I’m assuming the vagueness of the phrase “record player engagement” means it has a lot more to do with engagement with whatever microtransaction they have going than engagement with the game itself.
The game had an 8-hour free trial. That would drive the “engagement” they’re talking about, and I’m guessing it’s the only positive news they have. If the game was selling well or had significant daily active users, they’d be talking about that instead.
So this is why MS didn’t care if CoD went to Playstation. If people can just use Game Pass for $10-15/month and possibly already have it, why spend $70 every 1-2 years on new CODs on PS?
I thought that was clear from the start. They haven't really been shy about it. There haven't been exceptions to games appearing on Game Pass day 1 when Microsoft owns it; not that I can think of, anyway.
How is it even most wishlists if not by using bots tho like I get I don’t pay attention to what’s new much but I literally never heard of the game until I heard of the flop
I’ve discovered this in my own wishlist a few weeks ago. Must’ve been that “this looks interesting, let’s get back to it later” late night steam store browsing, because I do not remember putting it there.
Game pass might be a good deal, and I don’t fault anyone for wanting to maximize gaming on a budget, but the transition to subscription based gaming is going to be very bad for studios in the long term.
If the launch of these is anything like the original launch, I think I’ll pass on this one too. That launch experience trying to get ahold of one really soured me on the PS5
I’m in the same boat. I used that money and saved a bit more and just built my first gaming PC.
I still want to play Ghost of Tsushima but I will not buy a PS5 just for that game. Don’t think I’m going to buy any more consoles in the future, sadly. The last release soured me on these releases too.
Funnily enough same for me, I already had a prebuilt gaming PC but after spending the time trying to get ahold of the PS5, I just started saving and made my first PC build as an upgrade to what I already had, feel like it was the better choice in the long run.
In early 2021 I, like so many people, wanted to build my first gaming pc. As I’m sure you can guess, I had a hell of a time trying to get my hands on a decent graphics card. In the end I purchased a prebuilt pc. The whole gpu buying attempt was so stressful and giving up was so disappointing. Should I never try to build a pc in the future? Of course not! Mostly I learned to be patient and accept that I might not get exactly what I want. The large PS5s are currently readily available, just get one of those.
The thing i like most about pc is the wide array of games that require different specs. I have a pretty powerful pc but I could easily entertain myself with the lowest end pc.
It’s not just the lack of availability but that was a part of it. Microsoft and Sony’s lack of proper response is part of the reason.
I remained “patient” to some extent as I only just got to build my PC this year. The GPU “shortage” was a part of it too.
But I felt that Sony and Microsoft could have done more for customers. Sony had a program to get actual PS users a PS5 but that too was still sold out. Scalpers had no issue buying pallets of consoles but actual fans couldn’t. It was insane.
But besides that, I’ve since realized that, at least for myself, a PC is the better way to go. Consoles are a waste of money for me in the long run as a PC will be used for more than just gaming and the longevity of the parts and upgradeability is incomparable. I likely wouldn’t have felt this way had I just been able to get a PS5/Xbox Series X like I wanted.
But Microsoft and Sony don’t seem to care about their actual fans and them getting consoles in their homes, which is what soured it for me. Though, yeah, same could be said about Nvidia and AMD as well to an extent too, but there are more manufacturers under them that make the actual cards and you had some like EVGA that had programs that tried to get a GPU in actual customers’ hands and not the greedy scalpers.
Just a few months into her employment, she says she was instructed to investigate the performance of a particular employee, referred to as “James Smith.” But when she sat down to speak with Smith, he allegedly pointed out that he was the only Black employee on a team of 50 individuals, and expressed that he felt he was being singled out and racially targeted by his supervisor.
Alm goes on to say that she shared this information with her supervisor and recommended that Smith’s supervisor receive diversity training, but alleges that her recommendation was met with “hostility and denial.”
So she just took the allegedly under performing employees word and recommended diversity training without any further investigation? I hope the article is leaving something out.
Did you read the rest of the article? It talks about how she talked with others in the company about this, someone above her took it very personally as suggesting he was racist, and her prompt firing. It also highlights how bungie was exposed for both racial and gender bias by reporting just a few months before she was hired, indicating that these exposed problems likely still existed.
I don’t mean any harm when I say this, but why would you jump to the defense of a company in the first place, dismissing claims of racism or other forms of bigotry? The world is incredibly biased, and regular large-scale studies on company culture (and social culture) reveal widespread bigotry in our world. Simply assuming the status quo absent enough evidence on either side to clearly paint a picture is more often than not correct. What purpose does trying to discredit her accomplish here? How do you think it makes black people feel to see the only reply in a thread is an attempt at discrediting her?
Did you read the rest of the article? It talks about how she talked with others in the company about this, someone above her took it very personally as suggesting he was racist, and her prompt firing. It also highlights how bungie was exposed for both racial and gender bias by reporting just a few months before she was hired, indicating that these exposed problems likely still existed.
Yes. Her superiors disagreed that the supervisor needed diversity training just because that one person who received a bad review said he was being racially targeted. The article doesn’t say that she made any attempt to talk to that Black employee’s immediately coworkers. She just talked to him and decided the supervisor needed diversity training. So it’s not surprising that her supervisors reacted critically.
I don’t mean any harm when I say this, but why would you jump to the defense of a company in the first place, dismissing claims of racism or other forms of bigotry? The world is incredibly biased, and regular large-scale studies on company culture (and social culture) reveal widespread bigotry in our world. Simply assuming the status quo absent enough evidence on either side to clearly paint a picture is more often than not correct. What purpose does trying to discredit her accomplish here? How do you think it makes black people feel to see the only reply in a thread is an attempt at discrediting her?
I’m not siding with the company. I’m siding with the employee who was treated like a racist because one person who may have been underperforming said he was without any further investigation. That’s ridiculous.
You seem to keep making a lot of assumptions about what happened, absent any evidence that it did. Why do you assume that she didn’t make ‘any attempt to talk to that Black employee’s immediate coworkers’? Why do you assume she ‘just talked to him’? Why do you assume there was no ‘further investigation’?
We don’t have any of this information. It’s not fair to assume anything about whether they happened or not. Why are you making all of your assumptions in the direction of discrediting this individual? The article that is linked here links another article exposing a pervasive issue of gender and racial bias at this company, so it seems rather odd to be assuming that they had completely fixed this issue by the time of her hiring, a mere few months later, and that it was not at play in this situation. However, even if this article was not linked and this company was not specifically exposed for these issues, it seems odd to me to assume in the direction that research on bigotry in the workplace also does not support.
Why do you feel compelled to jump to the defense of someone you do not know, over an accusation which doesn’t affect you and you have no stakes in nor any knowledge of the circumstances?
Just want to hop in and also point out the vastly different costs of being wrong in each case.
On one hand, we have a supervisor having to take a diversity course, and an employee getting a written warning about their performance. On the other hand, a person is losing their income and health insurance. If the evidence equally supported both sides and we had to guess, the detrimental effect of incorrectly supporting one side is vastly more significant than incorrectly supporting the other.
And that assumes a hypothetical where the evidence doesn’t support either side, something I do not think is the case. I think the article supplies enough information to support Alm’s case.
On one hand, we have a supervisor having to take a diversity course, and an employee getting a written warning about their performance. On the other hand, a person is losing their income and health insurance. If the evidence equally supported both sides and we had to guess, the detrimental effect of incorrectly supporting one side is vastly more significant than incorrectly supporting the other.
Yes, but don’t you get it? Someone might be getting called racist when they’re not, and that’s obviously the worst thing in the whole big wide world! And on top of that case, a black person will get to under perform in the workplace! Oh the humanity! Will no one think of the children?!?!?!
I for one am thankful we were born and raised in a society with no racial biases that could seep in to my work. Now, if you excuse me, I have to go back to writing up the only black person on my team for underperforming at the video game company with a history of racism and sexism B)
Notably, Alm was hired at Bungie just five months following an IGN report on the company’s work culture. In it, over 25 employees alleged the company had a history of allowing toxic culture to fester, including racial and gender bias, with those who reported such instances to HR alleging their reports were frequently dismissed or even turned against them. Following this report and prior to Alm’s hiring, Bungie’s former HR head stepped down from her role. IGN understands from its sources that following its 2021 report, Bungie also hired a number of new HR personnel in an effort to address the issues from the article, amid some pressure from its new parent company Sony.
All the best workplaces that don’t have a racism problem are the ones where lightly suggesting diversity training is met with hostility, denial, and sacking of the person suggesting it. Such actions really highlight how seriously said company takes concerns of bigotry at the workplace and proves they’re giving it their all to make it as inclusive as possible.
I’m siding with the employee who was treated like a racist
Proving how incredibly not racist I am by taking incredible, personal offense at the suggestion of checking possible biases I may have as manager at a company with a history of racial biases, because I care about combating racism just that much
I’m siding with the employee who was treated like a racist because one person who may have been underperforming said he was without any further investigation.
It’s so poignant that you tell on yourself with this statement.
When someone is hired to address discrimination and someone reports that they are still being discriminated against, I would hope that the person hired to address discrimination would assume the report of coninued discrimination is correct.
Assuming the best when that is crealy not the situation is just shoving your head in the sand.
I would hope that the person hired to address discrimination would assume the report of coninued discrimination is correct.
They should assume it’s true for the purpose of more investigation. Then decide if the facts support or disprove the claim. That’s much different than hearing it from one person, and then concluding that it’s true.
Note that they believed it enough to raise the concern to someone higher up and that person took the existence of the complaint personally. That is doing exactly what you said, taking the complaint seriously enough to look into it.
Not sure about other companies, but at the one I work at, recommending a training doesn’t mean a whole lot except “this might be relevant to your work”. For example, in this case an employee expressed concerns of being discriminated against, so it makes sense to recommend training on how to identify and address those kinds of problems (even if no such situation is actually occurring) so that you’re better prepared to handle it.
To also be fair, producers have been trying to raise prices on game for over 15 years now to little traditional success and instead relying on battle pass and micro transactions
I don’t think it is surprising that with recent events they are attempting to raise prices again
The BASE cost remains the same. They then started finding ways market a spreadsheets with of ‘versions’. Then they added ‘micro’ transactions, battle passes, etc. Or they just shut down the old game so you have to buy the new version to keep playing.
And the cost of games has risen faster the minimum wage in the US.
So will all the multi millionaires and billionaires video games were making… I think $60 was more than fine for a large studio produced game.
I am totally fine with them only marginally improving combat. Fighting monsters in the first Dragons Dogma is still to this day the best feeling combat in any rpg! What I hope they improve on is the story, the way the story is presented and the way the player can impact the world. The only character from I can remember by name is Mercedes and only because I accidentally let her die in her escort mission and then for her to appear later as if nothing happened.
I liked that the story was almost a joke. The game did enough to pull you along. That amazing dragon fight at the end then… some shopkeep is your beloved :D
I feel it will be deeper this time around. Dark Arisen’s story was smaller but once you learn everything, including who Death is, it’s really cool.
Encumbrance is supposed to provide a type of challenge, and realism. Though how realistic is carrying more than like, one extra weapon really? Also, it is a weird thing to get hung up on for “realism’s” sake. The best possible argument for encumbrance is forcing players to make choices. In roguelikes for example, you very often only get to choose from a limited number of rewards. In that sense it’s really fun, but you cannot go back on your choice. With encumbrance, if you must, you can keep all your rewards, but it’s just very tedious to do so. So instead of forcing the choice and creating dynamic gameplay, most likely you’re just forcing the player to do some tedious shit. Roguelikes deal with the hording mentality much better than a traditional RPG.
Another thing to note about encumbrance, is that there’s just so much random garbage you can pick up in these games. Someone else mentioned that in real table top rpg, you’re not picking 100 wheels of cheese cuz they might come in handy later. I think it’s honestly just filler content, and doesn’t really add to the game aside from the fact that if you couldn’t pick up that wheel of cheese, you’d feel slightly cheated. I wouldn’t call it lazy game development, but I think “loot” as a gameplay element has a lot of evolving to do. It feels good to get loot, but so often it has to be padded out to feel like you’re actually getting anything. You have to receive it often enough. It has to give some benefit or it just feels like window dressing. That’s a fine line that very few games handle very well at all.
I think it would be interesting to be able to hire a merchant NPC to loot for you. You’d lose a bit of the value (say, half), but the merchant would reinvest those profits to carry better items, and they’d give you a discount.
You’d have an incentive to look through the loot to take what you want, as well as an incentive to ignore the stuff you don’t. That way you get the immersiveness of an encumbrance system, without most of the tedium.
Right, at the very least it’d add a gameplay element to the tedium. Or maybe your character refuses to pick up random shit unless they have the right abilities/training. Or like in skyrim where you can’t see the characteristics of certain plants you pick up until you’ve leveled up in a certain field enough, but instead of not showing the alchemical properties, the item itself isn’t fully detailed - like it’ll just look like a generic mushroom, or a generic sword/gun/etc. And a player with very high skills in certain areas would unlock different characteristics of that item.
The downside is with a realistic encumbrance system, you’d either:
A) Not be picking anything up, or:
B) Making so many milk runs your head will spin from the tedium of ferrying useless bullshit back and forth.
Being 70-80 hours into STARFIELD, there’s non-cheating ways to avoid the encumbrance penalty, such as the “Powered Assist” backpacks which lowers O2 / stamina consumption by 75% when overencumbered. You can also deposit your loot into your ship’s cargo bay and sell directly from it by pressing Q at any vendor.
In ITR/Into The Radius VR, a fully realistic military looter shooter survival horror like STALKER; I picked up and carried EVERYTHING, but through the use of an inane amount of utility items, such as a chest harness, backpack, lower back bags, leg bags, thigh bags, and so on. (My favorite thing to put in my belt bags was cake slices and energy drink cans, made for hilarious streaming content when you take a bite of cake in a dire situation)
I still spent like 20 real-life hours slogging knee deep through swamp to ferry back an entire inventory of artifacts worth 5K/ea.
So my takeaway is, people are gonna loot and hoard; if they do that, encourage it. If not, reward the player with more credits from missions and other things that don’t involve scraping and strip-mining every planet for every ounce of metal.
It depends on the kind of tabletop rpg. In old school ones you may have a cart and hireling to carry this stuff, so you would definitely take those cheese wheels to sell them or for food to your group that’s not so small anymore. Logistic was part of the game. But a part that’s easily lost depending on how you play.
Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.
To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.
So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.
But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.
ign.com
Ważne