/“beat” the game quickly as its own end instead of taking it all in, possibly and understandably due to player time constraints.
Fast travel is a convenience feature. People would be bitching if it wasn’t in there. Sometimes you just want to zip back to Whiterun Diamond City New Atlantis to sell some crap.
I think (for me atleast) the larger issue is the fact that I have to engage a cut-scene to land on a planet. I don’t have an issue with a loading screen in order to get into the system, or even just outside of the planets atmosphere, but it’s kinda weak that I also have a loading screen when landing.
It’s not really “both” from a space simulator perspective. There’s no option to fly down to a planet and skim the surface, there’s no option to fly from planet to planet without a loading screen (or even just to a moon), etc.
Starfield is a good RPG set in space and I’m enjoying it, but I think it’s fair to criticize that it was marketed like it was going to be a space sim by Bethesda and that’s not really what we got. If you were excited about the simulator part you are going to be disappointed.
I really have no idea where anyone got the idea it was a space sim from. They showed a good bit of gameplay that made it very clear that it was a traditional Bethesda game, with much more modern mechanics, set in space.
The issue would be believing anything not explicitly said or shown in a pre release showcase. You don't expect anything not extremely, extremely obvious or you just let yourself down and then blame the studio for underdelivering.
A bunch of that is of course the fault of marketing itself, but this goes for almost anything marketed ever, beyond video games.
I got a slightly better (though slightly harder to run on steam deck) version of what I expected after watching the direct. It's exactly what I wanted it to be.
It's just silly how people turn unsubstantiated wild speculation into some kind of unmet feature set.
I mean, there are parts of the game's major criticisms that are understandable and do impact the game experience in a way. The worst one for me is the lack of a local map. I've gotten lost in cities or complexly laid out buildings a number of times already, which is, suffice to say, not enjoyable and nigh on unforgivably clumsy to experience repeatedly.
I'll forgive, or even enjoy, say, Dark Souls for the same thing because it's not as complicatedly laid out and the world is smaller and much more visually distinct in its areas to make it up on the back end, along with the entire design ethos being very hands off in terms of delivering info to the player, which sets a standard compared to Starfield's polished to a sheen experience, which suddenly becomes less so in other spots, creating a negative contrast.
Others, like the lack of seamless planet to space transitions were never advertised, and though having them certainly increases immersion, visual spectacle, and thus perceived enjoyment and value of a game, is not really important in the grand scheme unless you wrongly expected it. I don't have enough time to worry about a planet transition, I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do there and what I'm gonna do next within the gameplay itself. With this sort of criticism, the game would be undoubtedly better with such a feature if it wouldn't have delayed development too significantly to implement, which no one can really say for sure.
Then there are criticisms like the fact that planets are limited in scale and you can't fly your ship close to the ground on the surface, which is just wildly beyond the scope of what Bethesda would be able to deliver and still say it's the same game. That would've been so complex it would've sacrificed other features undoubtedly, and shows more about a given player's desire for "Starfield 2: We Added all That Space Sim Stuff People Wanted that we couldn't before because we'd end up like Star Citizen" than it really does about Starfield's successes or failures in the features it explicitly attempted to deliver.
Back to the reviewers primary issue that in a traditional Bethesda game you experience the journey of going from one place to another, at least for the first time. Starfield has none of that. You never experience the journey of traveling to a new location, you just teleport. So effectively you are constantly disoriented, with no Tru sense of scale or journey.
It’s not a space sim and was never intended to be one. They made it clear almost a year ago that it didn’t have stuff like surface flying or atmo to space transitions. If you were still thinking it had this stuff at launch your weren’t paying attention.
The actual act of doing it gets old, but I do like the fact that you can't fast travel out of a situation in ED, it means if you go on a deep space expedition to make discovery money you are gonna be in DEEP SPACE, and you better be fucking prepared with a ship spec'd specifically for it because you do not want to turn around and give up because you couldn't fuel scoop or make a jump.
You definitely get a feeling of being a very small person in the galaxy with lots of things going on far away that you'll never see, and having limited fuel and constant frameshift jumps allows for more mechanics and complexity like fuel scooping or being interdicted.
Starfield lets you go wherever at a moment's notice which makes the galaxy feel very small comparatively and lacks stakes for exploration and jump range (along with the infinite fuel), reducing the need to have specialized ships. It also allows you to miss out on some random events that only happen when a ship in orbit with you hails you on comms. You miss those experiences if you fast travel past them all, which is echoed in other Bethesda titles with their own random encounters during travel that can be missed due to fast travel.
That being said, it's a Bethesda fantasy version of space, you want to do fun space opera things and having hardcore travel might clash with that, I can understand why it wasn't implemented that way. For example, no one mentions this, but I fucking LOVE bethesda's save system of saving the exact state of everything in the universe in that exact moment. Im a filthy save scummer and I love it. I like being able to save scum difficult space battles, and I don't think you can do that in most other hardcore space games, but I'm so grateful that I can here.
Maybe it’s because I’ve only just made it to Mars, but I didn’t know there was any other way to travel except for clicking and fast traveling. Click load click load click load planet. The tutorial tells you to do just that… is there something later on that says differently?
Hard disagree. For no other reason that it’s impossibly difficult to find/sort missions by proximity. You got one blue blip on the map or hud, maybe a white blip if it’s not active, but no options to make it active or to even find the mission in your mission list.
Not to mention, all travel is menu based. In space when you target a planet as your next destination, all it does is bring up the menu to fast travel to a location on that planet instead of… giving you the option to fly there yourself at warp speed.
Sure, you could do it one planet at a time instead of skipping systems… but it’s all the same experience You never truly experience the part of exploration involved in experiencing the space between origin and destination. So it might as well all just be exploration by menu, even if you pretend you aren’t.
I can agree that you absolutely can navigate without fast travel, but the whole design seems to be guiding you towards just fast traveling. From the menus always offering a “show on map” option, which then pulls up the prominent “land” prompt, to the fact that even fast traveling you’re apt to hit 4 loading screens completely killing any sense of continuity, and that only gets worse if you try to actually navigate.
It feels like a big series of set pieces broken up by a ton of liminal either loading screens or menus, depending on your preference of poison. I’ve never felt like I was discovering cool things, just going to the next set piece.
I don’t think fast travel is the problem. The problem is that there is an actual “exploration” part of the game, where you wander around planets scanning things and looking for points of interest, but it is by far the most boring part and I have not had much fun when interacting with it. There is nothing exciting to find, and it primarily rewards materials that I mostly haven’t had a lot of use for, because when I need something specific for research or crafting I can buy it at the store, because materials are nearly worthless in terms of credits.
The mini-dungeons and other points of interest you can find need to be way cooler for the wandering-around-on-planets to be worthwhile, and the actual exploration gameplay needs something more than walking across plains and hills in order to be interesting.
The best parts of the game are when you pretend it’s Fallout In Space and hang out in cities doing quests for randoms.
I mostly agree and have been defending it from haters recently myself. But there is one thing in the way of “You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission… I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do.”
Starfield is a “looter shooter RPG” like other Bethesda games. And like other Bethesda games, your time off-leash is limited by your inventory size, with valuable items dropping that take up to 10% of that or more a piece. Awkwardly, ship storage is just not that incredible, until/unless you either go all-in on outposts or all-in on megaships. Which means you do end up having to stop and go to a city often, probably the one with your next mission goal.
It’s not a huge gripe, but I think Bethesda has always used inventory to drive people back to populated centers to pick up quests.
Basically your choices with travel are “how many load screens do I want to see between here and my destination.” And that’s not really what anyone wants. It is not the same as being able to walk from Solitude to Dawnguard. Not even remotely close. You can’t even walk from settlement to settlement on a planet because they only ever have the one settlement.
I remember fondly playing overwatch 1 with my friends and sinking in hundreds of hours. If they wanted to break into the steam market they should have done it with the first one. Not with their lackluster, phoned in sequel. This was just stupid of them.
I loved Assassin's Creed 2, so I didn't bat an eye buying Brotherhood and Revelations as they had the same basic background. They were full price games and I played for about 15 to 20 hours on each. That's not much for full price. They were basically just new story lines for the main game.
Personally, I sometimes like when a game feels like just a new storyline (and map) for the same game. Sometimes I just want more of a good thing and don’t want to have to learn new mechanics or risk the game making things worse.
And since dev time is limited, I think in theory, this could mean more time could be spent on making the story missions perfect. But in practice, I don’t think that usually happens. Publishers would rather cheap out.
Lol when I first updated it the game didn’t replace my desktop icon so it was still saying overwatch 1 so yes just stupid patch that ruined a perfectly good game haven’t returned since
An update implies they changed something to the game. This was just an update to the monetization. A blatant pure cash grab sold as a sequel game. Its a travesty, and if they had any decency they’d scrap it, apologize, and release “Overwatch 2 A Realm Reborn” that is an actual legitimate sequel to the original game.
It seems better on launch with the nvidia driver for it than it was during the first open beta but I think they’re right with the overly aggressive culling and texture streaming causing issues. They said it’s still more than playable at 4k60 with my 3080ti and I’m having a blast
I updated my NVIDIA drivers to play and it broke display port support so I had to change the monitor cord to my motherboard display port and rollback drivers 😎
I think when all these famous studios were interesting, they still by inertia functioned the way people with actual skills founded them. I’m thinking of BioWare, Black Isle, Obsidian, but reading the history of any famous video game studio gives that impression. It was a rather personal business in 90s and early 00s, it seems.
Then the “professionals” came and started “fixing” everything, and something about today’s computing makes me personally deeply disgusted of anything advertised there.
I don’t want a shooter not better than a hundred Q3 clones, but taking 50GB disk space. I don’t even want it with “photorealistic” (no they aren’t) graphics. I don’t want CK3 because it’s slow and has too much bullshit happening, the secret of success is in quality of content more than amount, and more is not always better if a player gets bored with small events. I admit, I haven’t tried Hogwarts Legacy, put from what people say its open world is as useful as Daggerfall’s map the size of England, because most things on that map are all the same, though as a dungeon crawler Daggerfall is still better than typical modern game. And Star Wars - its Expanded Universe mostly came into existence in the 90s, it’s designed the way very convenient for all kinds of video games, or any entertainment and any secondary art at all, and George Lucas approached that theoretically before making the first movie (the “obscenely huge profits” part he may or may not have considered, but it came as a welcome bonus, I suppose), and still every modern time Star Wars game is just not interesting to me ; my favorite one is KotORII, so there is, of course, a gap between me and the majority, but it’s still baffling how didn’t they even try to make an X-Wing remake.
One can go on. People want to play interesting games. Very few people play games because of “more, better, wider” in ad. The whole idea of a game is to be interesting. It’s entertainment. It’s not “I’ve got a new iPhone and you don’t” dick size contest. Some game being very technically cool, but absolutely bullshit in gameplay, writing, UI design, character design, location design etc, - is not entertaining. Some other game being technically a visual novel (not necessarily), but with all those things done well, - it is entertaining.
So, making a good game doesn’t even require a lot of very competent and very stressed CS heroes working since dawn till dusk to the extent of their ability.
I live in the midst of something that can be very carefully called capitalism. It was called socialism once and then the “socialist administrators” did sort of a rebranding.
I think the big “issue” is that there’s a notable lag between loss of goodwill and loss of income/profit/value, and there’s an even bigger lag between trying to fix goodwill and returns on that. It makes it too hard for any profit-first company to get right.
External MBAs taking over running businesses will either result in this or making a billion dollar company through the heavy exploitation of their workers and the consumers. I think the vast majority are the former though.
Nah. TF2 is a shooter with 9 classes. People can double up on “soldier” for instance. A hero shooter has for one, a lot more classes / heroes (which comes from MOBAs), for two activated abilities on each hero which change the games significantly, and usually disables doubling up in competetive modes. You wouldn’t call Enemy Territory a hero shooter for instance.
Overwatch disabled doubling up well after launch, and only because they couldn’t or wouldn’t balance the game such that a 4 tank no DPS comp didn’t utterly cheese the game.
I think you can get there in TF2 when considering subclasses via weapons loadouts. Demoknight for instance is a completely different play style than normal pipe/sticky demoman.
I stand by my assessment that overwatch is essentially team fortress 2 with a limit of one player per class and fewer game modes.
I don’t know the name of the trope, but it’s like when a cover gets more popular than the original. Except the person doing the cover (blizzard) is a huge scumbag.
I mean, okay, people can claim that every fps is just Doom with extra steps, doesn’t make the distinction irrellevant though. Mobas are their own thing, they aren’t called RTS anymore. Same with hero shooters. Tf2 isn’t a hero shooter.
If you set the server config to limit one player per class, and set the max team size to like 8, you basically have a hero shooter. That’s not an unusual config- some servers were just like that for years.
What’s missing ? “Each class has two powers” is an extremely specific metric I don’t think is a requirement for hero shooters, and even if it was you have the unique grenades on top of the more obvious “he can build a sentry, he can turn invisible”.
You could maybe argue there aren’t enough classes, but I don’t buy that. As long as you have enough for everyone on the team to play something different, you’re good. The characters in TF2 certainly have personality.
I knew someone who got really upset when I compared overwatch to TF2, but I think it was because they were emotionally invested in overwatch and felt bad when I was like “it’s kind of like this much older game I like more”. Saying the thing they love is kind of a knockoff made them feel bad.
Anyway. To your point. I wouldn’t call tf2 a hero shooter first. It’s not the best representation of the genre, probably. But to my point, I still stand by overwatch added very little on top of TF2. Most of Blizzard’s changes were changes in minor detail. It’s basically "more classes, fewer game modes, you can’t run your own server, and we’re going to try to sell you micro transactions "
A lot of games do mocap on the face but what strikes me most about BG3 is how much body language the characters use. They aren’t an emotive head on a stiff body switching between obvious static poses. Dame Aylin isn’t just shouting at me she’s leaning into it, arms up, fists clenched and shaking. It really adds a lot to the character performances.
Astarion's mocap in particular is just excellent. He's so deeply weird and it's completely appropriate. I love how during most normal gameplay, his whole body is constantly on the edge between breaking into raucous laughter or total exasperation. Kudos to the actor(s) and techs that put the whole package together.
I knew having a Lucifer type character would be one of the more entertaining features of having a vampire as a party member before I even knew he was a vampire
Similarly, I feel like they did a great job in Horizon: Forbidden West. A lot of the animations are rote, sure, but then there’s facial expressions, like Kotallo thinking about Zo’s abilities, that are just amazingly human.
Gaming has stepped up the production in recent years, and the standouts are obvious.
Saying “gaming has stepped up” while praising the most over-hyped, bland-ass open-world action series in recent history doesn’t lend much credibility to your comment.
Horizon hit a niche that hasn’t been beaten into the ground? An Ubisoft style open world game with far too many collectables and garbage to waste time?
It’s not treading new ground from a genre standpoint.
But the combat is a style that isn’t really very common in open world games, and the commenter you are replying to specifically was talking about the story, characters, and world building…all three of which set Horizon apart from other games, IMO.
Calling DnD bland always strikes me as funny. It's bland compared to most modern fantasy for the same reason Seinfeld is bland compared to most modern sitcoms: it's one of the the foundations upon which most of the rest of what we've consumed since its inception is built. We've seen all the innovations upon its formula, so going back to the original can feel lacking if you don't bother to think critically about why it feels that way.
The important thing is that even without all those innovations, they nailed the source material and created the richest experience they could within its boundaries. If it's not for you, it's not for you, and that's fine - no game is for everyone. But it's a pity you dismiss it so flippantly, and I hope one day you can grow to see what's executed well in a project even when its end goal isn't to your tastes. Or just grow out of trolling, whichever applies. I'm not going to pick that apart.
Oh, you might be right. That's even odder to me then; I haven't played any of the Horizon games myself, but I find their setting premise fascinating. Is it so poorly executed?
If I misunderstood, my bad, but I'll leave it since there are people who rant about BG3 in a similar direction.
I have to say that I played Horizon: Zero Dawn, and after the first couple hours it felt very samey. Basically a Ubisoft open-world game with slightly better movement and combat. Haven’t tried the new one, but I don’t think any open-world will ever really catch me again like Elden Ring did.
That's a pity. Still, the setting (time period/tech levels/world population composition etc) is worth taking away as something good that people can learn from, I hope, even if they messed it up so badly.
It took me several hours to get into HZD, but once it hit its stride it really hooked me. The opening few hours are quite weak, IMO. It takes that time for the story to start to reveal, and for the more deliberate pace of combat to make itself apparent.
I personally haven’t played Horizon myself; but from what I saw if it, it doesn’t look poorly made; it just looks by the numbers. Over the shoulder “cinematic” open world game with that Sony trope of the protagonist telling you the solution to a puzzle upon seeing it.
If my impression is accurate I would compare it to Quake II or Blue Beetle, if you are already a fan of Sony’s style of games you’ll most likely love Horizon, if you don’t like that kind of game then there isn’t much Horizon can offer you.
Once you get to a certain point the only way to get new pokemon is to grind eggs and they set the drop rates for some so low it takes dozens and dozens of eggs to get them. Then you have the regional pokemon that are normally impossible to get without travel that will become available for special events if you shell out for 10+ bucks. Its manipulative
I think I have all the ones from eggs which are possible, I’d need to check though. Regional Pokémon haven’t been limited for a while, you can get them in 7km eggs which you get from others.
Year 1 I went hard on pokemon go, I committed to the original 150 (I don’t recognize anything past red and blue) that were available and in my region then peaced out. There wasn’t anything there past my nostalgia.
In a statement posted to Steam, developer Shiny Shoe said […]
What a sloppy and lazy article. They don’t even bother linking to the statement from the devs. Seriously, that would have taken less then 1 minute to add.
A Starfield player has credited the sci-fi game with saving their life after they stayed up late to play it and was awake when their apartment complex caught fire.
u/Tidyckilla took to Starfield’s subreddit over the weekend to report their amazing escape, saying that if they hadn’t been awake “bingeing” the game when the fire broke out, the player and their wife would likely have “died to smoke inhalation”.
eurogamer.net
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