I was just flabbergasted that they decided to make all of their perk trees boring and lame. I genuinely don’t remember anything about the characters other than disappointment.
Roland, Mordecai, Brick, Lilith: character design masterpieces. Distinct styles and strengths but not overly limited. Zer0, Salvador, Gage, Axton, Magic Chick 2: great, less type specialized but that’s not a bad thing.
Everyone else? Just walking gun stats. And not particularly fun ones.
Borderlands 3 had some of the best gameplay in any shooter I’ve played, story and difficulty be damned. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was back to form, despite its disappointing post-game and 3-room DLCs. The only reason I’m excited for 4 is because the gameplay looks solid and they’ve yet to tell a single joke.
You see, the problem is that game publishers have been innovating hard…
…ly, so modern games are barely an improvement over old games, except in terms of graphics. In particular, they want to continue not innovating by re-releasing those same old games with new graphics slapped onto them.
If everyone could just play those old titles, then they wouldn’t need to play the new titles, which would be very bad, because it would mean game publishers would need to innovate.
You know books haven’t been innovating graphics for centuries. It’s scary how many people have been using old books for recreational use. How can newer book publishers compete?
Even graphics are often stagnating or regressing already in some cases. Have you noticed that Ubisoft’s facial and movement animations for example have regressed quite dramatically since 2013?
Well, I’m at least not surprised. They didn’t achieve good face animations through technological advancement, but rather by throwing tons of money at the problem, i.e. hiring actors and motion-capturing them.
When it stops being your unique selling point, you’re not gonna get as much budget anymore, at which point it’s either scrapped or you might use worse equipment, worse actors and give the actors less time to practice and redo scenes.
In general, the problem with realistic graphics is that reality is your upper bound. It’s difficult to inch closer to it and it’s easy to regress when you don’t pay as much attention to some detail…
I haven’t, because I haven’t bought access to Ubisoft junk in years. Last I saw of their financials, I’m not the only one. If you want this behavior to stop, stop consuming media. I sure have cut way down. I cut the cable cord, I barely watch TV, cut all my streaming services except for one. Don’t buy many games anymore (mostly because they all suck, are often poorly finished and are often just a damn re-release). I saw my Spotify is going up 5 bucks this morning, it’s getting cut this week too.
All this purging, yet my life hasn’t changed whatsoever. Almost feels good to get rid of all this crap. They only did it to themselves, so I hope they go have fun chasing people pirating 20 year old software. The crash is imminent.
Cyberpunk oversold and underdelivered at launch. 3 months later it was insanely good, especially if you had a high end pc. It never sucked, the management of cdpr made a mistake, thats it.
Girls who code are rare. There are probably more AFAB coders at my work than those who identify as female. And a hell of a lot more men.
And I’m in a progressive city in a progressive state.
I work in IT, and I think there is one woman out of 50 employees on my corner of the org chart, and that’s the CIO’s admin assistant.
I’m certain it’s culture, and it doesn’t just go for programming, it goes for almost all of STEM. There was a recent “Stuff You Should Know” episode about toy chemistry sets, and they made it a point to talk about the marketing, and how it always was with boys, for boys. My son, 8 year old kid, says “that’s just wrong! Girls can do all that stuff!”. He’s got it figured out.
No…but I am being hyperbolic. I definitely interface with more transmasc and nonbinary coders than I do with cisgender female coders. This may also be because, again, cultural reasons.
There certainly are more cisgender female coders, but they are still a minority group by a big amount, and they tend to not draw much attention to themselves.
As a welder, I’ve had a female coworker ONCE in 15 years working in the industry. My current work doesn’t even have a bathroom for women in the same building as most of the workers. If we did hire a female welder, she’d have to walk across the parking lot to the administration building to actually use a women’s bathroom.
This broad dynamic isn’t new and it isn’t unique either to gaming or to men. Every single creative volunteer community on the net is filled with assholes and drama llamas, of any and all genders. It’s just the nature of the thing. You see the same things over and over with game modding, cracking, romhacking, emulation, manga scanlation, anime fansubbing, vocaloid production, mmd modeling, fanfic, fanart, and so on and on.
People often (generally?) are willing to invest the time and energy into whatever it is that they’re going to post online at least in large part because they crave the attention they hope it will bring, and specifically, they want to be lauded for their talent and skill.
And that often runs up against the fact that an awful lot of the responses they’re going to get are going to come from self-absorbed and entitled assholes bitching because they don’t like whatever it is that they’re getting for free, and think they have to be accommodated.
And very often, the response from the creator, unsurprisingly really, is to effectively (or even literally) say, “Fine then - fuck you all. I’m done.”
And 'round and 'round it goes, and has from the start, and likely will never stop. It’s just an unfortunate but pretty much inevitable clash between a personality type that’s likely to create and share something online for free and a personality type that’s likely to comment on something somebody else created and shared with them for free.
I don’t disagree with you but I feel that it is important to recognize and call out the misogyny element in this story. The gaming community has a pervasive sexism problem that’s normalized, and that part is unique in that it all comes from men.
I have only ever played three games online. The first was Final Fantasy XI, and I was part of a group/guild with nice people. It was fun!
The next was Team Fortress 2 because my husband wanted me to play with him. The vitriol and misogyny hurled at me over voice chat after two matches made me never play again.
The last was Destiny, and I turned off voice chat completely.
I don’t want to hammer on this really, because I think you mean well, but…
You’re not condemning the specific assholes who treated you poorly - you’re condemning “men” generally. Your point and your focus isn’t that they were assholes, but that they were men, as if that’s the actual problem - as if their failure isn’t being assholes, but simply being men.
I don’t know if that’s your actual view, but that is the way it comes across. And broadly, that view is part of the problem, since it alienates men who deserve no blame and diverts attention from those who do. And that’s exactly what I meant when I said that countering misogyny with misandry is a poor strategy.
yes you’re right this is a lawsuit about too much profit and it will directly set a precedent where companies aren’t allowed to have too much profit.
Pretty smart, as a leftist maybe I’ll sue every corporation for being privately owned, this is a whole new avenue for systemic change. You opened my eyes
I talk about wealth then I talk about income, compare both, then I compare wealth to net worth (which is how you measure wealth)
If you have enough wealth, it’s used to get money as your wealth is used as collateral, you don’t need to be rich to do that, you just need to own stuff that is paid for. I know people who only own a house that isn’t worth a fortune, the got a mortgage on it when the rates were down to 1% to invest it at a higher interest rate, their not rich, they just have wealth that can be used as collateral to get money.
I saw some stats the other day that if you remove the top 1000 incomes in the united states the average drops to around 35k. So that average of 75k is bullshit.
It’s funny and true; I have no desire to continue playing and yet I am still excited to get my hands on the toolkit and make my own shit because all I see are missed opportunities everywhere. Honestly, I kinda wonder how into sci-fi the devs actually are, because everything is surface-level and misses the mark on a lot of referencial material so often.
I bought borderlands 2 the other week and it’s been a blast on my SteamDeck. Unfortunately it seems it’s one of those games that loves to connect online all the time, like it’ll kick me out of single player if it detects wifi and make me reload into… singleplayer, but online. with 0 differences.
I probably would’ve been better off pirating it tbh.
BL3 was generic and forgettable. BL4 anything more than 40$ is easily forgettable. Don’t these guys know most gamers have backlogs at this point? No one has the money for this shit.
When Ubisoft introduced always online DRM with AC2, I was out. It’s nice with the Internet how much being anti-Ubisoft has become common enough to be unsurprising
While I like and appreciate the campaign, the issue IMO is bigger. IoT devices for example even have environmental impact when services behind them get discontinued.
I would therefore like a more general rule: whenever a product is discontinued for whatever reason, all necessary documents, sources, etc need to be released to allow third parties to take over maintenance (that also includes schematics for hardware repairs).
I think many people who are responsible for pushing the campaign forward would agree it’s a much bigger issue. It’s just that the bigger issue is big enough that there are multiple fronts one could fight on, and this is a politically useful opportunity to push forward. A victory from this campaign will be unlikely to lead to the larger developments without more of a fight, because achieving the general rule will take a few instances of arguing the specific case.
For now, I’m excited to see where this leads, even if the answer might be “nowhere”
EU cutizens can sign European Citizens’ Initiative that aims to prevent publishers using killswitches to permanently disable games. If it gets 1M signatures, it will be discussed in European Comission.
gamesradar.com
Ważne