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.
If you have a source on this, please share it - I have not found anything to corroborate that he is being replaced by AI, although the idea that this is happening is plausible and believable.
Astartes. I’m not a warhammer person at all but I’ve seen this short film about 5 times now. Just from an artistic standpoint it is super impressive. Highly recommended.
Why should they be focused on it? Xbox is now just a slimmed down Windows pc. You can play the exact same games on a pc, with access to the same storefront.
Microsoft’s original plan was to own the living room the way they own the office space. Not just gaming, but all your movies, TV, shopping, etc. could be done through the XBox.
Kinect was a particularly big jump in that regard. There were demos of AR-type stuff where you could see yourself wearing clothes you might want to buy. You could move around and the clothes on screen would move with your body. There’s some promo videos of that, but nothing concrete ever came of it.
Now they have slagging sales for two generations, and a AAA industry that struggles to make a real hit and is laying off a lot of people. They can’t even hold onto the core gaming market much less get their tendrils into the rest of the living room. They then release a handheld that’s basically an upgrade of an existing handheld that wasn’t selling very well, but now with XBox branding.
Is this a problem for the rest of us? No, not really. There’s plenty of alternatives, and we don’t need to care. Is this the result the money people at Microsoft envisioned when they started this ~25 years ago? No, not at all.
The end goal of all of that is to sell software. If they can do that without supporting a massive pipeline for selling custom hardware, that makes sense.
For wanting to own the living room, they never tried particularly hard. PS3 was a damned successful blueray player. They just needed to give you a nice, curated experience and ease of use. There were literally people buying PS3’s because they were cheaper than blueray players at the time
Yeah, Sony is just better at this. They’re really good at taking advantage of their competitors’ mistakes.
We forget a lot now, but the opening of the PS3/Xbox 360 era looked like Microsoft was winning. Sales looked good for them, Blu-ray be damned. Then the Red Ring of Death hits. In some ways, Microsoft has yet to recover from that. Sony held their face just above the toilet water ever since.
Yeah, just like PS2 and the DVD player built in. Being able to play movies up in my bedroom as an 11 year old was amazing. It was also the most cost effective way to buy something that could play DVDs and the cutting edge games at the time. There’s a reason why the PS2 remains the best selling console of all time
I really wish gamers could unite in a way that they buy out sufficient ownership stakes in these terrible publishers that they force them to treat development studios better, and not push out half-finished slop filled to the brim with predatory monetisation.
EA, Konami, Ubisoft would all be ripe for a renaissance if that were to pass.
Konami is an entirely different beast. The Japanese industry is so ingrained in a different ethos altogether, I just don’t see any public-backed push for change working the way it would with a Western publisher.
Just look at the direction Nintendo is heading. Do we have any actual chance of stopping that train?
Its capitalism. Individuals will not change this. Systemic problems need systemic solutions. First step is outlawing centralization of capital and putting back legislation against large corporations. But good luck doing that in the US.
I’ve been hearing it for years, the same as outright boycotts. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that not enough people care for it to make a difference. For every person pissed about getting burned on a $60+ purchase for a dogshit game, there are 99 more who’ll eat it and move on without caring all that much. You’ve got to improve the content at home, where it counts without worrying about the drek getting turned out by large companies/studios. Invest in indie, or shop around is the best bet IMO.
I’m sure we all (at least those old enough) to remember that Boycott Modern Warfare II Steam group screenshot.
Idealistically, imagine that for every release - instead of giving EA that $80 dollars, 10% of gamers put that money towards a share instead.
So that would work out to be ~$200m in lost upfront sales, and up to $540m in lost recurring spend (microtransactions, battle passes etc.).
That would only be enough for gamers to own 0.5% of the company after the first year, but keeping this up for multiple years could have a downward pressure on EA’s stock price long-term as they miss their financial forecasts - increasing gamer’s buying power on shares.
Within a few years, these “Gamers United” would begin to have sufficient stake to influence board decisions (for the better).
The best part being that, the entire time, EA would continue to pay dividends to them (currently at a rate of ~$3.10 per share, per year), while they still technically own that money - almost like a corporate savings account.
*Edit: out of the three companies I randomly picked, Ubisoft would actually be the softest target - as their market cap is only $1.38b, so gamers would only need to acquire ~$700m of shares to wrestle control of the company!
I don’t want the current iteration of EA to succeed; but I do want them to return to form and help* nurture quality releases of Command and Conquer, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Burn Out, Need for Speed, Road Rash, Theme X, Sim City and about a dozen other dormant (or mismanaged) franchises.
Could I get similar experiences from other publishers and developers? Absolutely — but I’d much rather we as gamers have a broader choice in the future of our hobby, rather than continually whittling down our options as quality developers get swallowed up and spat out by the current industrial machine.
To clarify, I’ve been told the layoffs are more than just Respawn and are similar to last year’s February layoff where 670 people were cut. I don’t know the exact number.
But yeah, I’m sure continuing to chase live service as though you’ll ever get Apex Legends to be as successful as it once was will totally work out.
EDIT: furthermore, he says:
Apex Legends and EA Sports FC both missed harder than people realize. Dragon Age barely registers in this.
They'd gotten especially cash grabby since I had started playing and then they disabled Linux and Steam Deck compatibility using them as the scapegoats for their inability to fix their shitty anti-cheat. News flash, there's still a bunch of cheaters because the cheats are made for Windows players.
The decline of a live service game is so inevitable that it seems silly to me to ascribe a reason to it. Eventually, people just want something newer than regular content updates can provide.
Afaik they’re still using awful third-party servers, lag compensation is still aggressive as fuck, they tried to “fix” visibility by slapping a bandaid in the form of healthbars, and the anticheat thing was another bandaid instead of a surgery. Overall it’s kinda stuck, all of the old issues are still there.
They have a shitload of new cosmetics though, if that’s your jam. Funnily enough, they were so greedy even esport orgs didn’t want to keep working with them. Rspn offered a one-time payment, orgs wanted a percentage of sales. Mind you, it’s a fairly big esport that advertises the game for them (btw played on better servers than available in-game).
I’m still playing it and it’s still pretty fun. Seems to be a controversial take but I do like that they’re constantly changing mechanics since I don’t really take the game seriously.
Controller aim assist is too much of an aimbot which made all the russians turn their hacks on and it’s just controllers vs cheaters and some nolifers in this game these days, not fun at all for most casual players
Exactly, it’s an awful treadmill. EA as a whole was at nearly 60% profit last year. Coupled with layoffs, it seems they’re trying to keep that infinite spend as potential as possible lol
I just hope something good comes out of recent ex-rspn teams.
Not to be too much of a bummer, but the gaming industry seemingly grew too fast, and the end result is going to be that there just aren’t as many jobs in the industry to be filled by any team once the layoffs are done. Maybe a handful of the people laid off here go on to work together again.
Recently, Clair Obscur told another story of ex-publisher success. So far, we only know of the review success and I don’t actually know if it’s a financial success.
If it is, I can only hope it leads to some investor understanding in just how done the world is of lottery-planning in the game world; seeing one victory, and having every single publisher chase it.
Players will be able to toggle between the new and previously existing visuals of Minecraft with the simple press of a button, meaning a classic look can be maintained by those who desire it.
thank goodness, shaders are pretty but I am massively suspect to nostalgia bias and I do not want to dedicate performance to shaders if my computer cannot handle it
I have to say, I was pretty neutral on this coming in, but reading all the people posturing anger while clearly not having any awareness of what the game is supposed to be or even reading the article is getting kind of annoying.
ign.com
Ważne