I’m not sure what games do work, but I’m surprised over half of what they’ve tested are in a good state considering it’s running on an emulation layer with immature drivers. Additionally, anti-cheat can’t really be helped, that’s an issue we’ve been dealing with on Linux for ages as well. I don’t think anyone was really expecting it arm on windows to overtake x86 instantaneously, but from a technical standpoint it’s not a bad start. Of course, things could be better, but they could be much worse.
Microsoft convinced hardware manufacturers to support UEFI and TPM overnight. If they just said next Windows is going to be ARM only software manufacturers would have to follow.
I’m happy to say that I was one of them. Beat the game this past weekend, and have really been enjoying trophy hunting in the endgame. Without the pressure of the main story I’ve actually started to feel a little more freedom to take chances and be less concerned about damage and loss of resources.
All in all, Pacific Drive has been an absolute highlight this year.
Man, I really wanted to like this game, I love the setting, art, music, and overall aesthetics, but I’m having trouble finding the fun.
When I first heard about it, I was hoping it was basically a linear road down the coast, with a story to experience along the way (kinda like the boat/car sections of HL2). But then it turned out to be a repetitive grind. There are some mechanics I think are novel and add a lot of fun (ex. the Quirks system), but 90% of what I was doing in the game felt unfun and pointless so I could eventually return to the garage and do it all again.
For me, the fun comes, like in some other crafting games (e.g., Subnautica) and roguelikes, from chasing the next upgrades, enjoying the sense of empowerment they bring, and getting to explore new areas.
For that reason, I love the idea of survival crafting games, but I hate the sandbox, perpetual loop format most of them come in (like No Man’s Sky). Subnautica is the gold standard (with Dysmantle being a surprise second place) of having a finite, focused progression path. Pacific Drive scratches that itch.
Although, I will admit that it’s more stressful than I would have liked too. I knew about the procedural generation and run-based loop early on, but I still kind of expected something overall tranquil. But with storms coming on a timer in every junction, anomalies frequently overwhelming every space you need to explore, and the high stakes of potentially losing a lot of critical material, I found myself playing much more anxiously than I would have preferred, which is what I alluded to about the endgame.
I’m fine with stressful, high risk gameplay, it’s when the game asks me to spend a bunch of time doing something I don’t find fun that it loses me.
Subnautica in particular did this to me. All my friends who like Outer Wilds told me to play Subnautica. I loved the exploration and story, but I didn’t care at all about building a fancy base that I would never see again after finishing the game. There was a particular point where I was bottlenecked on finding a single resource type that was located in one single place in a giant ocean, which turned out to be a place I felt I was being told not to go yet (trying to avoid spoilers). I thought i was being dense, just not learning what the game was trying to teach me, so I ended up having to look it up, only to realize the game did an absolutely piss poor job of directing me toward the resource. My entire experience was soured by that.
It was after that that I decided single player survival crafters are not my thing. I like them as a multiplayer experience, because you can amortize busy work across multiple people, and socialize as you do it, but by myself I’d rather do anything else. I get it if someone finds it relaxing to do that kind of thing, but it’s not for me.
Ha, that’s funny, that’s the exact opposite of me. But games are my downtime, and socializing is work (for me), so I am almost exclusively single-player.
Shame about Pacific Drive, but I get it. There is a ton of repetition.
It’s a microsoft product, so according to microsoft it absolutely is. It could be the most profitable product on the planet and they’d say it’s still underperforming.
I feel like, aside from the specificity of video games taking far more time and investment to finish than other media, no to mention the dedication to F2P titles, the news could’ve really pointed out that it most likely is not turning a profit because no other streaming service does.
Netflix has always operated with billions of debt that only grows, Amazon, Disney+ and Max only exist because they’re backed by the biggest corporations in the world, and Spotify pays nickels to its artists.
Which might be another point to consider, that the convenience that users get from subscribing to these services do nothing to actually support the creators behind its titles - see every cancellation, whether its a tv show, movie or game - and while having an ever growing library of media is enticing, having few but objective choices still make far more sense when it comes to gaming.
As an aside I’m not particularly fond of the author brushing the change to digital streaming as inevitable, and going back to buying media being backwards, when we are on the verge of constant media erasure from companies, and with physical ownership - and piracy, in extreme cases - becoming more and more vital. If anything, it is less the technology that got us so far, and more the control that IP holders exercise over digital media, and the ability to delist, control prices and manipulate supply and demand at will.
Really, if any game in your Steam library has a playtime of over 500 hours, you may be getting enough value from the games you buy that a catalog service actually becomes worse value by comparison.
I fit in this bucket, and so do a few of my friends. I’ve gotten so used to the Steam gamer lifestyle of waiting for games to go on sale, buying them on sale, and then slowly building up a massive catalog of games that I think I will enjoy gaming. It’s very rare that a hot new game will entice me to play it without waiting for a sale, because I know what it feels like to be disappointed in a $70 purchase.
If there is a hot new game that I am interested in, Game Pass might be appealing because it allows me play a new game for cheaper. But I also don’t play games very quickly, because I’m busy. A narrative single-player game usually takes me at least two months to get through. If I play that game via PC Game Pass, that’s at least $24. Most of the time, I can get a game on sale for $24 or less within 2 years of that game’s initial release.
I also think about how, if I go the Game Pass route, I will feel a pressure to play that game quickly, because I feel like the meter is running and I don’t want to waste my money. This makes it harder to enjoy the game because I am forced to play it at times that I don’t really feel like it. If I instead buy the game on sale, I can pick up and put the game down at my leisure, which just fits my life better. Sometimes waiting for the sale sucks, but I have my backlog to keep me warm.
Yeah, when I did the 3 month trial I felt pressured to make the most of the subscription so I put aside some games I had planned on playing that I already had. I didn’t find myself needing game pass since I already had enough games so I never renewed once the trial ended.
If there is a hot new game that I am interested in, Game Pass might be appealing because it allows me play a new game for cheaper. But I also don’t play games very quickly, because I’m busy.
Steam allows us to avoid FOMO. I’ll wishlist it, meanwhile I’ll play my massive backlog. By the time I complete one single player game, the wishlisted game is already on sale and the game has matured with updates. It’s perfect for the adult gamer.
I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.
TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.
I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.
That’s actually kind of shocking to see that indie games have surpassed AAA in revenue. I expected that was kind of inevitable given how uninspired and criticized modern AAA stuff is. But to actually see it already happened is cool.
It’s been shocking to see the amount of financial industry money and control at some of the bigger studio, and the way they talk about the future of the industry is disturbing. Although, if the money isn’t rolling in, or there are other parts of the market making more money, it makes me hopeful that finance will loosen it’s grip on these companies and let them make good projects rather than chasing arbitrary metrics.
I have started to notice that a lot, if not the majority, of games that make the biggest social splashes in the past couple years are smaller games - with exceptions for titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 which are their own labors of love on a AAA scale. Animal Well, Balatro, Dredge, Vampire Survivors, Talos Principle 2, Hi-Fi Rush…these are the games I tend to hear about the most.
The attention that a lot of AAA games get seems shallow and short-lived lately.
One of the things that’s excited me most recently is seeing new and inventive ways to use graphics and fidelity besides photorealism. Games like Gris and The Artful Escape are probably the most stunningly beautiful games I’ve ever played.
I’m not sure if you could call Talos Principle indie. Croteam is an ancient company (of Serious Sam fame), they sold out to their publisher some years ago (Developer Digital). Wikipedia says 42 people, that’s about the same ballpark as Wube (Factorio), way smaller than Coffee Stain (123), which yes vibes heavily indie (Goat Simulator!) but is part of Embracer Group.
If you look at Developer Digital and Embracer group they’re not really that small – certainly not smaller than CDProject Red, which is very much throwing AAA money at their projects and definitely had their own big business culture fuckups. They’re simply more distributed, instead of orchestrating one or two big projects they have multiple studios working largely independently on small to mid-sized projects. Talos and Satisfactory are AA scale.
Is Wube indie? Well, at least at the start they were, growing with Factorio’s early access. Still independent, as far as I know. Budget-wise they’re certainly not operating on a shoestring, though… you also have to take into account that they’re taking their sweet time for everything. Also AA.
A would be stuff like Celeste. That’s a broad category, I wouldn’t really call anything B unless you don’t have separate coder, writer, sfx/msx and gfx. Maybe toss the writer but anything under that and you’re smaller than minimum demo group size.
All this is to say: Can we please stop dividing the industry into “AAA” and “Indie”. CD Project Red is independent. They’re doing AAA. One is budget, the other is whether the studio has a corporate overlord lording over multiple studios. Game quality is a third measure. System requirements yet another: Factorio has no issues melting your CPU even though it’s highly optimised, then you have B-budget projects which melt your box because the dev has never heard of polycount and a background prop toothbrush has 400 quads… per bristle.
I suppose in my mind AAA refers more to certain group of publishers and parent companies. A certain way of structuring companies and doing business. As supposed to a metric of the budget needed for a game.
I think most do and it’s a good way to look at it. There are definitely companies out there that people don’t think of as indie that are technically independent, so I just wanted to mention it. It’s still very cool to hear they’ve surpassed triple a!
That’s a cool read. I would much rather play a smaller passion-project of a game than a AAA one anyway, but it’s cool to see markets shifting that way on the large
I think they gave people time to get over the hype and they saw that what they had was good enough. Especially once inflation hit and they had less extra money.
Exactly. It's not like they were gaining much, most games could do 1080p/60fps on the old generation anyway. 4K wasn't enough of a selling point and consoles are mainly used on TVs so there's no point in higher framerate support either. Games looked good enough for couch gaming on the old generation, so as you said, there was no point upgrading.
The difference between each generation of consoles is getting less and less. The latest jump doesn’t really give you anything the previous gen didn’t give you, it just has sharper graphics. The graphics aren’t even that much better.
I felt that way going from a 360 to XB1. More of the same, just shinier. I don’t think I’ve used my XB1 for anything except Rock Band in over a year. And the only reason I felt the urge to get a Series is that so RB loads in less than 10 minutes. (Well, that and Flight Simulator.)
Nintendo and indies are the only things keeping my interest in console gaming.
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