“We at HP believe that our products are just that: our products. Not yours. Let us maintain our products for you with features such as: mandatory subscriptions, and firmware updates that remove features and user freedom – simplifying and streamlining your experience.”
We absolutely do not need another investor-brained corpo games publisher on the scene, especially not one trying to buy up old IP. Buying status symbol brand names is a huge red flag.
Sold to consumers as “immersion” but likely makes money on the back end from advertising.
I also imagine it creates a game preservation issue if there was some sort of disagreement or failure to extend contract. I believe that’s what happened with music licenses so I’m imagining it may be similar with in game advertising?
Full disclosure this is mostly speculation, I’m not entirely sure how all of it truly works.
Yup. I don’t play the sports games anymore but I have friends that have mentioned ads for things that are time of year based at least. Shoulda had them fuck with their consoles date to see if that was locally controlled or not lol
If you read the article, it’s targeting things like “ads you must watch to progress” and “rewards for watching ads”. So literally targeting the very worst of the mobile game ad industry.
Season 3 was pretty bad, everyone was so shiny! 4 is good so far. Art style is back and improved + the gameplay is way better (combat!)
I think they somehow added part of the style to the previous games too, if you wanted to replay them anyway 👀
And you’re right about Wolf, if it were a tv show I’d never hit skip on the intro. Hopefully season 2 is still happening?
Edit: on the art -
“Graphic Black” art style brings Season 4’s enhanced visual style to all previous seasons. Also includes full dynamic lighting to episodes that previously did not receive this upgrade.
Walking Dead season 3 was weird because Clementine went from being a sweet and timid kid to being a shoot first ask question later, fuck everybody kind of person. She’s very hostile to the player character in 3. You don’t see any transformation as to why her personality changed so much. I kind of get it, she’s growing up into a teenager in a post apocalyptic zombie infested world. But then you start the 4th game and she’s much closer to who she was in the first 2 games. It’s hard to imagine anything she did in the 3rd game as being canon
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series
There’s a lot of hours here, it has the 4 Seasons, 400 Days (a dlc), and The Walking Dead: Michonne. Seasons 1, 2, and 4 are great, give this a shot if you haven’t yet! I’m replaying it and it still stands up.
The Wolf Among Us
urban fantasy, nice and grim
The Expanse: A Telltale Series
Tales of Monkey Island: Complete Season
Batman - The Telltale Series
Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series
Didn’t play the bottom 4, so not sure on the quality. Tales From the Borderlands is currently free with prime, too! Worth a playthrough
I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.
Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.
Their story based games feel higher budget, the controls start out serviceable but get better.
I think Wolf is the best controlling of the games I’ve played, but I might change my mind after Season 4. S4 is definitely the best looking so far
Thanks for the info! Monkey Island might be fun for a rainy day, never played the originals
You should definitely check out the original Monkey Island games when you have a chance! 1 and 2 got well done remasters, and 3 onward don’t really need any remastering.
I’m not a game dev, so I am asking naively this: why is networking code for games not standardized?
It’s crazy to me that so many companies develop their own netcode instead of pooling resources to create a library once and for all for netcode.
It is a non-trivial thing to develop, so everyone would gain from having a framework and library ready to use that works well and can be implemented into any game.
In the end, the information exchange is done between the client and the server and the application layer can have any packets it needs.
There are just a ton of ways to skin that cat. You can do things like object replication, where the server is authoritative and sends updates states to every player, but even then, you might want to have something like aiming in a 3D game done locally so that it feels responsive and then update it with the server’s understanding of what’s possible just in case things get out of whack. In the fighting game space, there’s rollback, where each player has a complete up to date simulation of what the game is doing, and they only send inputs back and forth; then if something is out of date, it resimulates the last couple of frames, invisibly, until it’s done catching up, all within the span of 1 frame. However, this approach tends to be less graceful when it comes to people coming and going, because you need to synchronize the game state before you start sharing information back and forth. The network infrastructure for something like Dark Souls, where you’re dynamically pulling in players, messages, and recordings of players’ ghosts, will be different still. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, but the most common ones do tend to be available in one-size-fits-most.
There are prebuilt solutions in some common engines, and companies like Multiplay that will help with development and hosting, but ultimately it depends on the specific needs of each game.
What works well for one project might be overkill for another, so studios have to spend a lot of time figuring out their needs and building something bespoke for it.
I could also see a database being used to coordinate game ownership with a fraction of the power usage. But neither will happen because consumers always get the raw end of the deal and nothing will ever be done to their benefit without being forced.
But blockchains get “bad” records added all the times. Database entries and blockchain blocks are both equally as susceptible to bad business logic making incorrect entries. No business is going to adopt a sales recording system that doesn’t allow them to control the entries and to reverse the entries they don’t agree with.
Publishers will like a database because it can be modified. If they were forced to implement such a system (thus abandoning all 'sell the same game to the same person twice' for different platforms), they'd oppose a blockchain system hard, since it would make it pricier to:
a) publish seven bazillion versions of any given game
b) revoke ownership of games just because it's cheaper to do that than honor the deal they made with customers
c) correct any data-fuckups they will inevitably make because they went for the cheapest route possible to implement this, and it went pear-shaped from day 3 onwards
I'm very much on the database-side here as well. I work for a Telco company here in Germany, and we use several such databases that are regulated by external bodies and government agencies to communicate between carriers (for number porting and such). Works great overall.
there is nothing wrong with the blockchain. cryptos main problem is the proof of work using to much energy. blockchain to actually do work with the energy it uses efficiently is great.
Go to Platform B and tell them : see, I bought Game already, let me play it here too.
Platform B : “who are you and why should I care?”
Proving your digital ownership never was the problem. The problem is those platforms are different companies and have no reason to honor a purchase from somewhere else.
Awesome news, and I look Forward to what folks make of this.
Shout-out to “Overload”, the spiritual successor that is great fun. VR version is included in case you need to aggressively lose your lunch. Fantastic game.
Not directly relevant but I just discovered CachyOS for my AYN Loki and it’s pretty fuckin awesome. I hope we retain some non-immutable options for those of us who want to heavily customize our experiences with these devices. It was hard to find something I could just run syncthing and some standalone emulators on. I don’t want valve and libretro in complete control of what I do and do not do on my handheld linux or not - and it could very easily go that way with the popularity of immutable distros. Maybe I’m just paranoid. I dont know.
I just installed cachyOS last week, and quite like it. Im experienced with Debian and rpm based OSes but haven’t used Arch before, but so far this OS has made it pretty straight forward.
I don’t understand why there is such a drama around using AI while developing. Everyone I know does that. Of course it doesn’t mean that I copy-paste the code from ChatGPT. But at the same time it is often useful and faster than Googling on Stack-Overflow… Someone even said there that developers using AI will have legal problems in future… I really don’t think so, because it is the AI provider responsibility to train it on data provided freely for this purpose. I’m against stealing data and brainslessly using AI, but at the same time the AI is here and you can’t ignore it.
The drama here isn’t solely over the use of AI. In fact, your last comment any brainlessly using AI is closer to the cause of this drama. The project lead is pushing untested code straight to main, and the fact it was AI generated was an addendum/insult to injury.
Other point the maintainers raised is the possibility that GenAI code violates the GPL license.
It’s a good concern to have, and one I feel people don’t talk about enough.
A little lesson about technical projects: You will quickly reach 95% completion and have something amazing to show off. Then, 95% of the work is completing that last 5% in order to make the prototype usable.
AI is good at making itself look ready. It is nowhere near ready.
I meant using AI for example for refactoring purposes or giving it some small tasks or questions. Not building whole projects with AI, because it is unmaintainable.
I would like to think some of it is class consciousness. “AI” inherently means fewer jobs. But considering the world we live in, I sincerely doubt the vast majority of people speaking out against it give a shit because “I am just demonstrating my value so the leopards won’t eat my face” and so forth.
Most of it is performative bullshit. Influencers who DID get fucked over (or decided this is why they didn’t get the job they wanted) have talked loud and proud about how evil it is and that is kind of where the conversation ends. “AI” is evil and nobody cares to think what “AI” actually means. I’ll never get tired of giving a depressed smirk when I see the same people who were championing the use of “magic” Adobe tools complaining about “AI” taking graphics design jobs and so forth. Same with the folk who have dozens of blog posts about using tools to generate their docstrings suddenly getting angry that “AI” does that too.
Personally? I very much DO care about the labor side. Not because I don’t think “AI” can do the job of an intern or even most early career staff (spend some time mentoring early career staff… I wish I just had to worry about six toes on a foot or code that would delete our prod tables if I don’t review it well enough). But because the only way for those dumbass kids to learn is by doing the tasks we would be getting rid of and that is already leading to a VERY rapid brain drain as it is increasingly hard to find staff who can actually do the job of a Senior role.
Which is the other issue… “AI” can do some stuff VERY well. Other stuff it is horrible at. And even more stuff that it “does well” is dictated by managers and “Prompt Engineers” and not actually the domain experts who can say “Yeah… this is good. THAT is complete dog shit”.
And then there is the IP theft part of things. People… are once again stupid and don’t realize that the folk posting answers on Stack Overflow were just as likely to have read that blog post where you talked about your cool algorithm. Or how much art is literally traced from others with no attribution and becomes part of major marketing campaigns. And while I think a MUCH bigger reckoning needs to happen regarding IP law and attribution… “AI” is just a symptom of the real problem.
so Saudi Arabia bought fifa, basically, with a free add on of some other sports games and a ton of dead ip that they hold.
All the sports games are basically gacha games now anyway with just yearly roster updates. And yet they get tons of whales dropping 10k+. Such a scam. Figures the saudi royals and kushner would be all about that unethical bullshit
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