The sad part is that this sets the standard (again) that companies can market the hell out of an unfinished game, release it buggy as hell, and still make an amazing profit. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
Eh, I dunno about the rest of you, but after 2077 I feel pretty good. Tuned out Starfield and the initial craze and feel…no fomo. I wait for games like BG3 to come out of early access before playing, and only play the games in early access that are actually worth it, like Sons of The Forest, which was pretty decent even at launch (when the fun bugs are still in, and weapons have not been balanced in the slightest!)
I’m hitting the now old classics, Battlefield 1 is excellent, Inscryption is awesome, and the AA and AAA games I do play are quite polished.
If you can count on games just being shitty at launch, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll play the last of us in a few years. I played Days Gone recently and loved it. There’s enough good games these days to have a packed steam library.
It’s such a trash game mechanic because it forces realism where there is none. You have faster than light travel in your game? Why don’t you have teleporters? You have magic in your game? Why don’t you have a Bag of Holding? If you are going to impose the constraint on the player for balance or gameplay reasons then at least make it fun, have a mechanic that is interesting in some way. Maybe teleporters and bags of Holding are expensive to build or don’t get unlocked until you collect 10 flippityboos but at least reward progression and picking up objects and don’t turn every decision into agony.
RuneScape has an excellent fast travel system. In fact, it has a whole bunch of 'em, and you have to work for them; either by completing quests, or by training your skills. You can also get items to expand your inventory somewhat, but they only work for specific item types.
RuneScape did it pretty well for sure yeah I always felt like there was a good level progression for items like at level 60 in old school bronze items were just straight up trash lol
Even if they think it’s a fun mechanic, they fundamentally fucked the amount you can carry imo. Should be higher than it is by default, because I straight up don’t want to waste skill points on that.
Then they’ve fucked the amount of cargo you can have on a ship. Either make it infinite, or ridiculously high even for a small ship.
I’ve got multiple freight containers on my ship, and apparently each can only carry about the same amount as my character??
Yes prove intent, but depending on the legal system that might not be enough. Say I believe that spraying someone with sparkling water on the beach would kill you, that does not necessarily mean you attempted to take someones life. Similarly hurting someone in sports does not mean you assaulted them in a criminal sense.
Right in front of the Dunkin, huh? It would be terrible if people kept accidentally spilling their coffee, hot chocolate and the like on it considering you have to immediately scrape bird shit and dead bugs off of it when you get to where you’re going to avoid corrosion. (Really.)
Even better. The steamdeck is like the Switch. Dock it and play on your TV. You can even render on a gaming PC and stream to your TV of you want those cutting edge graphics.
No surprise it’s FF VI. Absolutely peak final fantasy. Classic Uematsu soundtrack, great story with an iconic villain and a lovable cast. Active Time Battles and a phenomenal Esper system for customization. Square at the height of their pixel art powers with some beautiful sprites. Ultros, the opera scene, train suplexing…
It’s a shame they kind of butchered the pixel remaster. I’d try playing a romhack version on an emulator if you’re interested, preferably something based on Woolsey’s wonderful translation (son of a submariner!).
I recommend Woolsey Uncensored, I think it’s a really strong translation that combines the best of all worlds. The Dancing Mad mod was also recommended to me recently as a way to add uncompressed, higher quality music samples. I don’t have any experience using it, but it looks like it should work on top of Woolsey Uncensored. Your mileage may vary, though.
It’s not as bad as the mobile version from 2014 (seriously, go look it up if you don’t believe me!), but I still prefer the original art and sprites. Butchered is maybe too strong a word though, that’s more fair to say about the mobile version.
EDIT: forgot to mention they used the GBA translation as a base and discarded many iconic Woolsey lines from the original, like “son of a submariner!”. There are obviously a lot more changes but I’m not going to be full purist and claim everything was objectively better on the SNES just because that’s the version I’m used to. You can look at the full differences here.
Arkane- I mean, yeah Redfall was a clunker but Dishonored, Deathloop, and Prey all did pretty well I thought… though I suppose the two Wolfenstein games they did were kinda trash so there is a bit of falloff between the “glory days” and now.
Tango- Hi-Fi Rush was a bop, and Ghostwire did well enough I thought. Not seeing a good reason here.
Alpha Dog - Mighty Doom? Okay thats a fair closure.
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prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games
Chasing blockbusters is gonna fuck them up but I suppose more room in the lower weight classes isn’t bad for gamers since it lets indies and others who aren’t the big boys shine, and lord knows thats been wild over the past year’ish.
It is. Lots of “gamers” can’t be fucked learning the difference between Austin and arkane, it’s like how there’s people who think bioware Montreal is the same as Edmonton or rockstar north is the same as san Diego when north makes GTA and the other red dead. Generally gamers don’t care what studio does what just the first part of its name. Arkane Lyon are developing blade and that’s still in progress.
Arcane austin was already killed by the development of redfall. Most of the talent responsible for making dishonered and prey the games they were left during development of redfall. If arcane austin went back to making immersive sims instead of closing, it would be a new team making it, with little help from the pedegree implied by arcane’s legacy.
Keep in mind however that arcane was two studios, the main studio in lyon france, and the other in austin texas. Dishonered was developed jointly. Dishonored 2 was lyon, pray was austin, and deathloop was lyon.
The lyon studio still exists. They are continuing to make games. The only thing announced from arcane is the marvel’s blade game. Not optimistic, but arcane may still be around a while yet.
It didn’t say in the article but why the hell are people sending threats? Knowing the types of gamers that send threats it’s probably a really fucking dumb reason, isn’t it?
Out of every esports event that could face issues I did not think anyone would be crazy angry about Nintendo. Did someone get blueshelled too many times in Mario Kart? I mean, what would drive people to get intense about Nintendo?
Smash (specially Melee) has always attracted questionable people. So if it had happened there I wouldn’t be surprised… but this is for Splatoon of all things.
Specially melee? When the fallout happened, it was significantly more ultimate personalities who were confirmed problematic, mainly due to the fact that someone younger is more likely to have been playing ultimate(melees an over a 20 year old game), which would lead to a higher chance of a negative interaction.
Splatoon also has some animosity towards nintendo as they were also behind the smash scene because they know that nintendo does not ultimately care about them, as caring about them leads to how Arms fizzled out.
Nintendo games might be very family friendly, but Nintendo as a company has a well-earned negative reputation in a lot of verticals including esports and community events.
The article doesn't clarify where the threats were coming from, so it may be for different reasons. And obv it doesn't justify harassing and threatening random employees though.
Threats are obviously not justifiable and are not okay but Nintendo has been earning a lot of badwill with gamers recently with their decisions to disallow small esport events. They have also aggressively copyright struck videos in the past that realistically just gave their awesome games free advertising but that’s not okay with them, etc
They seem to make a lot of really dumb business and especially community decisions despite making some incredible games. It’s not too surprising some people would feel burned with that.
Apparently Nintendo doesn’t let small esport competitions to take place. They want to be the only ones. But at the same time that’s just as dumb a reason to send threats as what you said lol. There is never a good reason to send threats regardless
I need to preface this by saying it’s really stupid that anyone’s sending threats, but I think the reason they’re doing it is because Nintendo has made a very hard-line stance against small esport events. You arent allowed to host events without their permission
Nintendo is my favorite gaming company, but man, their IP lawyers are absolutely vicious. Granted they’re also in Japan, the poster boy for a corporate-owned country (I lived there several years, no joke, if you think big corps run the US you ain’t seen nothing yet) which makes American IP law look like Chinese IP law, but even for a Japanese company, they’re brutal. What I find rather ironic about it is that a measure they took to protect their image and that of their brands from controversy over bad gamer behavior, led to bad gamer behavior directed at them. But either way, to these idiots sending threats, it’s a classic instance of “this is why we can’t have nice things”, ruining even the fun we were allowed to have for everyone and probably making it even less likely that Nintendo will reverse their policy.
Gotcha. I can see why people are upset. But threats? I guess I was right in thinking it was a dumb reason. Nintendo can go fuck themselves for sure. But at the same time if you are the type of person to send threats over trivial bullshit you are still a garbage human.
Remember when people started sending death threats to the CDPR over the Cyberpunk delays? People had been spending way too long sucking Witcher 3’s dick so they automatically though CP2077 was gonna be the next game of the decade.
Threats are never justified, but I do see why they did it. “If we cant do it, you cant either” is a pretty common mentality, and this is a surefire way to completely shut down the official events.
The worst bit is now, if nintendo caves at all and pulls back their draconian behavior, these people will count it as a victory achieved via threats and likely encourage their use elsewhere.
Depending on your definition of “unofficial”, nothing. But at some point you need to make media to tell people about your tournament, or you want to stream the tournament, and doing either of those without using Nintendo’s copyrighted material/trademarks is impossible.
It shines in 2D where Unity falters, yes. But it’s perfectly capable of doing 3D competently. It’s shaders and lightning pipelines that are a bit rough on the edges, but that can be overcome with time with more brainpower coming in to contribute. The scripting is also far more robust than the hodgepodge that Unity tries to pass off as C#. The great advantage is that Godot is a non-profit foundation with a transparent governance model. Not a predatory venture capitalist behemoth like Unity.
Godot is a passable engine. It doesn't have a massive pile of money behind it, but it'll generally do most things adequately.
Honestly - and I may be biased as I'm a AAA dev who works with the engine - Unreal is really the way to go. Reasonable pricing on a powerful engine. The main issue is that it's bloated as hell and there's a learning curve... but if you're an indie, it's just as usable as Unity. Plus if you wanted to get into AAA development someday, Unreal is super popular and used everywhere.
It’s been really great for 2d, 4.0 made it really good for 3d, and it’s even decent for general GUI applications, as an engine it feels ready for wider adoption to me.
I think it’s not up to Unreal quality, but for the vast majority of indie games I believe it’s enough.
Curious if some of the many internal AAA engines out there might start to get shopped around as a new alternate to UE. Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all have a few in house engines that at least on paper seem viable for branching out — the biggest obstacle would be support, I suspect. Which isn’t a trivial obstacle, to be clear.
idTech is due for a resurgence. Maybe Valve could even get a revival in usage of Source.
The sad truth is that most of these devs would not have survived without embracer. MAYBE some of them can pull a Platinum and say “Yo, want to pay us to make a really mediocre tmnt game?” to help make ends meet. But with funding in the indie space what it increasingly is becoming… the odds of pulling that off are poor.
Of course, BECAUSE of the mass consolidation by platform holders and publishers those studios don’t even have the opportunity to try and make a shitty transformers game to keep the lights on.
Like, a decade or two ago the talking point was the EA killed all these amazing studios who were one hit wonders when they were bought out. And yeah, fuck EA. But there is a reason most of those genres ALSO died out with the studios because… they were one hit wonder genres. People loved the novelty of Dungeon Keeper and then rapidly lost interest with every iteration.
But also? Maybe those studios could have pivoted and we would have had what we see today with The Defenestration Trilogy and so forth.
This isn’t what was happening. It’s a tale as old as time, once a corporation becomes large enough it will buy up scrappy competitors and allow them to fail so that they can take the ideas and staff who would otherwise be resistant to the business getting sold.
This happens because even if 50 of those ideas fail but you have 1 guy who comes up with a battle royale game mode, it pays off. None of these companies want to own and manage 50 indie studios, so they shut them down and absorb them on purpose.
And big studios aren’t even immune from this. I think Bethesda is keeping their name, but they’re in dangerous territory. Obsidian is hanging by a thread and barely got saved from this. DoubleFine still exists for the moment. But look at what happened to Tango Gameworks getting shafted by Xbox. The industry devours indie studios day by day for the hope of their stock growth, don’t be fooled
I am not saying embracer or MS or Sony or whoever else are “good guys”
But actually look at the hellscape that is indie development right now. Studios with solid track records are fighting tooth and nail for publisher deals. And newer studios are just fucked. NoClip have done a few episodes of a “documentary” about making a game and Danny O’Dwyer gave a really depressing take on what it is like pitching for a publisher that compared it to Tinder and being glad if someone is kind enough to actually say “no” rather than ghosting you.
Some of the studios involved might have been able to secure publisher deals. Most would have gone out of business likely even sooner.
Its easy to blame big corporations and big corporations deserve a lot of blame. But it is more important to understand what is actually going on so that maybe people don’t throw shitfits when developers use Early Access or even try the kickstarter well again.
Most of this nostalgia was already functionally dead and got a second lease on life, really. There was no chance another Alone in the Dark or Outcast was going to come out of the previous IP owners.
Developer feedback is usually about answering questions that the players have, or finding bugs that were missed in QA. What Bethesda is doing is quite a bit more ridiculous.
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
To anyone who might care, you can identify an apple as a low-quality orange, but that doesn’t also mean the apple is a low-quality apple; they’re optimized to different ends. That is, I think, the point of the expression.
But, if we’re trying to evaluate them on something like taste, which is entirely subjective, yeah, I’m comparing those shits. And, I’m going oranges all the way.
You shouldn’t compare apples and oranges because they are both great but for different reasons and purposes. It isn’t anti-intellectual to recognize that apples are way better for pies than oranges are but if you want some amazing juice and don’t want to go through a whole process to make it good; oranges are the way to go.
This and the many other examples I didn’t want to fill this page with are the reason why it’s a saying. It’s much faster than prefacing what exactly said apples and oranges are going to be used for before giving a real answer and I personally feel it shouldn’t at all be taken literally.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions. Also, the engine is completely different.
If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less.
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Bethesda revealed in June 2021 that they were working on a new iteration of the engine called Creation Engine 2, and that it would power their upcoming games Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Creation Engine 2 features real-time global illumination and advanced volumetric lighting.
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Points out it does change.
jUst sLappInG a nUmbeR 2 aT tHe End dOesN’t mEan iT’s bEtTer
That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
By a lot, ask any web developer.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game. I think Star Citizen is a better comparison to Star Field in terms of style- and is much more empty.
Except they don’t really? And I didn’t see that much. Starfield to me seemed like it was being advertised as for RPG fans, and that they would have a lot of dialogue. And that space was just a setting, not the main character.
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