When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws
In the meantime, people are gonna do it anyway 'cause why ask permission to back up and preserve your own stuff? And when the law finally catches up, some will be grateful to those that did so despite the earlier wrongful laws that tried to discourage them.
Probably depends on the game. I’m pretty sure more popular games or games with a sizable amount of dedicated fans, like the TF2 community, have probably already found a way to make their own private servers or at least are working on it.
When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws
Or, don’t treat it like culture but slop to be consumed and discarded. If law is not there, put pressure on publishers to release games under licensing that allows preservation after predetermined amount of time. Maybe make slop ineligible for game awards and remove it from review aggregators. There are ways I’m sure.
…Who am I kidding, nobody is going to do because it would require too much cooperation and people are selfish.
Arguing that game perservation is cultural preservation gets messy.
Let’s use a somewhat recent example: Overwatch. A lot of us LOVED Overwatch during the first few years. Then there were enough changes to balance out teams for competitive play that a lot of us feel it is no longer the same game and bounced off of it. Similarly, Darkest Dungeon 1 was kind of infamous for some major balance changes during early access that proved the true horror was gamers.
What is the answer there? Is it to back up every single version of every single game? Ha! You’ve fallen for my trap card! (also, remember when yu-gi-oh wasn’t a game where it is about building a deck so you can turn one wipe the other player?).
Because youtubers like Josh Strife Hayes who specialize in MMOs and multiplayer games have talked about this to varying degrees. Josh can play a really interesting MMO where he is literally the only person online for most of his recording session. But… that means he can only talk about the mechanics of the MMO and can’t really talk about progression or what it was like to play.
And that extends to “normal” games. There was a time when EVERYONE who was playing Tunic (and La-Mulana before it) was in chat rooms and message boards trying to understand the secrets. And countless video game essayists will acknowledge this. That coming back to a game in 2024 is very much about trying to understand what the game was in 2004. Hell, Illusory Wall has done some great videos where he actually researches this and points out how many misconceptions people have about what the players of Dark Souls 1 were doing which… is amazing.
Which gets back to preservation of culture. Shakespeare’s works are undeniably influential. But what is preservation? Is it the script? Is it the 1968 film where we all saw some boobies? Probably not, but that is what we see in high school. Is it the 199t movie with a Sword 9mm? I actually have a lot of arguments for why it should be but…
Because also? Most of what people learn about Shakespeare completely ignores the… for lack of a more humorous term, cultural aspects of it. Almost everything that man (allegedly?) wrote was a commentary on politics of the day. And you can read an annotated copy that will add in these references Pop Up Video style (remember that?) but that still lacks the meaning of the dimwitted young actor playing Juliet who doesn’t realize and the veteran playing Mercutio who is keeping an eye on the audience and is ready to bolt if people get angry or some cops show up and decide it is too on the nose and go to beat on Billy S.
But also? Who is to say that is any less culturally important than a 10th grade Brit Lit class putting on a performance where Tybalt both decided it would be funny to pretend he is Keanu in Bill and Ted AND spent all night playing Tribes and never memorized his lines so he is just over-emoting while trying to read off a bunch of cue cards in his sleeve? And the class is equal parts amused and pissed off while the teacher takes sips from a flask because this is the third class that day who did something stupid.
And, going back to games: Who is to say that playing Dark Souls by yourself is any less culturally relevant than watching the influencers of the day lose their shit and get mad at chat because they can’t beat Ornstein and Smough?
Because media is not in a vacuum. Media’s impact on culture is informed by the people who consume it.
Which is why I increasingly think that, from a game and cultural preservation standpoint, youtube and twitch and the blogs of the day are actually MUCH more important to preserve.
I mean, that all sounds to me like a really good argument for preserving copies of every single version of every game. To go back to your Shakespeare example, it would be a massive loss if any of those adaptations were not preserved to be found by those who went looking, so all we had to go on was records of people talking about them. In fact, there are at least a few examples of exactly that: Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey are only parts of a much larger series which we only know exist because we have other records discussing it.
Yeah, just taking snapshots of everything isn’t going to let you perfectly recreate the culture surrounding a game at any point in time, but having those snapshots around is important for giving context to other records you have.
But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear? Uhm… okay, the NSA got you covered but you get my point.
But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players and… I dunno, I guess they are talking about the expensive mounts?
Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think “we are preserving culture” gives them a stronger argument.
But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear?
significantly less so than video games, which are digital files that are at least for a while all stored on a companies servers
But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players
You wouldn’t be copying a specific date, you’d be copying a game version. Opinions on how granular it should go vary, but in a game like FFXIV for example I’d say every major number patch. I’d quote like to go back and remember how things looked, felt, and we’re back then even without the players, which are the least important part of preserving that game world to me
Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think “we are preserving culture” gives them a stronger argument.
Ah, I think I get what’s happening here: video games are culture. Youre misinterpreting it as meaning “the culture around games” but we mean it literally as “a work of art/part of culture”, like “high culture art” or similar phrases. People preserve paintings, why not games? Both are culture
Because they are very different problems. And conflating the two is how you end up losing masters because “there are VHSes with it on it”.
Preserving a game isn’t about preserving the culture around it at the time of its release. It’s about a set of rules that the player can interact with that tend to lead to a certain type of experience. People playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will fall into basically the same meta that the game evolved into about 15 years ago, because those rules encourage using those characters.
Yes, we should have more distinct versions of updated games that we can choose to upgrade to, or not, by our own choice. It’s absolute garbage that you can have a version of Overwatch that you enjoy that can just be taken away from you on a whim.
Which I don’t disagree with (even if I suspect I do tend to lean more toward not making extra work for overworked devs than many)
The issue is arguing that you are preserving the culture when that very much isn’t Because what “meta” is there in MvC2 without other players? We all had our moment of “I am really good at Tekken” when we played against bots… and then were completely demolished by some kid at a truck stop who actually knew combos.
Which gets to what we see in reality where we DO have basically every version of MvC2 because it was before software patching was common. I would need to check what is popular for specifics but, like with all games, some versions get played and some don’t. And it doesn’t matter if you have every single revision of Karnov’s Revenge AND two different fan patches to rebalance it: if nobody plays it the meta doesn’t exist. MAYBE you can get a hotel room play of a version or two as a curiosity at Combo Breaker.
But you aren’t going to get a proper meta unless it is someone referencing a text guide that was also preserved. And that isn’t actually a “meta”. That is someone knowing combo strings or exploits. Because the meta that builds up around a fighting game involves people learning those combos and learning how to counter them and determining what is best and so forth. Otherwise? You are the kid who can consistently do a dragon punch up against the guy who can’t even do a hadouken.
Which gets back to the difference between preserving games/bytes and preserving culture.
The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I’m sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn’t work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.
MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Actually quite a lot of games had multiple revisions even as far back as cartridges. That is why you’ll often hear a speedrunner say “This is done on the 1.01 North American version” and the like. Mostly my point was more to say that there is no question of “did every single patch get archived”
And as a huge Dawn of War fan: you can have every single patcher from Fileplanet and STILL not have a snowball’s chance of getting the version you want. But that is more comedic than not.
Because:
MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with.
You can play MVC2. You can’t preserve the CULTURE of mvc2. Because, to switch gears to Third Strike: You and me probably aren’t going to do the kind of insane crap that folk like Daigo are able to do.
But also, like I mentioned above: You can get a hotel room game going. You won’t have anywhere near enough thoery crafting and experience to really run into cases where one character is noticeably better than another.
With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Let me tell you something as a Tribes 2 player. I can basically get a full server most nights of the week. But all the folk who are still playing Tribes? They never stopped. So the experience of hopping into a game in 2024 is absolutely nothing like it was back in 2004. It is a completely different kind of amazing but it is not “Tribes 2” from a “cultural” standpoint
The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn’t add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.
If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee “scene”; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That’s what you preserve when the game can still be played.
Interesting points, but you’re missing an important point: This isn’t necessarily about the definition of what SHOULD be or MUST be preserved, but whether studios should be allowed to PREVENT it from being preserved by those who want to.
I mean, many of us are trying. It’s fuckin’ hard tho when your opposition has billions of dollars and politicians in their back-pocket and our side’s greatest asset is the voice of Gordon Freeman from Ross’s Game Dungeon presents Freeman’s Mind.
we also should be supporting open source games—if it’s open source, it’s preservable! these people are already essentially giving up any revenue just to make something for someone else, we should be lifting them up, too!
It’s cool how you can be providing the labor for a company and then that company gets bought by another company and the shareholders who don’t actually make the thing get rich and then you get fired because the other company has a bad year even though the thing you labored for is incredibly successful.
Tangentially, I haven’t played in ages but they should have made it local coop so we can have fun on the courses without having to play through the same few opening courses and deal with lobbies.
Yeah, them deciding that no stage is sacred and not allow for any offline or private play was extremely frustrating and made it so that I just lost the ability to give a shit at all about the game
Custom lobbies (i.e. the exact feature you’re asking for) were launched in December 2020, in beta mode, then March 2021 to everyone. So the feature you wanted has been there for over 2.5 years.
It’s always fascinating to me to see highly rated comments that are pretty out of touch with the actual subject matter.
To me it just shows that they made the change far too late for anyone to even notice. It’s not reasonable to be a subject matter expert in every game one’s ever played.
Exactly this, I see this a lot in the Joe Rogan…“I bet you haven’t watched all his shows, so how can you say you don’t like him” you should’nt need to know everything in detail to form an opinion
Doubling down on what exactly? Man why are you so weird accusing me of editing comments and “doubling down” when all I’m doing is no changing my view based on an irrelevant reply from you.
And I compared the argument that “you can’t have a view on something without having an intimate and indepth knowledge of topic” especially when that view is whether or not you take part in the piece of media.
Workflow just wasn't as good, it didn't have a lot of the little features (search was definitely not as nice to use), and as a Nikon shooter back then, it never nailed the Nikon colours the way I wanted without very heavy post-processing, which was time I didn't want to spend.
I’d rather not pay a subscription in the first place.
I’ll never be a fan of sub bundles that it’s obvious that it’s all about maximum profit for the company. Why is the only bundle PS and LR? (Besides the 3d modeling crap.) Or using everything in the cloud. Why is there no “your choice bundle”? What if I just need Premiere and Acrobat? Or any other combination for that matter.
Because it's aimed at photographers who raised a huge stink in the first place (I was one of them).
You don't have to use it in the cloud too, all my camera photos are sitting in my drives, none of them have been uploaded to Adobe's servers.
PS and LR at this price is cheaper than the perpetual licenses if I upgraded every other cycle, so it's been cheaper for me. Of course there's still cheaper alternatives for PS now (Affinity Photo is really good), but since I still use LR a lot and the cost is bearable, I stay on it.
No, it's still US$10 for me for both. I wonder if it's a regional thing, or Adobe are being sneaky bastards and hiding the cheaper version of the plan somewhere.
Lol. I just searched it man. No need to get all defensive. It’s not an argument. Instead of replying twice, you can also edit. But I don’t see that plan at all on mobile. It seems like an intentional design choice. There is no “look harder” when it simply doesn’t exist.
Yeh, I use 4 applications from Adobe in very limited amounts. I wish they did a pay as you use subscription! If you use them all every day it’s cheap, but I maybe use them about 10-15 hours per month at the most.
Traditional I would be working on a freelance basis with companies and teams that would only use adobe, and wanted files in those formats. Though as I’m doing more and more of work just for myself the alternatives are getting more tempting.
Paying forever is not a better deal than paying the price of a few months of use and then having it for years. Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Hobbyists CAN and DO get the $10/mo plan. It’s cheaper than most streaming services and if it’s a part of your workflow (as a hobby photographer, for example) then $10/month for a constantly updated software is a good deal.
Like if you don’t value photoshop at $10/month that’s okay but A LOT of people do.
Paying forever is not a better deal
I just ran into the not forever issue when I had to re-buy Affinity photo to get the newest version.
It’s not. It’s miserable to actually use. It’s miserable to manage in a production setting. It’s just not acceptable unless you’re working for yourself.
Yeah…no. It’s objectively worse in many ways. Student on a budget? Hobbyist? Gimp will get the job done…but then again so will Pixlr 99% of the time. It’s gotta get a whole lot better before production houses seriously consider switching.
Gimp was competition for Photoshop some 25 years ago. Photoshop has improved a lot since those days, Gimp hasn’t. Gimp isn’t even the best graphics app in the Free Software space anymore.
I have used gimp over the past about 15 years, photoshop & Corel suite past 10 & 4 years ago as well. Gimp is not photoshop anyone who has used it, understands that it’s a different product and frankly it does not matter. It’s very capable where it matters and the net result is it costs nothing. No rent charging for nice but not necessary features for myself.
I’d recommend Photopea for casual use that’s not miserable to use. It’s in browser only and is basically a photoshop clone with slightly less features, but it’s amazingly close to Photoshop when I need it to be, even with things like using a pen or a really specific option menu.
It does generate it’s revenue via banner ads but I’ve never seen them with my adblock, if I’m needing to quickly whip something up and utilise my Photoshop familiarity, it’s my go to.
Sad that we went to unfinished games by moneydevouring publishers and all its errors that come along with that (overworked staff, bad salaries every here and there).
When did we leave the path that finished games should be released around the clock?
Basically, capitalism can be traced back as the reason for most decisions corporations make. Although the fact people will complain and do it anyway is something else.
Day one patch means they released an unfinished game. They haven’t done enough testing before physical production. Also fucks over the people with a slow connection.
A patch 1 year after release is fine. Some people found a rare bug which can be fixed. If the game gets patches 1 year or longer after release tells me the developers have love for their game and/or community for fixing it long after they had any obligation to.
A day-one patch is the day of the release, so it counts as included in the release in my books.
It doesn’t mean « they haven’t done enough testing before physical production », it means they took advantage of the inevitable several weeks or months between start of physical printing and release.
And of course a patch 1 year after release is fine. What I’m saying is that I prefer a broken game that is fixed on release day over a broken game that is fixed 1 year later.
Except that’s not what happened in the old days, I’ve been getting PC game patches for as long as I’ve been gaming, upwards of 30 years. You’re not going to get every bug. Console games just didn’t get patched, if it was a buggy PoS it remained a buggy PoS.
BG3 had a day-one patch, and is at its 6th hotfix now. Does it make it a broken game?
With the scale of modern AAA games it is inevitable, if a studio had to wait until every bug in a game the size of Starfield was fixed to release it, it would simply never release. You have to decide at some point that the game is in a releasable state, and at this moment you start printing discs, then you keep working on it and fixing bugs and that constitues the day-one patch. And don’t worry about the expansion, they started working on it long before the release.
Having a day one patch doesn’t make a game broken, but it is a symptom of a bad internal process. Here are the patch notes for BG3 Day 1 (not sure if 100% accurate, but this is the best source I could find). To me, that doesn’t sound like anything game breaking.
I’m not saying BG3 is the gold standard for AAA game releases, I’m merely saying it’s what we should expect for an average AAA release with some being a little better and some being a little worse.
I’m not saying every bug needs to be fixed. Even older games before SW patches were a thing had a ton of bugs. I’m just saying, the game should play well even if users never patch the game. This is really important for game preservation, so you should always be able to take the game disk and install it offline and play through the whole game and have a great experience. That’s not the standard many AAA studios hold themselves to.
Look at this way, you’ve got everything you needed to fix complete. The game is uploaded the the storefront database. It’s now a week before release. There will always be bugs to fix and no game will ever be completely bugfree (especially not games at this scale). At some point you have to release the game, so why not just release what you’ve been working on since when the game launches?
I’m not saying the game needs to be perfect, but it should be a great experience beginning to end without applying any patches. As in, I should be able to take the game disk and install it without any Internet connection and play through the game with only minor bugs here and there.
This is really important for game preservation (the patch servers will eventually go offline), yet many AAA games are almost unplayable without day one patches.
I’m a huge fan of software updates for games, but those updates should merely improve an already great experience, not be the method to fix a broken game. A broken game should never leave QA.
As usual, people have no idea of the complexity of software. Games are extra complex. Games that are meant to run on an infinite variety of hardware combinations are worse. And it’s not any game, it’s an expansive RPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay and paths.
It’s impossible to ship this kind of product bug-free, and it’s quite probable that it will never truly be bug-free. A day-1 patch is obviously expected, and bugfixes in the following weeks mean that devs are closely monitoring how it goes, and are still working full-time on it. That’s commendable.
Day one patch is fine. It’s just an odd remnant of buying physically as the discs have to be pressed and shipped several months ahead of launch while the Devs carry on working. Digital owners just download the latest build on launch.
If there’s a patch and the game is still full of issues, thats another story.
So pressing unfinished games on disks is fine for you? They should release a finished game. What if the console shop or server goes offline? How can you play it then? For preservation, day one patches are a nightmare.
I’m glad to see the trend of releasing more games for pc beside their console counterpart rising. It makes preservation easier.
Pressing unfinished games is a trade-off and a lesser evil than instead choosing to distribute games digital only. One alternative would be to delay all launches until multiple months after the game is considered “ready,” but that would likely impact revenue streams in a way that the people making those decisions would never agree to. It would also upset the 80% of the market who buy games digitally - why should their release be delayed?
Would you prefer for physical releases to not be available until 3-6 months after the digital release (and more frequently, for there to be no physical release at all)?
Even if you press finished game, you still find tons of issues to fix before the release. It should be treated as bonus polishing time though, not time to finish the game.
BG3 has plenty of bugs, some of them game breaking. Look at the litany of fixes they delivered in each patch. It’s not about that. It’s about releasing a game that isn’t a “service”, and just a purely high quality game - tactical combat that works well, characters with good writing, a solid plot hook, a distinct graphical style, phenomenal voice acting and mocap (which matter more for this genre than they would in, say, a third person shooter).
Every game has bugs, that is not really what a ‘finished game’ is about. Its more about consistently working features, delivering what you promised and working on fixing things you know arent working correctly.
There’s no need for Unity anymore. Godot is excellent for at least 2D games the same way Unity used to be. Unreal is easy to pick up for 3D. GameMaker Studio is going strong.
Unreal Engine 1.5 - yeah, maybe. Definitely not UE5. It’s one of the most complicated, convoluted and heavyweight systems in existence. Just engine itself is 100gb+ download, opening it the first time takes 30m to compile shaders. Just reading briefly through gtlf import dialog took me like 10minutes.
UE is a beast to run (and has incredibly shitty linux support if you want to use the marketplace or any plugins…). But basically everything you listed is a one time cost or just an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato.
Honestly? For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king. Godot is awesome but a lot of the core loops and flows are very much geared with 2D first and the performance of 3D games is a hotly contested issue. I would still say that Godot’s 3D “performance” is better than Unreal’s 2D but… that is an incredibly low bar.
And in terms of workflows? UE is more than a bit convoluted but with stuff like blueprints it is probably the most consistent tool out there (so long as you never try to do a 2D game). Unity is a distant second. And Godot is great but it also reeks of an open source project that is being designed and redesigned in real time (just look at how file IDs are handled…). Not the end of the world if you understand the core concepts but also not something people are generally going to learn without a lot of trips to the forums (or watching youtubes of people who did said trips for them).
Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.
an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.
I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.
but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much
If a slow startup of the editor the first time you start it is enough to end your career in game dev: you never had one.
And any good tutorial resource will do something like “Okay. Now start up that engine. Yes, do it now. Okay. It might look like it is unresponsive but that is because it is compiling shaders. Just leave that running and let’s start talking about some core concepts…”
If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer
It is a philosophical difference. But the reason I still suggest folk “learn with” UE is that it is, mostly, consistent between all the different kinds of games you may want to make. Which… is a leading cause of said performance issues when you start pushing things but more on that in…
Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release
Now. First and foremost: That means nothing for a hobbyist learning and making a game with their kids or spending a few hours a week for a few months until they give up.
As for the A-AA space (AAA means something, god damn it): That is not something that an individual developer is going to have any say in. That is going to be a corporate decision and it is almost exclusively going to be that company’s engine (ha, Frostbite) or Unreal because UE is the industry standard and there is a lot of value in being able to rapidly onboard a new hire or a contractor.
As for performance for those corporate games? That is really no concern for the hobbyist scale and is a much more complicated question related to allocating resources and time. But if there being poorly performant games made with an engine disqualified that engine: NO engines would exist.
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
This gets back to the optimization side of things. You should not need to go through and migrate the critical path from gdscript to c# or even c++ just to test out your game. You want your development system to be significantly beefier than your target system so that you can rapidly iterate and debug. Get it working, profile it, and then optimize it. And… get a new respect for all the devs with “Unreal Engine games run like shit” games because you now realize that the optimization step might be months or even years of your life and you ain’t got time for that.
Other engines may or may not be more performant for debugging a specific “level” of fidelity. If you are at the point where your engine’s editor’s system requirements are limiting your ability to develop: You and your users are going to have a very bad time.
Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅
If a slow startup of the editor the first time
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.
It is a philosophical difference.
It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want.
That is learning anything that isn’t just “ChatGPT, how do I do X?”. Also, once you learn how to use blueprints you know how to do basically anything a hobbyist game dev would want.
Which is not dissimilar to Unity or Godot. You learn the basic concepts and then it is mostly a matter of experimenting or looking up how to do isometric camera angles or whatever.
But honestly? it sounds like you don’t want a game engine. You want a framework. In that case, RPG Maker is great for making a top down square style JRPG. Unreal is great for an FPS. And so forth.
Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.
I am a big supporter of godot but… it is incredibly tacky to run into a thread about layoffs and basically say “Good, they shouldn’t have jobs. Use this instead”
As much as I like to shit on Epic, but UE 5.x is pretty much innovative with each minor release. Watching the release videos of what the engine can do in realtime is always impressive. They are used as realtime backgrounds for movie sets.
I think it’s funny you try to show how good the game engine is by saying it’s used in movies. Like sure it’s impressive, but graphics don’t make a game. Give me one good game with simple graphics built in Godot, rather than 100 fancy locking $80 micro-transaction infested always online games.
Your argument has nothing to do with UE5‘s or Godot‘s strengths and weaknesses. You could literally flip it and it would make just as much (or little) sense: Give me one good asset library game in UE5, rather than 100 custom asset containing $80 micro-transaction infested always online Godot games. See? The argument doesn‘t actually say much about the engines, just about monetization which you can handle completely independently from the software. If your project makes a million or less, UE5 is free to use for anyone. That makes it pretty good for tiny indie devs and hobbyists actually.
Do you mix game development with engine? Of course an engine doesn’t make an innovative game by itself. An engine is - hence the name - only the means to an end to help develop a game. Innovative games are all over the place in regards to the engines they use; from in-house/custom to products like unity, unreal, etc.
That you have the impression that engines like UE and Unity are “less innovative” by judging released games just shows how many games are developed using these engines - especially Unity. It’s so damn easy to build games with it, that many people do, even when they only build something simple. And that’s fine … it means that more people can channel their creativity into game development, even when it doesn’t yield anything ground breaking.
It also shows, though, that developers can focus more on the game development and have to deal less with engine development and now even asset creation, since these engines also bring asset catalogs. So it’s really quite a good time to dive into game development, which fosters creativity and in the end there will also be innovative games among them.
Yes but at the same time Unreal doesn’t really compete with Unity at all when it comes to 2D games. Unreal is primarily meant for 3D games and maybe you could make a 2D one work in it but Unity has a lot more resources for 2D games. That’s why games like this switched to Godot instead of Unreal cause Unreal wasn’t really an option. I could be wrong but when Ive made some projects in Unreal it didn’t really seem to have any options for 2D games like Unity has.
It’s got all of the functionality you need but nothing in UE is “boilerplate” for 2D, meaning they don’t have the functions built for you to use out of the box. Godot has all the boilerplate for a complete novice to use after a few tutorials videos. Haven’t used Unity for maybe a decade so idk about them.
Unity’s modus operandi is to develop a feature halfway and then deprecate it and replace it with something that’s not yet released. Such a mess of a product.
Bevy is damn impressive. I can understand why it’s not suitable for large projects yet but for anyone tinkering or projects willing to adapt to a rapidly iterate ecosystem is well worth a look.
I’m very sorry man, I’ve been through that, and I have friends that have been cut at unity before. They treat their workers terribly.
Focus on getting better first, just process it for a bit. When you’re ready to start looking, the market is warm right now. I’m more than happy to help review resumes.
Ah I think my comment made in haste was ambiguous. Fortunately I was not cut this time around, I’ve somehow skated by all the firings. I’m actually just clinging on for a few more months then I’m off to Sweden to go back to school. Hoping to actually finish my game dev degree this time around! I do have some school application stuff I would love to have people see though I’ll keep you in mind for that if you are up for it (for a work sample primarily, to get into higher rates schools)
Good then, glad you’ve made it through, but obviously stay frosty. Those execs will cut every engineer as long as they still look good. Be ready for anything
This bit got me: Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
…Did you not see this coming? Have you really not had a plan for when Fortnite started to lose momentum? I get that having a product blow up will leaf to a period of manic spending because your cash flow suddenly feels infinite, but come on. You’re not a small player in this, Epic. You’ve been around since the 90s. You know better than to mindlessly ride the wave of a success.
Of course the Fortnite money was going to run out. That’s why you invested so heavily in UE5, right?.. Right?
But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!
Not to mention the amount of money they literally burn through EGS. If I remember correctly, the plan was that it wouldn’t be profitable for another 3/4 years (by 2027).
Fucking idiots. I swear, i dont know why we place CEOs and richer folks, in general, on a pedestal so much. Minecraft has longevity because its basically digital legos. Fortnite is a FPS with buildable aspects.FPSes come and go with the winds.
People have this tendency to associate wealth with knowledge, or business savvy. For many companies, it’s just a matter of “creative accounting” coupled with a psychopath CEO and lucking out. Epic lucked out with Fortnite Battle Royale, don’t forget their original “save world” was a total flop as a paid product
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
It essentially allows for special closed source builds. These closed source builds can have the engine support for consoles and still be in keeping with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo's licenses.
So, basically the console manufacturer gives you the SDK, integration code, etc after you sign their NDAs. After that, you can either use what they gave you to port it yourself to that console, or you can pay someone else for their build.
Hey EU. How about lowering that barrier to entry by pumping a couple of million Euro’s into cold-room reverse engineering the API’s and developing an open source alternative that can be distributed freely.
We’ll invite Sony lawyers, Microsoft lawyers, watch them cope and seethe as their framework is made more open…
…aaaand then realising that a lot more people will take the shot to pay for actual licensing. Go figure.
It's still valuable information for those that would seek to load homebrew (unsigned code) onto their systems.
Console security is one of those things where every additional barrier helps. The goal isn't to outright prevent homebrew or piracy but to limit the scope of breaches and delay them as much as possible. Even modern consoles like the Switch and PS5 are not immune
It would be great if there was a guaranteed way to homebrew your consoles, but yeah security and stability is the real thing we benefit from. I don’t think anyone would advocate for more hackers in console multiplayer games, and I don’t want a homebrew game I’m running to crash or brick my system because of their fly-by-night hardware usage.
So, I didn't bring up Xbox earlier, because Microsoft has an official way to run homebrew on Xbox consoles.
All modern Xboxes have access to something called developer mode. This allows people to put whatever code they like on it, but removes the ability to play retail games. The change isn't permanent, however, and switching between the modes is perfectly safe.
This is a big part of the reason why Xbox 1 never had piracy; pirates couldn't piggyback on the back of homebrewers, who simply opted to use developer mode instead of cracking the console.
Interesting, I didn’t realize this. I assumed a dev kit was always required for that behavior, and that’s why Nintendo offering a cheap switch dev kit was such a big deal. TIL
I am not sure this is something other engines even offered at this level, but my issue is bindings support.
3.X had (3rd-party) production-ready bindings, even for niche languages.
4.X, with hopes of improving support for compiled languages, has a new bindings system meaning that all bindings need to be redone as a new effort. This happened with the language that I'm interested in, the group that made the production-ready 3.X bindings abdicated the crown and there have been splintered efforts by individuals to work on 4.X bindings.
So it (3.X vs 4.X) is language vs engine features. When/if 4.X bindings do come out, it is not known how similar they will be so (aside from non-Godot-specific code) that will likely add complication to it as well.
I don't really care about consoles (needing to jump through hoops to develop for it is one reason) so a different potential issue would web export limitations. Both for different languages and for visual quality (AA). Those were issues in the past, though I'm not actually sure where they're at now (the 4.1 docs do say you can't have C# web exports in 4.X).
I’m all for Godot getting better; that said, has Epic, Open3D, or Crytek made similar moves?
(I know Crytek isn’t much of a player currently, but as someone who’s been following them closer in recent years, it really seems like they got their house back in order)
I think epic made their engine more appealing by waiving some Epic Games Store charges for Unreal games. And had a no fee until 1m earnings thing. Not this kind of shit.
I think I read another user said “they treated the time I have to spend on video games with respect.”
And that line has stuck with me.
So while I don’t expect anything close to BG3’s scale or polish but every few years, I do expect not to buy a game and have the game hold its hand out for cash.
Games respecting my time is something that I’ve definitely come to value a lot more. Quantity for quantities sake, inane things like overly restrictive save points or busywork for people who don’t pay to skip… I just can’t really be bothered with it.
Save points stopped being an issue when game suspension/quick resume became standard. I’ve left my Series X mid game before, powered it off at the wall and gone away for a week, the game loaded back exactly to the point I left it still.
Yeah I love suspend/resume on my steam deck. I definitely don’t think it’s stopped being an issue for me though, sometimes I want to turn the device off or if I’m playing on PC I want to quit the game and do something else or just turn it off.
It’s just frustrating because saving the game is not a technical problem and hasn’t been for decades, it’s a design choice and I shouldn’t need to lean on a technical solution to get around it. Maybe I’m just stubborn though
saves are also important for archiving and sharing game states, maybe i want to preserve this specific game state so i can relive it for the rest of my life? or i want to download a save from someone else to experience something specific they found or made
That is SUCH an amazing way to put it. No grinding, no waiting for timers to run out, no traveling back and forth to savepoint, no insanely hard challenges or unlocks. Just experiencing it, and (for the most part) even failing forward.
Just scores of empty containers to check. I know they can’t all have something but respecting my time would include minimizing having so many empty containers. That’s about my only complaint so far though in that regard so it’s not that bad or anything either.
Lol my pinky gets tired holding down the alt key all the time. I need a mod that permanently enables those highlights and I need it to highlight everything including plates, cups, bottles, etc. Because I’m gonna take it all!
The standard argument here is that you’re not supposed to look in every container for loot. However yep everyone I’ve seen play this game including myself is an absolute loot goblin. What if this rotten fruit basket has a +2 greatsword or boots of elvenkind!
I think there’s a mod that adds a button you can click to “loot the room” - characters make perception rolls and “find” anything of value and put the items into their inventories. Haven’t tried it but might be your jam.
I completely agree with your comment. It’s a bit of a slowdown from play when you search everything but at the same time if playing tabletop you’d have people trying random things that don’t light up for interaction of a video game. In the end it’s only a slight slowdown anyways and does add to immersion so it’s not terrible but more a time waster is all.
I haven’t looked at mods yet, I like to do a first playthrough vanilla usually but I completely forgot they were a thing here, so thanks for the reminder.
hey now we also have to go between three different telephones the size of washing machines all 20 meters apart in a world where you can communicate across the entire solar system instantly with no delay.
exactly. I gave MMOs a try, I gave looter shooters a try, and eventually I figured out GAAS is just not for me. single player offline only games please and thank you.
The more established term is a live service game: A game where development continues far beyond release with a trickle of content to keep players playing (and paying).
I’m not sure I understand. When was the last time a video game was used to go on a killing spree?
The same argument can be used in one context and be wrong, yet used in another context and be right.
The object in the argument matters. For example, the argument that punishment reduces undesirable behavior. This could be true in criminal justice, but it’s absolutely not true when applied to early child development. It just teaches them to be scared of you if the child isn’t old enough to understand.
There might be an association between guns and violence. Is that even true for video games?
Guns may not cause the mental health issues that make people turn violent, but they do allow violent people to become mass murderers. Video games do neither.
Sorry, you can’t propose an analogy and expect others to think about it for themselves, but then when presented with a nearly identical analogy, expect others to spend time explaining it to you.
“Drinking and driving doesn’t kill people, people kill people” oh wait, that’s senseless and they’re not identical… Maybe you responded with this instead of answering my question because you know that.
“Cars and alcohol don’t kill people people kill people” yeah that’s why it’s drinking and driving that’s illegal, not cars and/or alcohol. But you thought of that already and realized your mistake, which is why you’re dodging.
No no, keep going, you’re so right. It sounds like you agree that demonstrating competency before being granted a driver’s license is useful? And you agree that revoking these licenses when they have demonstrated that they are a risk to public safety is also working out for us?
They voted back in all the same leadership at an election not long after. Having made that decision, I find this to be less surprising than it might have been.
I remember reading about that. All I could conclude is that the voters must approve in some sense of those actions. In which case, I’m afraid your peers have spoken and clearly indicate that it’s not a priority. It’s a shame.
What about all the movies with guns? It’s much more normal to see a movie about someone getting shot or otherwise killed than see even a titty, much less any genitalia. I’d argue that many more people watch media than play games, if that’s the logic they’re going for.
Their frustration is completely misdirected also because it’s friggin’ Texas! What do you need to get a gun in that state? A pulse?
Edit: the dude was 18, how did he even get a gun? You need to be at least 21 to have one. How did he even get an semi-automatic weapon? The fuck?
There’s no classes of licenses like that in the US. If you are 18 and meet the minimal legal requirements, you can buy a long gun of any type in most states. (Some states are trying to move that age to 21.) That means a single shot, break action, lever action, bolt action, pump, or yes, semi-automatic. Once you hit 21, you can buy handguns. Again: that includes break action, revolvers, and normal semi-automatics.
The only real restriction in all of this is machine guns; to get those, you need to come up with the $20,000+ that a legal one will cost, and file a transfer application with the BATF, pay a $250 fee, and wait to see if your application is approved or denied. There are some states that prevent individual ownership of machine guns entirely.
I hear what you’re saying, but how many hours are logged by some swimming in images of fps games? I’d argue, from my interaction with teens, that there are far more hours logged than passively watching any media. But that’s not the point anyway.
Our American society is swimming with a gun obsession. Whether it’s via video games, movies, social media, politicians, the NRA, “2nd ammendment cities” (wtf), and too many more avenues to think of. Games are just one vector of marketing guns to a maleable population. The core of this suit is that a manufacturer was pushing their models within the game in collusion with Activision. I believe advertising guns to a kids demographic is prohibited. I’d search it, but I’m lazy and the AI results would be wrong anyway.
Certainly. Hence, steps. Although, video games is probably not where I would begin if we wish to take this problem seriously. It should be part of a complete plan to address violence involving guns.
Those arguments were weak then and they are no better now after years of research trying to test whether video games cause violent behavior. I don’t think there’s a need to revisit the same argument — unless of course new information or context that changes things has been found.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing at all. Even with all the evidence that video games aren't the problem, it's a convenient scapegoat to point a finger at while ignoring those who actually need to be held accountable.
Do we really think video games are promoting violence?
No, that’s not their argument. They are saying the gun manufacturer advertised their real life gun in the video game. They don’t have an issue with video game violence, they have an issue with advertising weapons to children.
This reads like a statement from a vulture capitalist who plans to break up the company and sell the parts to make a quick buck. One would think they would focus on building trust, not giving yet more devs reasons to use a different engine.
I’m honestly surprised that Slack doesn’t have some kind of steganographic watermarking so that leaked screenshots can be traced back to the original user, given how many big companies use it for all their internal comms.
I did use slack; we had general channels with tons of people and smaller channels/meeting rooms with 5-30 people. If it was a 5-30 channel they can be found.
Ok well Im not an idiot, I have plenty of comms apps and that one died really quickly presumably because everyone’s experience was as boring and disjointed as mine
The techniques you’re thinking of are for documents sent by email or some such. You add innocuous whitespace or typos that are unique to each one, and send them individually. If one leaks, you can match it to the employee who received it. That doesn’t work for screenshots of Slack.
Well you could make it work, for example some random pattern in chat backgrounds that trace back to whoever is the user. That would still show up in a screenshot.
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