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Kolanaki, do games w Ex-PlayStation boss says the games industry is "littered" with Fortnite clones and "people trying to do Overwatch with different skins," but keep dreaming if you're just trying to get "big sacks of money"
@Kolanaki@pawb.social avatar

That’s pretty much been the landscape of major commercial gaming since I’ve been alive. Just replace Fortnite and Overwatch with the current popular game. Doom, Diablo, Minecraft, etc.

halcyoncmdr,
@halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world avatar

Nearly everything is a derivative of something from before. Occasionally something new comes up though. I don’t remember anything like Getting Over It seems to have created the Foddian game genre for example. And while Balatro uses relatively normal cards for its base, the gameplay itself is unique.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@pawb.social avatar

The MOBA genre as we know it today simply took Warcraft 3 and tweaked the gameplay a bit with the original DOTA mod. But then stuff started ripping it off and we got League of Legends which, from what I could tell when these were rerelatively new, was the same thing as Dota but with different characters.

Palworld gets a lot of attention for duplicating some elements of Pokemon, but the whole game is basically a reskinned Ark, which itself is just Rust with more gimmicks.

The BR genre started as an Arma mod, then became a stand alone game, which Fortnite shifted gears from some kind of PvE game to add the BR that is dominating now, and everyone is trying to copy that. As a 40 year old gamer, it really is starting to feel like there is nothing new under the sun.

Goodeye8,

Depends on how you define new. Battle Royale could be viewed as just an evolution of the arena shooter genre where you expand the map and the player count to the maximum with the “arena pickups” being randomized. Or it could be viewed as something new because it fundamentally plays differently. IMO taking things that have been done before and combining them into something that hasn’t been done before is still creating something new.

And if you want really fresh ideas, there’s always the indie scene. I will always point my finger at Noita and the absolutely insane wand/spellcrafting system which is probably the most wizarding experience you can have. You can literally create a wand that (and I’m significantly simplifying the process because honestly I have no idea how that actually works) summons a deer into a parallel world and then swaps your location with the deer making you teleport into a parallel world. And no, that is most likely not the intended use of any of the spells that go into that wand. The devs themselves were probably trying to figure out if that’s a feature or a bug.

nyctre,

Even DotA itself was inspired by Aeon of Strife which was a StarCraft map. There were a few AOS-like maps at the time but DotA became the most popular. Then Riot came along and approached an ex DotA designer to help them make a successor. They also approached the owner of dota-allstars.com which at the time was the main site for DotA. Discussions, hero suggestions, fan art, pretty much anything dota related was there. Then, the owner, Fuck Pendragon, took the entire site down and replaced it with a LoL ad. Ofc all those hero suggestions were taken and implemented into LoL without crediting the creators. A few years later he also tried to use blizzard to sue valve for the dota rights but blizz and valve settled it out of court without him.

JandroDelSol,

And ow there’s a bunch of rougelikes based around other kinds of games like dice. Not a bad thing, but Balatro has certainly started a new mini genre

rigatti,
@rigatti@lemmy.world avatar

Agree but I think the trend started before Balatro. Slay the Spire was probably more influential in that sense.

rozodru,
@rozodru@pie.andmc.ca avatar

to be fair there are many games that are like Getting Over it or Balatro or even Vampire Survivors it’s just many of them aren’t as successful or known as those games.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

The major difference being how many recurring costs you incur for chasing live services rather than just making Diablo or Doom clones.

wagesj45,
@wagesj45@fedia.io avatar

Same problem, new challenges.

allo, do games w The creator of upcoming life sim Inzoi says he was "recklessly brave to even think about creating a game of this scale"
@allo@sh.itjust.works avatar

“Now, I understand why so few companies have attempted to develop a life simulation game. The challenge isn’t just additive the more you try to build—it’s exponential. At a certain point, finding bugs in this vast world we’ve created feels like playing tag with invisible ghosts.”

He’s not bragging; it’s honesty. I’m thankful he is sharing the experience. I know totally what he’s talking about. I remember trying to make a simulation of reality in the wc3 map editor in elementary school. Add the weather so the plants grow. Tie growth variables also in to deer eating them. wolves eat the deer. So everything needs hunger variables. But already we start having the ‘exponential growth’ he is talking about: because what about the Weather and the Deer? And the Weather and Wolves? Add aspect of the world for one type of object (weather for plants), and suddenly you have to figure out how or whether it relates to everything else you have (Deer and Wolves). Now let’s say we add villagers and Structures. Every time we add something, we have more nodes to consider the interrelations of.

It’s easy when there are few systems and few types of things (like a cardgame of creatures with atk and def), but it escalates quick and does exactly what he’s saying the more systems you try to accurately include and farther toward ‘full life sim’.

So im just a noob, but I see clearly this is what he is conveying to us. (probably cuz i tried a similar path in elementary school. if i remember correctly i ran in to this same issue, scale was too big too big project and i switched to something else. it exponentialed quick; just like he says)

edit: i bet he wasnt brave as much as did not forsee the exponentialness aspect and wanting to aim high caused him to fall in to it

Sonotsugipaa,

So everything needs hunger variables

T̸h̶e̴ ̷f̵o̶g̴ ̷w̴a̷s̴ ̸h̸u̵n̵g̴r̸y̸,̸ ̶i̴t̷ ̵a̸t̶e̵ ̵t̷h̵e̶ ̸w̴o̸l̷v̷e̸s̴

allo,
@allo@sh.itjust.works avatar

that would be a super cool touch in a game

Secret of the Haunted Forest

Player eventually realizes the reason for the unexplained corpses is the hunger mechanic applies to the fog too.

snugglesthefalse,

I’m just reminded of the fog men in kenshi

Maestro,

Dwarf Fortress goes that deep. They once had to fix a problem where cats died from alcohol poisoning. Dwarfs in a bar would spill their drinks, the cats would walk through the puddles and subsequently lick their paws to clean themselves. It's crazy!

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In, (edited )

I think the bug was that a splash of beer had the same alcohol content as a cup.

echodot,

Yes that was the bug. After all it makes sense that cats would clean their paws and get a bit of alcohol in their bodies. Kind of bizarre to think though that the system was sophisticated enough to track grooming behavior but not quantity.

It really goes to show how stupid computers actually are. They just follow your instructions regardless of how insane they may be

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In,

What is amazing is how our universe and existence seems to be governed by a few physics laws (which we don’t fully understand).

Adalast,

Reminds me of Rimworld and the fact that, if there is no other accessible entities on the map with a nutrition stat, children and animals will b-line for booze that raiders drop and get hammered. I can’t count the number of Muffalo, dogs, and cats that I have had which end up with an alcohol tolerance hedif out of nowhere.

Kaldo,

Making a system like this one day is my dream. I'm not in game dev and I'm probably never going to make a playable game but I naively believe that if you organize this well enough in advance, the moment it starts clicking together would be amazing. If you define all the individual actors in a flexible enough way, eventually the simulation should just 'click' and start functioning on its own, right? :P

For example, you dont need to code the specific wolves+rain interaction - you just need to code "if vulnerable/tired - find shelter" and have rain affect the living creatures in that way. It doesn't matter if there are deer or sheep in the area, "if wolf hungry" logic should just say "find something with meat to eat nearby".

Then again I know enough about programming to know this is extremely naive and it'd probably be a million times more difficult if I ever got around to doing it. I don't even know where I fall on the dunner-kruger graph yet, but it's an interesting thing to think about for me.

echodot,

According to the dwarf fortress developer the hard part isn’t the code exactly it’s the graphics which is why he doesn’t bother with them.

Kaldo,

Oh I empathize with that. I tried unity/godot and code part would always be fun and easy, I love that... models, assets, animations break my brain however. I wish I could just not bother with them but it's such an important part of the experience, arguably the most important one

redhorsejacket,

This video series sounds like it might be up your alley. Guy documents his attempts to simulate a goblin society and ecosystem.

echodot,

I’ve read from a few people who’ve done similar sorts of things that the solution to this problem is to just have everything track everything to begin with. Hunger level, heart rate, mood, everything you can possibly think of to track, and then just have everything else inherit from that global class. A lot of the values will be zero for some objects, but that’s okay, after all a storage crate doesn’t need a mood, both at some point in the future maybe you want to add an emotional box, and your code will definitely handle it now. Otherwise you have to go back in and alter everything every time you make a slight change.

rhombus,

A more complicated but ultimately faster approach is using a structure like an Entity Component System. You build an entity (deer, person, plant) out of components that are just data (health, hunger, mood), and then each type of component has a corresponding system that updates all the components at once based on other values. It’s somewhat similar, but you save space on unnecessary components not being added, and it packs the data together in way that is faster for the computer to iterate through.

redhorsejacket,

An emotional box? Enough about my wife!

OH!

shalafi,

LOL, forgot about that tacky bastard.

redhorsejacket,

He sucks, but it was such a good set-up for a shitty Dice Man style joke, I couldn’t resist.

Paradachshund,

Hey another kid who grew up wc3 modding! I did a ton of that too.

AmosBurton_ThatGuy,
@AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.ca avatar

I made a tower defense map in the Starcraft map editor when I was a kid , but it was based off of anti air rather than anti ground like the other TD maps at the time. I got it working pretty damn well (at least IMO) but I didn’t have internet at the time and that was on my dads work laptop so it sadly got lost.

I don’t think I could recreate that now if I tried, crazy what you can do as a bored kid with too much time.

Paradachshund,

That’s cool! I made tons of stuff but most of it never got finished or released cause I just kept starting the next thing. Probably the wildest thing I ever made was a prototype for a sidescrolling platformer in wc3. It had keyboard movement and ability usage, jumping, a heart counter in the top left, enemies, powerups… It was kind of janky but it worked surprisingly well considering what I built it in.

allo,
@allo@sh.itjust.works avatar

o the memories lol.

<3 both of u. I was Pixie_Tails on US east and west and in one of the big mapmaking guilds on east. I look back and think wc3 was the mentally healthiest part of my childhood. My most fun thing was a game like dota but with a huge natural map and a minute at the start for everyone to choose their castle locations. Like you could choose to be on a hill, along a river, etc. Then there were diff biomes to choose your hero from and the hero choices spawned like pkmn and there were rares. and choosing base unit types. then it became like dota where units spawned at castles and attackmoved to other castles. Was epic.

My weakness was unit and ability balancing since it didnt interest me so i never did it.

anyway, we thought up and made these as kids. i think that’s the coolest thing

Paradachshund,

That’s so cool sounding too! I made so many half baked ideas honestly. Tower defenses, single player campaigns (way too ambitious ones), and so many more. It really taught me a lot about proper game dev honestly.

AmosBurton_ThatGuy,
@AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.ca avatar

God damn, that sounds awesome! Those map editors were seriously impressive for their time, so many cool things you could do with them. I also liked making “campaign” maps but with hero units and harder AI (SC base ai was too easy but you could set it to be harder through the map editor) or those “maze” maps where you have to keep the units you start out with alive through a bunch of different encounters.

Ahh good times!

Paradachshund,

For real. I had a project to make two full since player campaigns and it was waaaaaay too ambitious. I’ve always been hopelessly ambitious with game dev stuff and I still am honestly 😅

So fun to hear everyone chiming about doing this back then.

ramble81, do gaming w Popular Female Skyrim Modder Has Abandoned Her Work Due to Daily Harrassment

This is the sexism that we saw come out during the election. We thought the country was getting better but they were just quietly simmering but connecting online.

I said that with an American slanted focus but sadly it’s worldwide too.

BossDj,

This is where my brain went, too. Even looking at this Lemmy thread. 6 of the 10 most upvoted top level comments (including THE most upvoted) are “not meee”, “not alllll men”, defensive crap or “well she should have just…” and “even men have to deal with it toooo” like damn. We ARE fucked.

Dkarma,

It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.

If men had said they picked the bear it would have been framed as misogyny.

Case in point. Some dude just got murdered by the cops cuz the home invader was a woman and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.

Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.

Schadrach,

It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.

Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.

Welcome to society. Frankly, it’s malagency (mis-assignment of agency, specifically in a fashion that often makes men responsible for things that happen to them even when they really aren’t and often absolves women of that responsibility when they really should have it) all the way down.

Malagency as a lens predicts reality better than a lot of other gender focused lenses. “What would happen if women are believed to be less responsible for what happens than they really are and men are believed to be more responsible for what happens than they really are?” tends to map to reality better than “What would happen if everything in society were created by men to benefit men at the expense of women and to oppress women?” Especially once you stop looking narrowly at the top few percent of men, where the two lenses give similar results.

and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.

Something like 95% of people shot by police are men. This of course is not discriminatory on the grounds that men are evil, violent savages unlike every other group that are disproportionately shot by police who are innocent victims of oppression.

davel,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

We thought the country was getting better

Who the hell thought the country was getting better? No one I know. This is the same weak basket of deplorables excuse the DNC used for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Because they’ll blame anyone but themselves for their failures.

The Democrats fail because they’ve embraced grinding neoliberalism for an entire generation, because they abandoned the working class long ago. The DNC crushed Sanders—twice—because even a little social safety net, as a treat, is a bridge too far for them. Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/a9e8b1a2-d44a-469c-ad75-adfb6282d55c.jpeg

I said that with an American slanted focus but sadly it’s worldwide too.

Fascism isn’t on the rise in the US in particular and the West in general for no reason. The cause is ever-worsening neoliberalism, which is monopoly capitalism in decay. I wrote about this two months ago, but I’ll spare everyone the copypasta and just link to it.

IzzyJ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

I did, for one

toxicbubble, (edited ) do games w After 10,000+ hours grinding, MapleStory's first level 300 player slams the brakes at 299.99 to rant about the MMO and then quit, all on a dev-promoted stream

i was around during the first lvl 200, fully support the player’s decision. ppl asking “why play then?” have never been in an abusive relationship. it’s a great game tbh, just filled with mtx & grinding to the brim. ima check out his latest vids @tniru to see his side of the story

Pra,

Extaliams players, reply here ⬇️

hal_5700X, (edited )

check out his latest vids @tniru to see his side of the story

Here’s his youtube channel, www.youtube.com/channel/UCU0jd4xbundnzQcTlBbzETg.

RageAgainstTheRich,

Exactly. It is a really great game and the grinding can be very fun with the character skill explosions wiping out entire screens worth of mobs.

When the game released, the only micro transactions were clothing for your character and a pet that could pick up items automatically. Its really sad they didn’t just keep it that way.

A few months ago they got in deep shit because the gacha part apparently sometimes didn’t contain the low chance stuff at all. So you could pay a million dollars and you would never get it.

Another amazing game ruined by greed 💔

yote_zip, do games w Cities: Skylines 2 "absolutely cannot" have the decade of DLC features that the original game added | GamesRadar+
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.

In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it’s actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?

dinckelman,

I feel really bad for the people working on these games. PAYDAY 3 will eventually reach success in a niche, but will likely be hated by those same people.

The objective behind a game like this, or Sims, or FIFA/FC, is not to create a great gameplay experience. Sadly, they make a passable game, that will help them leech money sustainably for a considerable amount of time, through endless DLC. Paradox will inevitably make Colossal Order do the same with C:S2, despite them claiming that it’ll be fewer but larger DLC.

There are very few studios I will refuse to show respect for, and the one behind PAYDAY is one of them. Just like what remains of Maxis

captainlezbian,

Yeah for an example of a series that has found a reasonable equilibrium there companies should be looking at Civ. By making every game significantly enough different moving to the next doesn’t feel like 20 downgrades to get a slight upgrade, but more like 5 has reached the conclusion of what it will ever be, 6 is now new and will have 2 major expansions and a variety of minor ones, but you only see a bit of how it’s incomplete until years later when you’re reminded that some feature came in rise and fall and you’ve just taken it for granted for several years.

Sacha,

I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.

Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)

The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.

So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.

I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.

kayrae_42,

I’ve been playing Sims since 2006. Sims 4 feels like an insult. I want to like it, and aesthetically it is pleasing, the build tools are nice. But game play wise I need so many mods to make it enjoyable. The packs don’t really integrate with each other and the relationships feel very shallow in vanilla experience. I have Sims 3 and Sims 2 and I love both of them, I used mods but I also it was a fun vanilla experience. I never felt robbed when I bought dlc for them, but at this point with sims 4 unless the dlc is on sale I will not buy it at all. Every sims 4 thing I have bought except base game has been sale. It didn’t even release with pools or toddlers.

I am interested in Life By You from paradox games just to see something different in the genre, it helps that Rob Humble is on the development team. I also keep an eye on Paralives to see how that grows. I just want something new in the life sim genre.

dinckelman,

If not for mods, I would not play 4 at all. It’s just bland. It has no soul. And don’t get me started on how broken the few recent expansions were. Not just “egh, an occasional bug that would prompt a restart”, straight up irreparable damage to your save, and broken features that are still not fixed

hiddengoat,

Yeah, and Payday 2 had basically nothing at launch compared to Payday and people bitched about the lack of content after only two years.

vagrantprodigy,

CK3 was the last straw for me. It’s been years, and the DLC released is both expensive and lacking in the mechanics of CK2.

De_Narm,

What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.

yote_zip,
@yote_zip@pawb.social avatar

The trend would be developers that are unwilling or unable to release a new game that is better than the old one (especially in formulaic series like a racing game), or that they intentionally withhold features in order to resell them again. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes good reasons for it, just that it’s something I’ve personally noticed happening now that developers are leaning harder and harder into DLC, and now that games are stagnating in innovation and reasons to buy the next entry in the series.

Also for PAYDAY 3 specifically if you don’t have any familiarity with Overkill/Starbreeze I wouldn’t defend them on this one. They have chosen money over their players every single chance they could get, including breaking their promise to never include microtransactions in the game, and then breaking their promise in 2017 that they wouldn’t release any more paid DLC. In 2017 they released the Ultimate Edition with this promise, and in 2019 they went back on it. In 2019, they started releasing DLC again with the mission statement of “hey any money you put into this DLC will help fund PAYDAY 3 development”. The community immediately noticed that the DLC from 2019 onwards was of lower quality and more expensive, and although people frequently brought this up, others would defend it and say “yes, but we need to support Overkill or PAYDAY 3 won’t be made.”

They started development on PAYDAY 3 in 2016, so they’ve had 7 years to develop it before it released, whereas PAYDAY 2 has been out for 10 years at this point. The moral of the story is they kept releasing mediocre DLC for PAYDAY 2 because it was easy and lucrative, and it became such an addiction that they neglected PAYDAY 3’s development to the point where it released with barely any features or content even after 7 years of development.

breakingcups, do games w CD Projekt exec says "the right thing to do" is release a real Nintendo Switch 2 cartridge for Cyberpunk 2077, not a game-key card, in message to other studios: "Do not underestimate the physical edit

I mean, releasing something physical means it has to be done. Remember what state Cyberpunk 2077 was in on release?

NaibofTabr,

Hey, it’s been awhile, it’s gotta be done by now!

Did they finally add all the features they advertised?

OmegaLemmy,
@OmegaLemmy@discuss.online avatar

No… They built on what they managed to make instead. Frankly, a more manageable solution

NaibofTabr,

Ah the ol’bait’n’switch, a classic.

SomethingBurger,

They used the No Man’s Sky strategy: release trash, polish it a bit, then get praised for improving while the game is still nowhere near what was promised.

levzzz,

I agree, but nms probably did it better

caseofthematts,

It’s why I’ll never get it unless obtained for the good ol’ price of free. I’m glad people are enjoying it and it’s much improved over the trash pile they delivered! But it’s still a very different game than advertised.

Frankly, it’s concerning how quickly the narrative shifted on this. You’d think with the internet recording the whole fiasco, there wouldn’t be a quick narrative shift and misinformation on the subject, but people have convinced themselves the launch wasn’t that bad, Sony somehow screwed them and this is what they said the game would be!

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

One’s mileage could vary wildly at launch with that game. It did work just fine for me, with some minimal jank, but I could clearly see the video evidence others had of their bad time.

caseofthematts,

Oh absolutely. I know it wasn’t super janky for everyone - but the fact is that it was so broken on launch for not just PC, but PS as well. The mass refunds, which Sony has never done, etc. Denying that this was a thing is what the narrative seems to be for many.

I’m glad it worked for you on launch, and hope you had a great time playing it!

UnfortunateShort,

They arguably did worse, because NMS didn’t just polish the game, they retroactively added most of the content + didn’t release a paid DLC. Cyberpunk falls short of what has been promised to this day.

Blackmist,

I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.

I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.

Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.

Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.

NaibofTabr, (edited )

I’m not sure what most people were expecting

People were expecting the game that was promised in all the lead-up marketing.

CD Projekt has been building up expectations, previewing intriguing scenes and customizations that never came to pass.

It went to promise real-time AI that would grant over a thousand NPCs a variety of roles and actions that, complete with a day/night cycle, was designed to change up their routines. But as fans began playing, they quickly discovered this wasn’t true.

Then, there are the gameplay and AI issues that hinder the experience. A game like Cyberpunk 2077 runs on crime, and CD Projekt promised realistic interactions with the police. One would fully expect officers to come running if a crime was committed out in the open with witnesses, or even in a remote alleyway. Sadly, there is nothing realistic about a bunch of cops spawning unexpectedly around the player with guns firing – especially if no one even witnessed the crime.

Basically all of the marketing turned out to be lies and the game that CDPR promised never existed.

“Masterpiece” is a real stretch

Be sure to watch part 2 where they show pedestrian & vehicle pathing.

Blackmist,

@UnfortunateShort

I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.

I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.

There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.

I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.

I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.

Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.

UnfortunateShort,

That’s funny, I would point put the amazing gameplay in particular as their no. 1 selling point, if I had to choose anything. But the discussion what’s good and what’s bad aside, they just didn’t deliver on their promises.

I was fed the story of a GTA contender. A life-sim where your choices matter, starting with your origin story, which was supposed to already have great impact. And what does reality look like? Well, your origin story gets you a different tutorial mission and you get a few extra dialog options that do nothing. Your character always behaves exactly the same outside of that and it changes nothing about the story. It’s hardly even referenced by other characters at all, something Mass Effect and Dragon Age did better forever ago. The one big difference I noticed is that Jackie matters even less to you as corpo, which makes all the emotional stuff feel even more out of place and awkward, since you lose the offrenda mission. Hurray.

As for life-sim aspects, you can eat in some select few cut scenes, otherwise eating is useless and doesn’t even come with generic animations. You cannot even eat your useless food at a stall in the city or have a drink at the countless bars in the game just for fun. Except for cutscenes and in your, save for the wardrobe, useless apartment of course. You can also take a useless shower, or wait in bed instead of literally anywhere else. Wow.

You can randomly date a select few characters out of nowhere by choosing a random dialogue option. At least this yields you an almost sex-scene and a bonus quest… Followed by optional, awkward staring in your apartment and no further impact at all. Funnily enough your gender has a greater impact on the game than your backstory that way.

NPCs are generally dumb and you can’t really interact much with them at all. Police is dumb and easily outsmarted as well, but also always punishes you by death for anything. MaxTac is really tough actually and beating them yields you… Nothing! Nothing at all.

You do get a couple of choices throughout the story, but do they really change all that much? I would argue no, they don’t. Most of the time they cause some characters you barely know to live or die. Not the really important ones of course! We need those and there aren’t that many. I think one of the most interesting interactions in the entire game is the one with the ranom Natwatch guy, because you can’t really forsee the consequences for once.

Then there are a couple of different endings, some of which are actually hard to find. I think in retrospective, they are the main thing, besides the very varied gameplay, offering replay-value. The thing is, you don’t need to replay the game to see them all.

Is Cyberpunk trash? No, of course not, I’ve had my fair share of fun. I’m actually in my third playthrough to do liberty city, because everyone says it’s amazing. As for the main game only, I can’t help but be disappointed by the countless things this game doesn’t do. Including many low hanging fruits.

dumblederp,
@dumblederp@aussie.zone avatar

Battlefield 2042 tried that and still seems to be widely hated. I like it, it was on sale recently and would’ve been a good buy for $7 bucks.

Maven,

That game also happens to have some of the worst enemy AI I’ve ever seen in any game ever

dumblederp,
@dumblederp@aussie.zone avatar

Uhh, it’s mostly a PvP game, there’s only ever AI when a round isn’t full.

Maven,

You’re right! I mixed it up with a different battlefield. I was thinking of the campaign mode for BFV

Regrettable_incident,
@Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve just started playing it for the first time, seems to run fine on my steam deck.

stardust, do games w After 350,000 signatures in an EU consumer rights campaign, Ubisoft is adding offline modes to The Crew games - but not the now-dead original

I want Crew 1 offline more than the others because it has an actual single player campaign.

Beaver,
@Beaver@lemmy.ca avatar

Looks like Ubisoft didn’t get enough pressure.

hoghammertroll,

While Ubisoft likely isn’t going to make that happen, some dedicated fans are working on it

stardust,

Yeah been keeping eye on it and they’ve been making good progress with some of the story being playable already.

wreckedcarzz, (edited )
@wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world avatar

Well, and because 2 is fucking abysmal as a game. The starter car shouldn’t feel like it’s on rails regardless of speed, mostly - it’s a fucking racing game, get it right. (modern nfs is in the corner giggling but that piece of shit is always trying to force me to drift, again with an un-upgraded starter car with like 150hp, so it’s no better)

I was a closed beta tester for 1 and 2, and was very excited for both, but going from 1 to 2 is a huge step backwards in handling alone. Whereas I pre-ordered 1 and got several others to as well, I told everyone I know to avoid 2, bought it on sale a while after launch, was immediately disappointed they never addressed this, and it sits with… 13 hours on the clock. As a reference, I have 4,048 hours played in Forza Horizon 5.

I have no idea how they fucked up so badly. It’s a travesty.

(I play with keyboard/mouse out of preference but also because of physical disabilities, so while I /could/ use a controller and maybe mitigate this, grab a controller and try playing with one hand, see how great that experience is x_x) .

poolhelmetinstrument,
@poolhelmetinstrument@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t even played my copy of The Crew. Seems like now I won’t ever be able to.

TurboHarbinger, do games w Sony boss admits forcing PC gamers into PlayStation accounts can "invite pushback," but insists they have to keep games safe – which doesn't really track in single-player

Steals your information

calls it safety

lightnsfw, do gaming w Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is"

Doesn’t really matter why it is the way it is if the way it is sucks.

Crankpork,

Seriously. At the end of the day it’s the players who decide whether a game is good or fun. They might not understand the nuances of what went into creating a game they don’t find fun, but that doesn’t make them wrong.

Duamerthrax, do games w Ubisoft says you "cannot complain" it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren't "deceived" by the lack of an offline version

Ubisoft can’t complain that I wont buy their games if I don’t really own their games.

uis,

Boycott doesn’t work, grab pitchforks and torches(EU citizens only).

Duamerthrax,

Ubisoft’s stocks aren’t looking great at the moment.

uis,

Ubisoft’s stocks aren’t ubisoft’s assets. It is opinion on how much they worth, not how much they have.

atro_city, do games w Ubisoft says you "cannot complain" it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren't "deceived" by the lack of an offline version

Don't like this? Sign the EU petition Stop Killing Games.

Minizarbi,
@Minizarbi@jlai.lu avatar

Yea I was thinking about this !

uis,

I wish I could sign. Sadly, not all european citizens are EU citizens.

Sylvartas, do games w Vampire Survivors devs launch official wiki "free of ads, banners, and all of the junk that gets in your way"

Good to see we’re finally fighting back against Fandom

w3dd1e,

Fandom is icky. A few years ago, my mom was getting scammed by some conspiracy guy from LinkedIn who offered her a “job.”

These dudes set up their own fandom wiki to try to make their bullshit seem real. I can’t remember the name of the people involved but one guy was claiming that he was owed 300 trillion dollars by the government. (Can’t remember the exact number but it was astronomically high. More money than exists kinda high)

NuXCOM_90Percent,

A lot of devs of “wiki games” have been doing this lately.

Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that wiki.warframe.com/…/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Ana… and the old fandom equivalent “explains” it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.

NigelFrobisher, do gaming w Helldivers 2 gets delisted in more countries without PSN access, blindsided devs call for it to be "available worldwide" | Gamesrader

Pray that I don’t alter the deal further.

RightHandOfIkaros, do games w After 11 years, Xbox One emulators are finally coming to PC - but they're not actually using emulation at all

Nobody was missing out on anything. All of 343s Halo games have been garbage, but Halo 5 takes the garbage cake home.

The translation layer is awesome for every other game though.

tacosanonymous,
@tacosanonymous@lemm.ee avatar

I was a big LAN player in the heyday of the original, even got through 4.

That trash game came with the xbone I bought for my wife and I still couldn’t play it.

Microplasticbrain,

343 just sucks at making good halo stories, great gameplay (on infinite atleast), but they just don’t know where to take the story. I was disappointed in 4 skipped 5 and infinite was another halfbaked story that just felt empty.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Half of Halo 4 was the best Halo story. The other half of it was the worst Halo story.

RightHandOfIkaros,

343 is okay at making gameplay, but they are not good at making Halo gameplay. I mean, Halo 4 was just Call of Duty with Halo window dressing. And it makes sense because 343 was so proud to announce that they hired people who hate Halo to work on Halo. Well look how that turned out.

fox2263,

They capitulate too much.

As the other reply said, half the (H4) game was good. But they listened to the haters and changed up H5 dropping or rehashing the majority of things from H4. Then they capitulated again and threw everything out for H6 and gave us essentially H7 in all but name.

Years spent bringing everything to a head for 6 with Cortana, the Guardians, even Halo Wars. Then it’s all confined to audio logs.

I want to finish that damn story 343. Not whatever the fuck Infinite was.

Microplasticbrain,

Yea infinite was strange because the whole thing was like a prologue

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve said before, Infinite feels like the DLC to a Halo 6 game that was never released.

catloaf,

Isn’t that true of all Halo games though? I’ve only played 1 and 2, but the writing in those was just not good at all. I can’t imagine subsequent games being even worse.

MossyFeathers,
@MossyFeathers@pawb.social avatar

I couldn’t get through Halo 4’s campaign when it was released as part of the MCC, nor was I able to get though Halo Infinite’s (it wasn’t bad, just… meh; nowhere near as good as the Bungie campaigns but not trash either, just not as good). I would still like the option to play Halo 5 on PC just so I have the ability to play the main campaign, plus I’ve heard it’s the best multiplayer Halo? But yeah. Even if I never actually play it, it’s nice to have the option.

On a tangential note, I think 343’s Halo games would have been considered good if it wasn’t for Bungie’s Halo. I don’t think their campaigns are honestly bad, per se (though again, haven’t tried to play H5), they’re just bad in comparison to the “OG” games.

WhyFlip,

Pew pew pew!

simple,

Yeah there’s a reason there hasn’t been much interested in Xbone emulation, almost everything worth emulating has gotten PC ports over the years or is also on PS3 which does have a good emulator. Maybe if Sunset Overdrive was still a console exclusive I’d bother, but I guess this is cool for some peeps.

TrustedTyrant,

Forza horizon 2 is the only game I can think of that I would use this for.

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

Halo 5 had a lot of problems. Bit it’s a damned masterpiece compared to Infinite.

Halo 5 had great gunplay, Warzone Firefight was a blast, the Guardians were a great stand-in for the Halo rings, Cortana was an intimidating enemy by the end of the game, the lootboxes were actually better than the armor cores and marketplace from Infinite.

There are A LOT of negatives in there too. But a lot of positives. Infinite is just a shitshow from the beginning.

BestTestInTheWest,

Do people not like infinite? A mate and I are playing coop currently and I’m really enjoying it.

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

I have a lot of problems with it. Between the “story” and the copy-paste map. I would rather the game didn’t exist, because at least then they could make a follow up to 5’s end.

I really don’t want to spoil your fun if you’re enjoying it though. A lot of the gameplay elements are fun to play around with.

intensely_human,

Infinite has coop now??

russjr08,

As far as I recall, Infinite has had online co-op, just not local/split screen co-op.

But don’t quote me on that!

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

It did not release with co-op. I think they had to figure out how to make it work with the open world map and zip lining. When I had finished it, it still didn’t have it. When they added it, they also announced that they had stopped trying to make local co-op work.

russjr08,

Jeez, no wonder Infinite has always had such a bad reputation then!

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

As far as I know, they gave up on assassinations too. To be honest, by the time I finished the game, the missing features were at the bottom of the list of problems I had with it.

turtletracks,

The Master Chief Collection doesn’t have split screen campaigns on PC

So fucking upsetting getting it all set up only to be told it’s online only. It’s fucking Halo!!!

turtletracks,

Then even more pissed off that it’s in the console version. Why cut features between the two??

maxenmajs,
@maxenmajs@lemmy.world avatar

It’s in a more or less acceptable state now and I play it, but it sure doesn’t live up to the original 10 year live service promise.

scrubbles,
!deleted6348 avatar

Them just retconning Cortana was such a letdown. Honestly while 5 wasn’t great, it did set up infinite to be really really good. Then they went with a really boring alternative.

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

This is my biggest complaint. Halo 6 was set up to be an amazing game. Then Infinite ended up with zero story. The most interesting stuff in Infinite were the little flashback sequences that bridge 5 to Infinite.

scrubbles,
!deleted6348 avatar

You can really tell that campaign took a back seat in the game. A shame because the open world was honestly a lot of fun, it was just empty and hollow because of such of a lame story. You could have been jumping between worlds fighting Cortana for the survival of the human race. Instead… we’re lost on a ring again, and we’re fighting a brute guy we don’t care about, while desperate for any actual story about what the hell happened

PraiseTheSoup,

Halo 5 is still the worst Halo game.

Omegamanthethird,
@Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world avatar

I STRONGLY disagree. 5 was a letdown with some bright spots. Infinite is offensively bad with no redeeming value.

Even if you remove Infinite, 5’s combat is better than 4’s in every single way. I would split second worst between those two depending on what aspects you’re comparing.

PraiseTheSoup,

5’s combat is better than 4’s in every single way

Halo 5 has ADS and Halo 4 does not. This alone makes Halo 5 combat worse.

cevn,

Infinite is good now with the netcode having been re worked. It has a few poor maps and bad choices regarding forge and split screen. Ut actually playing the game is fun in most cases.

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I played Halo 5 Forge on PC no scratch the Halo itch when MCC wasnt even announced yet (I felt so cool for knowing that exists).
If I could choose, I’d play Halo 5 Forge over Infinite. But I like the gadgets more than the booster feature.

curry,

It’s still important for video game preservation, no matter how crappy the games themselves might be.

Pratai, do games w More than Skyrim or Fallout, Todd Howard says Starfield was "intentionally made to be played for a long time" and Bethesda's looking 5+ years ahead

If that’s the case, wouldn’t they have made it interesting?

RealFknNito,
@RealFknNito@lemmy.world avatar

“basically we made a coloring book. It’s bland, boring, but some talented artists will add onto the poorly fleshed out systems later and keep it alive for five years. We love our modding community.”

Watching Bethesda scrape together this new IP and it just being… Average… Is disheartening. I hope they’re just channeling their good ideas in ES6 but I’m losing faith.

Zoomboingding,
@Zoomboingding@lemmy.world avatar

I lost faith when the lead creative left like 6 years ago

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