They‘ve been so successful with singleplayer stuff but would somehow rather burn billions failing live services than sticking with them. They could‘ve put that money into several offline experiences and made at least SOME money but yeah, rather lose MOUNTAINS of money, I guess.
Not a huge fan of multiplayer games, but can be fun with friends.
As for people who don’t like live service games, Sony has mentioned multiple times that the budget for live service games is completely separate from single player games. The issue was that they previously put their good single player studios to making these games, as long as they get proper third party or specialised studios for these and leave their first party studios for first party, I am happy.
I think this is pretty normal as you grow up. You get kind of bored of playing games that use the same gameplay mechanisms and you just look for a change. Even if the mechanisms in these indie games aren’t as good, just being different makes the game more interesting.
Nowadays I’d much rather play a short indie games that a big budget game.
I fully agree! This is a perfect example of how true the cliche “variety is the spice of life” can be. Novel experiences are abundant when you’re young, but when you’ve “seen/done it all” life can become boring or perhaps feel like the movie Groundhog Day…every day the same routine, no change in schedule or behavior, no change in outcome or expectation. There’s certainly comfort in routine but i find learning and trying new things to be one of the most rewarding experiences as i get older.
For real, I don’t consider myself a car lover/enthusiast, but it is a genre that has really grown on me, more like arcade racing, I think Burnout Legends and Domination for the PSP propelled this feeling lol.
Now I play Asphalt 8 regularly on my Android phone whenever I get the chance… But I really need a better alternative because I hate ads (and not seeking for emulation).
I don’t really do racing games, but Distance is the best one I’ve played.
You get community maps from the workshop.
There are some very cool jumps to do.
You can also train your gripfly skills. Basically, it’s where you flip your car and use the thrusters to fly. Gripfly is a useful technique, but hard to master.
Nice, I didn’t know about this game, I am gonna check it out.
For the curious, I found a nice mod project about Asphalt 8 called Asphalt 8 Retry it basically is an offline mod of the game with updated tracks, graphics and cards, I have been having a blast with it, definitely the ads killed the momentum for me with this one.
Apple announced a game without securing distribution rights first? Seems a bit shady on Bungie’s part for letting them, and negligent on Apple’s.
Also, if we want to paint the narrative that a potential future of Apple in gaming was stolen by Microsoft, wouldn’t that put Apple in the perfect position now to hit back? They’ve been toying with the idea of bringing gaming to macOS, but they seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting. On Linux you have Proton, and on macOS we had Whisky, but the guy threw in the towel when he realised another company was making a commercial product out of it, he didn’t want to take away from the work they were doing. (To be fair, they had been at it longer.) But it seems like if Apple wants to be serious about gaming, they need to build something like Proton. Maybe they should buy Crossover and make it part of macOS. Let just any Mac user run games made for Windows. But I’m also not saying non-gamer Mac users should bear any part of the cost of gaming, but something gotta give somewhere.
Microsoft is screwing up by running people off of Windows when PC building costs are at record highs and the economy is so low, and running up the price of the Xbox due to a situation they had a hand in creating (the AI bubble). While Linux will be a better target for people with perfectly good computers who don’t want to build a whole new one to satisfy Windows 11’s requirements, anyone looking at the end of the life of their gaming PC should be looking at the M4 Mac mini at $500 and at least considering it. And Apple can help them make that decision by appealing to gamers and actually being serious about it. Because if fucking Apple of all companies starts taking gaming seriously, maybe Microsoft will again, too.
Apple had a handshake deal with Bungie, until Microsoft bought Bungie and made the Mac exclusive an Xbox exclusive.
It came full circle when Halo CE SE was released as a Mac exclusive on Mac & PC. And it is arguably the best version of the original game on any platform (higher resolution textures without a complete remake, exclusive multiplayer weapons, etc.).
Can you elaborate on CE SE? Is this different from the 2003 Mac port? As far as I’m aware, the port to Mac had lower resolution textures on top of certain rendering issues, poorer AI behaviour etc.
I was not aware of any of those problems. And I played the Mac version. When I had an Xbox, I spent a lot of time looking at textures up close cause the quality was amazing to me. Once I played it on the Mac I instantly noticed how much cleaner and sharper everything was.
It was released during the PowerPC era, and the internet says it works on Intel Mac through Rosetta emulation. That might result in the graphical issues you mentioned. Having to run through Rosetta means Microsoft (or Macport) never issued a patch for native Intel compatibility.
I was wrong about it being Mac exclusive. I though the Windows PC version was a straight port from Xbox, but it’s the same “enhanced” version of the game that Macs got.
Bungie made games for Mac originally. The 2003 Mac version isn’t a port, It’s the original game. The PC and Xbox versions are the port. That’s why it feels like it’s behind those. Because it literally did have less development time despite coming out later.
They released another Halo for Mac a few years later that I think is the one the other commenter is talking about. It came out around the time of the MacBook Air and as a result is the only game I know of that has an official no-cd patch.
this is factually incorrect. the first builds shown at macworld were not a full build of the game by any stretch. they were tech demos, essentially. once the deal was done afaik no work was done on the mac platform for years.
If I recall right, the only exlusive weapon was the Flamethrower, but they also added the missile Warthog. Might be forgetting some other weapons though, as I never had the Xbox version.
I had some fun when I was younger modding the demo. The only content stripped out of it were the levels, so there were all these custom versions of the Blood Gulch map floating around with Ghosts and Scorpion tanks, etc.
I liked messing with weapon properties. Had my own temu/wish.com “cursed halo at home” long before it was a real thing.
Sniper rifle fired plasma grenades, and you could do fun stuff like stacking two so the first would throw the second into the air and the trail and explosion made it like a flare.
Shotgun fired a spread of frag grenades instead of bullets, and pushed you backwards a bit.
Pistol was more accurate, slightly faster, much less damage, and pushed whoever got hit back a ton. You could easily juggle someone up into the skybox with it. It pushed vehicles too.
Rocket launcher fired a massive ball of rockets that would lag everything.
Flamethrower fired rockets instead of flames, with a much higher ammo pool, but no other changes. So rocket sprinkler.
Fully charged plasma pistol fired a Scorpion Tank shot. I think the non charged ones homed in to a stupid extent.
Chaingun Warthog fired needler rounds with an increased lifetime.
Assault rifle worked as area denial, setting an area in an orb shape around you on fire.
The plasma cannon thing would spawn a Scorpion tank over your head, crushing you.
I think I turned the needler into a shotgun blast thing, but it still fired needles.
I think I changed the elites’ plasma smg thing to start firing slowly but “rev up” to stupid fast speeds, and then the cooldown hurt your shields?
There was something that would call down a larger version of the plasma cannon projectile from the sky, with a larger explosion radius and a stupid big/strong pushback effect.
Vehicle crashes called the same kind of system as a projectile hitting, so you were effectively “shot” with a vehicle impact “bullet” as a rider if you crashed too hard. Congrats that’s now a frag grenade explosion. That one was shamelessly stolen from a tutorial.
It’s a popular misconception that Halo was intended to be a Mac exclusive when it was revealed. It was going to be released on Mac and PC.
You may know that, but a lot of people think that it was revealed at Macworld because it was exclusive. But it was just a headliner in a statement of “hey, we can play games too!” In fact the literal game they were running on stage was actually running backstage on a PC.
macOS we had Whisky, but the guy threw in the towel when he realised another company was making a commercial product out of it, he didn’t want to take away from the work they were doing.
I misunderstood what happened with whiskey, I thought he was making a free version of a paid product.
No, he wasn’t making a free version of Crossover, but it did the same thing as Crossover. They both use free software made by WINE. The Whisky dev was not stealing from Crossover. However, Crossover gives some of its proceeds to the WINE community, so the Whisky developer felt that users using Whisky were indirectly cheating the WINE community by getting a free ride. Note that Proton and WINE are free. Crossover is the outlier being paid, but Crossover also gives back.
There are no assholes in this situation whatsoever. Not the Whisky dev for giving us a free alternative and not the Whisky users not paying for Crossover. Not even Crossover since they contribute to WINE. If there are any assholes, it’s developers who make games for Switch but not Mac (since they’re both ARM64 platforms; obviously not counting first-party Nintendo developers), people who pirated Crossover, and developers not developing at all for ARM64. But that’s a stretch and I’m not after any of those people, I’m just saying, if someone has to be an asshole, that’s where I’d look, not at Whisky/its dev/its users, and not at Crossover/its dev/its users.
Hard to imagine but back in the day it wasn’t up to your operating system to distribute software. They were just a platform and you had open choice to obtain software.
Apple showcasing what their hardware and software was capable of was normal. I don’t think this was negligent but maybe naive seeing how things are run now. It was much better and we got better products and competition.
Budgie was an apple developer before with Marathon which was exclusive not because of any distribution rights but just preference for the platform.
There have been exclusives for a long time, even before Halo. Mostly console, because Windows hasn’t really faced competition. Macs could never decide on a chipset. First it was Motorola, then PowerPC, then Intel, and now Apple Silicon. It’s a moving target. Apple Silicon may not be forever either. If Apple wants to get into gaming, I can see them working with AMD, but not soon.
Apple can’t even be arsed to support games that were released on their own platform like 5 years ago. Why would they suddenly start bothering to support games released for other platforms?
To be fair they did move to a completely different CPU architecture and ARM is a hit or miss in gaming. Some games are fine, but then there are ones like Minecraft that ran better on my 10 year old Intel than on a top of the line M processor
Someone else said that Apple want everyone to use Metal on MacOS, and don’t properly support OpenGL. Which seems like a bigger problem than absence of some variants of Wine.
It’s not they don’t properly support opengl, is that they intentionally chose to stop any kind of development on opengl 8 years ago, so devs are forced to choose between using an ancient version of opengl or make a native “metal” build.
Their idea is that once devs spent thousands of hours on their “metal” engine, then they will focus exclusively or primarily on apple devices
Maybe they should buy Crossover and make it part of macOS
Absolutely no! Previous acquisition prove that they’ll stop any kind of work on Linux (that means backports on Wine, codeweawer is a massive sponsor) and for almost nothing.
And the end result will be like Rosetta, introduce a perfect interpreter but discontinue and remove it from the operating system a few years later because you want to push developers to make native builds and push consumers to throw their perfectly working PowerPC and buy an Intel Mac
Wait, of all the tech companies in the world, you specifically chose Apple for the “don’t want to throw perfectly good computers” line? The same Apple that every single year is routinely removing perfectly good computers from the newest MacOS compatibility list using same bullshit/fake requirements as Microsoft did with Windows 11?
“Don’t want to throw your 8 years old 7th gen Intel PC because Windows 10 is EOL? Buy a new Mac and throw it after 6-7 years when MacOS is EOL for your device!”
Yeah, but Apple has a history of doing that. They dropped support for Motorola chips in the PowerPC era. They dropped support for PowerPC chips in the Intel era. And they’ve started dropping Intel chips in the Apple Silicon era. They keep reinventing the Mac to stay current. Meanwhile, Windows supports stuff going way back regardless of it being updated to support the newest stuff. Except Microsoft decided to try a similar thing, but also kinda not really? I mean, you can run Windows 11 on 7th gen Intel (I was running it on a 4th gen Xeon), they just don’t want you to.
At least with Apple you know what you’re getting, and it’s a lot more secure and stable for it.
Besides, I wouldn’t expect someone with a perfectly good PC to throw it out and get a Mac. I’d suggest they run Linux instead. It’ll run better than Windows, too. But if your computer is dead, dying, or on its way there, I do suggest Mac as a perfectly good alternative.
No one’s really running computers for 20+ years, except the government. For whatever dumb ass reason.
My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.
Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.
It is exactly why I’m an apple hater, as an owner of an iPad mini and Intel iMac. Both are basically bricks.
The iPad can’t even be used to browse websites because Apple it’s so magnanimous to tie browser updates to the operating system. Once the os is EOL, the browser is EOL, and all the third party browsers too, as Apple forces devs to use the system browser as engine (= Firefox, Chrome for iOS basically are glorified Safari skins). Apps for iOS almost all require the latest version and you can’t download a previous version unless you have a Time machine and you press download before the cutoff. Imagine on Android if apps required Android 15 and greater. Instead most of them can still run on Android 10 and even earlier.
The iMac, despite being a 4th gen Intel with dedicated AMD GPU, it’s also a brick. Every app (including Firefox, Chrome, etc) requires a recent MacOS version (here devs aren’t targeting latest and greatest, but still is annoying). Of course Apple still ties Safari updates on the operating system. Imagine on PC if apps required Windows 11 24H1. Because newer versions of MacOS don’t have the driver for my dedicated GPU, they can’t be tricked to install a newer version (I tried, it’s unbearable to use MacOS without GPU acceleration, with all that eye candy it’s a must have)
At least the iMac could run a different operating system… Debian shows a black screen and I would need an external monitor, Arch somehow turns off the USB ports on the back and I can’t use keyboard and mouse… I have to use Windows 10…
Because if fucking Apple of all companies starts taking gaming seriously, maybe Microsoft will again, too.
You can’t expect large megacorps to “do the right thing”, no matter how you define that. Linux is the only path towards open-source software and promotion.
Apple is dipping their toes in the gaming water. Like couple of weeks ago they had a livestream, outside the WWDC schedule, about porting pc games to MacOs. They have even made plugins for Unity and put them on GitHub. So at least they take gaming a bit more seriously than they did under Steve Jobs.
Apple already has the Game Porting Toolkit which is made by CodeWeavers - D3DMetal can run a lot of Windows games like Proton’s DXVK/VKD3D. MoltenVK is a little behind to fully empower VKD3D on macOS; it’s not as smooth sailing as Proton.
The biggest issue is that Apple are still hoping developers spend the time to work on converting shaders to Metal, implement Game Center, UI and Accessibility features etc so the game feels like a native app.
Which is dumb. As was Metal (they should have just made Metal as a Vulkan abstraction layer).
Valve took the smart route and while they love developers using the Steam SDK, at least with the Steam Overlay they can still offer a native-like feeling experience.
Here’s hoping Steam Machine etc is incredibly disruptive as if it’s a decent workstation too, there’s a dwindling number of reasons to not use Linux (Adobe / Affinity / Office / AutoCAD / MinecraftBE / Fortnite).
What do you consider Obsidian? They put out two bangers this year. Does Split Fiction count? They’re at least an order of magnitude under the budget of a marquis Sony game, let alone the likes of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. How about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? The Alters? Dispatch? Have you heard of a little game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? I hear people like that one. (I’m joking. I’ve played it, too. Budget estimates are still in the tens of millions of dollars.) I’m strongly of the opinion that AA is back right now.
You got anything action? I’m only aware of Lost Soul Aside.
Genokids and Spirit X Strike are indie in Early Access, and I’d be hesitant to qualify Ninja Gaiden 4 as AA.
I’ve probably come across a couple of other indies along the way, but AFAIK, that’s the whole year.
I was psyched Fatal Fury is back until freaking Cristiano Ronaldo showed up 😂 I was never an SNK fan and I’m still knees deep into other fighting games anyway so that’s alright.
I would call Avowed the best action game this year, yes. I think a lot of people were let down by the ways that it’s light on RPG systems, expecting it to be a Bethesda style game, but I’d say that, while it’s not 1:1, that game has a lot in common with FromSoft games but without the tense feeling of being against tough odds. If you haven’t played it yet, you’ll see what I mean. There’s also Eternal Strands, which I haven’t played just because there was so much else to play this year, but it’s got some buzz and interesting design ideas behind it.
The AAA label can be misleading. I’ve been playing Dying Light: The Beast, which is technically a AAA game, but it has an indie jankiness to it that all open world Techland games have which is part of its charm.
People who swear off AAA games seem to think that they’re all COD, and they’re missing out on the good ones.
FromSoftware is a AAA studio. And there are plenty of AAA studios that resist the typical enshittification common to big budget studios. Now that I’m thinking about it, a lot of the “good” triple A studios that come to mind are based in Europe or Japan. USA style capitalism is the problem, not AAA studios themselves.
We have capitalism here in Europe too, and don’t get me started about the work culture in Japan.
I think there’s something else in the US. It’s a lack of cultural diversity. Yes, the country is a mixing pot of cultures, technically speaking - but it’s also kinda not. US mainstream media (I don’t mean news, I mean games, movies, etc) in general is quite homogenized. It’s also a huge export, so of course people in other countries get influenced by a lot of it too, but we have a lot of our own culture, which doesn’t much influence the US, but influences us.
I blame the death of mid-budget movies for the death of American media diversity. Which of course is largely due to Netflix et al. So capitalism is still the root cause, but it’s also the extreme cultural dominance of the US. Whereas here in Europe most movies and TV shows get made with the expectation that they’ll be watched by people of the country where it’s made, so it can afford to be jankier, American media has the expectation of being consumed around the world - so it’s a bit more generic and polished.
There’s also the factor of the death or at least severe weakening of regional cultures, think your old Californian desert, Appalachian, or Old Boston cultures. A lot of these were weakened or even wiped out by the Great depression, Dust Bowl, and post war migrations, meaning that even the stronger of these more regional cultures can barely flex even in their own areas.
While it’s obviously misguided there is a reason rural folks are so conservative, the source isn’t necessarily political it’s because they recognize that their culture is weakening to the mainstream Pan American culture but assume it’s political since they don’t really have the language to figure out otherwise.
I feel like this is pretty reductive, really, to blanket all AAA games as one thing that are all bad. Just like all indie games aren’t great. In fact, the vast majority are kinda trash, really.
For every Call of Duty, you can find amazing games like Death Stranding 2 that have insane budgets but swing for the fences (and succeed in my opinion). And on the flip side for every Silksong you have three million, anime-girl-on-the-cover trash indie games.
There’s no “one is better than the other” when comparing the totality of AAA vs indie.
I just go into all games with no expectations or influences. its a much better way to game, imho.
rather than writing off AAA entirely. if I avoid reviews/ forum discussions etc and just play, then the labels kinda fall away. every game has a chance to be fun. regardless if it was made by 100 person dev team or 2.
Indie games have had a far better hit rate with me since about 2017 or so, but this year, bigger budget games have been more my speed. I agree; there’s no need to stick to those sorts of categories when your favorite can come from anywhere.
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